‘Yeah. Please. Just find a way.’
She hesitates and he waits for her to say she can’t – won’t – come, but she doesn’t. She whispers ‘Okay,’ her voice tender.
Forty-Three
Bianka
It’s not true what Bianka told Charlotte and basically everyone else about her early life. Her mother didn’t die as she’d insinuated; she left her for a man named Joel in America, and went to live with him in his big house in Fort Lauderdale. Joel didn’t want any more kids, so Bianka’s mother left her to be raised by her great-aunt, Edna. Aunt Edna gave up after a couple of years and sent her to a Christian boarding school on the west coast of Norway, after her early teens were marred by uncontrollable behaviour and substance abuse.
She walked out of the school after three weeks and she can still see herself as the lone figure she must have been then, running through the wet, dark night to the main road, feet slipping on trampled orange leaves, black mountains swept in drifts of fog blocking the moon from reaching the narrow, remote valley. She didn’t see her mother again until her twenties, and by that time she had become an unrepentant day-drinker who rarely returned her daughter’s calls. Bianka suspects that deep down, she is very angry. No wonder Bianka panics whenever people pull away from her. Everything would have been different if her mother hadn’t abandoned and rejected her. She wouldn’t have been drawn to others who’d repeat that pattern, like Mia. But now, everything is different. The cycle is broken and Bianka is about to discover a different kind of life, one defined by genuine love and connection.
Bianka walks as though in a haze through Gatwick Airport, going through the motions of the security check point on autopilot – her weekend holdall bag on a tray. That’s it – it’s all she carries as she travels toward her new life. She tries to rid herself of the thoughts of her early life but finds that she can’t quite; her brain keeps wanting to go back, to understand. She realizes she has to process the past to release it and move forward, like Charlotte said.
How did we get here, Bianka? She asks herself the question as she heads through the winding duty-free shop and catches sight of herself in the mirror of the Dior makeup counter.
Who is this woman? It feels as though she’s entirely created herself, as if she came from nowhere at all, with nothing to root her or keep her moored. She thinks of Emil, and as much as he’s a good man and a loving husband, their marriage is entirely based on performance, on Bianka constantly acting to perform the part she had to play to save herself. And Storm… Storm has been a difficult chapter from the beginning. Bianka has always known she’s walking on eggshells with the boy, that if anyone was going to tear her down, it would be him.
Bianka has the sensation that her life has been lived uphill but that she’s always had to pretend otherwise. Or chosen to. But now, she’s tired. She’s tired of pretending, lying, conforming, aspiring, concealing. Once, she was in love and filled up inside by it, and once she’d had it, everything else seems like a lie by contrast. But Mia took it all away from her. She questioned the very reality on which Bianka’s world rested. She said she was delusional and wrong and to stay away, or else, but nobody speaks to Bianka like that. Nobody hurts her and gets away with it, as Mia learned the hard way. Bianka just hadn’t counted on a witness.
*
On the plane, she sits in her seat at the back, leaning her head against the headrest and closing her eyes, letting the cool air from the funnel rush across her face. She lets herself go back in her memories again as the plane begins its cumbersome taxi toward the runway, and the future. She’s surprised by how easy it suddenly feels to look back, and how rarely she’s attempted it over the years.
People don’t usually want to lie and fuck people over, they do it because they feel they have to, and Bianka is no different. She’d never planned to do it, but once you go down the road of building a life from lies, then you are going to be maintaining them forever. To herself, Bianka justifies it all simply as doing what she had to do. It just wasn’t going to cut it to turn up in Oslo as a teenage runaway, an empty shell of a kid, wanted by nobody, so Bianka created another version of events. The boarding school in the deep, rain-lashed valley became a top Swiss private school. Her mother became a vague and tragic reference, and always brought sympathy.
The lies kept coming, one after another, and with time, she came to find that people almost always believe what you tell them, because why wouldn’t they? The vast majority of people who look like Bianka and speak like Bianka and fit into the world Bianka inhabits, really are who they say they are.
At the beginning, when she first arrived in Oslo and began to build a life for herself, she realized that she was good at befriending people and not so good at keeping people in her life; it was a repeat pattern and one that grew increasingly devastating with time. It brought up all the old trauma of her mother suddenly deciding one day that life would be better without Bianka in it. She decided to break the cycle and create a beguiling persona that nobody would ever reject or abandon again. At the beginning, it was difficult. But Bianka knew even then that nothing worth having comes easily. She would meet someone and they’d be drawn in by Bianka’s effusiveness and contagious energy, but inevitably, weeks or months later, they’d drift away, giving one vacuous excuse or another. But Bianka took something from each of them and made it her own; a gesture, a look, a subtle honing of her carefully studied Oslo West accent, a stolen anecdote that reflected the person she was constructing.
By the time she met Mia in her late teens, she had had plenty of practice creating herself and knew she came across as successful, thoughtful, and charismatic, often described as a real breath of fresh air, someone who made other people feel special and brought a burst of energy to her surroundings. She’d learned that the trick with people was to reflect back what people themselves wanted to be. Most people wanted to be confident, to feel seen and interesting, qualities that are remarkably easy to emulate – it’s simply a case of making the other person feel that they are those things.
Then she met Mia, Mia who was so good at seeing beneath the surface, who just seemed to gently crawl into the most hidden of places, her very core. Things began to change for Bianka, she went from nightclub promotion to PR to marketing, and friends no longer constantly dropped out of her life – she was popular and seemingly well liked.
Mia was confusion and conflict and connection and love, passionate love. Mia was deep water. Mia was everything. Sometimes Bianka couldn’t be sure if she loved her or wanted to be her; it was probably a case of both. They slept together, but only once, and what had seemed to Bianka to be a natural and beautiful progression, filled Mia with regret.
Mia began to distance herself. She met a man and said she was in love. And Bianka couldn’t handle it when she lost her. Even now, so many years later, Bianka can’t bear to think of what happened next, and who she had to become without her. She pretended like it was all fine but set about trying to dismantle Mia’s new life. Coercion, manipulation, bullying – these had all seemed like acceptable strategies to Bianka.
She wrenches her mind off Mia and replaces the image with Charlotte. This is easy; they look remarkably alike, a source of endless amazement for Bianka. When she first laid eyes on Charlotte it felt like Mia was back, that it could all be undone. She couldn’t believe her fortune when she realized how fundamentally insecure Charlotte was. She comes across as so powerful and confident, but she was easy game, someone who constantly craves reassurance and attention – a classic avoidant narcissist. Charlotte just doesn’t see other people or understand that they are real independent beings with their own needs and agendas – as long as her ego is stroked sufficiently, she purrs like a cat.
When she realized that she’d truly lost Mia, that Mia would report her for harassment, she did what she had to do. It wasn’t easy but it had to be done. The rejection brought back the searing heat of grief and rage that Bianka had felt when her mother left her; violent storms of emotion that were eventually internalized and replaced with that numb, white haze. Bianka simply snapped, after months of pleading and what Mia called emotional blackmail. She wasn’t planning to kill her, of course not, she’d gone to the cabin to reason with her. She hadn’t meant to come across as threatening. She just wanted to talk. But Mia wasn’t there, the cabin was empty. The farmer down the road had told Bianka that Mia headed up to Rasletind most mornings, so Bianka drove there and parked her car right next to Mia’s. She walked fast up through the woods on the gravel path which grew narrower as it looped around the neck of the mountain, the valley opening up far below. They came face to face on the path and Bianka will never forget the look of sheer shock and horror on Mia’s face as she took her in. Up until that moment Bianka must have believed on some level that Mia loved her and that it was merely a matter of convincing her of that, but as she stood there in front of her on the path with a look of disgust on her face, the truth was very obvious. The truth was ugly. And it hurt so much. I just want to talk to you, Bianka said. But Mia didn’t want to talk; she ran away from her as she approached, rushing down the narrow path, dragging the little boy alongside her. And Bianka snapped.
Months later Emil got in touch to ask whether she might help him make sense of some drawings little Storm had been making, since she’d been the person who knew Mia best, apart from him. He wanted to hear about the moment Mia had leapt from the path; was Bianka really sure it was intentional? Could she perhaps have tripped? Bianka shook her head sadly and let her eyes fill with tears. Emil had placed his warm hand atop hers and something about him suddenly felt safe and irresistible, like coming home to the parent she’d never had.
By this time, Bianka had lost her grip on her life completely. Haunted by what she’d done, she spent her days in bed, high or drunk or both. She was shocked when she saw Storm’s drawings. Could it be that he’d be able to articulate what had really happened? Emil, too, looked exhausted and terrorized, and his warm eyes searched hers. Bianka realized the solution was there. Right in front of her. If she couldn’t be with Mia, she could become her and allow herself an idyllic, comfortable life. Two birds with one hell of a large rock. Marry the money, get the life she’d never had growing up, and shut the kid up. It was all better than expected for a while; Bianka found she enjoyed being idolized and taken care of by Emil, who was probably beyond grateful to get a second chance at marriage, and not having to raise his son by himself. It was easy to pretend to be there for him; he was so naïve and unquestioning. Bianka spent time sorting through most of Mia’s possessions, getting rid of her diaries where she whined pathetically about her ‘delusional friend’ stalking her and harassing her to the point of a nervous breakdown in the years after she married Emil.
Bianka did what she could to be a good wife to Emil and a stand-in mother for Storm, but the truth was she found them both repulsive and annoying, and it took all her effort to achieve just a vague semblance of family life. There were upsides, too – Emil was the first person Bianka had ever met who she didn’t think would ever leave her, and she grew to cherish the secure, almost parental relationship that developed between them.
There were other indiscretions before Charlotte – after all, Bianka is only human. A couple of women, one she met through work who turned out to be boring and not worth the effort, and another, a Swedish singer who also bore a vague resemblance to Mia. Bianka pursued her relentlessly, which eventually ended in a formal charge of harassment and a restraining order, with two years of mandatory therapy sessions with Dr Matheson. But all of that is water under the bridge now. Charlotte loves her and she is on a plane moving fast toward the future.
Forty-Four
Charlotte
I sit across from Inspector Fuentes, a man with a misleadingly pleasant demeanour, considering his job is essentially to expose liars and criminals like myself. Behind him sits a woman with a buzz cut and cool eyes, pen poised above paper to take notes. I feel like she can tell what I’ve done just by looking at me. Nobody can see inside of you, I tell myself. This is something Ximena often told me. It’s your job to show them.
Or not.
‘As briefly discussed on the phone, you’re aware of the disappearance of Maxime Dubois-Joseph?’
‘Yes.’
‘We’re at a stage of our investigations into his disappearance where we are building a picture of Dubois-Joseph’s days leading up to when he went missing. It is of utmost importance that we know who he was with, what he was doing, what his plans were.’
‘Of course.’
‘We’ve spoken to a number of Dubois-Joseph’s friends, as well as your guests at Can Xara. I’m glad you could come in in person, as these conversations have left us with more questions than answers.’
‘Oh,’ I say, swallowing nervously – a lump has appeared in my throat. Stop, I tell myself, you’re prepared for this. I smile what I hope is a slightly confused, uncomplicated, law-abiding-citizen smile.
‘Can you confirm whether you have ever met the missing man, Maxime Dubois-Joseph?’ asks Fuentes, speaking slowly.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say. ‘I can’t recall.’
‘Perhaps it would be most helpful for us to start off with a run-through of your activities during your recent trip to Ibiza. Can you confirm you were with three friends, and their names?’
‘Yes. It was Anette Young, Linda Wagner-Cantrell, and Bianka Langeland.’
‘What was the purpose of this trip?’
