and been somewhere on the ocean when it happened, then I would get an email in some port when it was all over, and the ocean would put our little lives, our little deaths into perspective.
But what opportunities for growth and resolution would I then have fled from? What if I was close to an epiphany, I asked myself, perhaps this was the moment, perhaps this was the challenge. And if I failed to meet it, I would never learn the most important lesson of all, but have made only half-hearted attempts and settled for easy answers.
But it hasn’t been easy, I protested, it has been a struggle, an ordeal! But what if it’s not over yet, I wondered to myself, perhaps this is the last leg of the race and I mustn’t give up now.
I didn’t sleep the night I had reread the I-just-thought-you-ought-to-know message from Astrid. To be reconciled, to forgive? But surely you can’t forgive what people refuse to admit? Did I think they were capable of owning up to it? To finally admit the truth about the very thing they had devoted so much energy to repress and deny? Did I really think they would risk public censure in order to be reconciled with me? No, I wasn’t worth that much, they had made that crystal clear to me on several occasions. But what if they admitted it just to me? If I wrote to Mum and Dad that they could admit it just to me, and that I would promise never to tell anyone. No, that wouldn’t happen either, I was sure of it, because it didn’t even exist between the two of them, they never talked about it, they had entered into a conspiracy to save their reputation, to maintain a level of self-respect; they had entered into an unspoken, unbreakable pact a long time ago in which they were the victims of their oldest daughter’s mendacity and callousness, and as long as that version was believed, they remained on the receiving end of compassion, pity and care, and they couldn’t manage without that, they fed on it, and it would be harder for them to get it if they ever admitted the truth to me, even if it stayed just between the three of us, harder to keep up their public image of them as the victims. They must be pitied. And there were times when I did pity them because of the mess they had created for themselves, because they were ill and old and would probably die soon, while I was in good health, touch wood, touch more wood, and only halfway through my life. You, too, are going to die, I told myself, by way of consolation. You might die tomorrow, I said, in order to strengthen my resolve. Why do they care, I called out to the sky, what do they want from me, I called out into the darkness. But they didn’t care, not really, they hadn’t cared for years.
Two days later I got a text message from Astrid saying all Mum’s tests were fine. She would make a full recovery and was already feeling much better. As was Dad. I wrote that that was nice and asked her to say hi. I resumed my own life.
~
A month later Astrid called. She would be turning fifty soon and was having a party with lots of guests, people she thought I would enjoy meeting. She told me the date and I was free, she was pleased about that, she said, and then she paused and said that Mum and Dad would be there too. They so love a big party, she said, and didn’t say ‘one final’ but it was in the air.
She would appear to think that something had changed. That although I hadn’t turned up at the hospital when Mum had her operation, I had wished Mum a speedy recovery and probably realised that Mum could be gone for ever at any moment, and that I’d subsequently had a change of heart. It’s merely abstract to her, I thought. But all too real to me. Having to enter a room where my parents were and shake hands? Hug them? Say what? The others had met up regularly during all these years, they were at ease in one another’s company, I had chosen to distance myself and be the black sheep. Would I turn up, smiling, with a ‘hiya’? As though we didn’t see the world differently, in mutually exclusive terms, as though they weren’t denying the very fabric from which I was made. Had Astrid no understanding of the reason why I had done what I had done, how deep it went? She talked to me as if it had been a whim, a fad, the result of a childish, rebellious urge which I could put aside when something really important happened. That I could ‘pull myself together’, make an intellectual decision to change my point of view, did she not understand the physical terror I felt at the thought of entering her house where I hadn’t been for years, where Mum and Dad came all the time, and seeing them, my parents. To Astrid and to most other people, they probably came across as two harmless, fragile, old folks, but to me they were giants whose grip it had taken years of therapy to shake off, was that the problem? Astrid didn’t understand how I could be scared of two stooping, grey, old creatures, but I couldn’t go to an airport without quaking with fear of accidentally bumping into them. What are you scared of, I would ask myself on the airport train. I forced myself to imagine seeing them, confronting them like you do to cure yourself of a phobia. What would happen if I reached the airport and they were in the check-in queue? Fear rippled through me! Well, so what? Would I walk straight past them? No. Too stupid, too immature for a woman over fifty to dodge them, to be unable to greet her own parents in a check-in queue. I hoped that I would stop and ask where they were going and they would tell me and then ask me where I was going and I would tell them and smile stiffly and add have a safe flight. A straightforward exchange, perhaps it would be easy to behave like an almost ‘normal family’, but no! Because afterwards I would have gone to the lavatory and locked myself in a cubicle and sat trembling on the loo seat and waited until they would surely have taken off, even if it meant missing my own flight. It was depressing that I had made so little progress, that it could catch up with me at any time because I didn’t want it to catch up with me, I didn’t want to be back there again, and yet here I was! I so wanted to be adult and calm and composed. I decided not to go to Astrid’s birthday party, I would invent an excuse and forget all about it. But I couldn’t do it. Because if my parents hadn’t been invited, I would have gone to my sister’s fiftieth birthday party to meet the people she worked with, who were likely to be exciting and interesting and possibly useful to me. That was my loss. That I was so inhibited and traumatised that I had to stay away from something that might have been good for me. All because of my stupid childhood. That should be my epitaph: All because of my stupid childhood. Over fifty, but still suffering from that fear of parental authority, which all children have. Except my siblings appeared to have grown out of it. Perhaps Astrid had invited us all because she thought I was free of my childhood, that I had worked through my traumas and my fear of my parents? Perhaps she thought the only reason I hadn’t turned up at the hospital was habit, and decided that it was time for a change. So the invitation could also be regarded as a compliment from Astrid, who thought I had made more progress than I had. Astrid, who believed that I was capable of turning up, all smiles, unaffected by my parents’ presence, that I no longer cared about what they thought of me.
I said that I would think about it. I thought of nothing else. I went for long walks in the empty void of the forest and imagined that I was on another continent where no one could reach me. No one can reach you, I told myself, if you make yourself unreachable. Who are you, I asked myself, and who do you want to be and what yardstick do you measure yourself by.
The biggest?
I imagined myself walking through the once familiar streets on my way to Astrid’s birthday party, a quiet Saturday afternoon in bright autumn light. Apples hanging ripe on the branches, heavy redcurrant bushes over the fences, bumblebees buzzing, and the smell of freshly cut grass. I inhale it gratefully, the bounty of the earth. Calmly I ring the doorbell and enter my sister’s house.
Would I ever get there? No. I so badly wanted to be free, but I was trapped. I so badly wanted to be strong, but I was weak. My heart was pounding and I didn’t know how to calm it. I knelt on the ground, pressed my face against my knees and sobbed.
~
That was three years ago.
It was such a long road.
I wondered where Bård was on his journey, and how different it was from mine.
I couldn’t ask him that as we sat silent and awkward in the old-fashioned restaurant.
So instead I told him about the time Klara and I went to the old cabin on Hvaler with Tale and her friends, it was many years ago, back when I still had a small amount of contact with my family for the sake of my children. We had been playing music and dancing when Mum appeared in the doorway and asked if I had given the girls ecstasy.
Bård