Page 87 of Hidden in Memories
Jovanka is looking encouragingly at him, and he searches for something concrete to talk about. He really wants to get up and walk out, but that’s not an option.
“When my half sister was born,” he begins tentatively, “they took my room.”
“Your room?”
He pictures his old bedroom in Umeå. It was light and sunny, right next door to the bedroom his father shared with his new wife. But when he came to visit after his half sister’s birth, everything had changed. The room had been painted pink, and his bed was gone. It had been replaced by a crib, and there was a white changing table by the window.
All of his toys had disappeared.
“They’d turned my room into a nursery.”
“So where were you supposed to sleep?”
“In the attic.”
Jovanka raises her eyebrows.
Daniel realizes that the memory still hurts. He will be thirty-eight in September, almost thirty years have passed, but it still hurts. He can’t work out if he is embarrassed at his own reaction, or whether this is about his father letting down the little boy he was back then.
“Dad told me to follow him; then he opened the door to the stairs leading up to the attic.”
He remembers how steep the staircase was, and how cold, as if the heat in the rest of the house simply couldn’t reach that far.
“There were two rooms in the attic. The first was my father’s study, but if you went along a narrow corridor, you came to another room, and that was where they’d put my things.”
He closes his eyes again, recalling the detail. His father had explained that he was old enough to sleep up here all by himself—as if it were something fun and exciting. Daniel had noticed the dirty window—it was so high up that he couldn’t see out.
After a while his father had fallen silent, but he had kept his gaze fixed on his son as if he was waiting for a reaction. A thank-you, perhaps, or a cry of joy over the new furniture from IKEA.
Even though Daniel was so young, he realized that his father was expecting praise.
His heart contracts with the pain. He was only eight years old.
He stood there in front of his father, wanting to ask what he should do if he woke up in the middle of the night and wanted to pee. The corridor leading to the stairs was dark and scary.
But the words stuck in his throat.
He didn’t dare to complain.
It was impossible to tell his father that he was afraid to sleep on his own up in the attic. He was angry and upset, but too frightened to explain.
He wet himself on the first night.
“Tell me how you felt at that moment,” Jovanka says, bringing him back to the present.
He looks down at his lap. A hard lump has formed in his throat. He glances at the box of tissues, he doesn’t want to reach out and take one.
“It’s fine, Daniel. This is a safe place. You can say whatever you want when you’re with me.”
When Daniel opens his mouth he can almost hear the high voice of a little boy.
“I hated him. And her. Both of them. I wished they would die.”
“And how do you feel now, after so many years?”
He tries to analyze his emotions. They are complicated and messy, hard to put into words. It feels like a sharp stone deep in his chest.
“What does grown-up Daniel think today?”
