by C S Duffy
‘Have a lovely time then, darling, and don’t forget I’m only ever a phone call away.’
After we hung up I finished my coffee and mourned the waste of the cardamon bun, which I’d picked into a sticky mess. I stared blankly at the rain for a few more minutes, then got up, and found myself face-to-face with Liv, who was about to enter the coffee shop.
‘Hi,’ I said, automatically reaching out to give her a hug. She sort of leaned limply into me, and I stepped back. ‘How are you?’
‘Yes, I am okay,’ she muttered, glancing over my shoulder into the coffee shop.
‘I mean — with, everything. Neither Johan nor I could sleep the first few nights, it was so —’
‘Yes, he told me.’
I flinched somewhere deep inside, as though someone had poked at my guts with a very fine needle. When had Johan told Liv anything?
‘Right, well. Managed a couple of hours last night, finally, which was good.’
‘Yes.’
‘Johan is taking me to see Hammarby tonight. Not really one for football, but whatever makes him happy I suppose.’
‘Hammar-bai,’ she corrected, which sounded to me more or less exactly what I’d said.
‘Thanks. Wouldn’t want to get it wrong there and have the crowds turn on me.’
She smiled, the sort of pained, forced polite smile you give a guy who has just told a sexist joke but could fire you if you told him where to go.
‘Okay. See you.’
8
The T-bana that trundled its way beneath the city was jam-packed. It seemed that Johan’s team were playing their arch rivals from the other side of Stockholm, and both sets of fans were squished together in one subway carriage. The atmosphere was heavy with a sort of muted aggression, and there was so much testosterone in the air that I was slightly afraid if I breathed in too deeply I might grow a beard.
‘Whatever happened to metrosexual Swedish new men?’ I said, as a giant ginger dude, his hair and beard actually plaited like a Viking, stared me down for reasons best known to himself. Johan was holding on to the handle overhead and I held on to him, as he leaned down to whisper a detailed history of his football club and a translation of their anthem in my ear.
‘It’s a really beautiful song,’ he was saying. ‘When you hear everyone sing it together, it is just amazing. You know we started the tradition of fans singing in Sweden, we brought it over from England.’
‘Dunno if it’s a such brilliant idea to copy behaviour from English football fans,’ I said, making a face, and Johan grinned.
‘English games are fantastic. One day, we will make the European league and —’
‘You know in the anthem, why is it ‘just today I am strong’?’ I asked with a sly grin and Johan chuckled. ‘Why don’t you want to sing about being strong every day?’
‘Because every day they are shit,’ said a gruff voice behind me.
I couldn’t quite turn to see who had spoken because the ginger Viking had me pinned to Johan, but I saw Johan’s jaw clench as he glared at the guy.
‘Well that’s just the height of wit.’ I rolled my eyes, rubbing Johan’s waist, or at least as much as I could without accidentally also feeling up the ginger Viking. ‘And actually I was just pissing about, I think it’s a really lovely sentiment.’
I felt Johan’s every muscle clench as he spat something in Swedish, and the guy roared something back. The ginger Viking was shouting, possibly trying to tell them both to calm the fuck down, and I tried to get hold of Johan’s hand, my other hand on his chest, as my heart leapt into my mouth.
‘Hey,’ I shouted over the rabble. ‘Johan — he’s not worth it — just leave it —‘
I sensed Johan draw back and for an instant I felt relief, then he lunged forward and headbutted the guy over my head. I screamed. Bone and cartilage shattered with a sickening crunch, blood splattered my cheek, fists flew and the air filled with roars.
An arm reached over me and yanked Johan by the scruff of the neck, knocking him into me. I started to fall and Johan yelled — then suddenly I was yanked backwards, as the ginger Viking shoved me into a corner out of harm’s way —
‘No, I need to — he’ll listen to me — Johan!’
Johan grabbed a guy— stocky, but at least a head shorter than him — and rammed him against the door, punched his already bloodied face —
From somewhere a siren sounded — the train jerked to a stop and the doors opened.
Shouting and screaming, the crowd pushed their way onto the platform and I was left alone, clutching onto a seatback, trembling.
Twenty minutes later, I stood next to a map of the T-bana system, staring at it blindly, hugging my arms as though I might fall apart if I let go. A few feet away, Johan sat on a bench, head bent, being berated by a couple of uniformed police officers. Their heavy boots and prominent gun holsters gave me chills. There were no garlands of wildflowers down here, I thought, no crystal clear archipelago waters. Deep in the bowels of Stockholm, there was angry graffiti and a stink of piss just like everywhere else.
‘Are you okay?’ said a soft voice, and I turned to see the ginger Viking standing behind me. I nodded, not sure if I could speak. ‘This is my sister’s phone number,’ he added, pressing a note into my hand. ‘If you want to talk to a woman. She is not trained in anything, she is just a nice person.’
I nodded again, staring at the note as the numbers swam before my eyes.
He hesitated a moment, his eyes filled with concern, then he nodded and left. I glanced over at Johan and saw that the police had left him. We were alone.
‘I guess maybe I should have warned you I was a hooligan,’ Johan said quietly, his words echoing in the empty platform. I tried to raise a ghost of a smile but my face wouldn’t quite cooperate.
He sat hunched over, staring at a puddle that might be due to the rain earlier, or going by the smell that pervaded the station, might well have been piss. He looked beaten.
Not literally. There was an angry looking graze on his left cheekbone, the beginnings of a faint bruise on his right temple, but no blood, no real injury. It had been him against three of them in the end, I thought dully. The one who’d made the crack about Johan’s team being shit and two of his mates. And Johan was barely injured.
One of them had passed me by a few minutes earlier, leaning heavily on the police officer supporting him, holding a paper towel against his mangled and bloodied nose. Johan had done that, I’d thought, the words echoing meaninglessly around my mind.
I took a couple of steps forward and stood over him, at the far end of the bench. Misery emanated from him, so strongly it was palpable. I was torn, I thought desperately with rising panic. Every fibre of me wanted to go to him, to put my arms around him and make it all better. Every fibre of me wanted to turn and run far, far away.
‘It was my girlfriend.’
What?
Was he talking about me? I was his girlfriend. But he wasn’t talking about me. A heavy, icy feeling slithered through me, hardening in my veins, beginning to suffocate me. Of course he wasn’t talking about me.
‘She — who — what you found. On the beach. She was my girlfriend.’
A T-bana train pulled into the station and deposited a handful of commuters. The crowds were long gone now, everyone who was going to the game was already there; everyone else, it seemed, had hurried home or to the pub to watch with friends. The commuters cleared the platform and Johan and I were alone again.
‘She went missing, last September. And you — you found her.’
9
I sat down very suddenly, at the far end of the bench, as far away from Johan as I could. A jubilent cheer sounded somewhere in the distance, echoing around the the empty platform. Somebody had scored a goal. A numb, hollow feeling was spreading through me.
‘It was the last weekend in September,’ Johan was saying, his voice low and strained, though curiously brisk, as though now he had opened the door to this speech there
was no stopping it. ‘It was sunny and warm as summer, so we decided to go to Krister's cottage one last time before winter set in. Sanna didn’t want to come. There was some party in Stockholm she wanted to go to, one of her friends was launching a new bar in Stureplan. Then at the last moment she changed her mind and came along.
‘On the Sunday she wanted to take the early ferry back, about lunchtime, but I was hungover and tired and wanted to enjoy the sun without rushing. We argued a little bit, then she said she would take the kayak out for a while, and I fell asleep in the garden. When I woke and she was not there, I thought she had decided to get the early ferry after all, and —’ He shook his head, a hard, bitter smile playing on his face. ‘I was relieved.’
‘How would she have got to the ferry?’ I asked. I shivered, my mind reeling.
Focus on facts. If I could just gather the facts, sort them into a neat pile, then everything would be okay. ‘Krister's boat was presumably still on the island.’
‘The kayak,’ he replied. ‘We use it if someone else needs the boat. It is not so far to the island where the ferry stops, and Sanna knew the way, she had done it before. We tie the kayak beneath the jetty, and the next person brings it back to the island and so on.’
‘So it wasn’t until you got back to Stockholm that you realised she was missing?’
He nodded. ‘It was one day later. That night I went straight home and crashed out. It was not until I finished work the following day that I realised I had not heard from her and started to call her friends.’
Johan worked as a bank teller. I remembered being slightly surprised when he told me that. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a bank teller, it just didn’t seem to suit him somehow. Then one night he confessed he had wanted to be a nurse but it hadn’t worked out. I’d encouraged him to retrain — never too late to follow your dreams and all that, but he’d got a bit shirty about it and we’d dropped the subject.
‘They suspected me.’ His voice broke. He pressed his fist against his mouth, holding back a sob that threatened to choke him. His knuckles were raw and bloody. I pictured the guy being led away by police, his nose mashed across his face.
‘There is a very deep channel that runs between two islands which you must cross to get to the ferry, and the day after we finally called the police, they found the kayak floating upturned there. They sent divers down, of course, but it is a very difficult area to search completely, with many underwater ledges and caves. They concluded she must be trapped somewhere very deep.’
I nodded. I remembered from writing about a drowning in the Thames last year that it’s typical for bodies to initially sink to the bottom then gradually rise again and eventually resurface a few weeks later. Unless they were trapped, I thought with a shudder.
‘They thought she just tipped out of the kayak at some point?’ I asked. ‘Wouldn’t she have swum to the shore?’ I remembered most of the islands being fairly close together. The main thing that had kept me from screaming out loud as Krister drove us to his island was the fact that dry land never seemed particularly far away.
Johan shrugged. ‘We had been drinking, and the water was already cold so close to October. It can put you into shock if you fall in fast, you panic, lose your bearings — it happens.’
Tiny tingles of anxiety were breaking out over me. I thought about the macabre sight on the beach that morning. There had been a scrap of bright red fabric clinging to what had once been her shoulder. A sundress, I thought. A pretty sundress she had put on that morning. Maybe with a full skirt that had billowed up around her as she struggled in the icy water, choking on her own terror as she fought for air. I wiggled my fingers a little to try to release the pins and needles, forced myself to take a long, slow breath.
‘But they suspected you?’
Johan nodded, his jaw tight. ‘I understand,’ he said, his voice so strained I barely recognised it. ‘I know the statistics for if a woman goes missing or is hurt — of course they must consider her partner. There was a hole in the kayak that we all knew about, it is just old and shit and has been patched many times. When the police found the kayak, the latest patch was gone. It could have just worn away, it probably did, but they questioned me —’ he turned to me, his eyes desperate — ‘just as a witness, but a piece-of-shit newspaper wrote about it as though I was a suspect and my whole life fell apart.
‘Only Liv and Krister and Mia believed me without question. Some of my other friends still do not speak to me, or worse, they smile when they see me but their eyes wonder. I was asked to take a long absence from my job which eventually turned into my job no longer existing. My mother —’ he gave a shaky sigh — ‘my mother asked me to look her in the eyes and promise her that I was innocent.’
The sob finally overcame him and he bent double, shuddered as it wracked through him. His ragged, choking gasps tore at my heart and I scrabbled across the bench, held him close, stroked his hair as he sobbed.
10
Later that night, the soft lilac glow of the midnight twilight filled the flat as I lay wide awake, listening to Johan’s gentle snores, feeling the heat of him next to me.
He didn’t have any curtains. Neither did any of his neighbours, as I’d discovered on my second evening there when I’d glanced out the window and been treated to the sight of an elderly woman pottering about her flat across the road, naked as the day she was born. I’d been so mortified I’d burst into a fit of giggles, and Johan’s bafflement had made me laugh harder.
‘We trust people not to look,’ he’d muttered stiffly, and I’d got the hiccups.
Now, I was grateful for the light streaming through the window. I didn’t trust my state of mind to darkness. Johan shifted in his sleep, and my heart leapt into my mouth for absolutely no reason. Irritated with myself, I fumbled on the nightstand for my phone and and went over to the sofa, a little away from the sleeping alcove, so as not to disturb Johan. There was a pile of my clothes on the sofa and I felt a stab of guilt as I moved them aside.
Johan’s flat was tiny, just one room and kitchen and hallway. It was smaller than even the pokiest flat I’d known in London, but by virtue of its high ceilings, bright white walls and ingenius use of space, it didn’t feel nearly as claustrophobic as I’d first thought it might be. It was, however, disturbingly pristine.
I’m not overly messy, but I’ve always liked a bit of cheerful clutter about the place. Knick-knacks, souvenirs and the odd random postcard blu-tacked to my kitchen wall that I’ve always meant to get around to getting a frame for. Johan’s flat, however, looked like a showroom, all clean lines and minimalism, framed black and white prints of city skylines and two or three books artfully posed on a single shelf. At first I thought he must have cleaned up for my arrival, and fully expected to open a cupboard one day to have all manner of smelly boy stuff descend on my head. But nope, what was visible appeared to be all the shit he had. I was in love with a neat freak. It was what it was.
Curling up on the sofa, I started to scroll mindlessly through Facebook. I didn’t know what I thought about everything he’d told me that evening. I didn’t even know where to begin. My mind felt blank and heavy, as though bits of my brain had turned to lead and I didn’t have the energy to force it into thoughts. I thumbed through engagement announcements and holiday selfies and the odd abhorrent political rant, clicking to like or love or shed a tear for no particular reason.
None of the Midsummer crew had posted anything in days. A little flutter of something sharp and bitter sprang to life in my stomach as I realised that they had all known. Of course they had. What were the chances a random skeleton had washed up right where their friend disappeared nine months previously? That explained the huddle that didn’t include me, the tension zinging in the air I’d chosen to ignore.
Then I noticed that someone had posted something on Johan’s wall, just a few minutes earlier. I clicked to translate. Someone named Linda Andersson had written I am so shit sorry, friend. Sanna was a beaut
iful person who will live in my heart. This was followed by a series of heart emojis, presumably in case Johan was unsure as to what she meant by ‘heart.’ My own heart started to beat a tiny bit faster as I noticed that the word ‘Sanna’ was bolded. Linda had tagged her in the post. Knowing I was intruding on grief I had no business to, I let my thumb hover over her name for several seconds before I clicked on it and Sanna Johansson’s profile loaded.
A nasty part of me almost laughed when I saw her profile picture. A blonde goddess in an itsy bitsy bikini, doing a star jump against a flawlessly blue sky on some idyllic beach somewhere. Of course she bloody was. If I tried to do a star jump in a bikini I’d probably knock myself out with one of my own boobs.
What is the matter with me, I thought in horror. This poor woman was tragically dead at thirty, and here I was, snuggled up on her boyfriend’s sofa, resenting her for being hot.
Her wall had turned into a sort of condolence guest book. The comments had been automatically translated, dozens and dozens of variations on miss you forever, thoughts with your family, cannot believe I will never see your smiling face again. One comment caught my eye as I passed, and I had to scroll back to find it again.
A Gustav Lindström, who, according to his profile picture, appeared to consist primarily of pecs, had posted Fy fan Sanna, followed by a heart emoji. The was no translation available, but the words rang a bell. I remembered Krister shouting it during the Midsummer dinner, when Johan spilled a bottle of beer over him. I’d laughed, and Mia had explained it meant for fuck’s sake.
I clicked on Gustav Lindström’s profile.
It appeared I was correct about him primarily consisting of pecs. His sculpted torso made even Johan look like he had a jiggly dad bod, and the few posts on his wall that were public were of him straining, surprisingly unattractively, to deadlift some spectacular weight or other. His bio identified him as a personal trainer, but if he shared any more personal details than that, they were visible to friends only.
