by Liz Jensen
These were some of the things that passed through my mind when Kaitlin was telling me the story of her liaison, the fact of which eventually led to our parting of ways. When she had finished, she declared that it was my ‘impenetrability’ which made her seek comfort in a lover. That’s when she called me ‘a robot made of meat’.
But I am not a robot made of meat.
In that moment, though, I wished I was.
The early part of the train journey to Stockholm is long and pleasantly uneventful, through the dusty post-harvest landscapes of Belgium and Germany. I spend the first few hours reading the complex financial documents Ashok has sent. The day after his sabotage was revealed, Jonas Svensson swallowed more than a hundred aspirin. If his teenage son Erik had not come home from school early and found him, he’d have died. There’s a ferry to the Danish island of Zealand, then another train to the Central Station in Copenhagen, where I change trains. The next part of the journey involves crossing a long and elegant bridge with a view of wind turbines. I like wind turbines, both from an engineering and an aesthetic standpoint. In Sweden itself, the geography is monotonous and rain-washed, with oceans of fir forest. It’s a centralised nation with a largely urban population: now I’m seeing for myself how this translates visually. There are few towns and vast tracts of land which, save for the railway line itself and a few isolated farms, are unmarked by any human presence. I have brought my Swedish dictionary. Suicide is självmord, meaning self-murder. Sabotage is sabotage, just as it is in many European languages, deriving from the French word ‘sabot’: in the eighteenth century protesting workers would fling their wooden clogs – sabots – into a factory’s machinery to wreck the production process. I know that in Sweden they have advanced public services and a solid welfare system. Crime is low, but modern Swedes are preoccupied with its genesis, a preoccupation which has spawned much popular fiction. The theory is that if someone breaks the law, their actions are seen to represent a wider societal dysfunction. Like the parents of wayward children asking themselves how they failed their offspring, the focus is not on what the criminal did wrong, but on how Swedish society could have prevented it happening.
The morning after my arrival in Stockholm I discover that Jonas Svensson’s boss Lars Axel is in this sense a classic Swede. He wants, urgently and desperately, to know the explanation for Svensson’s inexplicable act, and the distress which led to it. The Svensson and the Axel families were friends. They cross-country skied together. His office overlooks a large and elegant square. The interior walls are white and the furniture is black apart from a lamp whose metal shade I identify as Weathershield’s 2011 Autumn Mustard.
‘We are relaxed in this organisation. And open,’ he tells me, leaning back in his chair and scraping the hair off his forehead to reveal the shape of his skull, which is strong and majestic, in contrast to the smaller and more delicate features of his face. ‘If Jonas had a problem with coffee futures, or anything else, why didn’t he tell me?’
‘He may not have known how to articulate it.’
He shrugs. ‘Well he certainly wasn’t himself. To commit sabotage on this scale, and for absolutely no reason, after all the hard work he has done, and then try to kill himself . . .’ He trails off, as though exhausted, and inspects his hands. I think again of Sunny Chen’s acte manqué. A single oddity is a one-off. Two is the beginning of a Venn. ‘He wouldn’t talk to me after he’d done it. He was avoiding me. I didn’t know what was happening at that point, of course. But when it came out, I think he felt ashamed. Or at least very confused.’
‘Is there no explanation?’
‘None that makes sense.’
‘Tell me anyway.’
‘Annika, that’s his wife, she says he claimed he was bullied into it. I said to her, who would bully him? Nobody here at work, we are all like a family, it’s very informal.’ His voice is cracking. ‘She said it was kids. Kids! He must have been having a breakdown.’ He gulps and shifts in his chair, offering me a three-quarter view of his features. They’re struggling, and water is welling in his eyes. ‘His son’s eighteen. They have a good relationship. He’d never bully him or get his friends to. And what do kids know about futures markets? What do they care? Hesketh, I’m so sorry. I—’
Lars Axel has started to cry. Huge sobs disrupt his body. He leans forward and hides his face in his hands. Swiftly, I start to fold paper in my head. I know I should do something else, but I’m at a loss. Then, before I can even begin to configure the etiquette of the situation, he has sprung up and walked out of his office, openly weeping. Through the glass panelling, I watch a female colleague attempt to console him. A man joins her. Then together they lead him away slowly and with great gentleness.
I stay where I am for a long time. Then I open my briefcase and take out some origami paper, and select a sheet of Classic Ivory.
Japanese tradition requires one, on a first visit, to present a gift to the host. I’m not Japanese and nor is Lars Axel, but I think: Lars Axel will see that I wanted to make a gesture of some sort, to mark his pain and my awareness of it: a memento of the few awkward moments that we spent in one another’s presence. I know that Sunny Chen appreciated his praying mantis. I make a lotus flower, and balance it carefully on his desk. It’s not much by way of consolation, I suppose. I realise I’m not talented in this department, in the way Lars Axel’s Swedish colleagues are. But nor am I ‘a robot made of meat’.
Then I leave.
Back in the hotel I sift through the financial files a second time and sort them into piles according to their relevance. I read more on the acte manqué, which leads me into medical descriptions of the psychogenic ‘fugue’ state, in which part of the mind can ‘dissociate’ from the rest and make its own independent decisions. Trauma or heavily suppressed negative emotions such as guilt, jealousy, resentment and rage can play a role in triggering the mind going behind its own back in this way. Most interesting to me are those cases which involve self-sabotage, such as the man who sends an anonymous letter to the police, accusing himself of his wife’s murder, and then denies he ever wrote it, or the nurse who injects the wrong drug ‘by accident’ to five different patients on the same day and cannot explain why, or the bride who sets fire to her wedding dress as she prepares for the ceremony. I sketch out some Venns. If I am on to something, my blood feels it before my brain and I get very hungry. I raid the mini-bar. Dried fruit. Salted cashews. The inevitable Toblerone. As I eat, I shut my eyes and wait for the connection to materialise.
But instead, along comes Freddy. He does this more and more.
I open my eyes and check the time. He will just be home from school now.
My body-clock remembers his schedule.
For my birthday back in February he gave me the dinosaur that subsequently became my one souvenir of him. It has toilet-roll cardboard legs and goggly egg-carton eyes. Its skin is a crude layer of papier mâché painted green with red spots. When I asked him what it was called, he said, ‘a Happybirthdayosaurus’. Children have no inhibitions about inventing words. The Happybirthdayosaurus stands on my desk at home next to the semi-assembled hermit crab. Freddy’s exceptionally good with his hands, for a boy of his age. Kaitlin came up with the idea of getting him a big work-table for his bedroom, and a special chest of drawers which he filled with feathers, conkers, cardboard toilet rolls, scraps of fabric in different textures, sequins, busted jewellery, screws, nails – anything that could be fashioned into something else. He kept his tools in there too. I used to bring home odd bits of packaging and polystyrene chips, defunct cartridges, and broken computer parts for him to add to his collection. He likes to invent, and get messy. He is a fan of wood glue. He always has some on his hands. He peels it off at mealtimes. He calls it ‘dead pirate skin’.
When I call Kaitlin’s home number, nobody answers. This is usually what happens. She keeps her answerphone switched off. I hang on anyway, counting the rings.
I’ve made seven mental ozuru and I’m
beginning an eighth. I’m just about to hang up when, on the fifty-ninth ring, someone picks up.
‘Hello Freddie Kalifakidis speaking who is it?’ His voice is breathless and loud: he must have been running.
‘Hello Freddy K! It’s me.’ I am so surprised to hear him that I stall completely. But he doesn’t.
‘When are you coming back?’
I hesitate. ‘What did your mother say?’
‘She said you went abroad and we won’t see you again for ages and ages.’
I start to rock gently. I gather that one of the rules with children, in the world I am not completely part of, is: ‘spare them the truth’.
‘Well I am in another country. But I don’t live here. I have a cottage on the island of Arran in Scotland. So she got that wrong.’
‘What do you do there?’
‘I work. And I’ve got a goldfish. In an old bathtub.’
‘Cool!’ Freddy has always hankered after a fish.
‘Maybe you can visit, and help me choose it a name.’ He is very keen on christening things. ‘Where’s your mother?’
‘In the garden. We were pulling up dandelions, but she got mad furious because I ate a woodlouse and she said I had to brush my teeth and it was disgusting, that’s why I’m here to wash it off cos I’ve still got mud and stuff in my mouth, woodlouse blood.’
‘You ate a woodlouse?’
‘Actually lots of woodlouses. Maybe a hundred. You touch them and they roll into a ball. And then you eat them like peanuts. I found them in the ground, there was a whole nest under a stick. Some of them were smaller than a . . . a grain of pepper or an ant’s bottom.’
‘Freddy K. Irregular plural. So it’s woodlice. Did they taste good?’
‘Nyet. Crunchy. A bit sour. And they smell weird.’
‘So what else have you been doing, apart from eating woodlice?’
‘Making papier-mâché stuff. Mum said I could use your origami paper.’
‘Of course you can. I was thinking of getting you a new Lego model. A big one that we can work on together.’
‘Cool. A ship.’
‘OK. I’ll find one. How’s school?’
There’s a noise in the background and he breaks off for a moment. When he comes back his voice is different. ‘Mum’s here . . . She says she can’t talk she’s got muddy hands.’ I hear her hissing who is it at him. He tells her. ‘She says she’ll call you back . . . I have to wash my face and brush my teeth because of the woodlouses.’ His voice has changed. I’m losing him.
‘Freddy K—’ I rock harder. ‘Remember the irregular plural. Louse becomes lice.’
I hear his mother say his name sharply, and he says, ‘Got to go. Bye Hesketh,’ and he’s hung up.
I check the Svensson file again and draw up a mental list of questions to ask him and his doctors. Kaitlin doesn’t call back. Freddy will be interrogating her about me, I am sure. He’ll want to know why we can’t see each other and she’ll come up with a new lie which she will justify by saying it’s a ‘white’ one.
Dulux has many whites in its range. Lily, Ivory, Orchid, Ice, Barely Grey, Pacific Mist.
We argued about Freddy before I left.
‘I’m the only adult male he’s ever been around on a regular basis,’ I said. ‘He thinks of me as his father.’
‘That’s exactly the problem,’ she said.
‘So you’ll just go and find him a new one?’
She didn’t say anything. I did a mental flow chart which brought me to the conclusion that this might already have happened.
It’s six o’clock and I have gone down to the hotel bar where a woman is sitting alone drinking white wine. She is flicking through a demographics journal. This attracts my attention, firstly because population distribution is a fascinating field of study and secondly because the journal is in German, a language I speak passably. I like to practise it, so I introduce myself to the woman in German – guten Abend – and we get talking. She tells me she is an academic attending a conference on statistical projections in the wake of the UN’s recent warning. It’s called The Perfect Storm: Climate, Hunger and Population. She shows me a graph whose growth curve I am familiar with: it is applicable to any biological species with no significant predators and finite resources. I ask her when she sees the exponential growth phase being replaced by stationary and death phases. She replies that it is unlikely to be later than 2100 and could be sooner than 2050.
‘Human civilisation faces a 90 per cent risk of collapse if the population rate isn’t held in check. We’re a species out of control. Do you realise, the world’s population has more than doubled in my lifetime?’
I do a swift calculation. She’d have been born around 1960. ‘You must be above fifty, then.’ Her eyes change shape. ‘That’s OK. I like older women.’
Although she has no distinguishing features by which she can be readily recognised, she is reasonably attractive. I haven’t had sex in two hundred and sixteen days and I feel the need with a sudden urgency. So I ask a few personal-information questions by way of a warm-up: where do you live, etcetera. I learn that she is based in Geneva but travels a great deal, which means she can’t have a dog. But she would like one. I ask what breed and she says a King Charles spaniel. I tell her I have an as-yet un-christened fish. When I ask her if she’d like to join me in my room, she understands what I mean immediately, but claims she is ein bisschen überrascht, ‘a little taken aback’, and suggests we have another drink first um sich kennenzulernen, ‘to get acquainted’.
I thought we’d done that. I don’t want another drink, but I buy her a second glass of wine and wait for her to finish it.
‘Don’t you want one?’ she asks. She is drinking her wine rather slowly.
Apparently I hadn’t made myself clear. ‘No. I just want you. I like older women. And sex too of course. I like sex. We won’t reproduce.’
This prompts the blush reflex and she laughs. ‘Not at my age, no.’
She looks down at her hands. Then she looks up and says, ‘Hesketh. You’re an incredibly good-looking man. But I expect you know that.’
I do, as women have often told me so before. ‘My ex used to call me the tall, dark stranger,’ I tell her. ‘But she didn’t mean it as a compliment.’
She smiles. I run my finger up the inside of her wrist, one of my favourite places on women. Then she finishes her drink in one gulp and we go upstairs and I get to sample some of my other favourite places: the nape of the neck, the breasts and nipples, and, of course, the mons venus area.
The sex starts well, but just as I’ve established a definitive momentum my phone makes its text-message noise, which is the cry of the peregrine falcon. I regret programming this in. Some rhythms are not meant to be broken, and certain sounds are particularly disruptive, so this causes a setback. The Swiss demographer gets me going again quite expertly, but once my penis is back in her vagina it’s all over after twenty-two thrusts. She hasn’t had an orgasm, and although she at first declines my offer to give her one, she then changes her mind and guides my hand and my movements. Every woman seems to have her own bespoke requirements here, and I consider it polite to pay heed to this. They generally appreciate my respect for the rules of reciprocity.
Afterwards, she suggests we have dinner together, but I decline.
‘Sorry. In other circumstances I would, but tonight I have to work.’
‘I could come by later when you’ve finished. Stay the night.’ Perhaps she wants another orgasm.
‘No, that’s not possible.’ Here I switch to English because I lack the vocabulary I need. ‘I have RLS. That’s an acronym for Restless Leg Syndrome. It means I kick women. In bed. By accident, of course.’ I switch back to German. ‘Don’t worry,’ I reassure her, as she finishes dressing. ‘We don’t need to see each other again.’
Her mood must have shifted because her smile vanishes. I’ve observed this before with women, post-sex. They want to linger, but they can’t spell out why.
‘Do you make a habit of this?’
‘No, but I’d like to,’ I tell her. ‘It’s just that I’m not good at being with other people for long. I know I don’t have—’ Once again I can’t find the German term I need, which annoys me. So I say it in English. ‘People skills.’
She switches to English. ‘I noticed.’ She is fiddling with a silver bangle on her wrist, decorated with a pattern of feathers. Indian, at a guess. I realise I have probably hit the wrong note again, but I don’t know how to remedy it. I haven’t memorised the phrases for it in any language. ‘Tell me,’ she says, ‘isn’t a problem with social interaction quite a handicap in your field? Didn’t you say you were an anthropologist?’ Her English is far superior to my German. I must take the time to study harder.
‘When it comes to gauging human behaviour, it’s an asset. It’s like colour-blind people being deployed by the military to detect camouflage,’ I reply. ‘They look for the shapes rather than the colours.’ This line is tried and tested.
Her features relax into a more forgiving configuration. All of a sudden, she seems to understand. Usually they do. I reach for my laptop and fire it up. She stands in the doorway watching me for a long time, just as Kaitlin used to.
At some point she gives up on me and leaves the room.
Kaitlin did that too. It was always a relief.
It’s only later on, when I’m setting my phone alarm, that I see the text that interrupted sex with the demographer.
You have left Freddy very confused. He’s not your son and you are out of his life now. If you want the best for him, then please leave him in peace and let’s all move on.
Kaitlin Kalifakidis is a lawyer: we met on a case. I was instantly attracted to her. I liked her Greek surname, but it was her wild hair that struck me most. It seemed messy and a little unprofessional, given her sober job. Even tied up, there was – and is – a huge amount of it. So that’s what I registered first: that confusion of Burnt Cedar hair piled high. I liked her mouth. The full lips, lipsticked a good, forceful red. Wide-set, animated eyes, a small neat body. There are certain colours I dislike intensely, so it suited me that she was largely a monochrome dresser. Blacks, whites and shades of cream or beige: she wore nothing that shouted. Everything was discreet and suited her. The only bright colour was on her lips: the rest of her make-up was a variation of her own hair colour and skin tones. ‘Easier to make decisions,’ she explained once. ‘Anyway clothes should showcase you. Not the other way round.’ I liked that in her: the choice to limit her wardrobe to what worked, and ignore fashion. Her practicality.
