She's Never Coming Back (3 page)

He flicked through the book, glancing at the class photos, looking for names. Of course, yes. Him. And him. Wasn’t she the sister of …? The teacher’s daughter who
looked like she wanted the ground to swallow her up in her picture. The boy who set fire to the playground. The girl who committed suicide. And that poor sod who had to look after his siblings and always slept through the classes.

Madeleine moment after madeleine moment, à la Proust.

Finally, the whole class. Jörgen got a shock. They were just kids, their hairstyles and clothes bore witness to the passing of time. Yet the black-and-white photograph still made him uncomfortable.

He looked at the picture, scanned row after row.

His classmates stared back at him. Jörgen could almost hear the clamour from the corridor: the comments, the shouts, the jostling and laughter. The power struggle, that’s all it was. Maintaining your position on the ladder. The girls were self-regulatory, the boys more forceful.

The four loudest at the back. Arms folded and staring confidently straight at the camera, radiating world domination. Judging by their smug faces, they couldn’t possibly imagine a reality other than their own.

One of them, Morgan, had died of cancer a year ago. Jörgen wondered whether anyone missed him. He certainly didn’t.

He carried on through the rows of names. He’d forgotten
some of them and was forced to look up at the photograph to pull any information from his mental archives. Of course, yes.

But he still didn’t recognise two or three of his classmates. The faces and names were not enough. They were erased from his brain, just like the blank faces on Lasse Åberg’s picture.

Jörgen looked at himself, squashed into the front row, barely visible and with an expression that was just begging to get out of there.

Calle Collin looked happy. A bit detached, not worried about being an outsider, strong enough in himself.

The teacher, jeez, the old bird was younger in the photo than Jörgen was now.

He put all the removal boxes back and took the yearbook with him up into the house. He was going to look at the photos until they no longer frightened him.

Jörgen went into the kitchen and rang his friend.

‘D’you want to go for a beer?’

‘Just the one?’ Calle Collin asked.

‘Two, three. As many as you like,’ Jörgen said. ‘I’ve dug out some of our old yearbooks, I’ll bring them with me.’

‘What the hell for?’

Mike Zetterberg picked his daughter up from the after-school club at half past four. She was sitting at a table at the back of the room, engrossed in an old magic box. When she caught sight of her father, her face lit up as it hadn’t done since he picked her up when she first started nursery.

‘Daddy, come.’

Sanna was sitting with an egg cup in front of her. A three-piece egg cup with a plastic top. Mike realised that her pleasure at seeing him had something to do with him playing captive audience.

‘Hey, sweetie.’

He kissed her on the forehead.

‘Look,’ she said, and lifted the top off the egg cup. ‘There’s an egg here.’

‘I can see that,’ Mike said.

‘And now I’m going to magic it away.’

‘Surely you can’t do that?’ Mike exclaimed.

‘Yes, watch.’

Sanna put the top back on and moved her hand in circles above the egg cup.

‘Abracadabra.’

She lifted the top off and the egg had vanished.

‘What? How did you do that?’

‘Daddy! You know.’

‘No, I don’t,’ Mike said.

‘Yes, you do, I’ve shown you.’

‘Have you?’

‘It’s not a real egg.’

Sanna showed him the middle section that was hollow and hidden inside the top of the egg cup.

‘You knew that,’ Sanna said.

Mike shook his head.

‘If I did, then I’ve forgotten,’ he assured her.

‘No, you haven’t.’

‘Really, it’s true. It must be because you’re so good at it.’

Sanna had already started to put things back on the plastic tray in the box.

‘Do you like magic?’ Mike asked.

Sanna shrugged. ‘Sometimes.’

She put the colourful lid, which was worn in one corner from frequent use, back on the box.

‘Maybe you’d like to get a magic box for your birthday?’

‘How far away is that?’

Mike looked at his watch.

‘Not in hours,’ Sanna said.

‘Fifteen days,’ Mike told her. ‘It says on the clock what day it is.’

‘Does it?’

Mike showed her.

‘The numbers in the little square tell you what day it is. It’s the fifth of May today, and your birthday is on the twentieth. In fifteen days’ time.’

Sanna took on board this information without being overly impressed. Watches weren’t the status symbol they used to be, Mike thought to himself.

He hadn’t been much older than his daughter when he and his parents had moved back to Sweden. They said they
were moving home, even though the only home that Mike had ever known was in Fresno, a baking hot town in central California, caught between the Coast Range and the Sierra Nevada. The temperature remained around thirty to forty-five degrees for the greater part of the year. It was too hot to live in, and most people went from air-conditioned houses to air-conditioned cars and drove to air-conditioned schools and workplaces.

Practically no one had a suntan in The Big Sauna, as his parents used to call the place, and Mike got a shock when he came to Helsingborg in summer 1976 and saw all the brown people splashing around in the water, despite the fact that the air was freezing, barely twenty-five degrees.

Mike’s parents had spoken Swedish to him since he was little, so he had no problem with the language, except that people often said he spoke like an American. They thought he sounded sweet. Mike had been horrified at having to move back to Sweden and then having the way he talked corrected the whole time.

The children of his own age that he met on the beach the first evening were of a different opinion. They thought he sounded like Columbo and McCloud. And Mike knew instantly that that was no bad thing.

Having noticed the strangely overdressed boy wandering about, the other children had finally approached him and asked if he wanted to play football. Half an hour later, when he’d played up a sweat and peeled off his thick sweater, his new friends discovered his watch, which had no hands, but showed the time in square numbers instead.

Their awe was boundless. The most incredible part about it was that one button had several functions. If you pressed it once, it did one thing, if you pressed it twice, it did something else. Even though it was the same button. No one understood how it worked.

‘What do you reckon?’ he said to his daughter, thirty years later. ‘Are you ready?’

Sanna nodded.

Ylva Zetterberg was conscious.

She lay on the back seat and saw the world pass in the shape of familiar treetops and roofs. She recognised the geography from the movements of the car, knew the whole time where they were.

She was nearly home when the car slowed down to let another car pass and then swung into a gravel drive in front of the newly renovated house. The woman opened the
garage door with a remote control, then drove in. She waited until the door had closed behind them before getting out of the car and opening the door to the back seat. Together with her husband, the woman steered Ylva down into the cellar without so much as a word.

The man and woman lay Ylva down on a bed and handcuffed her to the frame.

The man then produced a remote control and pointed it at a TV that was mounted just below the ceiling.

‘You like watching,’ he said, and turned it on.

‘We have to go to the supermarket and do some shopping,’ Mike said.

‘Can I sit in the front?’

Sanna looked at him, full of hope.

‘Of course,’ Mike said.

‘Which way shall we go?’ he asked, once he’d helped his daughter to belt herself in.

‘By the water,’ Sanna decided.

‘The water,’ Mike repeated, and nodded to himself as if to emphasise that it was a wise choice.

He drove down Sundsliden, braking down to second gear
on the steepest part. The water stretched out unashamedly in front of them, almost showing off. It was more open here now than when Mike had been a child, even though there were more houses. As property prices climbed, the view in itself became an asset and the trees were cut down. Snug houses that were built as protection against the wind and weather had been replaced by aquariums designed to display wealth.

‘We can go swimming again soon,’ Mike commented.

‘How warm is it?’

‘In the water? I don’t know, maybe fifteen or sixteen degrees.’

‘You can swim then, can’t you?’

‘Absolutely,’ Mike said, ‘but it might be a bit chilly.’

He swung to the left by the house that he’d named Taxi-Johansson’s as a child. The owner of the town’s only taxi, a black Mercedes with a good many years under its bonnet, had lived in the house and had driven the schoolchildren to the dentist in Kattarp every year. Someone else lived there now and there weren’t many who remembered Taxi-Johansson, though there was still an old sign that said TAXI on the garage.

A lot had changed since Mike moved home from the States. Women no longer sunbathed topless and there was a
decent variety of TV channels, financed by advertising. Unnecessarily large cars had made an appearance and these days there was no embarrassment in wearing jeans that weren’t Levi 501s.

Soon after they’d come back from the US, his mother opened a clothes shop in Kullagatan. Jeans and T-shirts with UCLA and Berkeley on the front. Nearly everyone in Mike’s class bought clothes there. His friends got a discount.

The business had been going well and his dad had a job.

As an adult, Mike struggled to remember at what point everything started to go wrong. Sometimes he thought he knew the answer, but as soon as he tried to focus and remember, something else popped up that had been just as decisive.

His father’s death was obviously the main cause. He drove into the side of a bridge outside Malmö when Mike was thirteen. His mother always talked about it as though it was an accident, unfortunate and unnecessary.

Mike was seventeen when he realised that it was probably a planned suicide. He’d heard it other places. When he asked his mum, he understood from her rather vague answer that he’d been kept in the dark for four years.

He still remembered the feeling of alienation and emptiness. The utter loneliness. Of having no one. His stomach was empty and there was a metallic taste in his mouth.

‘It’s impossible to know for sure,’ his mum said. ‘He didn’t leave a letter or anything like that. And he seemed to be so happy.’

According to the experts, that wasn’t so unusual. As if a flame flared up and gave the person who had decided to take their own life a brief period of peace.

Mike had long since come to terms with his mother’s betrayal, but the knowledge that he was basically alone and couldn’t trust anyone was forever branded on his heart.

That sounded a bit stupid, it really did. Nothing had happened to him. And how good were things now? With a wife and daughter and a well-paid job.

And if he was honest, Mike had felt the change long before his father’s death. Wrong, it wasn’t a change so much as a slide from good to bad.

A couple of years after they’d moved back to Sweden, his dad had lost his job. The jeans shop, which previously had been a lucrative hobby for his mum, became the family’s sole source of income. And things started to go
downhill when customers chose to go to the shopping centre in Väla instead of buying clothes in town.

It became harder to keep up with the neighbours in a posh part of town where a watch without hands was no longer impressive.

‘Can you speak?’

The man slapped Ylva lightly on the cheek.

‘Water,’ she slurred.

‘Makes you thirsty,’ the man said.

He’d had the foresight to take a glass of water with him. He held it to Ylva’s lips, let her taste it. Some trickled out of the corners of her mouth and Ylva instinctively tried to put her handcuffed hand up to wipe it away.

‘You can drink by yourself,’ the man said.

He took out a key and undid the handcuff around Ylva’s right hand. She pushed herself back against the end of the bed until she was sitting up. She took the glass and drank it down in one go.

‘More?’ the man asked.

Ylva nodded and held the glass out to him. He went over to the sink and filled it again. There was a kind of kitchen, the sort you get in barracks and building sites and student
bedsits. Two built-in hot plates, a sink and draining board, and a fridge-freezer underneath. Ylva thought they were maybe called kitchenettes. She wasn’t sure. Nor was she sure why she was thinking about it at all, given the situation she was in.

The man came back, handed her the glass and went over to the TV.

‘Why am I here?’ Ylva asked.

‘I think you know.’

Ylva turned round and tried to pull her left hand out of the handcuff.

‘What do you think of the picture?’

The man pointed to the TV screen.

‘I don’t understand,’ Ylva said.

‘A bit grainy, but it’s on maximum zoom. You might not appreciate it now, but just wait a few days, a week. It’ll be different then. I bet you’ll be setting your watch by it. Just sitting there, staring, without being able to do anything. But that isn’t a problem for you, is it? To just stand by and do nothing, I mean.’

Ylva looked at him, not moving.

‘What are you talking about?’

The man struck her across the face with the back of his hand. It was sudden and completely without warning. Ylva’s
cheek burned, but it was more her surprise at the violence than actual pain that made her gasp.

‘Don’t play stupid,’ the man said. ‘We know exactly what happened. Morgan told us. Confessed on his deathbed. In great detail. We’d blamed ourselves until that day. And in fact it was you lot. The whole time, it was you.’

Ylva was shaking. Her eyes were warm and she blinked furiously. Her lower lip trembled.