The Therapist

by Helene Flood

  But it’s peculiar.

  The pan on the hob, for example. It’s empty – clean, even – I put it there yesterday evening after boiling some water for a cup of tea. It has a long handle, so it can be held with just one hand. When I was little, such pots and pans always had to be pos-itioned with the handle facing inwards. It was Mamma who was particular about it. “Small children might grab that handle,” she used to say. I was seven when she died, and had no interest in things like pots and pans, but I can remember Annika saying it: “You have to put the pans like this, Mamma says so.” Handle in. I always position my pans that way; Annika and Pappa do, too. But the pan on the hob has the end of its handle sticking out over the edge of the counter. A child – should one be here – would be able to grab it. I would never have left a pan like that.

  Or would I? And by that I mean, was I really so groggy yesterday – the wine, the voicemail message – that I left the pan that way without thinking? I remember the cup of tea. I remember that I was simultaneously thinking about Sigurd: his lie, of which I was now convinced. About why he would lie. Was he carrying on with someone else? Fru Atkinson, for example? Was he involved in something dodgy I didn’t know about? Was he avoiding me because of my constant nagging about the renovations? That’s what I’d stood there thinking about. My hands prepared the cup of tea on autopilot. I look in the bin – the teabag is there. I look at the pan. It twists within me, that handle sticking out over the edge of the hob. It makes my fingers prickle just to look at it. Could it have been me? Could I have been in that much of a daze?

  Or might it have been Julie? I breathe, remember that I was lying upstairs on the bed with my mobile pressed to my forehead as I heard her pottering in the kitchen, calling my name. So, Julie, you were snooping around while you were here? Took a peek in my pan? Had a little look in the fridge, perhaps? Just couldn’t help yourself.

  I lose my sense of calm again, lose it so fast. I’m clearly not myself because of all this. I have to remember what she said, the woman at the police station who answered the telephone. Most people come home of their own accord.

  As I sit there with my cup of coffee and look around the living room, it occurs to me that there’s something else. I don’t know what, exactly – which detail has changed – but something is different. Did Julie take a little walk around in here?

  Then I remember that I woke in the night. That I was calling out to him. Was he here? Walking around in the living room, without coming upstairs?

  I shudder. Shake off the thought – it’s unthinkable. It was Julie, of course it was. Julie, on the prowl for gossip. I have such a short fuse. My nerves are frayed.

  *

  A friend would come in handy right now. When Sigurd and I met four years ago, I had many. Ronja I was closest to, but there were others – Benedicte, Ida, Eva-Lise. We shared a flat in Bergen: Ronja, Benedicte and I. A shabby apartment in Håkonsgaten, close to the cinema.

  But we haven’t been good at keeping in touch. Ronja is bumming around, travelling the world now, writing articles for various newspapers and taking casual jobs before she moves on again. It’s difficult to reach her – if I send her an email, she answers a few weeks later. She calls me every now and again if she’s here in the city, and we go out, have a few beers, laugh and have fun, but she’s not someone I can depend on – not the way I could depend on her when we were students. Ida got married and moved to Stavanger. She and her husband both have hectic careers in the oil industry, and whenever they’re not working they’re outdoors, climbing some mountain. Benedicte has one-year-old twins. Whenever I call her, I hear them screaming and hollering in the background. Eva-Lise lives in Tromsø, and works at the university there. Neither she nor I particularly enjoy speaking on the telephone, but we do speak every now and again – it’s not that. I don’t mean to complain. But we all used to be so close. I could speak to them about anything – and by anything I mean the important things. But even more importantly, we could also talk about the unimportant things. Everyday things, the things that don’t matter so much. The kind of you’ll-never-guess-what-happened-to-me-on-the-bus type things; the did-I-tell-you-about-that-guy-at-work stuff.

  When your husband doesn’t answer his phone for hours on end, those are the people you want to speak to. The people who you can talk to without it being hard work. Friends the conversation just flows with, where you can say whatever occurs to you or simply stay silent. The people who can make you think about something differently. I can’t just call Eva-Lise on a Saturday and say, “Tell me about something that happened at work yesterday.” Because now there’s all the other accumulated stuff, the kind of what’s-happened-since-we-last-spoke things we’d have to catch up on. And that’s exactly what I need a break from, what’s happening right now. The screaming absence in this house. Sigurd.

  On a whim, I call Margrethe. Maybe he’s just with his mother. I can already hear the apology, hear him explaining: “Oh, my phone was out of battery, and I’d forgotten my key. I didn’t want to wake you, so I went to my mum’s.” His apology? Do I really believe that explanation would constitute an apology?

  While the ringing tone buzzes in my ear I consider what I’m about to say to her. How I’m going to call her up and worry her like this. On the other hand, she’s a strikingly sensible woman, someone who disapproves of the highly strung and the nervous, who would tell the better part of my patients that they just need to pull themselves together – to stop thinking so much, get enough sleep, eat healthily, do their schoolwork and clean up their rooms – and then everything will be fine. But perhaps “sensible” isn’t the right word. There’s plenty that Margrethe doesn’t understand.

  The number rings and rings. No answer.

  I go out. Where I’m going, I don’t know, but I don’t want to just sit around at home. Sigurd has taken the car, so I take the train into the city centre.

  The sun is out today, pale and cold. The snow is almost gone, and the closer I get to the centre of town the less snow remains on the ground. On the train are teenage girls, heading into the city to go shopping.

  I could visit my dad – it’s been a while. I should visit him soon. But then a heaviness comes over me as I think of Pappa in his study, of us talking as we sit before the fireplace, drinking tea. And of course I’ll have to have something to say, preferably about something I’ve read that we can discuss, a novel, although nothing too socially relevant or incendiary. To say anything about this – about Sigurd – this thing that’s quivering within me, I’d need the words for it, a way to present it as a manageable problem. And if I don’t have these things, I certainly won’t be able to tell Pappa about it. But perhaps I could go there anyway, just stay for a while. The great thing about my father – who has an attention span that extends only to the most superficial things that happen in my life – is that he doesn’t expect much closeness, many confidences. With him I can spend time with another person while still being left alone. But it doesn’t feel quite right, not when I’m in such a bad mood. And then there’s the stupid rule that we’re supposed to call before we turn up, to make sure he doesn’t have company and that the house isn’t swarming with smitten students who think he’s some kind of guru. No, what am I thinking? A day like today is not the day to visit my father.

  But I can go see Annika. That’s what I want to do. We’ve said we might meet for lunch tomorrow, but I could just go to her place today instead. Just stop by, say hello. Say that I wanted to see whether they were home.

  But maybe that’s too desperate. Maybe that’s the kind of thing you only do if it’s a matter of life and death and you can’t possibly stand to be alone. I drum my fingers against my handbag. Should I check my mobile again, even though the ringtone is set to the highest possible volume so that I won’t miss any calls?

  I get off the train at Majorstuen, following the flow of teenage girls with their mobiles and handbags and long locks of hair out of the station and down Bogstadveien. Perhaps I could buy myself
something? We’re saving money, want to spend what we earn on the house and nothing else, but whatever, Sigurd buys drawing equipment for work – maybe I need a new pair of trousers for my job? I go into a clothing store, watch the teenage girls milling around, “Oh my God, those trousers look so great on you, eight hundred kroner, Mamma gave me the money, Amalie and the others said they’re coming down to meet us.” Everything seems so problematic for these girls. They speak with big, wide-open eyes and gaping mouths, chew air between their greedy jaws, everything is so this or so that, the most neutral things presented as insurmountable obstacles. They talk about their friends and boyfriends as if they don’t know that this is just the beginning, that in four years’ time they won’t even know the boy they’re currently in love with. But who am I to tell them that? They come to me when they’ve really messed up, yes, they sit in my waiting room when everything is going wrong for them; when they’re depressed, anxious, sleepless, joyless. It all seems so easy when eavesdropping on them as they shop, but I know their secrets.

  I examine a few items of clothing and feel nothing, have no desire for any of it; can’t be bothered to go into a changing room, take off my jacket and clothes, untie my shoes. I go out again, wander along the street, and think that no, I can’t do this, I can’t be here. What if I see someone I don’t want to talk to? What if I bump into Julie?

  I take a tram to Nordstrand. I want to go and see Annika, after all.

  I hammer my hand against my thigh as the tram clatters its way up the hill. It’s almost three o’clock. Almost twenty-eight hours since Sigurd left his voicemail. Around twenty hours since Thomas called and said he was missing.

  *

  Annika and Henning live at the innermost end of a cul-de-sac. The thought which always occurs to me when I visit them is that they’re proper, orderly people. They live in a proper house, much smaller than mine and Sigurd’s, but a functional one. A terraced house, suitably new, suitably attractive, always messy – but messy because it’s used. Lives are lived there. They have three boys between the ages of two and seven. It’s always noisy, there’s always someone who has hit somebody, someone who’s tripped over something, something that has to be said right this second, and someone – usually Annika – who says, “Can’t we all just be quiet for a while?” There’s always so much to be done. Bicycles and balls and games in the garden and the drive to be tidied away. Grass to be cut, walls to be painted – always something to be getting on with. They work a lot, both of them. They should be exhausted, but they’re like the Duracell bunny, always hammering away with crazed smiles. I once told Sigurd that if they ever stopped to check and see whether they needed some time to relax, they might just hit the floor.

  As I round the corner into the cul-de-sac that leads to their house, it’s Henning I see first – because he’s hanging from the top of a tree. He’s holding a huge pair of loppers, turning his body, bending this way and that. He’s engrossed in what he’s doing, so he doesn’t see me. Then I hear Annika’s voice.

  “Aksel, watch out, that branch is about to fall, no, Aksel, no, I said come here – Henning, wait, he’s under the tree, Henning!”

  I stop when I see her; consider them for a moment. Henning’s back visible up there in the tree; my sister in jeans that sit bulkily around her hips and a checked shirt with its tails flapping free, running at top speed after a two year old squealing with delight at the fact that his mother is chasing him. I can’t see the other two, but this is nevertheless the perfect image of Annika’s family, as if every moment is about preventing accidents that could prove fatal.

  She catches the boy, throws her arms around him and lifts him up. The two year old begins to howl, furious. He wants to keep going, was on a mission – how can his mother simply lift him away like this? She puts him over her shoulder and he rages, twisting and squirming and kicking his legs.

  “I’ve got him,” Annika calls to Henning up in the tree.

  She catches sight of me as she walks back towards the house. First she stops and stares, and that’s when I think it must be true, she must be tired down to the very marrow of her bones. When she was a student she spent two years living in a legendary flatshare in Fredensborg that kept open house every day, where guests came to sit and drink coffee and wine, discussing ethics and philosophy and using words like “metalevel”. Now she looks at me and I see that I should have called first, because the muscles of her face go slack and she suddenly looks old, worn out. Then she pulls herself together, the muscles tightening again, and she smiles, tired and friendly, as the boy continues to writhe and wriggle up there on her shoulder.

  “Hello, Sara,” she says. “What a lovely surprise.”

  I follow Annika into the kitchen, the smallest boy dangling from her hip but still trying to break free. I apologise for turning up out of the blue and she assures me that it’s fine, it’s lovely to see me, although we both know this isn’t true. I do regret coming, but it’s too late now, and Annika deals with her son and runs her hands through her hair, perhaps feeling bad that she isn’t quite as happy to see me as she claims to be.

  “You want a cup of tea or something?” she asks me, and I thank her and say that I’ll make it.

  “I’ll just go find out what Theo and Joakim are up to,” she says. “Back in a sec.” She leaves the kitchen, then the stairs creak, and I hear her calling their names.

  Before we moved to Nordberg, Sigurd and I had tried to get pregnant. Just for around six months, no more. Back then visits to Annika and Henning were an effective contraceptive. We would look at each other on the train home and ask, “Do you think it has to be like that? So hectic? What if we only have one?”

  I look around the kitchen. The remains of breakfast are on the table – plates made of plastic and porcelain, sippy cups and mugs of coffee. The magnets on the fridge door hold so many pieces of paper that the fridge seems likely to fall to its knees under the weight of them: schedules, planners, shopping lists, memos about recycling and the clothing required at kinder-garten, a note about the importance of living a healthy life and meditating for twenty minutes a day. Among these are photographs. One of Annika and Henning from ten years ago, when they’d just met. She has her arms around his shoulders and is laughing at him; he looks into the camera, resting a hand at her waist. Then there are the pictures of the kids, individually and together; a childhood photograph of Annika and me, I must be around five, she seven; and one of Sigurd and me with Theo. It was taken one Sunday on a ski trip to Linderudkollen, two years ago now. We haven’t been skiing together since, but I remember it was a fun day. Another stab. But I know I mustn’t start to worry until after five o’clock. And by then he’ll probably have turned up. The police know what they’re talking about.

  Just then, Margrethe calls. The ringing of the mobile makes me jump. It’s Sigurd, he’s calling to put an end to this nightmare, everything is fine, he’s at home – that tiny, painful moment when I think everything is about to be O.K., and then it isn’t.

  “Sara,” a voice crackles down the line, “it’s Margrethe.” As if I didn’t know this from my mobile’s display. But she always speaks like this. She makes me think of a lost time, one I haven’t experienced but have read about in books or seen on T.V. When people drove sports cars, permed their hair and wore silk scarves and red lipstick; drank aperitifs in the library before dinner.

  “Hello,” I say.

  Her charm makes me taciturn; her style makes me clumsy. That’s the dynamic between us.

  “I’m visiting a friend in Hankø this weekend,” she tells me. “We’ve been working flat out in the garden all day, so I didn’t hear when you called.”

  It always feels as if Margrethe is waiting for me to participate, to tell her what I’ve been doing all day, and that whatever I tell her ought to be glamorous in some way. She seems to think everyone is like her, and she refuses to give up hope – or worse, to notice – that this isn’t true. It’s as if she can’t comprehend how awkward I am.<
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  And then Annika comes in, the little one still on her arm, sweat on her brow.

  “Anyway,” Margrethe says, when I say nothing further, “you called me, was there something you wanted, sweetie?”

  She calls me “sweetie”. Nobody else does – not my father, my sister or my husband. I clear my throat, need to lubricate my vocal chords, say what I need to say.

  “Yes. I was just wondering,” I say, clearing my throat again – it’s so dry, like sandpaper and dust – “if you’d spoken to Sigurd lately?”

  It goes quiet on the other end of the line.

  “Have I spoken to Sigurd?” Margrethe says.

  “Because,” I say, “it’s just that he’s been gone, or, not gone, but . . . He was supposed to go to a cabin with some friends at the weekend, and they say he never arrived. But . . .”

  I bite my tongue and it hurts, and I know that of course I don’t need to tell her all the rest of it, that really I shouldn’t, but I’ve started now, so I keep going.

  “But he called me and told me he was there, with them, but he isn’t. So then we started to wonder – Thomas and Jan Erik and I, that is – it was the three of them who were supposed to spend the weekend at Thomas’ cabin together. Because they say he isn’t with them. But he told me that he was.”

  “What is it that you’re trying to say, Sara?” Margrethe says, sounding a little strict now, as I imagine mothers can be when their children attempt to drag them into intrigues in which they have no interest.

  My tongue stings where I bit it, tastes of blood and metallic salt. Maybe I’m bleeding.

  “He never arrived at the cabin,” I say. “And he hasn’t come home.”