‘What are we having for tea?’
Kalle was standing in the door in his shiny new boots.
‘Coconut chicken with rice.’
‘With broccoli?’
She shook her head, feeling a panic attack bubbling up. She clutched the sink, looking into her son’s eyes and decided not to drown.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Water chestnuts and bamboo shoots and baby sweetcorn.’
His face relaxed, he smiled and came a step closer.
‘Do you know what, Mummy?’ he said. ‘I’ve got a wobbly tooth. Feel!’
And she reached out her hand, saw that it was trembling, she felt his left front tooth and, yes, it was definitely loose.
‘That’ll come out soon.’
‘Then I get a gold coin from the tooth fairy,’ Kalle said.
‘Then you get a gold coin from the tooth fairy,’ Annika said, turning away; she had to sit down.
Her insides had turned into razorblades and shards of ice, cutting her when she breathed. The kitchen table was swaying. There’s no point, it sang, there’s no point. And the angels tuned up in the background.
Suddenly she felt that she was about to be sick. She dashed into the toilet behind the kitchen and her stomach turned inside out, half-digested pasta from 7-Eleven tore at her throat, making her tears overflow.
Afterwards she hung across the toilet, the stench revolting her. The angels sang at full volume.
‘Shut up!’ she yelled, slamming the toilet lid.
She walked angrily into the kitchen, pulling out all the ingredients for dinner, burned herself on the flame when she put the rice on, cut herself when she sliced the onion and cut up the chicken, shaking as she opened the tins of coconut milk and baby sweetcorn and Asian chestnuts.
Was she wrong? It wasn’t impossible. Thomas looked like a lot of other Swedish men – tall and fair and broad-shouldered, with the beginnings of a stomach, and it had been dark and they were quite a long way away; maybe it wasn’t him standing there with the blonde woman at all.
She gripped the stove, closed her eyes and took four deep breaths.
Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe she’d seen wrong.
She straightened up, relaxed her shoulders, opened her eyes and heard the door open.
‘Daddy!’
The children’s cries of joy and sturdy welcoming hugs, his deep voice expressing a mixture of happiness and cautious fending-off; she fixed her gaze on the extractor fan and wondered if it showed, if there was something in his face that would give her the answer.
‘Hello,’ he said behind her back, kissing her on the back of her head. ‘How are you feeling? Better?’
She breathed in and out before turning round and setting her eyes on him.
He looked the same as usual. He looked exactly like he usually did. Dark-grey jacket, dark-blue jeans, light-grey shirt, shimmering silk tie. His eyes were the same, they were a bit tired and slightly disillusioned, his hair thick and brush-like above his bushy eyebrows.
She noticed she was holding her breath and took a deep, greedy breath.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘a bit better.’
‘Are you going to work tomorrow?’
She turned round to stir the chicken, hesitating.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been sick.’
‘As long as you don’t give us all this winter vomiting bug,’ Thomas said, sitting down at the kitchen table.
It couldn’t have been him. It must have been someone else.
‘How was work today?’ she said, putting the saucepan on a trivet from Designtorget.
He sighed, holding the morning paper out in front of him, preventing her from seeing his eyes.
‘Cramne at Justice is difficult to deal with. A load of talk and not much action. The girl from the Federation of County Councils and I are having to do most of the work, and he gets the credit.’
Annika stood still, the pan of rice in her hand, and stared at the headline on the front page of the paper, something to do with a leak about the culture proposal that was due next week.
‘The Federation of County Councils,’ she said. ‘What was her name again?’
Thomas inadvertently let one corner of the paper fold back, she met his eyes for an instant before he shook the paper to make it stand up again.
‘Sophia,’ he said. ‘Sophia Grenborg.’
Annika stared at the picture of the Minister of Culture illustrating the article.
‘What’s she like?’
Thomas carried on reading, hesitating a few moments before replying. ‘Ambitious,’ he said, ‘pretty good. Often tries to lobby for the Federation at our expense. She can be bloody annoying.’
He folded the paper, got up and tossed it onto the window sill.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the kids. I don’t want to miss tennis this week.’
And he came back into the kitchen with a squealing child under each arm, put them on their chairs, felt the loose tooth and admired the new boots, flicked the pigtails and listened to tales of sweet machines and promises to visit Peter No-Tail in Uppsala.
I’m imagining things, she thought. I must have seen wrong.
She tried to laugh, but couldn’t thaw out the sharp stone in her chest.
It wasn’t him. It was someone else. We’re his family and he loves us. He’d never let the children down.
They ate quickly, didn’t want to miss the cartoons.
‘That was great, thanks,’ Thomas said, giving her a peck on the cheek.
They cleared up together, their hands occasionally touching, their eyes meeting for brief moments.
He would never leave me.
She poured detergent into the dishwasher and switched it on. He took her face in his hands, studying her face with a frown.
‘It’s good you’re going to have another day at home,’ he said. ‘You look really pale.’
She looked down, pushed his hands away.
‘I feel a bit washed out,’ she said, and walked out of the kitchen.
‘Don’t wait up,’ he said to the back of her head. ‘I promised Arnold I’d go for a beer afterwards.’
She turned to ice in the doorway, the razor-sharp stone rotating in her chest. She stood still, feeling her heart thud.
‘Okay,’ she said, regaining control of her muscles again, moving one foot in front of the other, out into the hall, into the bedroom, onto the bed. She heard him take his sports bag and tennis racket out of the hall cupboard, he called goodbye to her and the children, she heard their distracted reply and her own silence.
Had he noticed anything odd about her? Had he reacted in a particular way?
She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.
To be honest, she had been a bit strange this past year. He wasn’t just reacting to this evening.
She got up, walked round the bed to use the phone on her little table.
‘Thomas said you were ill,’ Arnold said, the only one of Thomas’s old friends who had ever really accepted her. ‘Are you feeling any better?’
Annika swallowed and muttered.
‘Well, I can quite see why he can’t play tonight when you’re this bad, but this is the second week in a row.’
Annika fell. The floor beneath her became a black hole and she was sailing off through space.
‘I’ll have to find another partner if he keeps cancelling, I hope you can see that.’
‘Can’t you give it a bit longer?’ Annika said, sinking into the bed. ‘He appreciates your matches so much.’
Arnold sighed, irritated. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but Thomas is a real bloody pest. He can never make a decision and stick to it. If you book a fixed time on court for the whole autumn, you can’t just decide not to use it.’
Annika put a hand over her eyes, her heart racing.
‘Well, I’ll tell him,’ she said, and hung up.
Some time must have passed, because suddenly the children were with her in bed, one on each side of her, the
y were singing something she vaguely recognized and she hummed along, and in the background the angels sang a harmony.
These are my children, she thought. He’ll never take my children away from me.
‘Right,’ she said, ‘it’s time for bed.’
And she got them into bed by reading them a story, without any awareness of what she was reading. She tucked them in and kissed them and went round turning out the lights. She huddled into the alcove by the living-room window and rested her temple against the ice-cold glass. She could feel the draught from the ill-fitting frame against her thighs, and listened to the wind as it tried to creep round the hinges. Her insides were mute and calm, weighed down by the rumbling stone.
The apartment lay in darkness behind her. The swinging streetlamp outside cast yellow shadows across the room, from the outside her windows were nothing but black holes.
She listened, trying to hear the children’s breathing but could only hear her own. She held her breath trying to hear more, but her hearing was blocked by her heartbeat, the blood rushing and racing and bubbling in her head.
Unfaithful, she thought. Sven was always unfaithful.
She had refused to see it for all those years, and the only time she protested he had hit her in the head with a pair of pliers. Without realizing it, she fingered the small scar on her forehead, it was almost invisible now, she hardly ever thought about it.
She was used to men being unfaithful.
She could see him in front of her: her first love, her childhood friend, her fiancé, the sports star. Sven Mattsson who loved her more than anything else in the world, Sven who worshipped her so much that no one else could get close to her but him, couldn’t even talk to her, and she wasn’t allowed to think about anyone else but him, actually, nothing else but him. Anything else would be punished, and he punished her, he punished her and punished her until the day he stood before her by the furnace in the Hälleforsnäs works with his hunting knife in his hand.
She turned away from the image, stood up and shook it off, shrugging it off the same way she shrugged off her nightmares, the familiar nightmares that came back after that night in the tunnel, the men from Studio Six who were discussing what to do with her, Sven with his bloody knife, her cat flying through the air with its guts hanging out.
And now Thomas was unfaithful.
Right now he was probably in bed with blonde Sophia Grenborg, maybe he was entering her right now, maybe they were licking each other or relaxing in each other’s sweat.
She stared at the yellow shadows, planted her feet firmly on the wooden floor, the newly sanded floor that she had varnished three times. She folded her arms over her chest and forced herself to breathe slowly. The apartment responded to her with gentle caution.
How much was she prepared to sacrifice to hold her life together?
She had a choice. It was just a matter of making a decision.
The realization made her shoulders relax, and it was suddenly easier to breathe. She went over to her computer and logged on to the internet. In the darkness she looked up Sophia Grenborg in Stockholm in the census results, getting a load of hits.
The woman she had seen with Thomas outside NK was in her thirties, or slightly younger. Certainly not over thirty-five.
Annika narrowed the search.
As the representative of the Federation of County Councils in a research project looking into threats to politicians, she couldn’t be younger than twenty-five.
She removed anyone born after 1980.
Still too many.
She logged out and went into the Federation’s own website, and looked among the employees.
She spelled her name with ‘ph’. So incredibly bloody anally retentively absurdly sodding pretentious.
Back to the other website and the name search.
Sophia Grenborg. Just the one. Twenty-nine. Lived in Upper Östermalm, born in Engelbrekt parish. Oh how terribly, terribly bloody smart.
She printed out the page through the fax machine and logged out. With the printout in her hand she rang the duty desk of the National Police Board and asked for a copy of the passport belonging to the person with Sophia Grenborg’s personal identity number.
‘Ten minutes,’ the officer said tiredly.
Without making a sound she checked that the children were asleep, then crept out into the Stockholm night.
It had started to snow. Wet flakes materialized against the dirty grey sky, falling onto her face when she looked up. All sounds descended half an octave, striking her eardrums with doubt and deception.
She hurried through the snow, leaving damp tracks behind her on the pavement.
The entrance to the Stockholm Police Headquarters was on Bergsgatan, two hundred metres from her door. She stopped at the big electric gates, pressed the pedestrian intercom and was let into the oblong cage that led to the door itself.
The copy hadn’t arrived yet, so she was told to take a seat for a few minutes.
She sat down on one of the chairs along the wall, swallowed and refused to feel bad.
All passport photos in Sweden were still public documents and could be requested at any time. There had been discussions about restricting access, but so far no decision had been taken.
I don’t need to explain myself, she thought. I don’t need an excuse.
When she was given the envelope she couldn’t wait to see if she was right, and turned away from the reception desk and pulled out the Polaroid picture.
It was her. No doubt at all.
Sophia Grenborg.
Her husband was walking around Stockholm kissing Sophia Grenborg.
She put the photograph back in the envelope and went back to her children.
35
Margit Axelsson had believed in the innate power of human beings all her life. She was convinced that every individual had the power to influence events; it was just a matter of will-power and engagement. As a young woman she had believed in global revolution, that the masses would be freed and cast off the yoke of imperialism as the world rang out with hymns of praise.
She stretched her back and looked out over the room.
Today she knew that you could act on a large scale, or on a small scale. She knew that she was making a contribution, day by day, in her work with the children at the nursery, the collective future, everyone’s responsibility, but also in her work here, in the ceramics room of Pitholm’s People’s Hall.
The Workers’ Educational Association had always believed that those who had received the fewest of society’s resources should be compensated through education, cultural activities and opportunities. She regarded it as justice applied in the educational and cultural sphere.
Study groups were a lesson in democracy. They took as their starting point the belief that every individual has the capacity and desire to develop themselves, to exert influence and take responsibility, that every individual is a resource.
And she saw how the members grew, young and old alike. When they learned to handle the clay and the glazes their self-confidence grew, their understanding of the opinions of others, and, with that, their ability to actively influence what went on in the society around them.
She had to remind herself of this as she stood beside her sculpture.
She had had to live with the mistakes of her youth all her life. Not one day had passed without her peace of mind being disrupted by the thought of the consequences of her actions. For long periods the impact was small, superficial, life and work functioned as a plaster on her guilt. But other days she could hardly get out of bed, paralysed with rage at her own inadequacy.
Those days had got fewer over the years. Nonetheless, she knew they took their toll, had always known that the guilt she carried would kill her. She wasn’t just thinking about how overweight she was, how the comfort eating helped her through the bad patches, but about the gnawing away of her own psyche, her inability to fend off anxiety. She was often ill, had an unusually poor immune system.
And now he was back.
All those years she had had nightmares about him, turning round quickly in dark alleyways and imagining him behind her, and now he was really here.
Her reaction hadn’t been as violent as she had imagined.
She didn’t scream, didn’t faint, just noticed her heartbeat quicken, and felt slightly dizzy. She sank onto a chair in the hall with the yellow dragon in her hand, his unpleasant, childish signal that they should meet up at their old meeting place.
She knew he would seek her out. He wanted something more than just a group meeting like they used to have. The yellow dragon was simply a reminder, a way of bringing the Beasts back to life. He had already contacted the Black Panther – she knew that because the Panther had called her for the first time in thirty years to tell her, asking what she thought about the Dragon coming home.
She had merely hung up. Hadn’t said a word, just hung up and pulled the lead out of the socket.
But you never escape, she thought, looking at the sculpture that she never managed to finish, the child and the goat and the profound communication between them, beyond words and visions, based on understanding and intuitive sensitivity. She could never quite manage to express that, and she wasn’t going to get any further tonight.
Her back ached, she moved heavily over to the damp blanket that stopped the piece from drying out and cracking. She wrapped it up the usual way, and tied it in place. She took off her apron, hanging it up with the others and going off to check the kiln and wash her hands. Then she went round and looked at her students’ creations, making sure they had covered their work correctly, that the finished pieces weren’t drying too quickly, gathering up some stray tools. She filled the kiln ready for firing the following day, leaving some space for the Friday group at the top.
She stopped in the door, listening to the silence. As usual on Thursdays, she was the last one out. She changed her shoes, pulled on her outdoor clothes, shut the door behind her and locked it with a jangling key-ring.
The corridor ahead of her was weakly lit and full of dark shadows.
She didn’t like the dark. Before the events at the airbase it had never bothered her, but since then the screams and flames pursued her in a way that made night prickly and threatening.
Red Wolf Page 24
