by C R Martens
The Pretender:
Escaping The Past
By
Christina Martens
Copyright © 2019 by Christina Martens Röttig
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without written permission of the copyright owner except for the use of quotations in a book review. For more information, contact [email protected].
FIRST EDITION
www.cr-martens.com
ISBN 978-87-971870-0-5
To my mum and brother
1.
I have a lot of memories from my childhood, but I have always struggled to dig out the good ones. I am sure they are there somewhere in my mind because I don’t feel unloved thinking back on it. The hurt, however, is just what dominates in my memory and perhaps that is because I choose it to. Because I know one vital thing about myself, I thrive on pain. The older I have become, the more I have started to look inwards and backwards and I know that some things are still unresolved within me. I am not the person who goes and gets what she wants. no, I am the person who things happen to. I didn’t even choose my career, it just happened to me.
“This is it, my only chance to apologise to you, only I don’t really know how to so I hope that by reading this you’ll understand why I distanced myself from you and that that will give you some sort of relief. I have sent you the coordinates for three documents, two digital and one hard copy. They are three different documents but you’ll need them all to understand everything clearly. The hardcopy is my whole life and some of Harlow’s. It’s everything I have collected in my search for the truth. What I ask is not going to be easy and it will put you at risk, but I am using my final breaths to send this to you. This is my last chance for redemption for what I have done and my only chance to make them pay the ultimate price for what they have done. When you have read everything, the decision lies with you on what to do with the information; go to the media, hand it over to the proper international authorities or destroy it so that no one will ever know. It’s up to you…”
As a child Eve was frightened and fragile, she was robbed of a childhood by adult issues that even most adults can’t comprehend. Let alone her. She learnt that asking for help wasn’t something you did; it’s better to save face than to tell the truth, which is ironic considering her current situation. So, as a consequence she never learnt the importance of the truth, not that she lied a whole lot or made a habit of lying, but the truth hurts and therefore she’d tended to avoid it. Eve moved around the truth like it was an invisible entity in her sphere, something she knew she had to live with but didn’t want to acknowledge. Sometimes she could even feel it sitting on her chest when she tried to sleep. The pressure was overwhelming, quite like the pressure she felt right now. White lies ruled her life when she was a child. Now she relied and survived on them. Eve was so good at compartmentalising and avoiding the truth that she made it her living to avoid it. A living she excelled at, it felt natural to move in the space between what everyone else saw and what was reality. She never fit in in either place. This though, was the first time she felt like she was getting close to the truth although she was lying to get to it. But which truth? The truth about her, about her past or about her work? Eve felt she had never been as close to the truth as she was right now; she knew Harlow’s death wasn’t an accident, she knew it from the moment she heard about it.
Everything began and ended with her death. Harlow’s death. She was the woman who took everything Eve was and made it work, gave her a function and a purpose in life. Harlow made everything fit. So, when they told Eve Harlow’s death was accidental, her instant reaction was disbelief. Harlow wouldn’t have been so carefree as to accidentally poison herself. She was meticulous with every little detail; her planning was flawless and she kept it to herself so something like this would never happen. She even kept it from Eve. But they had put their trust in the wrong people and they have been working under an illusion. It’s true what they say, your life really does flash before your eyes right before you die. Eve was never afraid of dying, it was living she couldn’t figure out.
Two days before her death, Harlow came to Eve with a flash drive and said, “Keep it safe and hidden, no one must know you have this.”
“What’s on it?” Eve asked, knowing she wouldn’t get an answer.
“You’ll know soon enough,” Harlow said with a smile, but it wasn’t her usual smile, it was tense and fake. Of course Eve kept it hidden, she kept it somewhere Harlow wouldn’t even have known to look.
Eve knew when she first met Harlow that her life would change. Even without knowing, she knew exactly what she was saying yes to – a life in the shadows always pretending to be someone else. Strangely enough, that part was quite comforting to Eve. But how did she get from being an ordinary, lonely girl to working in a job so elusive and so confidence-based? When what she felt was anything but that. Eve had once seen her own personal file – a file the firm made for every employee containing everything they could collect about her, all their thoughts, reasoning’s and ideas about her, of what she used to be, what she was and, more importantly, what they wanted her to be. Seeing it written down in black on white was a shock: She’s a highly sensuous woman, very desirable, intelligent but not independent, trust issues. Highly observant, skilful at covering the truth and equally talented at spotting a lie. No real affiliations to hold her back. It didn’t sound like a person, it didn’t sound like her. It’s not who she wanted to be. There was still so much she wanted to know and find out, secrets she wanted to tell, truths she had avoided her whole life but for Eve there was no more time and regrets would stay just that, regrets. So it’s even more ironic that the thing she would avoid the most in her life, the truth, was going to be what kills her in the end.
2.
We all have freeze-frame images of happy moments in our memories, different moments in time at different ages that makes us who we are. I have happy ones, but my very first memories are not. they still play through my mind as though they happened yesterday. I wish I could delete them. But then I’d have to delete myself.
Eve stood across the street from the building. For such a massive building it didn’t leave much of an imprint on its surroundings. It was concrete and had tinted-glass windows, no colours, it was inconsequential to the people that passed it and to the area it stood in. It didn’t even have the name of the firm on the building. The building was a stark contrast to what was going on inside. She took her time watching the building and the people around it, she didn’t feel like rushing in. Eve knew what was waiting on the other side of the glass doors: consequences. Consequences for acting against the strict regulations of the firm. Her friend was dead and something had to be done. She finally took a breath, crossed the busy street and walked into the building.
“So, how will this go?” Eve asked the man sitting across from her. His dark, inexpensive suit had wrinkles in it and was ill fitting, making him look tatty. His glasses were smudged and his hair was untidy, hanging annoyingly in front of his face. He looked uncomfortable, looking around the room as if he had never been there before. Or maybe it was just because he knew what she did for a living.
“Um, we talk,” he said, straitening his tie, not that it made a difference. “Well, you talk mainly and I listen, occasionally asking questions.”
“What do I talk about then?” she asked, thinking there were more important things she could do with her time, but this was mandatory and Eve had already broken enough rules.
“Let’s start with your childhood,” he said, going through some papers. “How was your relationship with your father?”
“Now, why do you want to know about
my father?” asked Eve, getting comfortable in the chair. “I thought this would be about Harlow?”
“It’s about you leaving your post in the middle of an assignment and I am here to gauge your mental stability,” he said annoyed. He clearly wasn’t prepared for this, but that didn’t explain his sudden bad attitude towards her. “So, if you please, start with your father.”
“I left a straightforward, no complications assignment to come to the aid of a colleague in need. I informed my superior according to protocol. So, try again to explain, without attitude, why I am getting mandatory counselling,” she said calmly.
“I am not the one to make decisions.” He looked at Eve over his glasses. “I do what I’m told, when I am told. So, let’s not delay the process.”
“Fine. My parent’s divorce is not something I remember, nor do I remember Mum and I moving away. I don’t remember the flat we moved to and I only have a few vague memories of living there,” she said. He obviously knew more than he was letting on so Eve decided to play along to find out what exactly the firm wanted to accomplish by putting her in mandatory counselling.
“Did you see your father after the divorce?” the man asked, writing in his notebook.
“Yes.” Eve started her story. “From the outside, life seemed pretty normal, a child with two working parents. Our family life started in a small flat, but the flat soon turned into a house with a lovely garden and the wholesome family life seemed made. It was Mum, Dad and me, a little blue-eyed, curly blonde-haired girl with the capability to talk anyone’s ear off. I was an open, bright and talkative child with a crazy, wild imagination. We were by all appearances your average 1980’s family living in an average 60s-built bungalow house in a small town in Denmark. But behind the façade it was anything but average. Mum did the right thing under the circumstances, but what no one could have foreseen was that it was the beginning of our downfall.
“Alcohol. It was his favourite medication. It would move any self-doubt from his mind, but Dad’s problems started long before my birth, though no one was fully aware of the scale of them until a few months before the marriage broke. He was and had been an alcoholic all along. He was just so good at lying. He had a story prepared for every situation and he had the ability to make himself the victim. It was never his fault. The tipping point came when he lost his job because he was drinking at work. That’s when his drinking escalated. And hiding the fact that he had lost his job from Mum and pretending to leave for work every day didn’t make the situation better. As soon as he was alone he would start drinking. The day where everything fell apart Mum had left for work, I must have been about three-years-old, so I’m not sure if it’s a memory or something I have been told. It was just Dad and I, he sat at the dining table, waiting quite patiently for the car to start and leave the driveway. Then he got up, went to my room, stood on a chair, opened the top cupboard, stretched his arm as far back as he could and pulled out a bottle of vodka. He sat on that chair in my room and drank until he didn’t feel nervous anymore, drank himself into oblivion. How was he ever going to tell her he had been fired for drinking at work?
“Hours later Mum arrived back home after a long day at a conference. The house was dark, it was just the front door lights that were on. It was 8 pm as she drove up the driveway, she told me this, thinking it was unusual for the house to be dark like that, but maybe Dad had needed an early night. As she approached the front door, she could hear the muted sounds of a child crying. At first, she wasn’t sure if it was in another house, but then she opened the front door and it became very clear it was me that was crying. It wasn’t just a normal cry for my lost dummy, it was the frantic, desperate cry of a neglected child. Mum ran through the house to my room, towards the crying. Still in her shoes and coat, she opened the door. The room was pitch black, I was standing up in my cot crying, still in my day-time clothes though it was past my bedtime. I was distraught, I reached out to mum for safety and comfort; I had been alone for many hours in that dark room. The air in the room was heavy with the smell of urine and Mum could feel the weight of my nappy as she lifted me. I could barely breathe from crying. I was exhausted. Mum took me to the kitchen to give me something to drink. When she opened the fridge, it became alarmingly clear why I was still terribly upset. There in the fridge stood the dinner mum had prepared that morning, still wrapped up and untouched. With me on her arm and in a state of fury, she rushed to the master bedroom, flung open the door only to find Dad lying across the bed, face down. The room reeked of bad breath, alcohol and vomit. She sat me down on the chair by the door and in a fit of anger and hurt, she started to punch him and push him – not to hurt him, I think, but in an effort to wake him, to voice her anger. It was to no avail – he was long gone in his fog of intoxication. She wanted to hurt him so badly but that wasn’t the person she was. The next morning when he woke, he found his bags packed by the bed and a note to get out of the house by the time we got home from Granny’s at 3 pm. She kicked him out.
“It wasn’t enough to make him change, though, not even when faced with the massive ultimatum that he would never see his daughter again and his wife was leaving him. In fact, it may have made everything worse for him. It just made him want to drink more.
“So, my parents divorced and Mum and I moved to a small one-bedroom flat in Copenhagen. His severe drinking problem and the neglect of his child was what caused the divorce. After their divorce, Mum was granted full custody of me, but my dad somehow convinced the court of his capabilities as a father and was allowed to have me every other weekend, Friday to Sunday. Mum would usually drive me all the way to Dad’s place. Time with him was a lonely time and I was often left to play by myself all day. My earliest memory is one of him. It isn’t exactly a pleasant one and, try as I might, I can’t seem to recollect a happy one to replace it. I must have been around four-years-old; I wasn’t in school yet. I don’t know what time of year it was. I was at my dad’s for the weekend and even as a young child I could see something wasn’t right. I rarely felt safe when I was with him because I didn’t always know how much he had had to drink. He hid it well. He had made dinner – one of my favourite’s, gravy and crisps and beef – I remember this because Mum would never serve me that for dinner. When we had finished dinner, it was time for bed. Dad had made the old brown sofa into a bed for me. He had a studio flat so there wasn’t a lot of space. I got in and closed my eyes, but I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t, I didn’t feel safe, but my eyes stayed closed because I didn’t want my dad to know. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings by telling him I didn’t feel safe. I don’t know how long I had been in bed for when I heard Dad rummaging about. I heard the keys dingle and shoes being put on. The front door opened and then it closed again. The flat fell silent, I opened my eyes slowly. Dad had left me!
“I sat up, holding the duvet up as a shield, and whispered, “Dad? Dad!” I started to feel my heart beating faster and the tears coming to my eyes. I was wide awake in a dark flat, and I was alone. The room grew to an insurmountable size and the shadows started to move. Why would Dad leave me? What if someone came to take me and he wasn’t there? Who was going to protect me? The panic I felt inside I remember so clearly, my body still remembers it. Dad had a landline phone, and I knew the number for Mum’s flat, but I didn’t call her – the phone was on the other side of the room, too far away for me to dare go to it. I kept thinking, he just went down with the trash – even though there was a trash shoot on the landing right outside the front door – and if I called Mum, maybe it would get Dad in trouble. I knew the clock a little bit, and I could tell he had been gone for a long time, and for a child, time moves even slower. The shadows grew towards me, but the tears made it hard to see them so I took my duvet and crawled under the coffee table for safety. There I was, hidden from all the monsters. Then all of a sudden I heard a loud voice on the stairway. The voice sounded aggravated and became louder and louder until it was right on the other side of the front door. There was a ruckus, soun
ding like a lot of footsteps, and then something pounded up against the door. I head mumbling and then everything went quiet. Then there was more commotion by the door, the sound of keys being dropped again and again. BANG, BANG, BANG went on the door and a loud roar of ‘LET ME IN!’. It sounded like Dad, but I didn’t dare open the door. What if it wasn’t? I crawled out from under the coffee table and felt the warm urine running down my legs and was overcome by another internal fear: What would happen when he saw I had peed on the rug? So in the middle of the night the four-year-old me started to clean myself, the rug and the floor underneath it. Crying silently and shaking like a leaf, I cleaned everything up without making a sound. I was ashamed. When I had finished I got up on the sofa and pretended to be asleep; I didn’t want Dad to find me hiding underneath the coffee table when he came back. I don’t remember falling asleep, but I must have been exhausted. When the first light started to break through the window I heard rumbling out by the front door, keys going in and the door opening. I didn’t have my eyes fully open, I pretended to sleep, but I had to make sure it was Dad. It was and he was drunk, still. Then he stumbled through the room, knocking things over before he fell onto the bed. He didn’t even remember I was there. The smell he carried with him was nauseatingly sweet and alcoholic, and with his every snore, the air seemed to get heavier, to the point it was almost impossible to breathe clean air. I couldn’t go back to sleep so I cried. Silently. When he finally woke close to noon, I didn’t dare say anything. I just sat there on the sofa pretending to read a book; I hadn’t wanted to disturb him. I was hungry; I had felt the hunger for hours so I began to rummage around to see if it might wake him a little. It did. He still had his jacket and shoes on. He looked at me and said, ‘Do you want some breakfast?’ not knowing what time of day it was, but I didn’t care what food I got so long as I got something, so I nodded yes. Dad quickly poured some cereal and milk in a bowl, put it on the coffee table with the sugar bowl, turned on the TV. And then he disappeared into the bathroom where he stayed for quite a while. I could hear he wasn’t well. I finished my breakfast, got dressed, brushed my hair and sat on the sofa watching TV, waiting for Dad to reappear. He came stumbling back into the room and then he went back to bed. After that, visiting Dad became a chore – something I had to do, but I didn’t want to. I never said that out loud though.” Eve finished her stories of her first memories of her dad and sat there looking straight at the man who was looking down at his notes.
