Authors: Erik Axl Sund
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #Crime
‘How about taking Johan to the fair at Gröna Lund some weekend?’
Sofia waits for Jeanette’s reaction.
‘That sounds great. What a nice idea,’ Jeanette says with a smile. ‘You’re going to love him.’
JEANETTE LIGHTS A
cigarette. So who is Sofia Zetterlund, really? She feels a closeness to her, but at the same time she’s so out of reach. Sometimes so incredibly present, only to turn into someone else, suddenly and without warning.
Maybe that’s why she’s so captivated by her. Precisely because she is surprising, never predictable.
Isn’t it also the case that her voice seems to change sometimes?
Once Sofia has shut the bathroom door behind her, Jeanette gets up from the armchair and goes over to the bookcase. A number of thick volumes about psychology, psychoanalytical diagnosis and the cognitive development of children. A lot of philosophy, sociology, biography and fiction. Thomas de Quincey,
The
120 Days of Sodom
,
Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man,
side by side with Jan Guillou’s political novels and Stieg Larsson’s crime trilogy.
At the far left of the shelf is a book whose title catches her interest.
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier
. As she pulls the book from the shelf she notices a little catch sticking out of the side of the bookcase. Odd to have a lock on a bookcase, she thinks as Sofia comes into the room.
‘So you like Larsson?’ Sofia says.
‘Which one? Stig or Stieg? The wicked one or the good one?’
Jeanette laughs and shows her the cover. Stig Larsson’s
New Year
. ‘The wicked one, I presume?’
‘I see you’ve got two copies of Valerie Solanas’s
SCUM Manifesto
.’
‘Yes, I was young and angry back then. These days I just think it’s a very entertaining book. I now laugh at what I once took dead seriously.’
Jeanette puts the book back. ‘
SCUM
.
The Society for Cutting Up Men
. I’m not that well informed, although I have read it. I must have been young at the time, a teenager, I guess. In what way do you think it’s entertaining?’
‘It’s radical, and the entertainment value is in the radicalism. It’s so unrelenting in its approach to the bad sides of men that guys end up looking so ridiculous that I can’t help laughing. I was ten when I first read it, and back then I bought the whole thing. Literally. Now I can laugh at it, both the details and the book as a whole. That’s much better.’
Jeanette gulps down the last of the wine. ‘Did you say you were ten? I was forced to read
Lord of the Rings
by my romantically inclined dad when I was nine or ten. What sort of childhood did you have, if you were reading books like that when you were so young?’
‘I picked it myself, actually.’
Sofia stands in silence, breathing deeply.
Jeanette can see that Sofia is upset and asks what’s wrong.
‘It’s the book you were holding when I came in,’ she replies. ‘It had a big impact on me.’
‘This one, you mean?’ Jeanette pulls out the book about the child soldier and looks at the cover. A young boy carrying a rifle over his shoulder.
‘Yes, that’s the one. Samuel Bai was a child soldier in Sierra Leone, like Ishmael Beah. I was asked to do a fact-check for the Swedish edition, but I’m afraid I was too much of a coward to do it.’
Jeanette glances through the text on the back cover.
‘Read it out loud,’ Sofia says. ‘The bit that’s underlined on page two hundred and seventeen.’
Jeanette opens the book and reads.
There was a hunter who went into the bush to kill a monkey. When he was close enough and behind a tree where he could clearly see the monkey, he raised his rifle and aimed. Just when he was about to pull the trigger, the monkey spoke: ‘If you shoot me, your mother will die, and if you don’t, your father will die.’ The monkey resumed its position, chewing its food, and every so often scratched its head or the side of its belly.
What would you do if you were the hunter?
Jeanette looks up at Sofia and puts the book down.
‘I wouldn’t,’ Sofia says.
SOFIA ZETTERLUND TAKES
the metro from Skanstull to Gullmarsplan, where she had parked her car the previous day. She didn’t want it to be caught by the cameras that watch the roads leading in and out of central Stockholm on weekdays.
The Årsta forest colours the view from the Skanstull Bridge in shades of dark green. Down in the marina there is feverish activity, and the outdoor terrace of the Skanskvarn restaurant is already full.
After several months with little appetite, Sofia can no longer tell the difference between different types of pain. Physical nausea, which makes her throw up several times each day, has merged with her mental pain and with the torment of her tight shoes. Everything that hurts has become one, and over the course of the summer the darkness inside her has grown denser.
She has been finding it harder and harder to appreciate things she once found interesting, and things she used to like have started to get on her nerves.
No matter how often she washes she thinks she smells of sweat, and that her feet start to stink within an hour or so of showering. She carefully observes people around her to see if anyone shows any sign of detecting her bodily odours. When there is no reaction, she assumes that she is the only one bothered by them.
She’s run out of paroxetine tablets, and she hasn’t felt up to contacting anyone to get more.
She can’t even be bothered to use the tape recorder any more.
After each session she would end up exhausted, and it would take several hours before she felt like herself again.
At the start it felt good to have someone who listened, but in the end there was nothing more to say.
She doesn’t need analysis. That time has passed.
She needs action.
Sofia gets her car keys out, opens the door and sits in the driver’s seat. Reluctantly she takes hold of the gearstick to put it into neutral. It goes against her every instinct, and she starts to get dizzy. The memories of the roll of toilet paper next to the gearstick, and his breath, are so clear. She had been ten years old when he turned off the motorway just before Bålsta on the way to Dala-Floda.
She feels the cold leather of the gearstick against the palm of her hand. The ridged surface tickles her lifeline and she takes a firm grasp of the knob.
She has made up her mind.
There is no hesitation left.
No doubt.
She puts the car firmly into first gear, revs hard and heads off down Hammarbyvägen towards the Värmdö road. As she passes Orminge it starts to pour with rain and the air becomes cold and damp. Every breath offers resistance.
She is having trouble breathing again.
Now the waiting is over, she thinks as she drives into the dusk.
The street lights lead her on.
The car slowly gets warmer, but she is ice-cold, deep down in her marrow, and the heat settles as no more than a sweaty skin on her. It can’t get in.
Can’t reach her ice-cold, clear conviction.
Nothing can soften her.
It takes her a quarter of an hour to reach Willy’s discount supermarket in Gustavsberg, where she turns off and leaves the car in the customer car park. Here her memory is clear. This place didn’t exist then. She’s taken aback by the realisation that things can change so drastically just a couple of hundred metres from where time has stood still. Where her life has stood still.
This used to be a clump of trees where there were said to be dirty old men and alcoholics. But strangers meant well. Only those who were close to her could do her any real harm.
The forest had been a safe place.
She remembers the glade near the cottage. The one she never found again. The sunlight glittering through the leaves, the nuances of the white moss that defeated everything hard and sharp.
In the back seat she has an old workout top that’s far too large for her. She looks around, then pulls the hooded top on and locks the car.
She decided earlier that she would walk the last bit. That part demands mobility. It demands reflection and reflection can give rise to compromise, but the drive has only strengthened her resolve and she isn’t planning to come to her senses. She rejects all thoughts of reconciliation. He’s made his choices. Now it’s her turn to act.
Every paving slab is edged with memories, and everything she sees reminds her of the life she fled from.
She knows that what she is about to do is irreversible. She has reached the point at which the things he set in motion must come to an end.
As ye sow, so shall ye reap, she thinks.
She pulls the hood up and starts to walk down Skärgårdsvägen towards Grisslinge.
The clatter of the wooden shoes of her childhood follows her, echoing between the houses.
She thinks of all the times she ran up and down the streets, at a time when everything should have been play.
The child she once was wants to stop her doing what she’s going to do. It wants to go on existing.
But that child must be erased.
Her parental home is a three-storey modernist-style villa. It seems smaller now than it did then, but still rises up just as threateningly towards the sky. The house looks down on her with its curtained windows and well-kept flowers creeping along the panes.
There’s a white Volvo parked outside the house. They are at home.
To the left she can see the rowan tree her parents planted the day she was born. It’s grown since she last saw it. When she was seven she tried to set fire to it, but it wouldn’t burn.
The high fence he built to minimise the risk of neighbours seeing in gives her the perfect cover, and she creeps along the wall of the house, up onto the terrace, and peers in through the small basement window.
She had been right. Their routines are still laughably regular, and, just like every other Wednesday evening, they are in the sauna.
Inside the window she sees their clothes neatly folded on the bench. The thought of the smell of his trousers makes her feel nauseous, the sound of the zip being pulled down, the wave of sour sweat as his trousers fall to the floor.
Carefully she opens the unlocked front door and steps into the hall. The first thing she notices is the sickly scent of peppermint tea. It reeks of sickness in here, she thinks. A sickness that has crept into the walls. She hesitates before taking off her tennis shoes, and her own smell hits her. She smells of fear and fury.
Now her shoes are next to his again.
For a moment she is overwhelmed by a feeling that everything is the way it used to be. That she has come home from a normal day at school and that she still belongs to this life.
She shakes off the feeling before it can get its teeth into her.
This world is not mine, she tells herself.
We have made our choice.
She pads into the living room and looks around. Everything is just the same. Not a single thing is standing where it hasn’t always stood.
The large room is furnished with a simplicity that she always found pathetically spartan, and she remembers how she used to avoid having friends round because she was so ashamed.
On the white walls are a few paintings, mostly images from folklore, including a Carl Larsson reproduction that they were always incredibly proud of, for some reason. It’s still there, in all its paltriness.
She can see straight through all their lies and delusions.
He had paid a lot for the dining-room furniture at an auction in Bodarna. It had needed serious restoration, and an upholsterer in Falun had to replace the original fabric with something very similar. Everything had looked perfect, but now the passage of time was starting to show even on the new material.
There’s a faint smell of decay, of lives past their prime.
He hates change, and wants everything to stay the way he’s used to. He hates it when Mum rearranges things.
It’s as if he concluded at some given moment that everything was perfect, and decided to freeze time from then on.
He lived under the illusion that perfection was a permanent state that didn’t require any maintenance.
He is blind to decay, she thinks, to the shabbiness of his life, to everything she sees so clearly now.
The dirt.
The stale odours.
Her diploma hangs next to the stairs leading up to the top floor. It covers the space left by the African mask that used to hang there but is now gone forever.
She goes upstairs silently, turns left and opens the door to her childhood bedroom.
She can’t breathe.
The room looks like it did the day she stormed out, certain that she’d never return. There’s the bed, neatly made and untouched. There’s the desk and chair. A dead plant on the windowsill. Another frozen moment, she thinks.
They’ve preserved her memory, closing the door on what was once her life and never opening it again.
She opens the wardrobe door, and finds her clothes still inside. On a nail right at the back hangs the key she hasn’t used in more than twenty years. On the floor stands the red wooden box painted with traditional patterns that she was given by Aunt Elsa the summer she first met Martin.
She runs her fingers over the pattern on the lid, steeling herself before she opens it.
She doesn’t know what she’s going to find in there.
Or, rather, she knows exactly what she’s going to find, but doesn’t know what it’s going to do to her.
Inside the box are an envelope, a photograph album and a threadbare stuffed animal. On top of the envelope is the videotape she once sent to herself.
She looks over at the desktop, where she once carved loads of hearts and all sorts of different names. Her finger traces the carved letters and she tries to conjure up the faces the names represent. She can’t remember any of them.