This was where I was reborn, thought Fredrika.
The lights glimmered into life as she went round the flat turning them on, one after another. She put her hand on a radiator and found it cool. Spencer always objected to how cold she liked to keep the flat.
Spencer. Always Spencer. What does it mean, the fact that you and I were destined to meet?
The ringing of the phone cut through the flat. Her mother clearly had something on her mind.
‘Are you sleeping any better?’ was her opening gambit.
‘No,’ said Fredrika. ‘But I’m not in as much pain now. Haven’t been today, at any rate.’
‘I had an idea,’ her mother ventured.
Silence.
‘Perhaps you’d feel better if you started playing again?’
For a moment, time stood still and Fredrika was drowning in memories from the time before the Accident.
‘I don’t mean lots,’ her mother quickly added. ‘Not lots, just a little bit, to help you feel more in harmony with yourself. You know I always play when I can’t get to sleep.’
There was a time when conversations like that would have been natural for Fredrika and her mother. Back then, they used to play music together and draw up guidelines for Fredrika’s future. But that was then, before the Accident. Now, Fredrika’s mother no longer had a right to discuss Fredrika’s playing with her, and sensed as much when her daughter did not respond.
She decided to change the subject.
‘You’ve got to let us meet him, now.’
Firm but with a note of entreaty. Asking to be part of her daughter’s life again.
Fredrika felt shocked.
‘Your dad and I are trying, trying really hard in fact, to reconcile ourselves to the situation you’ve faced us with. We’re trying to understand the way you must have thought about this and planned it out. But we feel dreadfully excluded, Fredrika. Not only have you had a secret relationship with a man for over a decade, but now you’re expecting his baby as well.’
‘I don’t know what I can say,’ sighed Fredrika.
‘No, but I do,’ he mother said briskly. ‘Bring him round. Tomorrow.’
Fredrika weighed this in her mind and concluded that she could no longer keep Spencer and her family apart.
‘I’ll talk to Spencer when he gets here this evening,’ she promised. ‘I’ll let you know.’
Then she sat on the settee for a long time, brooding on the fateful question that had been haunting her for so long. What was the point, really, of falling in love with a man twenty years older than her who, married or not, would be leaving her long before she finished living her own life?
Alongside the darkness, fatigue and boredom came a soft call from a room she thought she had locked years before.
Play me, whispered a voice. Play.
She could not really explain afterwards what impulse it was that finally prompted her to get up, go into the hall and get out her violin for the first time since sentence was passed on her after the Accident. But suddenly there she was with the instrument, feeling the weight of it in her hands, so familiar and so infernally missed.
This was all I wanted to be.
By the time Spencer arrived a few hours later, the instrument lay in its case again. Newly tuned and played.
They came for him late in the evening. It was a procedure not unlike some he remembered from his past. Strangers arrived in the darkness with keys to a door only he should have been able to open. He lay stiffly between the sheets in the bed, with nowhere to go. Then he heard the man’s voice, the Swedish one who spoke such good Arabic.
‘Good evening, Ali,’ said the voice. ‘Are you awake?’
Of course he was awake. How much had he actually slept since he left Iraq? He guessed it did not amount to more than ten hours all told.
‘I’m here,’ he said, climbing out of bed.
They came into the room, all of them at once. The woman was not with them this time, but the man had two other men with him, strangers to Ali. He felt embarrassed standing there in his underpants. And socks. His feet were always so cold. He had stopped worrying about the smoky smell in the flat. The fresh pungency of newly painted walls that had met him when he first stepped into it was long gone.
‘Get your clothes on,’ said the man with a smile. ‘You’re going to stay somewhere else until Sunday.’
Relief spread through his body. He was going to get out of here – at last. Feel the coolness on his cheeks, breathe the fresh air. But the news also came as a surprise. No one had said anything about a change of accommodation.
He looked at his watch as he was pulling on his jeans and jersey; it was nearly midnight. The men moved around the flat like restless spirits. He could hear them in the kitchen, opening cupboards and the fridge. The food was all gone. He fervently hoped there would be more to eat at the new place.
They went down the stairs. The Arabic-speaking man went first, then Ali and the others brought up the rear. Out onto the pavement. Ali looked up and got snowflakes in his eyes. So much rain of that kind in this part of the world.
It was a bigger car this time, more like a minibus. Ali was to sit right at the back between the two strangers. The men put the bag he had been given in the boot. One man had a long overcoat on and reminded Ali of someone he had seen in a film. The other had a rather gruesome look. His face was strangely deformed. As if someone had slashed it down the middle with a knife and then sewed it back together. The man sensed Ali looking at him and turned his head slowly to meet his stare. Ali instinctively averted his eyes.
They drove through an estate where all the blocks of flats were the same. Then out onto a main road where the cars were going faster. Ali looked out to the right, then to the left. And suddenly, on the right. In the distance, but clearly visible. Something that looked like a gigantic golf ball, lit up like a temple.
‘The Globe,’ said the man beside him.
Ali looked straight ahead instead. How often did you travel in a car and not know where you were going?
Night closed the car in its embrace. His eyelids felt heavy.
Sometime, he thought wearily. Sometime I shall reach the end of this never-ending journey.
BANGKOK, THAILAND
They could not force her to hand herself over to the police. But nor could they offer her any protection. Advising her to contact the local police straight away, they threw her out into the street. She ran for her life, heading randomly down Sukhumvit. The exertion proved too much. With no food or drink inside her and the temperature nearing forty degrees Celsius, she only got a few blocks before she had to stop, trying to get her bearings. Her sense of direction had deserted her; she had no idea which direction she had run in.
Someone, she thought dully, someone – it did not matter who – should be able to vouch for who I am.
All her plans were in tatters. It was no longer a question of picking and choosing between friends and acquaintances and weighing up which of them she could confide in. Now she just needed all the help she could get.
Her knees gave way and she sank down onto the pavement. She tried to squeeze out one last drop of rational thought.
Think, think, think, she urged herself. What’s my main problem right now?
Her lack of money was acute, but manageable. The lack of contact details for her nearest and dearest now that she had no access to her mobile phone or email was harder. But there were other ways of getting hold of telephone numbers, and she could open new email accounts.
The priority had to be getting hold of her father. There was a risk that he, too, might be in danger.
Her eyes misted as she thought of her father. Why wasn’t he answering his phone? And her mother? Where had they both got to?
She counted her currency, and found she had enough baht for half an hour’s internet use and a couple of international calls.