Cold Courage

by Pekka Hiltunen

  Sarah sipped her tea.

  ‘Before I do that, you tell me what your impression was of Arthur when you first met him.’

  ‘I thought that under his polite shell he was a very cold, calculating person,’ Lia said.

  Sarah nodded.

  They had not seen each other since the divorce.

  ‘We had problems,’ Sarah said.

  She looked out the window.

  ‘Or, Arthur had problems,’ she added. ‘And his problems became my problems.’

  Sarah continued nursing her tea. Only the racket of the game in the other room broke the silence.

  Lia tried to put her thoughts into words, but she knew how strange they would sound.

  Your ex-husband is some sort of villain. But what kind?

  ‘I don’t know how to ask what I want to know,’ Lia said.

  Sarah snorted.

  ‘Just spit it out.’

  Lia swallowed.

  ‘I believe that Arthur is not what he seems. There’s something nasty hiding under the surface. But I don’t know what.’

  Sarah stared at her teacup as she weighed Lia’s words. She offered her more tea. Lia shook her head.

  ‘It may be that he’s changed. But during our marriage there was a lot wrong with him,’ Sarah said.

  Lia saw that Sarah was collecting herself.

  ‘No one knows about this. Not my sister, not anyone.’

  Sarah squeezed her cup, which was shaking. She had to set it back on the table.

  ‘I hope that Arthur has changed, because when I lived with him, he was a cruel rat bastard. He beat me so much that in the final years I had to escape to a women’s shelter three times.’

  Lia inhaled deeply. Everything was falling into place. Her observations about Sarah Hawkins and her home. Everything about Arthur Fried.

  ‘Do you want to know more?’ Sarah asked.

  Lia nodded.

  ‘Where’s your recorder? You must have a recorder if you’re doing a newspaper story.’

  ‘I don’t have a recorder. I want to hear your experience so I can decide what to do about it. Whether it deserves a newspaper story or something else.’

  ‘Fine. It’s all the same to me.’

  Sarah said she had waited, expecting that someone would come and ask her about her marriage to Arthur Fried. But no one ever came.

  ‘Maybe it’s because Arthur wasn’t famous when we were married.’

  At that point, Fair Rule’s supporter numbers had been so humble that they did not even register in the national polls, and instead of few invitations to televised debates, Fried received none. Sarah had been pleased to see Fried forced to understand that he was not the leader he imagined himself to be. But Fried’s frustration had sent him out of his mind at home and he started beating her.

  ‘No one came to ask about your marriage because almost no one knows about it. No record of it exists even in the national database,’ Lia said.

  Sarah was amazed. They had been married and filed for divorce in the usual ways, signing all the forms at the proper offices.

  ‘I think Arthur had the records erased somehow,’ Lia said.

  ‘That must be it. I’m sure he’s never regretted what he did to me.’

  Lia listened on the edge of her seat as Sarah spoke, the careful consideration and confidence of her words telling of years of thought directed at this moment.

  ‘My sister says someone would probably want to write a kiss-and-tell book about our story. But I don’t want to blow it up into something larger than it was.’

  They had been married seven years, the first three of which had been reasonably good and the last four of which were pure hell. Thousands of women went through the same thing. That was why Sarah had always intended to talk about it publicly someday. These men shouldn’t be able to get away with their violence without suffering the consequences.

  At first, Fried had only hit Sarah once or twice a month. It usually happened when he had drunk a couple of pints too many and wanted sex, but Sarah never wanted to when her husband was being aggressive.

  ‘But after the first few times, he didn’t need the excuse of being drunk any more. He would just hit me for anything.’

  Sarah talked for more than two hours. Lia listened in anguish. The situation was absurd: all the while, as this tragic story was flowing out of Sarah, the sounds of simulated car chases and random death echoed incessantly from the living room.

  Fried had usually begun by slamming Sarah into the floor. Sometimes she did not even see the blow coming and ended up with bruises just from the fall. Then she had to huddle on all fours as Fried circled her, lashing out at her at will.

  ‘Usually with his fists. Sometimes he used his belt. On my back or my breasts so no one would see the marks.’

  Sarah had not let anyone see her body, even in a swimsuit. At times even now in her dreams she would feel her body covered in bruises. For years she had simply become accustomed to the reality that another attack could come at any moment.

  Once it was so bad that she lost consciousness and fled to a shelter when she came to. Fried was both drunk and angry. The party was doing badly. Another time the parish failed to appoint Fried to its governing board.

  Once they were on holiday in Italy, on a road trip around Tuscany. Just before arriving in Volterra, Fried had suddenly flown into a rage.

  ‘He stopped the car on the side of the road and started beating me. Not in the face, just everywhere else. I tried to get out, but he held me with one hand and hit me with the other.’

  Sarah had been numb with shock and anger that he had dared to do it even when they were travelling. But she had no way to defend herself. Then her head jerked back so hard from the force of a blow that something cracked in her neck. For a moment she thought the torment would end there, on the side of that Italian motorway. She would never get to see Volterra or anywhere else ever again.

  Suddenly Fried had stopped, urged Sarah to control her crying and started the car. After driving the rest of the way to Volterra, they walked around seeing the sights, but Sarah had no memory of it.

  ‘At night in the restaurant, Arthur ate larded veal with truffle sauce and I ate painkillers.’

  Sarah noticed Lia shudder.

  ‘Have you ever seen domestic violence up close? No? I could give you a definitive lecture on the subject. It’s a strange drama of repetition and promises that things will change. But they never do.’

  Sarah had waited for years for Arthur to stop. If only she loved him enough or he got help from a therapist. The violence clouded the victim’s judgement: when someone close to you does something that terrible, you go into lockdown. Thinking that your situation was different from everyone else’s was typical.

  ‘In the beginning I made the same mistake as most women by thinking that I was to blame. It took two or three years for me to realise that it had nothing to do with me.’

  They were a textbook case.

  ‘Arthur was sick. Not deranged, but he did have some sort of personality disorder.’

  It had dawned on Sarah that although Arthur Fried had exceptional social skills, he was utterly cold. Not only did he see himself as the centre of everything, he also derived extreme pleasure from subjugating others.

  Sarah discovered that she was not the only woman Fried was doing this to. He had been visiting prostitutes the whole time they were married. This only came out after the violence had become commonplace and Fried no longer felt like pretending and concealing his whoring any longer. Not only had he been acting out sadomasochistic games with the prostitutes, he had really been hitting them too.

  ‘He had to pay them to keep quiet. Once some girl got hurt so badly the payoff had to be in real money. I heard him arranging it with his party secretary.’

  ‘Tom Gallagher?’

  ‘No, then it was a man named Bob Hewitt. Slimy toad. But he only had the job for a couple of years. Working under Arthur is hard, so turnover has always been high.
’

  Some forms of violence were a strong sexual fetish for Fried. He had wanted Sarah to praise how well-endowed he was.

  There were things she was supposed to say, things she could never say aloud again.

  Sarah could not even think of reporting her husband to the police. She was too afraid. There were days when she was unable to leave the house, and working was impossible. When she first met Fried, she was working as a secretary for a labour union, but after the first few years of the marriage that fell by the wayside.

  ‘I was so messed up. I kept having crying fits.’

  After the divorce, as she gradually began to recover from Fried, no jobs were open to her. She had been out of the workforce for more than ten years.

  Arthur Fried paid his ex-wife a small amount of maintenance each month, just enough for her to scrape by.

  ‘I know that Arthur pays me because he’s afraid. Now that I’m telling you everything, he’s sure to stop giving me money. But I’m thirty-eight years old. If life has anything left for me, it has to start sometime.’

  Lia was shocked. Sarah looked nearly fifty.

  It was strange that no rumours had got out about Fried’s violent tendencies, Lia observed.

  ‘He’s very good at what he does,’ Sarah said. ‘In the beginning his self-sufficiency was charming. Sounds stupid, doesn’t it? But I had never met anyone before who shines the way he does.’

  Fried could talk for an hour without expecting anything from his conversation partner other than the occasional nod of her head. And after one session like that, anyone would be prepared to vote for him. In fact, he had all the elements required of a good politician: he knew how to inspire, his energy was boundless and he knew how to play the game.

  ‘But he has no heart – he knows how to fake warmth, but he doesn’t feel any. Ever.’

  All politicians were narcissists to some degree, Sarah suggested. It went with the profession. They had to believe in themselves, in their own omnipotence, in their ability to act as representatives in others’ stead.

  But Fried was unique in one respect. According to Sarah, he didn’t even agree with many of the key Fair Rule policy positions. Fried had joined the party because he had seen its appeal to a type of voter he could control.

  ‘He despises most of them. He would come home from party meetings and yell: “I fucked them all!”’

  This meant that Fried had got one of the statements he wanted onto the party agenda.

  ‘Do you know what his ultimate goal is?’ Sarah asked.

  Lia shook her head.

  In the beginning it had felt like pie in the sky, Sarah said.

  ‘But not any more, not now that his numbers are up.’

  Fried’s goal was not simply to get Fair Rule into Parliament. He saw himself leading something much larger.

  ‘He speaks out against the EU, but he intends to be in the EU Parliament before long himself.’

  Fried’s objective was to unite all the fragmented far-right parties in Europe. To create a coalition that would make them even stronger and larger.

  Lia shivered. She thought of the fanatic zeal she had seen in the Streatham Ice Arena.

  Sarah glanced at her watch. It was already half past one.

  ‘I have to make lunch for the boy. Food is one of the only things that will get him to take a break from his games. But you can stay if you want to hear more.’

  Sarah Hawkins loaded chicken nuggets onto a baking tray and boiled them a fresh kettle. She seemed lost in thought. The stillness of afternoon fell over the kitchen.

  Lia thought about Sarah’s life and her own.

  When Sarah placed the teapot on the table and sat down, Lia made a decision. She felt obliged, in return for all that Sarah had just told her. The time for her to face her own fears had come.

  ‘I don’t know anything about domestic violence,’ Lia began. ‘But I know what it feels like when someone you think you love becomes someone you hate.’

  Sarah listened in silence. This was the first time Lia had ever spoken about her experience to anyone in England. No one knew but her parents: not her old friends in Finland, not anyone at Level, not even Mari – although Lia was unsure whether she could actually keep anything secret from her.

  His name was Matti. Lia had been twenty-one and Matti a few years older. Perhaps it was his fascinating restlessness that had interested her first.

  ‘He had such a different energy than everyone else.’

  Matti’s deep infatuation with her flattered Lia. He worshipped her. He gave her gifts and sent her letters – long, impassioned missives. He promised to build them the old Finnish dream, to fell the logs for their home with his own two hands, to fill the shed with a winter’s worth of wood and build them a bed.

  Before long his manic ardour became exhausting.

  When Lia began showing signs of reluctance, Matti enlisted every tool he could invent. He sent her more gifts. Whatever she wanted, he wanted. But when he started writing letters to her friends and fellow students, Lia balked.

  ‘He went to extremes you wouldn’t believe. He was a stalker.’

  When she came out of her block of flats in the morning, that tall, slim figure was always there on the street corner. He tried to call her hundreds of times a day. When she didn’t answer, he called the people he saw her with.

  Matti only drew the line at calling Lia’s parents, who were surprised to see the relationship falling apart. He seemed like a lovely boy. He was good with his hands and wanted to start a family.

  One night a small cot appeared in Lia’s bedroom. With a baby doll lying in it.

  ‘That was the main reason I left Finland. I haven’t talked to anyone about this in years.’

  ‘I can tell,’ Sarah said quietly.

  Sarah’s eyes told that she understood. Something of what they had experienced was the same.

  ‘He never hit me,’ Lia said. ‘He wanted to though. Sometimes I wonder if someday he’ll come here from Finland and do what he wants to me. Finish the job.’

  Sarah took her by the hand. A quick squeeze, strong and reassuring.

  Would Sarah be willing to speak publicly about everything she had told her about Fried? Lia asked.

  ‘Yes. If we do it the way I want and I get to see the story in advance,’ Sarah said.

  She didn’t want anything that made her look like the bitter old ex-wife of a famous politician. She only wanted to tell her story. And she wanted facts about domestic violence victims to accompany it.

  ‘Sometimes they list the statistics in the newspapers and on the telly, but not very often,’ Sarah said.

  And besides, it was only a couple of weeks until Christmas. Families did more hitting at Christmas than those who hadn’t experienced it would believe. Whenever a newspaper or TV programme dealt with domestic violence, the women’s shelters saw a spike in calls.

  Thanking Sarah, Lia said she would get back to her within a day or two. She stood up to leave.

  ‘You forgot this,’ Sarah said, pointing at the vodka bottle.

  ‘Oh my God!’ Mari said.

  Lia had asked Mari to meet her immediately at the Anthologist Bar. When Mari heard Sarah Hawkins’ story, all she could do for a while was repeat two phrases. Oh my God. That poor woman.

  A determined look came over her face.

  ‘Fried will never recover from this.’

  The three weapons they now had would send the sainted Arthur Fried to the bottom of the ocean. Corporate tax evasion, material support for racists and years of domestic abuse.

  ‘Do you understand why stopping Arthur Fried has been so important for me?’ Mari asked.

  ‘Yes. Now I do.’

  Fried’s goal of becoming a force to be reckoned with in Europe was perfectly plausible, Mari said. He really could create a coalition of right-wing extremists from different countries that all supported xenophobia, the limiting of women’s rights and a return of the European police state. A conservative coalition
already operated in the Euro-Parliament, but fractures weakened it: the groups belonging to it were too different, and speculation was rife about the eventual withdrawal of the extreme right wing into their own caucus.

  Did Sarah seem balanced? Mari asked.

  ‘She looks tired. And you can see how limited her life has been,’ Lia said. ‘But when she talks about Fried she seems sincere.’

  ‘Good. Instead of a print story, we’ll do a video. And then spread it all over. When people see a woman talking directly about being beaten, they’ll have to listen. This will stop everyone in their tracks.’

  Mari created the plan right then and there. They would record Sarah Hawkins’ full account of Fried’s violence and then compress it down into a clip that was only a few minutes long.

  Preserving the anonymity of the person making the video was important. Rico would take care of that.

  For distribution they would give the final recording to an organisation with a good reputation so Fried would have fewer grounds to question its veracity.

  Lia saw the tension release on Mari’s face.

  ‘We did it,’ Mari said. ‘We stopped Arthur Fried.’

  She called the waiter.

  ‘This calls for champagne.’

  The following morning, Lia called Sarah Hawkins from work.

  ‘Yes, a video is fine with me,’ Sarah said.

  She had thought it over during the evening. When the story came out, she wanted to have a professional agent to help her, to answer all the media inquiries, as well as a lawyer just in case.

  ‘For a few days Arthur will be all the news can talk about. And I’ll be fair game for the tabloids. They’ll dig into all my business. They’ll go over every single visit I’ve ever made to a health centre looking for evidence that I’m disturbed and trying to prove whether this really happened. And Arthur will deny it all. But I have the nights I spent in shelters and the medical records of my injuries as evidence.’

  Lia promised a media advisor, a lawyer and even a make-up artist so Sarah could look her best. Mari had thought of this the previous night as well.

  ‘And can we put a women’s help hotline at the end of the video?’ Sarah asked.