The One Day You Were My Husband (83)

I wait for her to go on.

“As I understand it, Johan was about to hand the parcel over to Prawat’s brother at his shop. Then a woman came and intervened. She knew there were illegal drugs in Johan’s bag; she’d been waiting for them. She took Prawat’s brother completely by surprise.”

“So you’re telling me you don’t know who that woman was? You don’t know about the other drugs?”

“I can only tell you about my part,” Mum responds stiffly.

“Well in that case, perhaps you can tell me why you couldn’t deliver these antibiotics yourself, if you cared so much about them? Why couldn’t it have been someone connected to Prawat’s charity? Why Johan?”

“Johan was coming from Myanmar,” Mum says. “They cost a quarter of the price there. He was right there in Rangoon, and he was coming to Thailand at precisely the time the charity was running out.”

“How convenient.”

She ignores me. “Johan had told me all about carrying his dive kit through an airport. How customs officials never knew what to do and normally just waved them through in the end. It was an easy solution to a serious problem. I have spent my life finding simple solutions like this; it’s what I do. This is what Prawat does; this is what thousands of people do every day to get help to those the system has forgotten. Prawat has had people bring antibiotics, emergency contraceptives, vaccines into the country for these women hundreds of times since, without incident. And he will continue to because he has been called to help others and so he does. It’s the same for me, too, Carrie.”

What a Samaritan, I want to say. And how inconvenient that the one time it goes wrong, it’s your daughter’s husband who loses everything.

But I say nothing because she cannot, and will never, see past her work. She will always think that she’s right, even if the collateral damage includes her own child.

I walk outside and step onto the jetty, taking in a few deep lungfuls of sea air. It’s bitingly cold now; dark is falling fast and the wind has picked up. On an island a few hundred meters from where I’m standing, a series of garden lights have begun to glow but they’re an empty promise; the house is shut up and dark. I wonder if it will snow overnight. I must not get stuck here.

Mum is still talking about Prawat’s charity, but I’m barely listening. Now, as then, it seems surreal that this should be my life. That a girl from Devon should find herself in a filmlike nightmare involving drugs and prisons, a nightmare that rumbles on even now, more than twelve years later.

“You should never have asked him,” is what I say when she lets off. “If there was any risk at all, you should have done it yourself.”

Mum takes a deep breath, as if trying to avoid losing her temper. “There was no real risk. It wasn’t strictly legal, but it wasn’t illegal either. Besides, Johan reassured me that some of the items in his dive kit were probably a customs gray area. Life is full of gray areas, Carrie.”

“Life isn’t full of gray areas for me,” I begin, but she’s not interested.

“I only thought of Johan because I heard Prawat was having a supply-chain problem and I realized I knew someone who could easily help.”

I sit up. “Hang on. We’d been in Bangkok for more than a week before you said you were going to call Prawat. You told me you hadn’t spoken to him in years. You said he’d broken your heart.”

My mother doesn’t say anything, and I know I’m onto something I won’t like.

“That’s right,” she says carefully. “I hadn’t been in touch with Prawat in a long time. I organized the antibiotics delivery with his brother. Not Prawat himself. They work closely together.”

I wait for her to carry on, which she does with obvious reluctance. “As I said: I’d heard through the grapevine that they were having supply problems. I reached out to his brother and said I knew someone who was in Myanmar. He said that even a small delivery would be helpful. So I called Johan and asked if he’d be willing.”

“Prawat had nothing to do with it?”

“No. I didn’t contact him until I realized I was getting nowhere with Johan’s arrest. I did it as a last resort.”

“So why did you organize the delivery, if you weren’t helping Prawat? If you weren’t even in touch?”

She says nothing, but I realize, with a slide of fury, that I know the answer. “You were trying to get his attention, weren’t you? Remind him you existed. Do something heroic so he’d notice you. Oh my God, Mum.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” my mother says, but her voice is soft now, bruised, and I know I’m right.

“So you used Johan as a pawn in your game. You used him to pick at the scab of a relationship you hadn’t quite been able to forget.” I feel a sob rising in my throat.

It takes me a while to realize that she, too, is crying. The last time that happened was more than twelve years ago, when we sat in the Malaysian restaurant and she signed over her flat to me for a year.

I listen to her cry for a while.

The ugly truth is that I am no stronger than my mother, no less attached to my work. I, too, am only here in Sweden because I picked at my own scabs.

“Why did he say yes?” I ask suddenly. “Johan was sensible. Why would he sign up for something like this?”