Page 4 of The Happiness Blueprint
“No thanks. I’m fine, Dad. I had one on the plane.” He looks relieved. It’s one thing offering me an 80-kronor coffee but a very different thing to actually buy it. Plus, we both want to get out of this crowded place. He smiles and ruffles my hair. Acceptable when I was a child, not now that I’m an adult dealing with volume, frizz and all the other things that come with, well, adult female hair. I suppose I could tell him to stop, but then I half like the ritual of hair-messing and half know he’d continue it anyway. Dad does what Dad wants to. Part of me can’t believe how Mum and Saga got away with this and convinced him to hand over the reins to someone else. Everything has to be Dad’s way. Even Saga’s wedding was micromanaged by him. A gift. If she hadn’t put her foot down, they’d have gotten married in a Swedish barn lined with straw bales as if they were cowboys. Too stubborn to even let his daughter plan her own wedding.
I follow him out of the airport building and toward what looks like the back end of the cargo hangar. I look at him as we walk, not having seen him in several months. He is tall and statuesque with long legs and arms that swing when he walks as if aiding his balance. His back is bent slightly, perhaps from spending his whole life doing physical work, and his blond hair has been replaced with a shade of speckled white that would look quite stylish on a young girl working in the fashion industry. I look nothing like him, having inherited every trace of DNA from my mum, seemingly. In contrast, my sister is a tall and blue-eyed copy of our dad. When Saga and I shared our first flat in London, people—usually men—would ask if I was switched at birth. I know I wasn’t because they put those wristbands on you, though mine was around my ankle because I was so small. It saidNilsson 26 June 1996and anFforfemale. I keep it in a box with memories, next to the Happy Birthday cards from all my birthdays.
We’re almost at the end of the parking lot, and I start wondering where his car is.
“Another few minutes,” he says, nodding toward the hangar.
I sigh and thank myself for choosing a hooded sweater this morning, pulling it up to cover my hair from the rain which isn’t proper British rain but more like the dust they spray in beach bars to cool your sweat down as you sip a margarita. Except here the spitting raindrops are freezing, and I have no drink in hand. There was a reason I left this country.
Well, actually, there were several.
The landscape stretches out in front of us: flat, sparse terrain made up of rock with greenery like tufts of hair. Land breaks into small islands as we approach the shore, my forehead pressed against the van’s window like when I was a little girl. I think how funny it is how our bodies never forget and all it takes is a parent within a few yards for us to fall back into old patterns.
The bridge connecting Denmark to Sweden appears, and I feel like I’ve been cut-and-pasted into a Scandi noir novel or an episode ofThe Bridge. My part of Sweden is known for its crime dramas. Mind you, I may murder someone myself if this colorless landscape and its never-ending fog is what I wake up to every morning. I don’t mind my wardrobe being monochrome, but the landscape? I make a mental note.Try not to become a serial killer. Area seems to inspire it.
I hold my breath as we enter the tunnel creeping underneath the Baltic Sea and count the seconds until we are out of it and I can take a breath. I hold my breath often. Every time there is a tunnel of manageable length, pedestrian crossings, between lampposts, the length of fields, for the duration of a hug.
When we pass the city of Malmö, I start clocking the journey, to get a rough idea of just how far from civilization I will be. My dad’s firm has a good reputation and serves a wide area ranging from Malmö all the way to Ystad on the south coast. His fleet of four customized vans spend hours on the road each day. If the sky is gray, then the rest of Skåne is definitely brown, I conclude. Brown as mud. It’s not a golden mud, but rather with dusky, grayish undertones, like iron and strength.
“Well, you know where to go. I will bring the rest of the bags in after I park,” Dad says as the van comes to a stop outside the white wooden fence that surrounds the garden. The white house looks exactly as it always does when I return to it, except for perhaps a new coat of paint. It used to be a farm on several acres of land, but my parents bought it freestanding, leaving the farmer the fields. They had a dream of a countryside idyll. Looking now at the simple square house, with a stable converted to a garage and home office surrounded by plowed brown fields, I’m unsure if they found it. I glance at the black door to that office now, a short walk across a lawn and graveled parking area from Dad’s house, half expecting it to wave a welcome.
The house is empty, a strange experience. Dad is obviously living there, but he is not the type of person that fills a house with his presence. The inside, especially the kitchen drawers that I randomly pull out, is a museum of my childhood. Which would be great, if my parents had expensive antiques rather than odd serving spoons and suspicious-looking liquor bottles brought back from Spain or Portugal taggedA gift from Auntie Lynn. I recognize the waffle maker, the oven gloves, even the kitchen spatulas. Dad has kept whatever Mum didn’t take with her when she left, an old-school mentality ofwhy replace something that works fine?Updating something for a new style or refreshing the interior are foreign concepts to him. What he and Mum had in common remains a mystery to us all, including the two of them.
My room is full of boxes and items in storage, so I settle in Saga’s old bedroom. The lighting follows the season, so when there is light outside, this room is bright, two windows lavishing the sun on wood floorboards, but when it’s dark, well... Saga used to come into my room because of the shadows on the wall and lie next to me, close but not touching, without saying a word. I knew she was afraid of those shadows. I tried to make her feel better with facts. “A ghost is only a vague evanescent form of a person and can cause no harm. Don’t fear the dead, fear the living.” I was never sure if this had the desired effect or not.
I shuffle items around on the upper two shelves of a fitted unit. I open the cover of the first Harry Potter book. On the yellowed page it saysTo Saga on Christmas Day 2002. Next, I pick up an old Barbie doll. Complete with jeans and crop top, she lies there as if she’s Sleeping Beauty, having waited for us to return to her after all these years. I loved Barbies. Decorating their houses, dressing them, setting them out in various positions and groups as if they were busy living life. The children playing, the adults in a group talking like all adults do.Don’t touch!I would say to Saga.What’s the point if we can’t touch them?she moaned.I just have to finish setting the game up. Is it ready now?Saga would reply.More impatient moaning.Now? Come on, Klara!But it had to be perfect. I didn’t even care about playing: it was the preparation I loved. Organizing them.
I smooth out Barbie’s long blond hair and put her back to resume her sleep. The Harry Potter books, some CDs and a figurine of a horse are removed and deposited in a drawer to make space for the items I’ve brought with me. They are, in order of importance, a picture of my family on holiday ten years ago, a notebook, my favorite scented candle (Musky Vanilla), and my purse of loyalty cards. I only have loyalty cards for the UK, none for Sweden, which gives me a funny, floating feeling. When I get to the bottom of my suitcase I hesitate, then turn the contents—two books on Scandinavian architecture—upside down and close the bag.I won’t be needing them. I’ve never needed them. Who am I kidding?
The room should feel familiar because this is the house I spent my childhood in. Arriving home from a holiday or after a sleepover always filled me with relief. I didn’t care that my room didn’t have a TV, pink walls, or a double bed. It smelled of home. It smells the same, but it’s not home. It’s confusing. Now, home is my bedroom in Alice’s flat, an almost-perfect square of white walls with a queen-size bed, built-in wardrobes and a large window where I don’t have a view (it’s a basement apartment, and all I see is a gray cement and moss-covered wall) but do have lots of light.
Moving was an easy way to recruit a friend, according to Google.
I went to view rooms, taking time to inspect the shower curtain and wardrobe space in each, when in reality it was the potential flatmate I was assessing. Alice had few facial expressions, in fact, only three. They are, in order of most used: huge laugh, friendly smile and neutral-resting face. When I’m around she uses the first two: this is how I know we are friends. I asked about whether she walked around the house in shoes, socks, or barefoot and she answered,Barefoot because the skin has to breathe, doesn’t it?and that socks worn all day made her think of older men with athlete’s foot. That was promising. I paid my deposit there and then. The good thing about living at 243A Munster Road SW6 is that I can get my coffee from La Bottega if I feel like chatting, and from Starbucks if I feel like only uttering my name for cup identification and nothing more.
I don’t want to move somewhere bigger. Large houses are full of spaces that have to be filled, and all I can think about is how much time it must take to clean everything. My boss gave me a warning once, when I told a YourMove customer who was looking at eight-bedroom mansions (notacountry house: that is something rich people say to seem humble) that it was a bad idea. “You may want to reconsider investing in a large property,” I told the customer. “It’s a lot of extra upkeep and cleaning and maintenance, all added distractions.”
“You may want to reconsider trying to talk customers out of buying homes through our site,”my boss said. Then he suspended me for two days.
I lie down on the single bed now and stare at the white ceiling, unsure of what to do next, until I hear Dad at the front door.
ALEX
Personal Calendar
• NEW TASK:Test. Who even uses these calendars? Guess it works...guess people who work use them...
• NEW TASK:Meet Dan (let’s pretend it’s a “meeting” and not just a beer-fueled moan)
• NEW TASK:Read (and throw out) 4 job openings proposed by Jobcenter
Bin truck wakes me at 5:14 a.m. from bizarre dream which I instantly forget. Apart from that, slept well last night. Of course, people never say things like that: we only talk about sleep if it’s been bad; we are not interested in the good or the neutral. Sleep is as skewed as Google business reviews.
The outside world makes its way into the flat through my single-pane windows. My apartment is small, with one bedroom and an open-plan living area in the bustling Möllevången with its mango-and-plantain filled market, coffee shops and vegan hotspots. I’m never alone, thankfully; the bustling mix of languages and faces wraps me up in a bubble of belonging. I just have to venture out to be reminded of the world around me.
Decide to get up and have an espresso as a start. Thought about enteringhave espressoin my calendar so I only have two things left to do today but refrained. Need to take first day of recovery program seriously, if it can even be called that.
The pile of bills on the breakfast bar, the only table I have and use when eating on the sofa is not appropriate, needs addressing so I start sifting through them. I prefer paperless; less in your face, easier to ignore if it’s somewhere in the cloud or a cluttered inbox. But these aren’t mine. The first one is a reminder that the lease agreement on the car is in default. It’s getting harder to ignore them. Old Alex would just get on with it, get a job and hustle. But I am not Old Alex anymore. Proof: Old Alex would be off playing paddleball on a Saturday morning. And Old Alex would definitely not find himself wearing a ring that doesn’t belong to him. Can still hear Dan’s reply when I asked to keep it.
