The Game Trilogy

by Anders de la Motte

  Once he’d settled down: plug the USB-cable into the laptop and open up the media player.

  And roll the film!

  If you could sit and concentrate in peace and quiet, it was much easier to pick up anything unusual. The discreet cameras covering every angle of the building, the roller-shutter on the slope leading down to the underground garage. The guard manning the barrier, rather than Lisa-the-receptionist-from-Bredäng. All of them small indications that he was in the right place.

  He didn’t notice the biggest thing for quite a while. It wasn’t actually anything at all, but rather the opposite.

  Apart from the orc on guard occasionally doing a circuit around the building, nothing was happening in or around Torshamnsgatan 142.

  Zippo, nada, niente!

  No clients, no visitors, not even a gaggle of nicotine-starved employees huddled by the side door.

  Zero traffic, no deliveries and not a single car in or out of the garage even though he had been watching at both four and five o’clock.

  In other words, there was no-one working inside the building. Not a soul, apart from the guard. But presumably a server-farm pretty much ran itself? Everything could be done remotely. Unless there were people living in there to look after the control room? Pasty little technicians who never saw daylight?

  Either way, he was feeling more and more sure. This was the place!

  This was where it was all controlled from: the Ants, the functionaries, the Players and the assignments. Reality as a game, and the Game reality, all in one single, seamless app. Hidden behind those anonymous walls was Mission Control, and it was him, Henrik HP Pettersson, who had found it.

  The Houston of Fucking Cyberspace!

  And he was sure of one more thing.

  He had to get inside.

  Rebecca opened the front door and sniffed carefully at the hall, but the only smell she could detect was paint. She’d picked the key up from the housing association and been given a ten-minute lecture about ‘how seriously we take this incident’. As if Henke was somehow responsible for someone trying to set fire to his flat?

  That wasn’t an entirely unreasonable conclusion, but that wasn’t something she felt like discussing with a total stranger. At least the old man had seemed relieved when she said she was there to empty the flat before they sold it, and hurried to get her out before she had time to change her mind. Maria Trappgränd was considerably more desirable now than when they had bought the flat in the mid-nineties.

  Really the street had been completely unsuitable for Mum, with its cobblestones and narrow steps.

  But as soon as she saw the flat and the area, she fell for a romantic dream based on an old film, Anderssonskans Kalle, and wouldn’t be shaken. Dad’s life insurance had been just enough for the down-payment and a bit of new furniture.

  Personally Rebecca thought the area was more The Third Man than anything. As if some unknown danger were lurking in amongst the gloomy alleyways and dark courtyards. She had never liked coming here, and today was no exception.

  The door was new, the hall repainted and the parquet floor repaired, but otherwise everything in the flat looked the same as usual. The same old Henke mess. And, the same as ever, she was playing at being the cavalry, helping him sort it all out.

  She manoeuvred the folded moving boxes into the kitchen and started to put them together. It only took half an hour or so to clear the kitchen. Most of it had evidently got broken during the fire, which at least saved her having to do any washing-up. The fridge and freezer were, with the exception of some mouldy cheese and a pack of frozen pies, basically empty, so she moved on to the living room. The high-tech stuff in there turned out to be pretty straightforward. The boxes were all in the corner, presumably because Henke couldn’t be bothered to carry them down to the bins. She couldn’t help wondering where the money for all these toys had come from. Computer, flatscreen TV, home cinema and games console: altogether they must have a shop value of at least forty thousand. But then Henke probably hadn’t bought them over the counter …

  Apart from the electronics, the furnishings in the flat weren’t much to write home about. A sagging sofa-bed, a couple of rickety Billy bookcases and a small coffee table. All things they’d bought when they moved in.

  The bedroom still contained Mum’s creaking old pine bed. The covers and sheets were on the floor. She couldn’t quite believe he’d kept it. Okay, Mum had died in the Ersta Clinic, but still …

  An old poster from a computer games fair was the only adornment on the otherwise bare walls.

  ‘Dreamhack -07, the Biggest Game-Fair in the World’, she muttered as she gathered together the heaps of clothes and stuffed them into various bags. Even her goodwill had its limits, so most of this could go to the nearest charity bin.

  The bookshelves contained a load of DVDs, many of them clearly burned copies.

  She ran her fingers along their dusty spines. There seemed to be a preponderance of gangster films, closely followed by American action films, with an impressive collection of adult material in an easy third place. But there was also a fair number of old classics, and for a moment she thought about taking some home with her. But when would she find the time to watch them?

  There were quite a few books on the shelves as well, which didn’t really surprise her. Henke liked reading, had done ever since he was little.

  She had helped him to start with, but he soon got the hang of it and was reading as well as her by the time he was six. Dad had had a load of old illustrated classics in a box at home, and Henke had ploughed through them more than once. The cartoon versions of Robinson Crusoe and Moby Dick had rescued his marks in Swedish pretty much the whole way through school. Ten minutes with the illustrated version from Reader’s Digest and he looked like he was well-read.

  So utterly typical of Henke!

  The master of cutting corners.

  Rebecca couldn’t help smiling. Despite his obvious failings, at least no-one ever had a dull moment in her little brother’s company. She used to take him to the library when they were a bit older. They would hang around there instead of going home. She used to bribe him to do his homework before he could look at the comics. The library had been a refuge, a safe haven where they could dream away a few hours, especially after Mum got ill and everything started to escalate. She still associated the smell of books with security.

  Often they would sit there until the library closed and the friendly librarians had to shepherd them out.

  It felt like a hundred years ago.

  The photograph album was on the bottom shelf. Brown plastic sleeves, with pages that had stuck together. She’d seen the yellowing pictures many times before, but even so she couldn’t help leafing through them. It hadn’t been all bad. Sometimes life had been almost normal. Like the camping holiday in Rättvik, with her, Mum and Henke all wearing traditional wooden clogs and squinting at the camera. The other two were blond and happy, while she had dark hair like Dad, and a more serious demeanour. Obviously Dad was behind the camera, the long shadow the only thing that betrayed his presence. She was pretty sure that was the closest he would come to being in any of the pictures in Henke’s album.

  She realized that that particular summer photograph from the early eighties actually said quite a bit about their family. Henke and Mum had always been close, whereas she was more Daddy’s girl. Like Mum, she had done all she could to keep him happy, even though he usually ignored them. Dad was a serious man who did a lot of thinking, and usually preferred his own company. He seldom smiled, almost never laughed, at least not as she remembered it. Work was probably the only thing that really interested him, some sort of sales job that she couldn’t remember much about, except that he travelled a fair bit. Sometimes they’d get a postcard, and very occasionally his duty-free bags would contain something apart from bottles of spirits. Sweets, perfume, or maybe some cheap plastic toy from the souvenir shop at the airport if the trip had gone particularly well and he was in a good
mood.

  On the rare days when Dad was at home he never wanted to be disturbed. He usually locked himself away in his little cubbyhole with a book and a bottle of some sort. The rest of the family simply didn’t interest him. A necessary distraction that he was obliged to tolerate, mostly for form’s sake. During his last years he got increasingly bitter at the way his life had turned out. How he had never been appreciated the way he thought he should have been.

  He had started some sort of memoir project which was supposed to prove him right, but instead it just seemed to make him feel even more badly treated, especially when no-one was interested in publishing it. They burned the whole lot once he was dead. They drove all the way out to Lida and threw the fat bundle of papers on one of the open barbeque fires out there.

  It took just a few minutes for all the close-written pages to burn up.

  None of them – not even Mum – had read a single word.

  But no matter what Henke might think, Dad wasn’t actually a bad person – far from it! It wasn’t until she was grown up that she realized his behaviour was a sort of handicap. That some people simply lack empathy and are therefore incapable of showing love.

  Poor Mum had probably done her best. Obeying his slightest command and tiptoeing round him in an effort to keep him in a good mood. Then illness and comfort-drinking took over Mum’s world and it was suddenly down to her to see that the home functioned the way Dad wanted.

  It really wasn’t so strange that she fell in love with Dag. When it came down to it, he was nothing but a younger version of her father. A bit of interest from his side was all it took. Unlike Dad, Dag could be extremely sensitive when he was in the right mood. Turning up with flowers and presents, telling the whole world how wonderful she was, and excelling in the role of devoted boyfriend. Obviously she had fallen head over heels, and he had proposed after just a few months. And so she had acquired a new authority figure to fit in with, someone whose love she would once again have to try to earn through self-sacrifice.

  As if there were actually something wrong with her.

  Bloody hell, it was easy to be wise in hindsight …

  Henke, on the other hand, had been fairly noisy and lively when he was little. He liked playing wild games which would sometimes take their toll on the furniture, and that sort of thing didn’t go down well with Dad, especially not if he’d already had his after-work drink … Sometimes the belt would come out, and Dad wasn’t the sort to hold back. He’d hit over and over again, even though she and Mum begged him to stop. Until one of them got between him and Henke, to protect him, to put a stop to it all.

  She remembered the hospital all too well. The look in the eyes of the doctors and nurses, and how she had held Dad’s hand tight.

  His feigned calm:

  ‘No, Doctor, Henrik just fell downstairs. Our little lad’s very accident-prone …’

  She bit her lower lip unconsciously.

  You had to be quick, get Henke out of the way before the situation slid out of control. Keep Dad and her little brother in a good mood so that everything at home ran smoothly. Though Mum had tried her best, at least to start with, the illness grew to demand more of her attention, and she hadn’t been able to try anymore, or perhaps didn’t even want to. Dad had finally started to see her. However odd it sounded, maybe it was the drink and the self-pity that finally brought Mum and Dad closer together. Gave them a mutual interest, something they could share? As time passed it was left more and more to Rebecca to maintain the balance at home. Always being on the alert, constantly ready to step in, almost like at work. At first, trying to protect Henke from Dad, then, later on, from himself as well.

  Henke. The truancy, his gang, the dope-smoking, all of that must have been some sort of revenge, at least to start with. Later on it was probably just an excuse not to give a damn about the rest of the world …

  Rebecca didn’t bother trying to separate the pages that had stuck together, so on the next page she looked at more than ten years had passed. She had just graduated from high school and was sitting at a heavily laden table in their old flat.

  She and Dag were smiling at the camera, in the first flush of teenage love. He had his arm round her shoulders and she was leaning awkwardly, and possibly too closely, into his broad chest. It almost looked as if he was holding her captive.

  She looked happy, overjoyed even, in her student cap and white summer dress. Even though it was only six months or so since they had met, the engagement ring sparkled on her finger. It could be a retrospective construct, but if she looked closely enough she imagined she could see that her smile wasn’t quite reaching her eyes. As if her joy in that picture was just a façade.

  The next photograph showed the other people at the table. Mum, hollow-eyed and emaciated as usual. Henke and Manga, Dag’s mother and Nilla, and a couple of her own friends whose names she could hardly remember now. They were all smiling and waving at the camera, which she must have been holding. A cheery greeting from an apparently happy past.

  ‘Now we’ll all smile and wave. Hello, Rebecca!’

  ‘Hello,’ she found herself muttering, suddenly feeling sad.

  When that picture was taken it couldn’t have been more than a year since Dad had gone to Spain for a conference and came home in a coffin. And ten months afterwards the cancer would have finished with Mum and she would have joined him in the Garden of Remembrance. But before that Dag would get himself killed and Henke would end up in prison.

  And her?

  Well, as Manga had said, she hardly got away unscathed either …

  But none of that was visible in the photograph in the album. In that frozen moment the future was still bright. Only her own nineteen-year-old eyes seemed to suggest anything different.

  She slammed the album shut and tossed it into one of the boxes of books, then tried to shake off the unsettling feeling. Only the clothes closet was left now, then she could call the removal firm and get shot of it all. The estate agent was coming the following week to value the flat, then in a couple of weeks or so it would doubtless have sold and the cavalry could stand down at last.

  She opened the door and saw to her relief that the little room was almost empty.

  That wasn’t actually altogether surprising, seeing as most of the clothes seemed to have been in various heaps around the flat.

  There were a few boxes on a shelf at the back of the room and she took a couple of steps forward to pull them down. On the way her foot landed on a striped piece of cloth on the floor. She fished it up and was about to throw it towards the bin-bag when she realized what it was.

  Henke’s old gym bag, the one he made in sewing-class. It was still neatly marked with his name and phone number, but the inside of the bag was sticky with some sort of oil. She wondered what he’d had inside it.

  She thought for a couple of seconds, then put it in one of the bags of clothing she’d decided to keep. Henke probably had some sort of sentimental attachment to the bag, so it could have a few months’ reprieve. She was actually fairly doubtful that he would ever come back, and even if he did he was hardly likely to want his old things. She’d give him six months, then she’d let the whole lot go to auction, including the photograph album.

  When she took down the last box something fell and landed on her foot. It was fairly heavy and she had to do a one-legged war-dance out into the bedroom before she shook off enough of the pain to go back into the closet.

  It turned out to be a little wooden box, probably made in Henke’s woodwork class. His initials had been neatly engraved on the top in black. There was no lock, but the wood must have swollen because she couldn’t get it open.

  She shook her find and got a metallic rattle in response, but the sound wasn’t exciting enough to make her go and get something to open it with. She put it alongside the photograph album in one of the boxes.

  When she had finished and was washing her hands in the kitchen sink, her mobile phone rang.

  ‘Hi, it’s M
icke!’

  ‘Hello!’

  She realized that her voice sounded happier than she had intended.

  ‘How … how are things?’

  ‘Good.’

  She probably ought to be annoyed.

  He had said he’d call, but that was last week. Much to her indignation, she had noticed that she was actually waiting for him to phone. But now that he had phoned, she couldn’t manage to keep her tone of voice quite as cool as she had planned. Because she was actually happy to hear his voice.

  ‘Do you feel like meeting up?’

  He sounded happy, almost exhilarated.

  ‘Somewhere in the city?’ he added before she had time to answer.

  ‘Sure,’ she said neutrally.

  ‘Good, there’s something I need to talk to you about. Sturekatten at five, if that sounds okay?’

  ‘Sure,’ she repeated. ‘Five is good.’

  ‘Okay, see you then, bye!’

  ‘Bye,’ she said, and clicked to end the call.

  What was all that about?

  Something I need to talk to you about …? It sounded so innocent. Like it was nothing important. But they didn’t share idle small-talk, or anything else for that matter apart from their physical relationship. So that was probably what he wanted to talk about. He wanted to finish with her. She’d already guessed that he had someone else. Maybe he’d decided once and for all to give it a go with the other woman? Dump the one who only showed up when she wanted to fuck? That sounded logical. Really she shouldn’t feel bothered.

  But there was something else that was starting to get to her. Someone had started calling her landline from a withheld number, letting the phone ring but always hanging up without leaving a message when the answer machine clicked in. For a while she had thought it was Micke calling, and not having the sense to leave a message. She had almost started to get annoyed with him until she recalled that she had never given him her home phone number, just her mobile.

  The calls had been sporadic to start with, but in recent days they were coming more often. As if someone really wanted to get hold of her, to tell her something important. Unless there was some other motive?