She's Never Coming Back (4 page)

‘Do you think it hasn’t haunted me?’ she said feebly. ‘A day doesn’t go by without me—’

‘It haunts you?’

The woman had come in through the door.

‘It haunts …
you
?’ she repeated as she walked over to the bed and stared down at Ylva, who automatically cowered.

When she eventually looked up, it was with pleading eyes.

‘If I could change one thing in my life,’ she tried, ‘just one …’

‘Morgan only had a few days left,’ the man said. ‘That made me so angry. That he got away with it so lightly. I suppose you’ve read about Anders?’

Ylva didn’t understand.

‘The hammer murder in Fjällgatan,’ the man said. ‘No? Well, I guess it’s easy to exaggerate your own importance
when you’re part of something. But it got its own tag: “the hammer murder”. The papers really went to town on it.’

Mike and Ylva had met at work. Naturally. That was where people usually met, in a sober state and with a function to fulfil. Mike had just started at the pharmaceutical company in Stockholm. Ylva worked in the marketing department and had been asked to interview him for the company’s internal magazine.

Neither of them fell head over heels, but they were attracted to each other, and had a good time together. Mike’s childhood had been happy compared to Ylva’s. Unlike him, she’d never met her biological father, and her mother was a heavy drug user. When she was six, Ylva was placed with foster parents and, following some very stormy years in her teens, she decided to leave home. She hadn’t been in touch with them since.

Mike wanted to explore the Stockholm archipelago that his dad had always spoken about with such enthusiasm, so he bought a six-metre sailing boat and they spent the next three summers on it. Mike read the navigation charts. Ylva held the rudder. They had sex in every natural harbour between Furusund and Nynäshamn.

When Ylva got pregnant, they promised each other that, no matter what, things would be just the same as before. Nothing would stop them, certainly not a small child that they could easily take with them.

By the time Sanna was six months old, the boat had been sold and the money invested in a flat.

A year later, Mike was offered a better job in his home town and, to his mother’s delight, moved down to Skåne with his family.

Having a small child meant change, a significant transition to a new phase in life. From public transport to a car, from evenings out to dinners with friends, from a mattress on the floor to a double bed and no time to lie in it. The porn films that they’d enjoyed so much were cleared out after Ylva, half asleep, had helped Sanna, then three, to put in a DVD and instead of Gummi Bear cartoons, they ended up in the middle of a blow job.

Ylva had lurched forward and turned off the TV.

‘What was that?’ she’d asked, embarrassed.

‘Ice-cream!’ Sanna suggested, an obvious association.

It was another life, very different from the summers on the sailing boat. But it was a good life.

‘No, no, no, it’s Morgan who’s dead,’ Jörgen Petersson said. ‘I remember because I was ashamed of how glad I felt when I read the notice. Cancer of the pancreas, dead within a couple of months.’

Calle Collin nodded.

‘Quite possibly,’ he said, ‘but Anders is dead now, as well.’

‘How did he die?’

‘He was murdered.’

‘Cool.’

‘No, I’m serious. The hammer murder up at Fjällgatan. The papers were full of it. That was Anders.’

‘The hammer murder?’ Jörgen repeated, while he searched his memory in vain.

Calle nodded.

‘Never heard about it,’ Jörgen said. ‘When did it happen?’

‘About six months ago.’

‘You mean murdered, as in killed on purpose?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who by?’

Calle shrugged. ‘Don’t think it’s been solved.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

‘I didn’t know it was him until a few days ago.’

‘Was it a fight or something like that?’

‘No idea.’

Jörgen was silent for a moment. ‘Jesus.’

‘Exactly.’

Jörgen let out a long breath. ‘I can’t say that I’m sorry.’

Calle turned his face away and held a hand up to his friend. ‘That’s pushing it.’

Jörgen took a drink of beer and then put the glass down.

‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got to admit, it couldn’t have happened to a bigger bastard.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Calle said. ‘People change.’

‘Do they?’

Calle didn’t answer. Jörgen looked at the class photograph, nodded to himself.

‘Morgan and Anders, dead,’ he said. ‘Then there’s only Johan and Ylva left. The Gang of Four reduced to a dynamic duo.’

‘The Gang of Four?’ Calle snorted. ‘Johan lives in Africa,’ he continued.

‘Africa?’ Jörgen exclaimed. ‘What’s he doing there?’

‘What the fuck do I know? What do Westerners do in the Third World? No doubt he’s wandering around in weird clothes and half-cut most of the time.’

‘Sounds just like the archipelago,’ Jörgen said. ‘What does he do?’

Calle leaned back in his chair.

‘How should I know? I haven’t seen him in twenty years. What’s with the obsession? Do you really go around thinking about them? Your old tormentors.’

Jörgen didn’t look happy.

‘When I opened the yearbook it was like going back in time,’ he said.

‘You wanted to wave your bank book under their noses?’

‘At least a balance statement from the cashpoint. I thought
I might just happen to stand in front of them in the queue and leave my receipt in the machine. What d’you reckon?’

Calle Collin shook his head and smiled.

‘Do you understand the extent of your illness?’

‘Everyone else is invited to class parties and reunions all the time, but not us,’ Jörgen said.

‘And I’m bloody grateful for it,’ Calle retorted. ‘And you should be too. Didn’t you see that film,
The Reunion
? The same shit over and over again, everyone reverts back to their old roles. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve done time or earned your first billion.’

‘I thought it was done automatically with some kind of database,’ Jörgen said, in a distant voice.

‘What?’ Calle asked, without any real interest.

‘The invitations,’ Jörgen replied, ‘to class reunions.’

Calle sighed loudly, finished his beer and pointed at Jörgen’s half-f glass. He nodded. Calle got up and went to the bar. Jörgen pulled the yearbook over and studied the class photo again. They were so young in the picture. But he still wanted to hold them to account, each of them, for all the shit they’d put him through. In Jörgen’s eyes, there was no time limit. Even though there were plenty who’d had it worse.

Calle put the two beers on the table and sat down.

‘You’re completely fixated,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Haven’t you got more important things to think about?’

Jörgen shrugged. ‘It’s not that, it’s just …’

‘Just what?’

‘I don’t know. It would just be so cool to know what’s happened to them all.’

‘Because you’re a big cheese now?’ Calle said.

‘No, not at all.’

Jörgen pretended to be insulted. Calle sent him a cynical look.

‘Well, maybe,’ Jörgen said, eventually. ‘But is that so strange? Look at me.’ He tapped the yearbook with his finger. ‘I don’t exist.’

Calle scrutinised his friend for a long time. He didn’t smile.

‘What?’ Jörgen asked.

‘I don’t think it’s very nice.’

‘What?’

‘What you’re doing,’ Calle said. ‘Look at me: unmarried, no children, a reporter for a weekly. I do saccharine interviews with washed-up TV celebrities and village eccentrics,
write racy short stories about young women at their peak, twenty-seven years old. Short stories that are read by women who are seventy-two. Same numbers, just inverted. I have no ambitions, no prospects. My only luxury in life is ice-cream in summer, a beer in the pub and sometimes, when the urge takes me, a trip to the cinema in the middle of the week.’

‘And you’re complaining?’ Jörgen said.

The woman released the handcuff that kept Ylva’s left hand locked to the head of the bed. Ylva massaged her wrist and pulled up her knees.

The man and the woman stood on either side of the bed. Ylva didn’t know who to look at.

‘Listen,’ she tried, ‘we need to …’

The woman leaned forward with feigned interest.

‘Need to what?’

‘Talk,’ Ylva said, and turned to the man with pleading eyes.

He had his hand down his trousers. What was he doing?

Ylva looked at the woman, who was smiling at her.

‘Yes, talk, certainly. You can talk and we can listen. Sit here and listen to what you’ve got to say, try to understand. That’s certainly one way of doing it.’

The man played with his penis, got an erection.

‘Give me your hands,’ the woman said to Ylva.

The man undid his trousers and stepped out of them, pulled down his pants. His hard-on was visible under his shirt.

‘Your hands,’ the woman repeated.

Ylva threw herself off the bed, in the direction of the locked door. The man quickly caught up with her. He grabbed hold of her arm, spun her round and hit her across the cheek again with his open hand. He twisted her arm up
behind her back and pushed her in front of him over to the bed.

Ylva kicked and screamed, which only seemed to make the couple more determined. The woman pulled Ylva’s jeans down to her knees. The man shoved her across the bed. The woman went round to the other side and yanked Ylva’s head up by the hair.

‘I didn’t do anything,’ Ylva cried.

‘No,’ the woman said. ‘You didn’t.’

Just then, Ylva felt the man force himself into her.

Her eyes smarted with the pain and her vision blurred. But still she could see the woman smiling at her.

‘When’s Mummy coming home?’

‘I don’t know, sweetheart. She said she might go out with some people from work.’

‘Again?’

‘She didn’t know for sure.’

‘She’s always out.’

‘No, sweetheart, she’s not.’

‘Always, all the time,’ Sanna said, and flounced off to the sitting room and the TV.

She stopped in the doorway and turned round.

‘What’s for supper?’

‘Spaghetti and mince.’

‘Red?’

‘Red.’

For some unknown reason, their daughter preferred the cheat’s version with ready-made tomato sauce to Ylva’s far tastier variant.

When it was served later, Sanna would be obliged to pick out with surgical precision any life-threatening traces of onion and red pepper before she could eat. Other than that, she showed remarkable interest in whatever was put on the table. If there was any cause for complaint, it was the time it took for her to eat. A Tibetan monk couldn’t have been less concerned about time.

Mike gazed out at the street and wondered if he should give Ylva a quick call, after all. Find out if she was going to come home for supper. He decided not to. For tactical reasons. It wasn’t because he was proud.

A year ago, Ylva had had an affair with one of her clients. A restaurant owner with no notable qualities other than a cheesy grin that Ylva couldn’t seem to get enough of.

Mike had kicked up a storm. It was a soap opera from start to finish, or at least reminiscent of an episode from one.
Mike was totally dependent on his wife and would rather that she was unfaithful to him for the rest of his life than be forced to live without her.

And yet, in weaker moments, hate was his companion, it latched on to him and walked beside him, too close, constantly tapping on his shoulder, demanding attention and energy.

Do something, the voice insisted. Do something.

In those moments, the world shrunk. The skies pushed down and hovered right above Mike’s head, like a basement ceiling.

He’d read somewhere that the person who was unfaithful often felt even worse. That it was all about confirmation and projected self-loathing, all that psychology bullshit that only they believed in and used to justify their behaviour.

Mike enjoyed playing the victim, to a certain extent. Not in the sense that he wanted everyone to know he was a cuckold, but in the privacy of his own home there’d be plenty of self-pity and accusing looks.

In the end, he went too far and Ylva gave him an ultimatum.

‘Things are the way they are. Either we put it behind us and move on …’

She was standing at the sink peeling potatoes when she said it. She paused, turned around with the peeler in one hand and a half-peeled potato in the other.

‘Or we’ll need to find another solution.’

Mike had never mentioned the lover’s name again.

The woman pulled Ylva’s hair hard and forced her face up.

‘How does she feel?’ she asked her husband.

She didn’t raise her voice even though Ylva was screaming and crying and talking incoherently about what had happened.

The woman didn’t want to miss a second of her humiliation, the long-anticipated retribution.

‘Like putting your cock in a bucket of hot water? She must be wide, she’s had that many in there.’

The woman pulled at her hair.

‘Well, are you? Wide?’

Ylva was crying and the snot ran from her nose. Her head bounced in time with the man’s thrusts. Her face was twisted with pain.

‘I think she likes it,’ the woman said. ‘She seems to like it. You’ll have to do it again, darling.’

Ylva pleaded with them.

‘Please.’

The woman leaned towards her.

‘I won’t do a thing,’ she whispered. ‘I’ll just watch.’

The movements quickened and then finally stopped. The man straightened up, out of breath, pulled on his pants and did up his trousers.