The Hidden Beach

by Karen Swan

  Linus glanced over towards the wide door, as though sensing the mystery friend was behind it. ‘Did I like her?’

  ‘Actually, she’s a he. And yes, you did, very much. You were the –’ Her voice faltered suddenly. ‘You were the best of friends.’

  ‘What’s his name?’ Linus asked.

  Hanna blinked, her smile stuck on her face but the fear gathering in her eyes again. Bell could see her courage slipping away like a tide; her body seemed to stiffen in the pose, becoming implacable and defensive. ‘. . . Well, why don’t we go in and you can introduce yourself?’

  What?

  Bell frowned. Hanna wasn’t going to leave it to Linus to work out the connection on his own, surely? But though her mouth opened in protest – like Max’s – he wasn’t her son, and she had to stay quiet as Hanna rose up, holding his hand. They turned to go in.

  The door opened with a swoosh, the faint suckering of the draughtproofing brushes punctuating the quiet, and the group of doctors surrounding the bed turned as one. Their gazes swept over Hanna and settled downwards, on Linus.

  ‘Ah, Hanna, you’re back,’ one of them said from the far side of the bed, and Bell recognized the woman’s voice from the phone call yesterday. Dr Sorensen. Her voice had a pointed quality to it, as though her words carried hidden meaning.

  The door closed, clamping down on any leaky audio from the outside world, hermetically sealing them in a pristine environment. Bell hung back against the wall, casting a curious gaze around the room and immediately feeling her own past reattach to her with sticky fingers. She was, sadly, no stranger to hospital rooms, but this was unlike any she had ever seen. She could still see at night, when she closed her eyes, the metal bed frames, the linoleum floor, the smell of antiseptic, the blue-tinged strip lights. But in here, there were framed photographs on a cabinet by the bed, expensive bed linen with a camel-coloured Hermes ‘H’ cashmere blanket, a potted weeping fig tree in one corner, a comfortable red linen armchair, and artwork on the walls that looked like it required insurance certificates. Was this the reality of long-term care? Personalize the environment in case he wakes up, disoriented, confused? She would have been overjoyed if this was her bedroom, full stop, much less in a hospital.

  Hanna and Linus were standing by the bed, the doctors flanking them like bodyguards so that all she could see was the line of a leg beneath a sheet, a glimpse of an almost-shaved head, dark stubble grazing the shockingly white scalp. She saw the head move as the doctor in charge touched his arm – responsive, alert, functions which had seemingly been impossible even the day before yesterday.

  ‘I’ve brought a special visitor for you,’ she heard Hanna say, also in an altered voice. ‘Do you remember I said I would bring someone very special?’

  On cue, Linus took a micro-step forward. His head was dipped and even from behind, Bell could see he was feeling shy and reluctant.

  A silence billowed through the room, punctuated only by the rhythmic beat of machines monitoring his blood pressure, oxygen saturation levels . . . One of them started flashing, and the nearest doctor turned and began pressing buttons.

  In the gap that opened up, Bell saw his profile. He was staring back at his son with a blank look, his skin pallid, the bony nub of his shoulders smooth beneath his hospital gown. She felt herself recoil. He was awake and he was alive, but he was not living. Not yet. His was a body that hadn’t seen daylight in seven years, skin that hadn’t felt sunshine or a cold breeze in almost a decade. For all those years, he had hovered in the realm of the unconscious, with only a hair’s breadth between the sleeping and the dead.

  By contrast, Linus was overstuffed with life force – radiant and rosy, glossy and glowing from his run in the park. His curls shone like golden leaves, and there was something about the outward curve of his plump cheeks that seemed a rebuke to the sunken dip of his father’s. There was no mirror in the room, but his father’s hand must have travelled upon his face; he surely knew the hard shapes he made in that bed.

  ‘Hello, I’m Linus. I’m nearly ten.’ His arm rose like a lever, Hanna standing crooked and immobile beside him, like a twig caught in a frozen lake. The moment stretched out – elastic, expansive – as the small arm stayed pointing towards him until slowly, he lowered it again.

  Linus looked up at his mother, a dawning look of panic on his face. ‘Did I do something wrong?’ he whispered. Bell felt a pinch of concern.

  ‘It’s okay, it’s fine,’ Hanna whispered, placing a hand on his head.

  Another doctor, an Asian woman standing closest to them, crouched down and smiled at him encouragingly. ‘Don’t take it to heart, Linus, your father is still very weak –’

  Silence cracked like a clap of thunder, a brilliant white light exploding in the room as the mistake was realized, and for several moments, the room was held in a suspended state. No one breathed, stirred, spoke. But then a sound started up – a sound made from fright, the moment before a scream – and the energy in the room shifted like a hibernating bear turning over in its cave, a great immobile mass suddenly moved and unsettled from position.

  The sound yawned into the room, a moan that rapidly became a siren wail – and through the gaps, as the doctors suddenly converged, Bell saw the emaciated, atrophied body on the bed beginning to thrash with surprising force.

  Linus gave a scream of fright and began to cry, but Hanna was rooted still, unable to tear her gaze from the unravelling scene on the bed.

  ‘Get them out!’ Dr Sorensen barked as the doctors all grabbed a limb and tried to restrain their patient. There were six of them, and still it was a challenge.

  Hanna, somehow, bundled Linus to her and they staggered back two paces from the bed, watching on in horror as bed straps were buckled onto his wrists and ankles, pinning him in place. But it wasn’t enough. His body still writhed, his head banging against the pillow, screams and obscenities crashing around the room with frightening violence. The chaos bloomed into deeper colours, spreading wide its petals so that everything lay exposed and vulnerable, screams echoing in the stark space and raining down on them all, wails and moans and shouts blending into an indistinct maw.

  Bell ran over to the mother and son, both of them frozen, Hanna’s body rigid in her grip.

  ‘We need to leave,’ she said, shaking Hanna firmly, wrenching her attention off the horror in the bed. ‘We need to get Linus out of here. Now.’ And she forcibly pushed them both towards the door, their footsteps stumbling and leaden.

  She flung open the door and the screams and curses and profanities and moans escaped into the corridor with them, like a rush of ghouls. A nurse walking by startled at the tumult, silence dropping as suddenly as a velvet curtain again as soon as the door swished shut.

  ‘Can I help?’ she asked, seeing their ashen faces.

  ‘We’re fine. But thank you,’ Bell managed, seeing how Hanna was trembling, as white as the walls. The nurse walked on.

  ‘Come and sit down, you look faint,’ Bell said, tugging Hanna forward by the arm to a leather tub chair. She collapsed into it, staring into nowhere, caught in her own head.

  Bell crouched down to clasp her arms around Linus. ‘Hey, are you okay?’ she whispered, pulling back to look into his eyes, to smooth his hair back from that beautiful face, to reassure him that it was all okay again. His sobs had subsided, but his eyelashes were glossy with hot tears. He nodded, but the movement was shaky, the movement of a child wanting to make his mother happy again; his eyes kept tracking back to her, fearful.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  He nodded again, but he would only look at his mother.

  ‘Hanna?’ she asked, turning to her too and touching her arm lightly.

  Hanna blinked, her eyes darting everywhere. ‘I’m . . . I’m fine.’

  Bell felt the silence expand as they each recovered. Away from the distraction of the confusion and chaos in that room, in the calm of this corridor, it was filled with something heavy – something that had been said and c
ouldn’t be unsaid. She felt a rush of anger that Hanna had allowed this to happen. To have handled it that badly . . . Max had been right. Linus should never have come here; and if Hanna was adamant he must, she should have told him the truth before they’d gone in. She should have explained exactly who that man was, and what had happened to him – and what might happen when he was reunited with the poppy-tall son he had last seen as a toddler. Instead, she’d left it to chance, and it had blown up in the most terrible of ways.

  ‘She called him my father.’ It was a statement, a question, an accusation.

  Oh God. Bell felt her stomach twist as she saw the uncomprehending expression on Linus’s tear-streaked face. He had been told the truth, and now Hanna had to explain it to him. Everything was back to front; it should never have happened this way . . .

  Hanna looked back at him, finally, and with outstretched arms, drew him towards her. Her hands were trembling still, her smile sketchy and weak. Bell swallowed. How could she say these words, here, in a hospital corridor? Max, fifty miles away, unable to tell the boy he had raised as his own that he was still his father, would always be that.

  ‘. . . That doctor was just confused, sweetheart.’

  Linus blinked, not so easily fooled. He was nearly ten, almost in double figures, a few years from being a teenager. ‘But she said—’

  ‘I know, but she was wrong. He’s just an old friend of mine. He’s your godfather.’

  Bell stared at her in horror. What the hell was she doing? She could understand why Hanna hadn’t told Linus about his real father before he had woken up: Linus would have been just a toddler when the accident had happened, and if the prognosis had been so poor . . . And Max had been an excellent father to him. There had never been any sense of difference that even she had discerned between his affection for Linus and for his sisters. But all of that was irrelevant now that the man in there was awake and was, in one way or another, going to be back in their lives. Linus had to know the truth. It couldn’t be kept from him. And yet –

  ‘You know who your daddy is.’

  Linus looked confused. Of course he knew his own father. Max. The man at breakfast and dinner, kicking a ball in the park on Saturdays and there at every school concert and play. The man who made the World’s Best BLT and tickled him till he wet himself, who had never yet beaten him at Fortnite and yet still played without complaint, who took him to the Hammarby IF handball games in Eriksdalshallen and went skiing off-piste with him whilst the girls did the bunny runs, who watched all the Bond films in one week with him when he’d broken his leg. He had never even questioned it.

  He looked back towards the room, its door firmly shut, no sound escaping from it now. ‘So he’s my godfather?’

  Hanna hesitated, then gave another shrug, the action careless and cold. ‘Yes.’ She took his hand in hers and kissed it, her decision made, her resolve growing again. ‘Like I said, just someone I used to know.’

  Linus softened, accepting the lie, the tension slackening in his face. ‘So then, can we get ice cream now?’

  Another pause, and Bell saw invisible doors to the truth slamming between them and clicking to a lock.

  ‘Sure,’ Hanna smiled, getting up and – still holding his hand – beginning to swing his arm as they turned and walked down the corridor, as though they were in the park.

  Bell stood rooted to the spot as she watched them go ahead, walking without a backward glance from the room where a man lay distressed, withered – and now abandoned. He had spent seven years here on the brink of death, trapped in a half-life, but his injuries had robbed him of far more than his consciousness. He couldn’t know it yet, but, Bell thought as she followed slowly after his wife and son in silent dismay, he was soon going to realize that waking up had been the easy part.

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Six months later – June 2020

  ‘The dolls’ house? Really?’ Bell asked, looking down at the pink plastic monstrosity. It had a purple handle shaped like a hairbrush. An oversized doll had been squashed into one of the rooms, leaving its backside dangling alarmingly through the window.

  ‘Mamma said we could!’ Tilde protested, looking up at her imploringly.

  ‘Well, I guess if Mamma says it’s okay . . .’ Bell sighed, blowing out through her cheeks as she looked around at the ever-increasing pile of toys surrounding the never-diminishing pile of bags on the floor.

  Max came running back through, ready to cart the next load into the car. ‘Right, we’re nearly – Oh!’

  Bell gave him an ‘exactly’ look.

  ‘That wasn’t there a minute ago, was it?’

  ‘Mamma said we could!’ Tilde repeated, just as Hanna herself came down the stairs with a gently enquiring glance.

  ‘Well, if Mamma says it’s okay, I guess it’s okay,’ Max shrugged, picking up the dolls’ house in one hand and Linus’s new skateboard and ramp in the other, soft bags shoved under his arms.

  Hanna shot them all a distracted smile as she walked through into the kitchen. It was the usual chaotic mess in spite of Bell’s best efforts to keep it tidy; the weaponry involved in making Linus’s emergency sandwich was still on the counter, Max’s files were spread across the table, and the twins’ costumes for the upcoming Midsommar festival had once again been pulled from the dressing-up box and strewn across the floor during a game of ‘weddings’.

  Bell grabbed the stray garments as she jogged in, folded them expertly into neat piles, and set to wiping off the crumbs and putting the dirty cutlery into the dishwasher, ready for Max to put it on tonight. He was on a deadline for his new client, and would be only coming to join them at the end of the week.

  ‘Did you find the beach towels?’ Hanna asked her, checking for something in her purse.

  ‘Yes. They were in the blue Ikea bag at the top of the wardrobe in the spare room.’

  Hanna stopped, as if to consider this. ‘Oh yes. I didn’t think to look there. Huh.’

  ‘And Linus has packed his project,’ Bell said, half over her shoulder as she rinsed the glasses that had been left in the sink.

  She stopped again. ‘Remind me . . .?’

  ‘Glacial retreat in the Arctic Circle.’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Hanna zipped up her purse and replaced it in her bag, pulling out the tickets and casually skimmed over the details; but Bell already knew the reason Max was red-cheeked and wild-eyed was because they had to leave in precisely six minutes if they were going to make it to the ferry.

  She turned off the tap and shook her hands dry, realizing too late that she had forgotten to plant out the potted rose Hanna had received as a gift from a patient.

  ‘Are you ready? Where is everybody?’ Max’s voice came through the house, his shadow long and angular in the bright sunlit pool on the hall floor. ‘It’s going to leave without you if you don’t get a move on!’

  The sound of stampeding feet on the stairs heralded the twins’ call to action, and the slow thud coming up from the playroom reintroduced Linus into the scene, a smear of jam at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘Have you got everything?’ Hanna asked him, seeing the iPad in his hands again. That and his skateboard were increasingly all he wanted. ‘Did you bring a book?’

  ‘No, should I?’

  ‘Should you?’ Hanna tutted. ‘Honestly, Linus, we discussed this.’

  ‘I’ll go find something now, then.’

  ‘Hurry up!’ Max’s voice carried through again, growing in impatience. ‘Move faster! You all need to get into the car. Now, now, now.’

  Hanna sighed, sounding as exasperated by Max as she was by her son. She swung her handbag over her shoulder. ‘You’ll have to read something already out there then, although I doubt there’ll be much of interest to a ten-year-old boy. Moby-Dick?’ She put her hand on his shoulder, directing him into the square hall and towards the front door. ‘Perhaps that’ll teach you to do as you’re told next time.’

  Bell grabbed her own bag �
�� a Sandqvist rolled backpack – and did another visual sweep of the room. It was as well Max was coming on afterwards, as they had no doubt forgotten half of what they needed and brought double of what they didn’t.

  She grabbed the electric scooter she’d left rather naughtily propped up in the hall – they weren’t supposed to be taken into private premises, but she hadn’t been able to risk someone else taking it. There were far fewer left lying around in the Ostermalm district, and there wasn’t room for the entire family and their luggage and her in the car. She pulled the front door shut behind her. Poor Max was attempting to close the boot, only for it to bounce off the bulging contents within. It took three attempts and all his body weight before it finally clicked shut.

  ‘I’ll see you down there,’ she said cheerily, stepping onto the board and scooting past them all, but no one noticed. Linus was back on his screen again, head bent at that pronounced angle that was no doubt going to make chiropractors rich in the coming generation, and the girls were too busy fighting over a Pippi Longstocking doll to see her go. Hanna was staring into space, her mouth slightly parted as though she was watching television on the windscreen.

  Bell turned around the corner, happy to have a few precious minutes to herself – she sensed there wasn’t going to be any let-up for the next four days – and let the breeze whistle around her neck as she zipped easily through the streets. Many families had left already; the surplus of empty parking spaces was the signature of summer in the capital. The horse chestnut, alder and beech trees were bushy-headed and thronging with life, squirrels leaping from branch to branch; choirs of birds sang riotously, hidden by the leaves. Window boxes rippled with bold colours, tulips and lavender, and everyone walked with the slight bounce that came with warm, sunny days in the holidays. There were people everywhere – tourists sitting in cafes, students perched on low walls – but traffic was still light as she emerged from the residential streets and joined the main flow downtown.