‘I was so proud of…’ she began.
Her voice broke. She tried to pull herself together. ‘I might start crying every so often, but it can’t be helped…’
She went on from where her tears had interrupted her: ‘… proud of being the mother of… of Anders and Elisabeth…’
Her sobbing got the better of her, her shoulders shook. She struggled to be able to speak again. ‘I, I… I did the best I could…’
She let her emotions have the upper hand for a few moments before getting a grip on herself and saying clearly:
‘Oh, we thought we’d found happiness!’
There was a metallic note to her voice, something mechanical, something a little old-fashioned.
‘Then it was Silkestrå. We bought a flat in 1982, moved in and started our homely happiness project. Which is the best thing that ever happened to me. Oh, I thought it was so nice. The children thought it was nice. We were looking forward to starting our new life. There’d be no more obstacles in our path. We could get busy on everything, things that needed doing, like decorating the flat, and I had my job as well, so they were grand times…’
Her phone played a little tune. She answered it.
‘Yes, oh hello, Elisabeth. Yes, fine. Yes, really sick, I throw up every day. Much the same, pretty bad, yes. No, they haven’t moved me yet, we shall have to see. Yes, they explain everything, but I lose the thread. You know, cancer patients have a tendency to be suspicious of what they’re told. I don’t really feel very good wherever I am, and I shall be going home soon now. All right, bye for now, Elisabeth.’
She went on with her story.
‘Things weren’t going well for Anders at the time. Dreadful. Lots of break-ups in his life. Of course he got overlooked in the midst of it all. When you’re caught up in a conflict, you’re blind to your children and other people. You don’t see yourself clearly either. You can’t.’ She paused. ‘And I felt guilty about being inadequate. I’m sure I did.’
‘In what way were you inadequate?’
‘I wasn’t mature enough. I wasn’t mature enough for the task.’
‘What task?’
‘Being a mother.’
She stopped, adjusted her back a little. ‘This thing with Anders has something to do with my own childhood, I expect. The circumstances I grew up in were tough. I’ve never come across anyone who had a worse time. Very poor conditions. Really harsh conditions. I had to look after my mother. Most things were taboo. I don’t know what I can say, without revealing too much. Everything was taboo. Sorry, I’m going to be sick now.’
‘Shall I get a nurse?’
‘Yes, please do.’
A young woman in a white uniform was fetched in from the corridor and she called out to another nurse that the lady in 334 needed to throw up.
Afterwards Wenche sat in bed smiling; the queasiness had gone and she felt a bit stronger. She went on with her account. ‘Well, we always come back to Silkestrå. All those cute little clothes and little presents in their bags when anyone had a birthday. That was how it was then. Lots of birthdays and school parties and nice things like that. And everyday life was much as it usually is, getting up early, school, homework, children’s programmes on TV, baking apple cake, just like ordinary people, nothing to find fault with.’
‘It says in the report that Anders was passive when playing.’
‘Well you have to consider. For one thing, they placed him up there at the centre, with strangers, in a strange setting, so it all goes wrong. I know very well it made him passive being up there. Anders was a self-conscious child. Reserved. And that psychiatrist who made his statement, the nasty one… they came round to the flat too, that psychiatrist or psychologist, to study us, judge us.’
They wanted to observe the bedtime routines in the family, Wenche remarked.
‘And Anders was so neat and tidy, you know. He couldn’t help the fact that he had an orderly mother.’
She took a breath. ‘It wasn’t his fault. I brought the boy up to be like me.’ She gave a tired sigh. ‘I’d said to Anders: we’re going to start a new game here at home. You and I are going to get undressed, and we’ll see who finishes first. I’ll time us, starting now! So I timed us, and Anders won. And there was his neat little pile, with mine beside it, and that was wrong too. And when he got a real psychiatric… psychiatric… psychiatric, no. I can’t find the word. Anyway, you have to get undressed first and then wash your hands, he was very keen on washing his hands, being clean, and then you put on your pyjamas, and then you have some supper and then clear up and so on, and then you wash your hands again. And they presented that as wrong, too.’
She shook her head.
‘What did Anders like best when he was little?’
‘He really liked to be praised when he’d been clever. When we played that undressing game in the evenings and he won, came first, he thought that was great. I could see how much he liked it. How they can say the opposite, that there was something wrong with the boy, I can’t understand.’
‘What did he play when he was at home?’
‘We played Lego, we did. Playmobil. We played everything there was. Duplo, Taplo, Poplo, you name it,’ she laughed.
‘In the report from the Centre for Child Psychiatry it says that on the one hand you bound him to you, and the two of you slept close together in the same bed, while on the other you could suddenly reject him and say hateful things to him.’
‘I still haven’t finished,’ she said, feeling for the thin plastic sick bag that lay close to hand.
‘I’ll go and get a nurse.’
‘Well if it happens, it happens,’ said Wenche.
Once the nausea had subsided, Wenche wanted to go on.
‘There has to be room for… room for… what’s it called again? There has to be room for – reconciliation, that’s it. Time for reconciliation,’ she said slowly, stressing every syllable. ‘We can’t change anything, after all. So let things rest. Try to understand instead. There’s a lot still to find out.’
‘For you too?’
‘Yes, for me too.’
‘Have you reconciled yourself to Anders’s actions?’
‘I reconciled myself a few months after it happened. I was convinced I’d be able to do it. Perhaps it’s just that I’m a forgiving mother.’
‘Have you forgiven him?’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘What do you think, was he sick or was it a political act?’
‘It was a rational political act. No question. It was unexpected, but perhaps not that unexpected.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I think we’ll call it a day now. Better for us to follow up later. Now, you go home and think it all through.’ Right at the end, after all the goodbyes and wishes for better days, she said:
‘Well, Anders is content now, anyway. At least that’s what he told me.’
The nurse came in with painkillers. ‘Oh, that’s sweet of you,’ said Wenche Behring Breivik to the young girl in white. ‘Would you mind closing the window too? I’m freezing.’
The nurse closed the window, which had been on the latch, letting in the cold of the March day outside. Spring was taking its time. There was a hint of sleet in the air.
On the windowsill of room 334 there was a pink plastic orchid, still in its crisp cellophane packet. It was getting late. The scrap of sky that Wenche could see when she rested her head on the pillow was growing darker. From there she could see the tiny snowflakes, so light that they seemed to take forever to reach the ground.