Annie Christie's To Die For:
Episode Eight
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: I can see clearly now.
_____________________________________________________________________
From Amsterdam to Frankfurt and then on to Dresden took the best part of two days. Travelling by train meant I could really soak up the countryside, though, of course, it’s not all countryside. I kept trying to stop myself trying to see Germany as Freddie would have seen it. There was no point trying not to think about Freddie – he was the reason for my trip, after all – but I knew I had to attempt to keep things in perspective. It was my adventure, not his. I wouldn’t find him at the end, I would find more about him. And possibly more about myself.
I got off the train at the main railway station and headed for the cheap(ish)hotel I’d booked for a couple of nights. I wanted to get my bearings and didn’t know how long I’d stay there. It was set near the Groβer Garten and when I stopped to check my local tourist map, I was amazed to see I was standing in the very street Freddie’s address had noted. I was literally standing opposite Karlotta’s house. I was weary and keen to get my backpack off my shoulders and wasn’t at all ready to meet Karlotta, but then… would I ever be ready? So I made a snap decision. Be courageous. I crossed the road and rang the doorbell. Part of me hoped it wouldn’t be answered.
It was. A woman in her late thirties, and heavily pregnant, answered the door. I was convinced this must be the wrong house.
‘Ich suche Karlotta,’ I said, trying out my pitiful German. Two days on a train with a teach yourself book really wasn’t going to get me far.
‘Ich bin Karlotta,’ the woman said.
That floored me. It couldn’t be the Karlotta Freddie had been in love with – could it?
A man came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder. I struggled to find words.
‘Was willst du?’ he asked. I could more or less guess he was asking me who I was and what the hell I was doing here. I was about to reply, but Karlotta got there before me.
‘Du bist Heather?’ she said. ‘You are Heather?’ She repeated it in English. I stood there, shocked.
‘Yes, I’m Heather,’ I said. Before I could ask how she knew, she flung her arms round me and said, ‘Please, come into the house with us. I have been waiting for you.’
None of it made any sense. Not then. My first thought was that my mum had somehow got wind of my plan and phoned ahead. But that was ridiculous. Then I thought maybe the police had… but Karlotta sat me down, with a cup of strong coffee and explained it all.
It seemed that all the time Freddie was in Scotland he’d been writing letters to Karlotta. Karlotta was, at least in his mind, the love of his life. But she explained to me that she was actually one of his teachers at the University – in the School of German Studies – and that she had never known of his love. She had only known him as a boy who was very keen to prove things about Romanticism, who was earnest, perhaps too obsessive in his views. And who had vanished off the face of the earth when he discovered she was pregnant – in April.
‘He was a good student,’ she said. ‘Albrecht taught him, too, didn’t you, Albrecht?’
Albrecht nodded. It was clear he wasn’t quite as keen on Freddie as Karlotta.
‘And what a terrible thing to happen,’ she said. ‘ Foolish. I sense he was trying to punish me.’
‘What for?’ I asked.
She shrugged.
‘For not loving him back?’ I asked.
‘More than this,’ she said. ‘For not believing in his art. He said if I didn’t believe in his art, I didn’t believe in him.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not true.’
‘His art was good,’ Albrecht admitted.
‘But I didn’t see eye to eye with him on Goethe, on Friedrich, on symbolism and romanticism and…’ Karlotta said.
‘He couldn’t take the challenge,’ Albrecht added with an air of finality.
‘But you have had a long journey,’ Karlotta said, ‘and I am so happy to meet you. You will stay here with us, please?’
This was so not what I’d expected that she caught me completely off guard. I didn’t know what to say, so I said yes. I reasoned that this was the one place I would find out the truth about Freddie, insofar as it would ever be possible.
Over the next few days Karlotta took me completely under her wing. She told me how she’d first met Freddie when he was twenty-one, beginning a dissertation on Romantic Art – and she was his co-supervisor. ‘He was an old soul,’ she said, ‘a boy out of his time, but he had some very confused ideas. He could not accept that art is not always life and that life is not always art. He would argue a lot. He did not like to be wrong.’
I didn’t really know what Karlotta was talking about, but she took it slowly. She knew I wanted to make sense of Freddie and what he did – to me and to her – and she put me through a kind of immersion therapy. At least that’s how it felt at the time.
It saw us spending time at the Groβer Garden, and the museums and art galleries of Dresden. Karlotta was a patient and wonderful teacher. She opened my eyes to all sorts of things I’d never even dreamed of and I could quite see how Freddie had fallen ‘under her spell’. But she was also a realist. She had clearly been shaken by Freddie’s actions and she was sad for how things had turned out. For herself. But for me she was more angry.
‘You did not deserve that,’ she said.
‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I sort of feel that he just used me to get back at you and that makes me feel…’ I didn’t really know how it made me feel, but it wasn’t good.
‘Ah, but you know, he loved you, too,’ she said.
‘What?’ I asked. How could she possibly know that.
‘What he wrote about you,’ she said. ‘I can show it to you, but it’s in German. You need to read for yourself, really. Perhaps now is not the time. But one day. For now, you must just know that he loved you. But he would not let go of the idea of loving me. He got confused with his romanticism. It happens.’
I just wished it hadn’t happened to me, and asked her to explain what she meant.
‘Romanticizing means simultaneously reading the world as if it were a book and imagining or writing a book that would be consubstantial with the world,’ she said. ‘Freddie got those two things confused sometimes.’
I wasn’t surprised, it sounded ridiculously complex… but my confusion was more with understanding what she was talking about. I realised I had a lot to learn. School at Kirkcudbright, even the ‘Academy’, hadn’t prepared me for half what I needed to know to make it in the adult world. Now it was up to me to learn. I wasn’t sure where to begin. But the time I spent with Karlotta and Albrecht really helped me.
Which was obviously more than could be said for Freddie. Then again, maybe he didn’t want help. He wanted something else, something more. Something Karlotta couldn’t give him. In every sense. It turned out that Freddie had graduated in 2002 and not got the result he’d wanted on his dissertation. He blamed Albrecht, and to a lesser extent Karlotta.
‘He was angry with us,’ she said, ‘because we would not, or could not see what he believed to be true. For us it was academic. For him it was his life. More than life.’
I got a new sense of the phrase: to die for.
‘And he was angry because you didn’t love him?’ I asked
‘Because she loved me,’ Albrecht said. Albrecht was a man of few words, and to be honest I found him a bit intimidating, but I couldn’t really imagine him as a love-rival for Freddie any more than I could imagine Karlotta being the object of Freddie’s unrequited love. If I thought Christy and Ian were an odd pairing, this one was even odder. What is it that makes people fall in love with the completely wrong people? But hadn’t I just done the same thing? I saw him, I fell in love, but I didn’t even know him. I was finding out more about him now, and he seemed a lot more like a silly Young Werther than a boy-band Romantic hero. Certainly not the love of my life. Already his reality was fading out of my memory. He wasn’t real any more, and not just because he wasn’t alive.
Karlotta explained to me that once Freddie had graduated his parents expected him to return home, get a job, maybe become a teacher. But instead he turned to painting as a way of trying to prove himself. He worked hard, and he had a natural talent. He had a job as a waiter to keep himself alive and he hung round the University where he was usually argumentative to the point of irritation, if Albrecht was to be believed. He sounded a worse stalker than Duggie – and he was old enough to know better. I began to realise that the picture you see depends firmly on the perspective from which you view. And that’s not just a comment on art.
‘What about his family?’ I asked. ‘His parents? I had never thought of Freddie’s parents in all this, any more than he had. But they must be suffering now too.
‘He broke their hearts,’ Karlotta said. ‘He cut himself off from them. They are nice people, but they didn’t understand why he would not just get a job, why he was wasting his degree.’
‘Do they know…?’ I asked.
Karlotta told me that the body had been sent back to them and the funeral had taken place a week after it had come back. She told me that she and Albrecht had gone to the funeral. I wanted to ask how it was, but I couldn’t get the words out in any language. I was struggling to get the image of Freddie hanging from the tree out of my mind and the thought of him in a coffin wasn’t one I wanted to add to it. I took a deep breath. I had to face this.
‘How was he?’ I asked.
I meant how was it, but I’d segued into that pigeon English we all use when talking to people whose first language isn’t English, even if their English is perfectly good.
‘He was peaceful,’ Karlotta said.
I must have looked shocked. Immediately I was back in my memory to the morning I woke early, took that picture of him before he woke. Peaceful. The calm before the storm. He hadn’t looked peaceful hanging from the tree. And death wasn’t peace, was it? It was negation. Nothing. The end.
Karlotta carried on. She knew we needed to see this one through.
‘It was a beautiful day,’ she said. The crematorium was set in a parkland with a lot of fir trees, and the sun was shining in a cloudless blue sky. It was a day he would have liked to paint.’
At that point I broke down.
I told her everything, and I was glad I did. Karlotta wasn’t that much younger than my mum, I suppose, but she wasn’t my mum – she wasn’t anyone’s mum at that point because she was still a couple of months shy of giving birth – and she was someone I felt I could talk to in confidence. We were bound together in some strange way. Because of Freddie. And Freddie, after all, was why I was there, in pieces. Karlotta put me back together again.
She let me talk. She listened. And she even managed to make me feel better. She took me into the Dresden forest and we sat down in the place where Chasseur in the Snow was painted. She let me play ‘Colourblind’. She talked to me about stories and romanticism and all kinds of things. And it was there that I started to see the light for the first time.
‘Our Freddie is a story that links us,’ she said. ‘Only us.’
I still wasn’t sure what the story was. Some of it was written in Goethe, and some of it in Freddie’s letters and notes. And some of it in his pictures. I knew that I needed to learn a lot more about German language and literature, and art, and life itself before I would ever understand. I faced death in the Galloway Forest Park, but I chose life in the Dresden Forest. They were both important moments in my life.
I spent two weeks with Karlotta and Albrecht before heading home. To say the experience totally changed my life would be an understatement. I went to University as planned in September. I changed courses. I studied German, Art History and Psychology in my first two years. I settled there easily enough, though perhaps I didn’t throw myself into being a student as much as many of my peers. It wasn’t that I felt aloof, but I often felt apart. I still had a lot to process in my own life and I wasn’t sure I had space to allow others in.
In the first long summer vacation, despite my mum wanting me to come and spend it in Kirkcudbright working at Rupert’s shop, I went to work as a nanny for Karlotta and Albrecht – looking after Novo, their son. He was a bright, beautiful, blond hair and blue eyed child. I did the same the next year. He’d grown, but he still remembered me and I found that I really liked looking after him. Dad and mum came and spent some time with us all that summer. It should have been really strange but actually it was great fun. Everyone was relaxed and positive and enjoying the experience.
After that summer I stayed on. I took the opportunity to study abroad for my third year. I studied German Romanticism and Society. Albrecht was one of my tutors. I lodged with Karlotta and Albrecht. We laughed about Goethe’s ‘Elective Affinities’. We reminded ourselves that it was dangerous to draw too many realist conclusions from romantic literature. During that year I went to see Freddie’s grave. I never met his parents. Novo got a little sister, Anya, and I began to find my place in the world. I even dated a couple of German boys. Nothing serious. I had more respect for love by that time. My German was good enough by then to read all of Freddie’s writing and I realised that he was, as Karlotta said, not bad, not even mad, but young and confused and instead of reaching out he shifted his focus away from the reality in front of him and tried to create a world that could never be. I read his writing and it was like reading part of his life. I was part of a chapter in his story. That’s what started getting me interested in narrative psychology.
I completed my degree at St Andrews the following year. My parents came to my graduation and were proud as punch. I was the first person in my family ever to graduate from university and my mum said, as dad took photographs by the ruined castle, ‘I never thought I’d see this day.’ It was a comment laden with layers over and above the usual and as I looked at her I realised how terrifying the whole Freddie thing must have been for her. She, at least, now had a sense of closure. Of an ending. Of a job well done.
‘You’ve been great parents,’ I told them. ‘The best.’ And I meant it.
I caught up with Christy that summer. She was pregnant, not married but living with the father. They were both committed, or it seemed that way. Duncan seemed a nice enough bloke. Steady job in banking, not what I’d have put Christy down for. But she’d calmed down a lot. Or grown up. She was looking forward to motherhood. I was able to tell her, from my vicarious experience, how great it would be.
It was strange, seeing her again after all that time. We’d grown apart and our lives had taken quite different paths, but there was still some kind of connection. We had been chapters in each other’s life story, I suppose, and sometimes it’s good to look back and see who you were, where you came from and how you’ve changed. As well as how you’ve stayed the same.
We’d grown out of ‘to die for’ love. We’d navigated the rocky waters of romance and were heading for the calmer shores of a more mature love. We even laughed about that summer, which was something I never thought I would do. I have Karlotta and Albrecht – and my dad – to thank for that. They were the people who held onto me when my narrative was falling apart and who picked up the leaves of a book that had been ripped apart, and put me back together again. The story, of course, is mine.
After University I did a masters in Narrative Psychology. And now it’s my job. I have so many people to thank for sending my life in that direction – it all started with Freddie but the story wasn’t all about him. My dad was right. Freddie was part of the story, but it’s my story and I’m still creating it.
In narrative psychology we use stories –the stories that are our lives – to make sense of ourselves. And that’s what this story is all about. I spend my days encouraging others to see their lives in terms of narrative – helping them to validate and understand and explore the meaning beyond words and pictures. It turns out I am quite good at helping people explore the meanings of their inner selves and how they relate to the wider picture.
And this year, a decade on, it seemed like it was time I wrote my own story down. We are all characters for you, the reader, but we are more than characters, too. We are real people. Like you. That’s the crux of narrative psychology. That we all to some extent create and exist in the narratives we, and others, make about us. We are all story. My final thought is that even though I’ve called my story ‘To die for’ you can probably see that its real title is ‘to live for’. And I have a lot more living to do. We all do. In and out of our storied existence.
Swearwords: None.
Description: I can see clearly now.
_____________________________________________________________________
From Amsterdam to Frankfurt and then on to Dresden took the best part of two days. Travelling by train meant I could really soak up the countryside, though, of course, it’s not all countryside. I kept trying to stop myself trying to see Germany as Freddie would have seen it. There was no point trying not to think about Freddie – he was the reason for my trip, after all – but I knew I had to attempt to keep things in perspective. It was my adventure, not his. I wouldn’t find him at the end, I would find more about him. And possibly more about myself.
I got off the train at the main railway station and headed for the cheap(ish)hotel I’d booked for a couple of nights. I wanted to get my bearings and didn’t know how long I’d stay there. It was set near the Groβer Garten and when I stopped to check my local tourist map, I was amazed to see I was standing in the very street Freddie’s address had noted. I was literally standing opposite Karlotta’s house. I was weary and keen to get my backpack off my shoulders and wasn’t at all ready to meet Karlotta, but then… would I ever be ready? So I made a snap decision. Be courageous. I crossed the road and rang the doorbell. Part of me hoped it wouldn’t be answered.
It was. A woman in her late thirties, and heavily pregnant, answered the door. I was convinced this must be the wrong house.
‘Ich suche Karlotta,’ I said, trying out my pitiful German. Two days on a train with a teach yourself book really wasn’t going to get me far.
‘Ich bin Karlotta,’ the woman said.
That floored me. It couldn’t be the Karlotta Freddie had been in love with – could it?
A man came up behind her and put his hand on her shoulder. I struggled to find words.
‘Was willst du?’ he asked. I could more or less guess he was asking me who I was and what the hell I was doing here. I was about to reply, but Karlotta got there before me.
‘Du bist Heather?’ she said. ‘You are Heather?’ She repeated it in English. I stood there, shocked.
‘Yes, I’m Heather,’ I said. Before I could ask how she knew, she flung her arms round me and said, ‘Please, come into the house with us. I have been waiting for you.’
None of it made any sense. Not then. My first thought was that my mum had somehow got wind of my plan and phoned ahead. But that was ridiculous. Then I thought maybe the police had… but Karlotta sat me down, with a cup of strong coffee and explained it all.
It seemed that all the time Freddie was in Scotland he’d been writing letters to Karlotta. Karlotta was, at least in his mind, the love of his life. But she explained to me that she was actually one of his teachers at the University – in the School of German Studies – and that she had never known of his love. She had only known him as a boy who was very keen to prove things about Romanticism, who was earnest, perhaps too obsessive in his views. And who had vanished off the face of the earth when he discovered she was pregnant – in April.
‘He was a good student,’ she said. ‘Albrecht taught him, too, didn’t you, Albrecht?’
Albrecht nodded. It was clear he wasn’t quite as keen on Freddie as Karlotta.
‘And what a terrible thing to happen,’ she said. ‘ Foolish. I sense he was trying to punish me.’
‘What for?’ I asked.
She shrugged.
‘For not loving him back?’ I asked.
‘More than this,’ she said. ‘For not believing in his art. He said if I didn’t believe in his art, I didn’t believe in him.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s not true.’
‘His art was good,’ Albrecht admitted.
‘But I didn’t see eye to eye with him on Goethe, on Friedrich, on symbolism and romanticism and…’ Karlotta said.
‘He couldn’t take the challenge,’ Albrecht added with an air of finality.
‘But you have had a long journey,’ Karlotta said, ‘and I am so happy to meet you. You will stay here with us, please?’
This was so not what I’d expected that she caught me completely off guard. I didn’t know what to say, so I said yes. I reasoned that this was the one place I would find out the truth about Freddie, insofar as it would ever be possible.
Over the next few days Karlotta took me completely under her wing. She told me how she’d first met Freddie when he was twenty-one, beginning a dissertation on Romantic Art – and she was his co-supervisor. ‘He was an old soul,’ she said, ‘a boy out of his time, but he had some very confused ideas. He could not accept that art is not always life and that life is not always art. He would argue a lot. He did not like to be wrong.’
I didn’t really know what Karlotta was talking about, but she took it slowly. She knew I wanted to make sense of Freddie and what he did – to me and to her – and she put me through a kind of immersion therapy. At least that’s how it felt at the time.
It saw us spending time at the Groβer Garden, and the museums and art galleries of Dresden. Karlotta was a patient and wonderful teacher. She opened my eyes to all sorts of things I’d never even dreamed of and I could quite see how Freddie had fallen ‘under her spell’. But she was also a realist. She had clearly been shaken by Freddie’s actions and she was sad for how things had turned out. For herself. But for me she was more angry.
‘You did not deserve that,’ she said.
‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I sort of feel that he just used me to get back at you and that makes me feel…’ I didn’t really know how it made me feel, but it wasn’t good.
‘Ah, but you know, he loved you, too,’ she said.
‘What?’ I asked. How could she possibly know that.
‘What he wrote about you,’ she said. ‘I can show it to you, but it’s in German. You need to read for yourself, really. Perhaps now is not the time. But one day. For now, you must just know that he loved you. But he would not let go of the idea of loving me. He got confused with his romanticism. It happens.’
I just wished it hadn’t happened to me, and asked her to explain what she meant.
‘Romanticizing means simultaneously reading the world as if it were a book and imagining or writing a book that would be consubstantial with the world,’ she said. ‘Freddie got those two things confused sometimes.’
I wasn’t surprised, it sounded ridiculously complex… but my confusion was more with understanding what she was talking about. I realised I had a lot to learn. School at Kirkcudbright, even the ‘Academy’, hadn’t prepared me for half what I needed to know to make it in the adult world. Now it was up to me to learn. I wasn’t sure where to begin. But the time I spent with Karlotta and Albrecht really helped me.
Which was obviously more than could be said for Freddie. Then again, maybe he didn’t want help. He wanted something else, something more. Something Karlotta couldn’t give him. In every sense. It turned out that Freddie had graduated in 2002 and not got the result he’d wanted on his dissertation. He blamed Albrecht, and to a lesser extent Karlotta.
‘He was angry with us,’ she said, ‘because we would not, or could not see what he believed to be true. For us it was academic. For him it was his life. More than life.’
I got a new sense of the phrase: to die for.
‘And he was angry because you didn’t love him?’ I asked
‘Because she loved me,’ Albrecht said. Albrecht was a man of few words, and to be honest I found him a bit intimidating, but I couldn’t really imagine him as a love-rival for Freddie any more than I could imagine Karlotta being the object of Freddie’s unrequited love. If I thought Christy and Ian were an odd pairing, this one was even odder. What is it that makes people fall in love with the completely wrong people? But hadn’t I just done the same thing? I saw him, I fell in love, but I didn’t even know him. I was finding out more about him now, and he seemed a lot more like a silly Young Werther than a boy-band Romantic hero. Certainly not the love of my life. Already his reality was fading out of my memory. He wasn’t real any more, and not just because he wasn’t alive.
Karlotta explained to me that once Freddie had graduated his parents expected him to return home, get a job, maybe become a teacher. But instead he turned to painting as a way of trying to prove himself. He worked hard, and he had a natural talent. He had a job as a waiter to keep himself alive and he hung round the University where he was usually argumentative to the point of irritation, if Albrecht was to be believed. He sounded a worse stalker than Duggie – and he was old enough to know better. I began to realise that the picture you see depends firmly on the perspective from which you view. And that’s not just a comment on art.
‘What about his family?’ I asked. ‘His parents? I had never thought of Freddie’s parents in all this, any more than he had. But they must be suffering now too.
‘He broke their hearts,’ Karlotta said. ‘He cut himself off from them. They are nice people, but they didn’t understand why he would not just get a job, why he was wasting his degree.’
‘Do they know…?’ I asked.
Karlotta told me that the body had been sent back to them and the funeral had taken place a week after it had come back. She told me that she and Albrecht had gone to the funeral. I wanted to ask how it was, but I couldn’t get the words out in any language. I was struggling to get the image of Freddie hanging from the tree out of my mind and the thought of him in a coffin wasn’t one I wanted to add to it. I took a deep breath. I had to face this.
‘How was he?’ I asked.
I meant how was it, but I’d segued into that pigeon English we all use when talking to people whose first language isn’t English, even if their English is perfectly good.
‘He was peaceful,’ Karlotta said.
I must have looked shocked. Immediately I was back in my memory to the morning I woke early, took that picture of him before he woke. Peaceful. The calm before the storm. He hadn’t looked peaceful hanging from the tree. And death wasn’t peace, was it? It was negation. Nothing. The end.
Karlotta carried on. She knew we needed to see this one through.
‘It was a beautiful day,’ she said. The crematorium was set in a parkland with a lot of fir trees, and the sun was shining in a cloudless blue sky. It was a day he would have liked to paint.’
At that point I broke down.
I told her everything, and I was glad I did. Karlotta wasn’t that much younger than my mum, I suppose, but she wasn’t my mum – she wasn’t anyone’s mum at that point because she was still a couple of months shy of giving birth – and she was someone I felt I could talk to in confidence. We were bound together in some strange way. Because of Freddie. And Freddie, after all, was why I was there, in pieces. Karlotta put me back together again.
She let me talk. She listened. And she even managed to make me feel better. She took me into the Dresden forest and we sat down in the place where Chasseur in the Snow was painted. She let me play ‘Colourblind’. She talked to me about stories and romanticism and all kinds of things. And it was there that I started to see the light for the first time.
‘Our Freddie is a story that links us,’ she said. ‘Only us.’
I still wasn’t sure what the story was. Some of it was written in Goethe, and some of it in Freddie’s letters and notes. And some of it in his pictures. I knew that I needed to learn a lot more about German language and literature, and art, and life itself before I would ever understand. I faced death in the Galloway Forest Park, but I chose life in the Dresden Forest. They were both important moments in my life.
I spent two weeks with Karlotta and Albrecht before heading home. To say the experience totally changed my life would be an understatement. I went to University as planned in September. I changed courses. I studied German, Art History and Psychology in my first two years. I settled there easily enough, though perhaps I didn’t throw myself into being a student as much as many of my peers. It wasn’t that I felt aloof, but I often felt apart. I still had a lot to process in my own life and I wasn’t sure I had space to allow others in.
In the first long summer vacation, despite my mum wanting me to come and spend it in Kirkcudbright working at Rupert’s shop, I went to work as a nanny for Karlotta and Albrecht – looking after Novo, their son. He was a bright, beautiful, blond hair and blue eyed child. I did the same the next year. He’d grown, but he still remembered me and I found that I really liked looking after him. Dad and mum came and spent some time with us all that summer. It should have been really strange but actually it was great fun. Everyone was relaxed and positive and enjoying the experience.
After that summer I stayed on. I took the opportunity to study abroad for my third year. I studied German Romanticism and Society. Albrecht was one of my tutors. I lodged with Karlotta and Albrecht. We laughed about Goethe’s ‘Elective Affinities’. We reminded ourselves that it was dangerous to draw too many realist conclusions from romantic literature. During that year I went to see Freddie’s grave. I never met his parents. Novo got a little sister, Anya, and I began to find my place in the world. I even dated a couple of German boys. Nothing serious. I had more respect for love by that time. My German was good enough by then to read all of Freddie’s writing and I realised that he was, as Karlotta said, not bad, not even mad, but young and confused and instead of reaching out he shifted his focus away from the reality in front of him and tried to create a world that could never be. I read his writing and it was like reading part of his life. I was part of a chapter in his story. That’s what started getting me interested in narrative psychology.
I completed my degree at St Andrews the following year. My parents came to my graduation and were proud as punch. I was the first person in my family ever to graduate from university and my mum said, as dad took photographs by the ruined castle, ‘I never thought I’d see this day.’ It was a comment laden with layers over and above the usual and as I looked at her I realised how terrifying the whole Freddie thing must have been for her. She, at least, now had a sense of closure. Of an ending. Of a job well done.
‘You’ve been great parents,’ I told them. ‘The best.’ And I meant it.
I caught up with Christy that summer. She was pregnant, not married but living with the father. They were both committed, or it seemed that way. Duncan seemed a nice enough bloke. Steady job in banking, not what I’d have put Christy down for. But she’d calmed down a lot. Or grown up. She was looking forward to motherhood. I was able to tell her, from my vicarious experience, how great it would be.
It was strange, seeing her again after all that time. We’d grown apart and our lives had taken quite different paths, but there was still some kind of connection. We had been chapters in each other’s life story, I suppose, and sometimes it’s good to look back and see who you were, where you came from and how you’ve changed. As well as how you’ve stayed the same.
We’d grown out of ‘to die for’ love. We’d navigated the rocky waters of romance and were heading for the calmer shores of a more mature love. We even laughed about that summer, which was something I never thought I would do. I have Karlotta and Albrecht – and my dad – to thank for that. They were the people who held onto me when my narrative was falling apart and who picked up the leaves of a book that had been ripped apart, and put me back together again. The story, of course, is mine.
After University I did a masters in Narrative Psychology. And now it’s my job. I have so many people to thank for sending my life in that direction – it all started with Freddie but the story wasn’t all about him. My dad was right. Freddie was part of the story, but it’s my story and I’m still creating it.
In narrative psychology we use stories –the stories that are our lives – to make sense of ourselves. And that’s what this story is all about. I spend my days encouraging others to see their lives in terms of narrative – helping them to validate and understand and explore the meaning beyond words and pictures. It turns out I am quite good at helping people explore the meanings of their inner selves and how they relate to the wider picture.
And this year, a decade on, it seemed like it was time I wrote my own story down. We are all characters for you, the reader, but we are more than characters, too. We are real people. Like you. That’s the crux of narrative psychology. That we all to some extent create and exist in the narratives we, and others, make about us. We are all story. My final thought is that even though I’ve called my story ‘To die for’ you can probably see that its real title is ‘to live for’. And I have a lot more living to do. We all do. In and out of our storied existence.
About the Author
Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.
To Die For is Annie's second McSerial written for McStorytellers.
Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project.
To Die For is Annie's second McSerial written for McStorytellers.