Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  ‘Are you feeling full now?’

  ‘We’re full, Mummy.’

  ‘Then let’s go and get some money out.’

  ‘Can I press the buttons?’

  ‘Me too, I want to press the buttons too.’

  ‘We’ll do it together.’ And they set off across the square, towards the cashpoint machine, where the bike with the rucksack is still parked.

  The mother sees the posters in the bank windows. She recognises them from adverts and flyers, doesn’t want to think the name, but can’t help herself.

  Kurtzon.

  Kurtzon Funds.

  The SEB bank has allowed its windows to be used by the company owned by the supposedly brilliant but extremely publicity-shy financier. The girls have reached the cashpoint, and beside them the automatic doors to the bank slide open and a man wearing a leather waistcoat, with bare, suntanned arms, comes out with a black briefcase in one hand. He looks around and smiles at the girls before disappearing off in the direction of the old courthouse.

  The mother is rapidly catching up with the girls, but she stumbles on a paving stone that is slightly higher than the others and drops her bag.

  Her purse tumbles out and falls open.

  Her green Visa card shines up at her.

  Still plenty in the account. It’s a long way from the end of the month, and she hasn’t touched the insurance money yet.

  She kneels down, feeling her joints creak.

  The children are standing at the cashpoint now, and the mother sees them playing as if in slow motion, as they pretend to put a card in, press the buttons and then pull out some huge, magical treasure from the machine.

  Her bag.

  Back in her hand again, and just as she is about to stand up she hears a hissing sound that turns into a bleep. Like a rattlesnake vibrating so furiously that it starts to whistle.

  She sees the girls stiffen and hold their ears, and she realises that the sound is coming from the rucksack on the parcel rack of the bicycle, and she wants to run to them but she can’t move, her body is locked in a hopeless posture and she sees the girls’ faces change and the sound from the rucksack bites into all three of them, like the teeth of poisonous monitor lizards.

  Then the mother screams.

  She screams her girls’ names, but the names disappear into an icy blue-white lightning, followed by a heat more intense that she ever thought possible, and she is thrown through the air. Then there is nothing but a silence that drowns out the infinitely painful thunder that carries across the whole city and on across the newly awoken forests and sprouting fields, open water, and dwellings of Östergötland.

  For the girls it is as if the world disappears, torn to shreds by millions of ravenous, salivating beasts, only to dissolve into an all-encompassing light that shifts into something else, into a frothy white heaven with no beginning and no end.

  2

  Are you in heaven now, Mum?

  As Malin Fors steps towards the coffin containing her mother, she feels the ground tremble slightly beneath her feet. She hears a dull rumble, but neither the vibration nor the sound manage to make the windows of the Chapel of the Resurrection rattle.

  They’re blasting at the roadworks out in Lambohov, Malin thinks, and looks down at the lacy hem of her long, black dress from H&M.

  There’s a lot of construction work in Linköping, because of the government’s investment in infrastructure designed to counteract the impact of the financial crisis, and there’s a lot of blasting going on. Unless this is something else, is it you, Mum, trying to say something, trying to crack the world open with the concentrated power of denial?

  It’s a long time since the last of the snow melted, uncovering the muddy surfaces where grass was waiting impatiently to break through, when Malin had stood in the living-room window watching the bare, apparently dead branches of the trees sway in the tremulous spring wind, and she could almost hear the life flowing through the branches, trying to turn the stiff blackness into green, turning it into something new. Yes, maybe it was life itself singing in the tree’s branches, and Malin could sense that something was about to happen, that this spring was going to uncover things that had been hidden in dark and chilly souls.

  She had taken a deep breath by that window. Watching the arrival of spring with confidence after seeing out the winter’s unquenchable longing for alcohol, struggling against it in isolation, and sure enough, something seemed to have happened, the spring had lived up to the promise it made that day.

  A red rose in her hand now.

  She looks at the distempered walls of the chapel, placating shades of orange and pale blue, and the raised platform holding the white coffin, positioned beneath the highest point of the roof to maximise the impression of sanctity.

  The vibrations and thunder have gone. She is standing with her back to the congregation and thinking that it can’t have been thunder, because the sky outside is blue, free from any smudges of white, and the trees and bushes and ground are sculpting forth life one more time after the winter, hoping to show their vitality.

  The rose’s stem has been stripped free of thorns, safe and comfortable to hold. All pain removed, and was that what you wanted, Mum, was that your secret?

  Malin stops beside the coffin. She can hear the silence, the other people breathing.

  Not many people there, Mum mourned by Dad, by me, by her granddaughter Tove. But do we really miss you, Mum, Tove and I? The fact that I’m even whispering the question when I’m standing by your coffin is a sort of blasphemy, isn’t it?

  I can’t hear anyone sniffing behind me, no sobbing. Instead I can smell the musty scent of the chapel, and the heat as the sun forces its way through the delicate curtains is warming the whole room, but not this moment, and I close my eyes, see your face, Mum, those hard, downward-pointing wrinkles around your mouth, and the look in your eyes that never dared to meet mine.

  I see you, Mum, as I turn to face the others sitting in the pews, and I wish I could say that I feel grief, but I don’t feel anything at all.

  The call had come on a rainy Saturday morning three weeks before, when she was alone in the flat making vegetable mash, one of the therapeutic tasks she did these days to keep the longing for tequila at bay. Or for any damn alcohol at all, come to that.

  Dad sounded upset at the other end of the line, fretful but still together, factual yet sad, but Malin still imagined she could detect a note of relief somewhere in his voice.

  He began to cry after the first words, then he pulled himself together, and said that he and her mother had been at the Abama golf course, and that at the third – or was it the fourth? – hole she had hit a ball over the edge of the cliff and watched it disappear into the waves of the Atlantic, and he could see that she was in a bad mood, but trying not to show it. And then, on the next stroke, she cracked when she sliced the ball and it flew off into the bushes under some palm trees. ‘And I saw her face turn red. Then she clutched at her throat, as if she couldn’t breathe, and fell to the grass, it had just been cut, and she didn’t move, Malin, she didn’t move, and she wasn’t breathing, do you understand what I’m saying, do you understand, Malin?’

  She had understood.

  ‘Dad, where are you now?’

  ‘Tenerife Hospital. They brought her here by ambulance.’

  She asked the question, even though she knew, she’d heard it in the peculiar tone of her father’s voice, a tone she recognised from the dozens of next-of-kin she had informed of deaths in the course of her work as a detective inspector.

  ‘How is she now?’

  ‘She’s dead, Malin. She was dead by the time they put her in the ambulance.’

  Dad.

  His lanky, uncertain figure alone on a bench in some waiting room in a Spanish hospital. His hand moving restlessly over the grey-black hair on his head.

  She had wished he was with her, so she could comfort him, and then, as she stirred the saucepan of bubbling root vegetables, she realis
ed that she wasn’t worried, scared, or even sad. In fact, it felt more like a huge mountain of practical difficulties was rising up in front of her. She was holding the phone in one hand, stirring the pan with the spoon she was holding in the other.

  Tove. Janne. My ex-husband.

  I have to tell them. Will Tove be upset? Malin had stared at the Ikea clock in the kitchen, and saw her ever-healthier thin face reflected in the window, her blonde bob framing her prominent cheekbones, and wondered about her appointment with the hairdresser later that week.

  ‘Malin, she’s dead. Do you understand?’

  ‘Have you got anyone with you?’

  ‘Malin.’

  ‘Who can you get to be with you?’

  ‘Hasse and Kajsa Ekvall are on their way. They can drive me home.’

  ‘I’ll book a flight. I can be there tomorrow.’

  ‘Don’t, Malin, don’t do that. I can take care of this.’

  And she heard it again, the relief in her father’s voice. It seemed to contain a promise that she would be able to regain something, that she would one day be able to turn around, look herself in the mirror, and maybe know her own innermost secret.

  The mourners at the funeral are sitting slumped in the pews of the chapel.

  The closest family on the first row.

  Mum’s body brought here by plane from Tenerife.

  Malin has stopped behind the coffin and can see Dad crying, a soundless, gentle crying. Tove, wearing a beautiful black dress with little white flowers on it, mostly just looks bored. They decided beforehand that Malin would step up to the coffin first, and that Tove would go after her grandfather.

  A white rose in Tove’s hand, she chose it herself. And Malin feels a pang of guilt as she looks at her sixteen-year-old daughter. Guilt at having so often been such a bad mother, putting her job and then the drink ahead of her child.

  Janne is sitting next to Tove, in a badly fitting blue suit he must have bought specially for the occasion from Dressman. In the seats behind them there are perhaps ten people, all dressed in dark clothes. Couples of Dad’s age. She recognises a few of them from Sturefors, people her parents used to socialise with when she was little.

  No brothers or sisters. She doesn’t have any.

  No other family either.

  The coffin is simple, no ornamentation, and arranged around it are a number of wreaths from Tenerife. Malin doesn’t recognise the names on the wreaths, and it occurs to her that she will never be able to put faces to the names, and that she really doesn’t care.

  She closes her eyes.

  Her mum is there again, but she’s only an image, nothing to do with humanity or flesh and blood and feelings. Malin opens her eyes, tries to squeeze out a tear for Dad’s sake, but no matter how hard she tries nothing comes out.

  The priest, a woman in her fifties, smiles gently from her chair over by one of the windows. She has just given the standard speech about what a fine person Mum was, and about her talent for interior decorating and golf.

  And secrets, Malin felt like adding. She had a talent for secrets, and above all maintaining a façade and making herself seem important, special, as if nothing, and least of all me, was ever good enough for her.

  While the priest was talking Malin got the feeling that it was all too late now, that something had been lost, that there had still been some sort of chance for her and her mum to sit down at a table and talk to each other like grown-ups.

  She could have asked the question, straight out: ‘Mum, why haven’t you ever cared about me? About Tove?’

  Or, even more pertinently: ‘Have you ever loved me, Mum? Loved us?’

  She puts the rose on the coffin.

  Then Malin moves her lips. Whispers to her mother inside the white coffin: ‘Did you ever love me, Mum? God knows, I loved you. Didn’t I?’

  Five hundred and forty-two days.

  That’s how long Malin has been sober. How long she and Janne have managed to get along, how long she has managed to withstand her body and soul’s howl for alcohol, how desperately fucking long she has managed to keep her boredom locked away.

  Her colleagues in the Linköping Police, with Zacharias ‘Zeke’ Martinsson and Superintendent Sven Sjöman in the vanguard, were worried that she might suffer a relapse when they heard about her mother, about her sudden heart attack, and that Margaretha Fors was being brought home for the funeral, and that Åke Fors would probably be selling his flat in Tenerife and moving back home again.

  Losing your mother is hard on everyone, her colleagues reasoned, but for a sober alcoholic an event of that sort could mean that frames of reference collapse, a bottle is opened and leads at the very least to helpless intoxication, and possibly something much worse.

  But Malin had told them not to worry when they asked how she was.

  She was more than capable of coping with the grief, if she actually felt any at all.

  Practical matters gave her something to do, it turned out, and kept her wretched restlessness as bay: talking to Dad over the phone, managing the funeral directors, cleaning up her parents’ flat before Dad got back, talking to the priest . . . Things to do, things to organise.

  When she told Tove that Grandma was dead, over the phone an hour after she got the call herself, Tove was as indifferent as only a teenager could be. She too had reacted in a practical way, asking if they would be going to Tenerife. Then Malin had heard the fear in her voice.

  ‘You haven’t got anything to drink in the flat, have you, Mum?’

  ‘Water and Coca-Cola, Tove.’

  ‘It’s not a joke.’

  ‘I promise I’m not going to drink, Tove.’

  ‘You promise? You need to do more than promise.’

  ‘I promise,’ Malin had replied, realising that her mother’s death was an opportunity for her to win back some of the trust she had lost.

  She had felt ashamed.

  In her work she got job satisfaction from extreme violence and murder, from other people’s misfortunes. She knew that, and had accepted it. But someone who instinctively wonders how to gain any sort of advantage from their own mother’s death, what sort of person is that?

  Then the longing for tequila returned.

  The longing or the thundering power of alcohol. For the senselessness of intoxication. The longing could come at any time, always without warning. She had tried to find a logic in its attacks, a structure, so that she could avoid situations that made her feel thirsty, but she hadn’t managed to find any logic in it.

  A sickness. A parasite. An unpredictable virus that strikes as it pleases, on a whim. Learning to live with it, like an invisible handicap.

  But just then, after her phone conversations with her dad and Tove, the pull had been stronger than ever. So she did what she sometimes did. She exposed herself to pain, and stuck the fingers of one hand into the bubbling, freshly mashed vegetables, feeling them sting and burn, but aware that it wasn’t hot enough to harm her skin.

  Tove’s face is close to Malin’s as they sit in the chapel. Her skin is completely smooth, free from the blemishes and spots that almost all other sixteen-year-old girls have. Tove toys with the rose, and mother and daughter exchange a quick glance, not quite sure what to say with their eyes.

  Up at the front lies Grandma, Mum, in her coffin. They can see Grandad, Dad, in his black suit, walking up to the coffin. They see him turn around, hesitate, take a deep breath, sob, then whisper something and lay a red rose on the coffin before he comes back to his seat.

  Malin and Tove look at each other, wondering what to do with this moment.

  And then Tove sets off towards the coffin, and without trying to force out any tears she lays her rose on top of it.

  Tove doesn’t whisper anything, doesn’t say anything, just comes back to her seat, and Malin looks towards her father, then Tove once more, and wishes she could read their minds, but instead she sees Janne approach the coffin with ritualistic movements, as if everything that happens on t
his spring day in the Chapel of the Resurrection is a piece of theatre that must be played out to its end.

  Please, just let this be over, Tove thinks, and closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to watch all the old people she doesn’t know go up to the coffin one by one and whisper things that can’t be heard.

  ‘Adieu,’ one of them says audibly, and Tove jerks, opens her eyes, and from the corner of her eye she can tell that Grandad is crying, she feels sorry for him, she’s always liked him, but Grandma? She never knew Grandma, and if you never knew someone, you can’t grieve when they’re gone. Even Mum doesn’t seem particularly upset, although Tove can tell she’s trying.

  Feigning emotions.

  Everyone she knows seems to do that.

  She thinks about the letter she’s expecting. She hasn’t told anyone, she daren’t say anything to Mum. It was wrong and immoral of her to forge her signature on the form.

  But it might work.

  And then she’d be happy, wouldn’t she?

  No.

  That wasn’t certain. It was very far from certain.

  Mum might well freak out totally.

  And Tove can’t help smiling when she thinks about the letter that might be on its way, but she can’t smile here. Even if there isn’t an absolute requirement that people should cry here, you definitely shouldn’t smile.

  A hymn fills the chapel. The sound of the organ tries to force the stale air aside, trying to imbue the daylight with the natural warmth it lacks.

  The last time Malin was here was when a murder victim was being buried, a lonely fat man whom the world seemed to have abandoned from the start.

  She walks behind her dad towards the exit, sees him nod to people lining the aisle.

  Malin nods.

  She imagines that must be what you’re supposed to do.

  Then the chapel door is opened and, suddenly backlit, her dad becomes a strange black outline, and around him seem to float two little girls with angels’ wings.

  Their faces are white and full of fear.

  Their fear is so strong that Malin feels like rushing over, pulling the girls down out of the air and holding them close to her.