The bus starts again. ‘Sorry for the delay. We’re now on our way to Tyres?.’
During the remaining twenty minutes of the journey Victoria reads her diary from cover to cover, and when she gets off she sits down on a wooden bench at the bus stop and continues writing.
Children are born in BB, the maternity ward, and BB is Bengt Bergman, and if you put the letter B against a mirror you get the number eight.
Eight is Hitler’s number, because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.
And now it’s 1988. 88.
Heil Hitler!
Heil Helgoland!
Heil Bergman!
She packs her things and walks towards the Eyes’ house.
The living room of the villa in Tyres? is light and the sun is shining through the white lace curtains in front of the open terrace door. She’s lying on her back on a sun-warmed sofa and the old woman is sitting opposite her.
She is going to tell everything, and it’s as if there’s no end to what needs to be said.
Victoria Bergman is going to die.
First she talks about interrailing a year before. About a nameless man in Paris in a room with cockroaches on the ceiling and leaking pipes. About a four-star hotel on the beach promenade in Nice. About the man in bed beside her, who was an estate agent and smelled of sweat. About Zurich, but she remembers nothing of the city, just snow and nightclubs and the fact that she jerked a man off in a park.
She tells the Eyes that she’s convinced external pain can wipe out internal pain. The old woman doesn’t interrupt her, just lets her talk freely. The curtains sway in the breeze, and she offers Victoria coffee and cake. It’s the first time she’s eaten anything since she left Copenhagen.
Victoria talks about a man called Nikos whom she met when they got to Greece. She remembers his expensive Rolex on the wrong wrist, and the fact that he smelled of garlic and aftershave, but not his face, and not his voice.
She tries to be honest in what she says. But when she talks about what happened in Greece it’s hard to stick to the facts. She can hear how crazy it all sounds.
She had woken up in Nikos’s home and went into the kitchen to get a glass of water.
‘And Hannah and Jessica are sitting at the kitchen table, and shout at me that I need to pull myself together. That I smell bad, that I’ve bitten my nails so much they must hurt, and that I have rolls of fat and varicose veins. And that I’ve been mean to Nikos.’ The old woman smiles at her like she usually does, but her eyes aren’t smiling, they look worried.
‘Did they really say that?’
Victoria nods. ‘Hannah and Jessica aren’t really two people,’ she says, and it’s like she suddenly understands herself. ‘There are three of them.’
The therapist looks at her with interest.
‘Three people,’ Victoria goes on. ‘One who works, is dutiful, and … well, obedient and moral. And one who is analytical, wise and understands what I have to do to feel better. Then there’s one who tells me off, a real moaning minnie. She gives me a guilty conscience.’
‘A Worker, an Analyst and a Moaning Minnie. Do you mean that Hannah and Jessica are two people who have different characteristics?’
‘Not really,’ Victoria replies. ‘They’re two people who are three people.’ She laughs uncertainly. ‘Does that sound muddled?’
‘No, I think I understand.’
She’s silent for a moment, then she asks Victoria if she’d like to describe Solace.
Victoria thinks about this, but isn’t sure that she has a good answer. ‘I needed her,’ she eventually says.
‘And Nikos? Do you want to talk about him?’
Victoria laughs. ‘He wanted to marry me. Can you imagine? Ridiculous!’
The woman says nothing, changes position in the armchair and leans back. It looks like she’s thinking about what to say next.
Victoria suddenly feels sleepy and bored. It’s no longer so easy to talk, but she feels that she wants to. The words seem sluggish and she has to make an effort not to lie. She feels ashamed in front of the Eyes.
‘I wanted to torment him,’ she says after a while, and as she does so she feels a great calm.
Victoria can’t help grinning, but when she sees that the old woman doesn’t seem at all amused she puts her hand over her mouth to hide her smile. She feels ashamed again and has to make an effort to find her way back to the voice that’s helping her talk.
When the psychologist leaves the room shortly afterwards to go to the toilet, Victoria can’t resist looking to see what she’s written, and she opens the notepad as soon as she’s alone.
Transitional object.
African fetish mask, symbol for Solace.
Cloth dog, Tramp, symbol for security in childhood.
Who? Not father or mother. Possibly relative of childhood friend. Most likely adult. Aunt Elsa?
Memory lapses. Reminiscent of DID/MPD.
She doesn’t understand, and is soon interrupted by footsteps in the hall.
‘What’s a transitional object?’ Victoria feels let down, because the therapist has been writing things they haven’t talked about.
The old woman sits down again. ‘A transitional object,’ she says, ‘is an object that represents someone or something that you have problems being separated from.’
‘Such as?’ Victoria fires back.
‘Well, a stuffed toy or a blanket can comfort a child because the object represents its mother. When she’s not there, the object is there in her place, and helps the child move from dependency on its mother to independence.’
Victoria still doesn’t understand. After all, she isn’t a child, she’s an adult. A grown-up.
Does she miss Solace? Was the wooden mask a transitional object?
She doesn’t know where Tramp, the little dog made out of real rabbit fur, came from.
‘What are DID and MPD?’
The old woman smiles. Victoria thinks she looks sad. ‘I can tell you’ve read my notes. But they aren’t absolute truths.’ She nods towards the notepad on the desk. ‘They’re just my reflections on our conversations.’
‘But what do DID and MPD mean?’
‘They’re a way of describing someone who has several autonomous personalities inside them. It isn’t –’ She stops herself, and looks very serious. ‘It isn’t a diagnosis,’ she continues. ‘I want you to understand that. It’s more like a personality trait.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘DID stands for dissociative identity disorder. It’s a logical self-defence mechanism, the brain’s way of handling difficult things. A person develops different personalities that act independently, separate from each other, in order to deal with different situations in the best possible way.’
What does that mean? Victoria thinks. Autonomous, dissociative, separate and independent? Is she separate and independent from herself through other people who are inside her?
It sounds ridiculous.