Playdate

by Alex Dahl

  ‘We came up to a bend in the road, we were going too fast to make the turn, and I screamed as the car skidded into the middle. Both Marcus and I pulled at the steering wheel to straighten up, but the car slammed into something, I thought we’d hit the curb protectors by the ditch. For the briefest moment a man’s face flashed before my eyes. There was a series of thuds. The car slid to a standstill across both lanes. Marcus was shouting and saying something, but my mind was completely blank. I couldn’t understand what he was saying or where I was – everything was just one big hazy white blur. I turned around and saw the outline of someone on the ground. I saw someone else stumbling towards us, and I could hear her screams through the closed windows of the car.’

  I stop for a moment, take another sip of water. The room is so quiet, it’s as though I’m in there by myself. I can’t look at Selma.

  ‘Then Marcus was holding the sides of my face, staring into my eyes, shouting at me. Get out! Get out! Just run. He said it was his car, and nobody would ever know I was in it, he would never tell. He told me he loved me. That our baby needed me. He just kept telling me to run.

  ‘So I did. I stumbled from the car, and as I turned back, Marcus sped off. In the light from a distant streetlamp I saw a woman limping towards me, her face all twisted and bloody, holding two dead children. At least, they both looked dead. “Help me,” she whispered. I turned and ran into the forest and I just kept running, through the snow, tripping over rocks and tree roots. I didn’t stop running until I reached the main road. And by then I could hear loads of ambulance and police sirens, and not long after came the chop of rotor blades and then I saw an air ambulance lifting up from somewhere in the forest.’

  I keep my eyes on my folded hands in my lap. Selma’s stunned silence is palpable.

  ‘At home, late that night, I sat by Lucia’s bed and watched her sleep, my mind haunted by images of another mother limping towards me, carrying a dead child in each arm. I sobbed and sobbed, stroking my baby’s velvety palms in circles and whispering promises into her ear. I swore on my life that I would never look back and that I would never let anything get in the way of my family ever again. I swore that I would protect her from all the evil things in world. But I didn’t, did I? I failed. I failed on every level. I told myself the past would stay buried, but maybe I always knew, deep down, that it would come back and take from me what was owed.’

  92

  Selma

  Lisbeth stands up and gives her a huge hug as she walks through the door at Dagsposten. Olav, too, steps forward and hugs her. ‘Look at you, Sherlock,’ he says, mischievously. ‘Reporter extraordinaire. But then again, we knew that already.’

  They smile at each other and then Olav and Lisbeth, together with several other members of staff, lead Selma into the staff room where a marzipan cake, her favorite, has been placed in the middle of the table. Lisbeth pours sparkling apple and pear Mozell into plastic champagne glasses and they raise them in a toast.

  ‘To Selma,’ says Olav, his eyes warm. ‘Our star!’

  Late that evening, Selma walks home. It’s a warm spring night and the sun is still burning on the horizon, though it is past nine. Karl Johans gate is buzzing with young people walking in the direction of downtown, carrying shopping bags and laughing, or sitting at one of the many sidewalk cafés. Selma smiles to herself and feels suddenly, overpoweringly, young and energetic. Life seems full of possibilities again, like she can go anywhere and do anything; like happiness is something more than an obscure impossibility.

  In her apartment, Selma picks Medusa off the windowsill and stands a while, stroking the old cat and looking out at Oslo in the fading pink light.

  She places the cat back down on the floor and goes to stand in front of the bathroom mirror. It’s a warm night and Selma steps out of her clothes. She looks at herself, stripped down to her underwear, the moonstone resting in the little hollow where her ribs meet, below her breasts. Your decision-making place, her mother used to call it. That’s where your gut feeling sits. Your hunch. Selma smiles at her reflection, then feels goofy but keeps doing it anyway, because she is seeing it, now, how much she resembles her mother. It’s like standing opposite a young Ingrid and seeing her smile back at her. This makes Selma cry, but they aren’t sad tears this time. They are tears of relief, and hope, and gratitude.

  Epilogue

  Jacqueline

  By the time the sun breaks over the peaks of the Alt Pirineu National Park, shining its sharp rays onto the hillsides of Le Tachoué and its burned-down farmstead, Jacqueline and Josiane are already south of Barcelona, heading down the AP7. Josiane is knocked out in the passenger seat in a deep sleep, aided by a sedative, her mouth slack. Jacqueline stays in the slow lane, mindful not to attract the attention of the many gendarmes and guardia civil she’s passed along the way. In her purse are the false identity documents Mikko Eilaanen provided her with. She will board the ferry from Alicante to Algiers this afternoon as Marilena Albert from Nancy, along with her daughter, Thérèse Albert.

  As they rumble on down the Spanish motorways, the sharp morning light growing hazy and mellow as the day gathers pace, Jacqueline’s mind slips back to the past, to the first few years after the accident. In early 2013 she was finally discharged from the psychiatric hospital where she’d been incarcerated since the accident. She’d been on suicide watch and had been given lithium to curb what the doctors described as hallucinations. But Jacqueline knew them for what they were: real memories. What she was seeing, over and over, as lifelike as her own reflection in the mirror, was a vision of Elisa’s face the split second before the car ploughed into Jacqueline’s family and obliterated it. It may have been the briefest of glimpses, but it was enough to sear Elisa’s face into Jacqueline’s memory.

  In those early days after the accident, when she would lie awake for days on end until they held her down and medicated her, she talked constantly out loud to the woman in her mind. ‘I saw you,’ she would say. ‘I saw you. And you saw me, you must have done, coming towards you with my bleeding, silent babies. But you ran away. You left me there, alone, with all that death. But I know your face. Your face is burnt into my brain. And I’m going to find you. Somehow, someday I will find you, no matter what.’

  Marcus Meling had accepted his punishment without question, even though he was given the strictest sentence ever for manslaughter in Norway. Jacqueline hated him with a white-hot rage, but at least he was behind bars and genuinely tormented by guilt. That much was obvious to her when she went to see him. It was guilt that had made him break down and admit to her that she was right, that he hadn’t been alone in the car. And it was Elisa she truly wanted to punish – for running away and continuing her seemingly perfect life as though nothing had happened, as though Jacqueline’s husband and child were less important than a speck of dirt caught underneath her shoe.

  Over time, Jacqueline became increasingly obsessed with Elisa Blix and her family. Jacqueline’s own precious daughter, Josiane, was returned to her in the fall of 2013 and soon blossomed into a confident and contented child despite what had happened to her. But, still, all Jacqueline could see was Elisa Blix. She was determined to take everything from her. Everything.

  But now it’s Jacqueline who’s in danger of losing it all, again. She has already sacrificed Le Tachoué and all the irreplaceable memories it holds. If she is caught now, she will lose Josiane too. Her darling daughter. All that she has. All that she really needs. She glances anxiously in the rearview mirror, alert to every flashing light, however distant. It wasn’t supposed to come to this. She was supposed to be at home in this moment, at Le Tachoué, where she grew up and where her children should have grown up.

  She sees Lucia in her mind, running wild and free through the fields at Le Tachoué, long dark hair flying in the wind, her laughter echoing down the valley. She sees the blurred silhouette of her, high up in her favorite tree, her giggles cascading to the ground like falling leaves. She sees her in the garden ove
rlooking the snow-clad mountains, dancing around herself, Boulette and Samba barking and bleating, wagging tails and stomping feet, the little girl singing and laughing. I love you, Lulu-Rose, thinks Jacqueline. All I wanted was to love you.

  Whatever happens next, this new life will necessarily be one of flight and secrets and borrowed time. But at least, for now, she is free.

  Acknowledgements

  A novel is a hugely collaborative undertaking, both on a professional and a personal level. Writing Playdate was a real joy – it reminded me of all the countless reasons why I love my job and wanted to be a writer. Still, there were moments of sheer panic and exasperation – no wonder, really, when you have a full cast of demanding characters in your head, chattering away and plotting vengeance across timelines and countries. I am lucky to have a solid support system around me for those times.

  A huge thank you, as always, to my enthusiastic, encouraging agent extraordinaire, Laura Longrigg – I lucked out big time with you! Thank you also to the whole team at MBA Literary Agents, your work is deeply appreciated. A big thank you is due to Louisa Pritchard, whose hard work and enthusiasm is very much appreciated. Thank you also to Jill Marsal of Marsal Lyons Literary Agents, for everything you do for me in the United States.

  To Madeleine O’Shea, my editor at Head of Zeus – thank you, merci, tusen takk – it is such a joy to work with you. I always look forward to our meetings and hearing your thoughts, and your insights have benefitted Playdate immensely. I’d also like to thank the whole team at Head of Zeus, I love working with all of you, and you make every occasion feel like a party.

  Thank you to Lucy Ridout for your concise and hugely constructive insights into Playdate. A thank you is also due Eirik Husby Sæther, a Norwegian police investigator and fellow crime writer who was kind enough to talk me through police procedures in the event of a child abduction in Norway. I was also fortunate enough to receive unique and useful advice from Lillehammer native Kristin Marøy Stockman, so thank you. To my office colleagues at K19 Sandefjord – thank you for tolerating a highly reclusive writer, though my presence was mostly ghost-like, I enjoyed being surrounded by you all while writing Playdate.

  I am fortunate to have acquired a nurturing and interesting community of writers over the years, including novelists across the world, and my much-loved writing group in Bath – thank you to each and every one of you.

  Thank you to Tricia Wastvedt, for friendship, for sanity, for everything – I thank my lucky stars for you. Thank you to Kristina Takashina, for our wonderful and nurturing long-standing friendship. A big thank you is also due Rhonda Guttulsrod – for all the laughter, and for handling the tears with equal constancy – what a gift our friendship is. To Elisabeth Sandnes, Elisabeth Hersoug, Trine Bretteville, Sinéad McClafferty L’Orange, Olivia Foster, Krisha Leer, Renate Mjelde, Katrine Bjerke Mathisen, Richard and Elizabeth Bailey, and Barbara Jaques- thank you for being there.

  Thank you also to Lisa Lawrence, for not pretending to have all the answers, and for the (very big) difference you make.

  To the Norwegian School of London – thank you for nurturing my littles in the best way so I could spend my days in a parallel universe creating this book.

  Music is hugely important to me in the writing process, I simply do not write without it. Playdate was written to two songs on repeat, and these two will forever be the Playdate songs for me – so thank you to Moha La Squale for ‘Ma Belle’ and to Lana Del Rey for ‘Venice Bitch’.

  Finally, to my family – thank you for putting up with me and for enabling me to pursue a life as a writer. Oscar and Anastasia and Louison – thank you for tolerating your scatterbrained mother, and I hope you know that everything I ever do is for you – I love you. To my mother, Marianne, for all your help and support over the years, I would not have been able to do any of this without it – thank you. And thank you to Judy and Chris Hadfield, the best in-laws. Last but not least – thank you to Laura for adulting, for partnership, for home, and most of all for love.

  About the Author

  ALEX DAHL is a half-American, half-Norwegian author. Born in Oslo, she studied Russian and German linguistics with international studies, then went on to complete an MA in creative writing at Bath Spa University and an MSc in business management at Bath University.

  A committed Francophile, Alex loves to travel, and has so far lived in Moscow, Paris, Stuttgart, Sandefjord, Switzerland, Bath and London. Her first thriller, The Boy at the Door, was a Sunday Times Crime Club star pick.

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