The Therapist

by Helene Flood

  Breathe, breathe. I flounder, wake with my head under Sigurd’s pillow. Was something there – did I hear a sound? I listen. I hear nothing but silence.

  Has he called? The telephone is blank. It’s 3.46 a.m. His space is empty; his side of the bed cold.

  “Sigurd?”

  I say it softly, repeat it. Get up, open the door, call out, go down the stairs to the living room and kitchen.

  "Sigurd?”

  It was as if I heard something – as if I was startled awake. But now I can hear nothing. I go back to bed.

  Sitting beside me on the sofa is a history student, prattling on and on. She has her face turned towards me, is drowning me in her words, pouring and spraying and spewing them over me so they splash around in my ears. I look over at the veranda door, which is open, and beyond it can see my friend Ronja standing there speaking to a guy she’s interested in. It’s Ronja who dragged me here. We were at home in our apartment drinking Sambuca from shot glasses decorated with cheaply printed religious symbols which she’d bought for me in Peru over the summer – we’d laughed until we cried when I opened them – and Ronja said, “If I drink up first we’re going to that party You Know Who is going to, and if you drink up first, we’ll go to your friend’s place in Gyldenpris like we said we would.” Ronja was the faster drinker, so here we are.

  “So what do you do?” the history student asked me when I sat down on the sofa.

  “I’m studying psychology,” I said.

  “Are you really?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. I knew where this was going.

  “So then maybe you can help me with something,” the history student said. “You see, my dad’s just got remarried, my parents divorced when I was ten, and his new wife, well, if I were to describe her in a single word? – she’s a bitch.”

  And so it goes on. My eyes search the room for someone I know, but the party’s been organised by a friend of Ronja’s would-be boyfriend. He’s an architecture student and sitting in the kitchen – I saw him when I put our beers in the fridge. He was in the middle of telling a girl with a face full of piercings about how he intended to “reinvent the kitchen”. There are some girls sitting on the sofa across from us, deep in discussion, but they’re friends – the first of them has an arm around the second; the third slaps the first one on the thigh as she speaks. It suggests a kind of intimacy I’m not party to – I can’t just barge in on their conversation. Then there’s the drunk guys eating salted pretzels at the dining table, and then there’s the guy standing there leaning against the door frame.

  Him. He’s alone. He doesn’t seem to be bothered by this, but of course that might be affected. He squints at the air in front of him, thinking about something, perhaps. The beer bottle in his hand has had its label torn off. His hands are covered in flecks of paint, they’re fine, the fingers crooked, as hands should be. He’s bitten his nails all the way down to the quick.

  I watch him, seeing all this – his destroyed nails, his soft eyes, the dishevelled hair – but mainly I see that he’s standing alone. He doesn’t look desperate, but he’s standing alone, and I just know that he’s waiting to meet someone. Someone funny and smart and passably attractive. Someone like me.

  “Excuse me,” I say to the history student, and get up.

  I go over to him.

  “Hey,” I say, “it’s you.”

  I put my arms around his neck and whisper, just beside his tiny, round ear: “Pretend you know me.”

  “Hi,” he says.

  I look at him. He has a mole under his left eye; it stretches when he smiles.

  “It’s been a while,” I say. “I haven’t seen you since that day in Berlin.”

  “Yeah, Berlin,” he says, “that must be a few years ago now.”

  “Did you go to France, like you said you would?” I say.

  “No,” he says. He smiles more, the mole stretching thinner, longer. “I ended up going to Australia. Studied at a Panda school for two years. Became a panda-ologist.”

  I laugh. O.K., so he’s playing along. But it was me who started it. I’m funnier.

  “What a coincidence,” I say, “because my panda’s actually sick at the moment.”

  “Sick in what way?”

  “A bit under the weather. Hacking and coughing. Can you help?”

  “Unfortunately not,” he says. “I no longer dabble in panda medicine. I teach.”

  We grin at each other – that’s enough. He glances around, leans towards me and says, his voice lower:

  “Why are we pretending that we know each other?”

  “I’m trying to get away from the girl on the sofa.”

  He leans his head past mine to look and I observe his neck, a strong, healthy sinew in the middle of it, and I think, I like that, sinewy men.

  “She looks about one metre sixty, fifty kilos maybe,” he says. “I reckon you can take her.”

  Now he’s trying to be too funny, I think, he must have something to prove – and anyway, it’s not nice to comment on people’s weight, although it is true that I’m almost twenty centimetres taller than she is.

  “I think your name is Harald,” I say.

  “Wrong,” he says.

  “Are you sure? You look like a Harald. Well, anyway, Harald, this party isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. What do you say we go grab a burger?”

  “I’m in,” he says. “But call me Sigurd. Harald’s my brother.”

  *

  Because he was standing alone. Because boys like him stand there at parties looking for girls like me. Because I was tipsy and twenty-five years old. Because my friend was out on the veranda, talking to some boy. Because I felt so safe out and about with her, with the other girls I knew at the time, that it didn’t matter to me whether he said yes or no.

  Saturday, March 7: Missing

  Old Torp’s doorbell wakes me. The sound is piercing, like an air raid siren – appropriate should the communists see fit to stop by. My dream was restless and fluid – I think I was swimming – and there was something I had to remember to do. The doorbell. The hard, insistent cries call me back. I look around me. Sigurd’s side of the bed is empty.

  But there’s someone at the door, and who else could it be? I throw my dressing gown over my shoulders, tie it closed as I run into the hall. I rush down the stairs, holding the banister so that I won’t slip on the cardboard that covers the sticky floor that once featured wall-to-wall carpeting, lifting my feet so I don’t trip on the loose treads.

  He’s back. He’ll explain everything. It’ll all be a misunderstanding, it doesn’t matter what kind.

  I tear down the next flight, down to the ground floor where the front door is and throw it open, expecting to see him, to throw my arms around him.

  On the front step is Julie.

  “How are you?” she says.

  I look at her, not understanding. What is she doing here? Before I manage to answer she’s over the threshold with her arms around me.

  “Good,” I say, a reflex response, but I’m no longer sure, haven’t yet had time to check in with myself. I’ve spent all night tossing and turning, wide awake, checking the telephone only to see that nobody’s called; I’ve pondered, slept, dreamed, woken up. And now I’m standing here with Julie before me, her hand on the sleeve of my dressing gown in an attempt to comfort me. We don’t know each other very well, even though she’s been with Thomas as long as I’ve known Sigurd. It hits me that I haven’t checked my mobile since I was last awake at 3.45 a.m.

  Without a word I turn and run back upstairs, to the first floor where the living room and kitchen are, then up to the second floor and into the bedroom. Frantic, I look through the items on the bedside table, knocking over a glass, shoving aside a book to find my mobile. Then I look in the bed, sit on my knees on the mattress, put my hands under his side of the duvet – still warm, but it’s
only my heat – until I finally feel the smooth, flat rectangle of my phone, hidden between our pillows.

  There are two messages. One is from Thomas, received this morning at 07:15:

  He’s still not turned up. We’re packing up and making our way back to town. I’ll call you.

  The second is from Julie, received at 07:38:

  Hi, Sara, Thomas told me what happened. I’ll stop by when you’re awake. Hugs, Julie.

  Nothing from him.

  It seems that Julie could wait no longer, because it’s now 8.23 a.m. and she’s here in my house. I hear her steps downstairs; she’s made her way up to the living room. She calls my name, probingly, as if she’s not quite sure whether I’m still here. My breathing becoming shallower and shallower, straight down my throat and back up again, I tap Sigurd’s name in my list of calls and put the phone to my ear. Pick up, pick up, pick up. The line is silent.

  “Sara, where are you?” Julie says from downstairs.

  The receiver crackles, and then a friendly female voice tells me that the person I’m trying to call has turned off their mobile.

  The effect of this is like a punch to the gut. I fold over on the bed, although this is really no different from yesterday – his telephone rang and rang without him answering then too. It stands to reason that it would run out of battery. But yesterday there was a line connecting us, which has now in one fell swoop been snapped. I had called his mobile, and it had rung – wherever it might be. Now it no longer rings. This technical detail, a mobile with battery, a mobile without, startles me. I lie here in a folded lump on the bed and listen to Julie’s footsteps. As she makes her way up the stairs to the second floor, I whisper to myself: “Sigurd, Sigurd, Sigurd.”

  I sense that she’s standing behind me before she says anything, as you can sometimes sense that someone’s staring at you – that uncomfortable sensation of being observed. Here I am in my dressing gown, the mobile clasped between my hands and my forehead against its glass surface; my feet hurt, I must have tripped on a loose tread on the way up. I lie here in our messy, half-finished bedroom, wallpaper half-stripped from the walls, the night’s stale air hanging heavily over the bed, a lingering smell of alcohol from the bottle of wine I emptied. Julie stands and looks at me.

  “Sara,” she says, her voice uncertain, “are you O.K.?”

  I don’t respond. The cold screen of my mobile is smooth against my forehead. One of my feet is stinging – might even be bleeding. I want her to leave.

  But Julie does not leave. Instead, she comes in, crosses the threshold and comes over to the bed, places both hands on my dressing-gown-covered back, and says:

  “Come on now, you can’t just lie here. Let’s go downstairs and make some coffee.”

  She takes hold of my shoulder as if to pull me up, hoist me out of the bed, and as she does so I feel it rising in me, a column from my belly, a source of heat, an elemental force travelling from my stomach up my back and into my arms and legs and throughout my body – who the fuck does she think she is?

  I rip myself free of her, pull away, want to hit her – so fierce is this force quivering through me. It takes a degree of self-control not to lash out at her. She stands there, confused, with her big innocent doe eyes, her snub little button nose, her round chin – her adorable face, with its fringe and ponytail, as if she’s a teenage schoolgirl out to play the Samaritan, out to help me. How self-satisfied she is, I think, telling me that I can’t just lie here. Ordinary little Julie has come to set things straight, pick up the pieces. She must have practised in the car all the way here, going over how she would act. And now she’s standing there, so surprised, her face just begging to be slapped, and the only thing that stops me from hitting her is the fact that I pull away.

  This is our bedroom. Sigurd lives here, and so do I. This is where we have lived and loved and fought and slept. He left yesterday morning, and since then it’s been just me, alone, but now she’s standing here, in our very inner sanctum – who the fuck is she?

  The first time I met her, at a barbecue in their back garden in Nydalen, she delightedly said to me: “I’m sure we’ll become good friends.” But it never happened. Even then I felt an unwillingness at this expectation – we’ve fallen in love with two friends so therefore it’s only logical for us to be friends, too. More than that – we should become close, intimate. She was wearing heart-shaped earrings and a white lace blouse; she was smiling and dumb, and I saw nothing in her that I could identify with.

  That was four years ago. Sigurd has sometimes complained about it. Julie’s fine, he says, you could try to get to know her a bit better. Perhaps I could, but on the other hand maybe I’m just using my common sense.

  I pull the dressing gown tight around me and stare at her, trembling, heat leaching from my pores, my eyes, my mouth – I can feel it, I’m no longer sane.

  “Get out,” I hiss.

  “But—” says Julie.

  “Get out.”

  Her face crumples; it’s as if I have struck her, after all. She turns, about to leave, hesitates, and turns back to me.

  “I was just trying to be nice,” she says to me, her voice thick now, full of tears and rust and jagged stones, “even though you’ve never been nice to me. I just wanted to help.” She turns again and goes – I can hear her footsteps, hard and quick, as she makes her way down the stairs. I sit with the telephone in my hands, this dead, shiny object. Sigurd, Sigurd, where are you?

  Downstairs the front door slams shut behind Julie. I try to breathe deeply, down into my stomach. It’s Saturday, and I’m alone.

  “Oslo police headquarters,” says the woman on the other end of the line.

  “Yes, hello,” I say, “I’m calling about a missing person, yes, a man – my husband. He, well, he’s been missing since early yesterday morning, or around nine-thirty, I don’t know when exactly. He called me a little after nine-thirty. That’s the last I’ve heard from him. He should have arrived at his friend’s cabin by five, but he never made it there.”

  “I see,” the woman says. “But current procedure is not to start looking for anyone until at least twenty-four hours have passed.”

  “Right, O.K.,” I say, fumbling – I hadn’t thought this far, about searches, that kind of thing.

  “This is an adult we’re talking about?”

  “Yes, my husband, so – he’s thirty-two.”

  “I understand,” she says. “Of course you’re welcome to come down to the station and make a report, but we won’t be able to do anything until twenty-four hours have passed.”

  “No, O.K., then.”

  I don’t know what else to say. Twenty-four hours. Missing, wanted.

  “Most people who go missing turn up again after a few hours,” the woman says, her tone a little friendlier now. “Generally there’s been a misunderstanding about an agreement, or someone’s misremembered something.”

  I clear my throat.

  “He left me a message on my voicemail,” I say, “telling me he was with his friends. But they say he wasn’t with them.”

  “Hmm,” she says. “Well, as I said, it’s often a misunder-standing.”

  The economy of these sentences – he was with his friends. Of course it sounds like a misunderstanding.

  “I understand,” I say. I have to try. “But you see, he said he was with them, and they say he wasn’t, so either, well, either he’s lying or they are.”

  “O.K.,” she says, and I hear how I must sound – like a ridiculous woman, the victim of some joke or indiscretion, too stupid to understand. “Well, it’s hard to know sometimes, but when it’s an adult and the circumstances aren’t evidently critical, we don’t do anything until after twenty-four hours. So you can call back again then, if you like. If he doesn’t turn up in the meantime, that is.”

  “O.K.”

  “As I said, most people do.”

  I hang up. “Evidently critical.” Then what are we talking about? I’m still sitting in bed in my dr
essing gown.

  The shower makes me feel more normal; afterwards, I stick a plaster on my toe. As I dress I think that she was right, the woman on the phone. Most people do turn up. The police have experience of this kind of thing – they know what they’re talking about. I need to calm down. I’ve always been good in emergency situations at work – administering first aid, handling out-of-control children, taking taxi rides to accident and emergency with suicidal teenagers. I know how to keep calm. It’s one of my strengths.

  I’ve let myself get carried away. Jan Erik is wobbly by nature, he jokes about everything and takes nothing seriously – isn’t that a symptom of insecurity? Isn’t it insecurity that makes him cower at the slightest change in the weather? Thomas, well, Thomas is sensible, but his feathers may have been ruffled by Jan Erik. Or by Julie. Yes, that’s true – a man married to Julie must be the kind of man who succumbs to pressure.

  But I’m stronger than that; I should be able to stand firm. Perhaps it was the session with Trygve; maybe it was the bottle of wine. It’s strange, the voicemail message, but there must be an explanation. I just need to relax. Wait. Things will work themselves out. Sigurd will turn up; everything will be explained.

  I threw Julie out – that may have been a bit extreme. I was angry, of course; confused, just woken up. I’d had a bit to drink. There’s no getting away from it – I was tipsy last night, off balance. She caught me napping – in the most literal sense. I overreacted. I’m private by nature, and we’re not close. I’ll have to send her a message and apologise.

  I take a long, deep breath. Yes. That feels better. Nothing but a minor worry, a troubled lump in my belly. Otherwise, I feel fine. Relaxed. It’s Saturday. I should get on with my normal routine.

  On the first floor something makes me stop. I’m about to go over to our kitchen nook and make a cup of coffee, but I stop, look around me. Something feels strange.

  It’s hard to put my finger on what. I remember yesterday in detail, what I did and didn’t do, but my memories from last night are fuzzy. It was the wine – that has to be partly to blame – and of course all this to do with Sigurd, too. All the thoughts that ran through my head. To remember anything, I have to focus.