Where the fuck is Lundsberg?
In Värmland.
She knows what sort of establishment it is.
It must be six hundred kilometres from here?
Formal confirmation? Signature?
She looks at Tove, who looks as if she’s about to burst with pride, and it feels as if two fists are wrenching Malin’s guts and heart out, and she stands up, throws her arms out, looks at Tove and says: ‘So this isn’t good enough for you? Well? Is that what you want? To go to some stuck-up school with a load of stuck-up toffs? Do you really think they’re going to see you as one of them? Do you?’
She hears her words, how cruel and hurt they sound, their unvarnished, unforgivable self-absorption, but she still can’t stop herself, and raises her voice before going on: ‘For God’s sake, surely you could have said something? Did you imagine I’d be happy just because you got a scholarship to some stuck-up school? Did you think I’d be happy about you going so far away? Bloody hell, I love you, Tove, and I want you here with me, surely you can see that? I’ve never seen anything so selfish. And what’s this about signatures? Did you forge my signature?’
Tove looks past Malin, picks the letter up from the table, folds it carefully, and puts it back in the envelope, then tucks it inside her book, before standing up.
‘I thought you’d be happy for me,’ Tove says firmly, without sounding the least bit sad. ‘You should be. Do you know what it means to get in there? Do you know what it costs? The contacts it gives you? And yes, I faked your signature on the application, because I was expecting you to be angry even if I hoped you might have changed your bloody behaviour.’
‘That’s against the law, Tove! Did you know that? Does your dad know about this?’
‘You’re mad, Mum, you know that, don’t you? No, he doesn’t know anything. I only needed one signature, and I didn’t want to ask him either, because he’d have insisted on talking to you. And I wanted to tell you first.’
Malin breathes.
Snorts.
Shuts her eyes.
Rubs her temples, feels like screaming, screaming out loud, roaring meaningless sounds there in the kitchen, bellowing like a cornered animal, and only when her scream has died away does she open her eyes, look at Tove. Before her stands her daughter, smiling.
‘I’m not going to listen to what you say, Mum,’ Tove whispers. ‘I know things must be hard for you right now, with everything that’s going on, with Grandma.’
Calm, Malin calm. Pull yourself together.
And she manages, even though she can feel the tears running down her cheeks.
For the second time in just a few minutes Malin hugs her daughter, and whispers in her ear.
‘Sorry. Sorry. I want you to be able to trust me. Let’s go out for pizza, and I’ll tell you something really weird,’ she says.
‘Sturm und Drang,’ Tove says, and Malin tries to work out what she means, but fails.
Ham.
Prawns and ham.
But no artichoke.
They’re sitting at a table for two in the Shalom Pizzeria on Trädgårdsgatan, in a brightly lit room with yellowing wallpaper, and Tove is eating greedily, only interrupting herself to take gulps of Cuba Cola.
They walked past the main square on their way here. A dozen candles were burning in the darkness, casting flickering, anxious shadows across the dark pavement. Most of the bars and restaurants already had new windows fitted.
They didn’t talk about the bomb on the way to the pizzeria, discussing everything else that had happened instead.
The fact that Janne seemed to have met someone new really didn’t seem to bother Tove, she didn’t seem to feel any jealousy or desire for them to become a normal family unit again.
They talked about Lundsberg, and Malin told her about the boy in the care home, and now Tove says: ‘We have to go and see him. I want to meet him. We can go tomorrow. He’s my uncle.’
‘We will visit him,’ Malin says.
Tove had fallen silent when Malin told her about the reading of the will, and about her brother. Every time Malin repeated the story to someone else it became more real to her, as if it had somehow all been a dream, and now, when Tove says the words ‘my uncle’, for the first time Malin feels that there’s someone else out there apart from Tove who is almost her.
She shakes her head.
‘But I can’t go tomorrow. I have to work.’
‘Maybe this is more important,’ Tove says.
‘It’s much more important,’ Malin says, and her cheeks feel greasy from the pizza, and it occurs to her that Janne and his new girl might be sitting just a few blocks away.
Never mind that now.
Think about Peter Hamse instead.
Her little brother.
Tove.
Try to live in the moment.
‘So, do what feels most important,’ Tove says. ‘Anyway, what’s his name?’
‘His name’s Stefan.’
‘Do they call him Steffe?’
Malin shakes her head, says: ‘I don’t know what sort of nicknames he’s got. I know we ought to see him, but this case I’m working on right now . . . I get the feeling something’s going on, something big and small at the same time, it feels like it’s a matter of life or death, and that it’s urgent, but I don’t know how.’
‘How do you mean? That there’s someone you have to rescue?’
‘Maybe,’ Malin says. ‘But I don’t know who.’
‘Maybe it’s you, Mum,’ Tove smiles. ‘Maybe you have to rescue yourself. You’re worried about seeing him, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, I suppose I am worried.’
‘What about doing it for my sake, Mum? Can’t we go right away for my sake?’
‘We will go, Tove. Just not yet.’
‘Then you’ll be letting him down as well.’
As well. And Malin feels her shame flare up, at the way her drinking and long hours almost made her ignore Tove altogether. Am I doing the same thing again? No.
Shame is pointless, she knows that.
‘Tove. I’m only human.’
‘Really?’ Tove says with a smile.
Then she takes a piece of pizza, pops it in her mouth, chews and swallows, evidently thinking, carefully weighing her words before she says: ‘What are you going to do about Grandad? I can understand you being angry with him.’
‘I don’t know, Tove. What do you think?’
‘There’s only one thing you can do, Mum. You have to forgive him. You only get one dad.’
Mother and daughter walk hand in hand through the late spring evening.
They don’t know it, but they’re nudging up against one of the watersheds that make up the core of human life, balancing along the fragile line of their story.
Tove asks her mum: ‘You’re not going to report me for forging your signature, are you?’
‘What do you take me for? Of course I’m not.’
‘You are happy for me, aren’t you? This is what I’ve always dreamed of.’
Malin lets go of her daughter’s hand and wraps her arm around her instead, pulling her close, and they weave their way up the illuminated street.
‘Of course I’m happy for you,’ Malin says. ‘I’m just scared of losing you.’
35
Friday, 14 May
Can’t sleep.
Have to sleep. Have I slept? Yes, I fell asleep to begin with, slept for a few hours, then woke up again, and now there’s nothing I can do with my body, or my mind. I want to get away from it, into sleep and dreams, but there’s no point trying.
Malin sits up.
Beyond the venetian blind she can just make out the still of night, and she knows Tove is lying in the next room, and Malin hopes she’s sleeping.
Lundsberg.
Don’t think about it. Let it happen. It’s what Tove wants, and that’s the most important thing. It was smart of her to forge my signature on the application, but why didn’t she just ask us abo
ut it?
What must you think of us, Tove?
And Malin closes her eyes again, sees her mother’s face in her mind’s eye, chasing her through the house, going on at her to tidy up after herself, shouting at her not to talk so much, to be quiet when there are adults present, that nice girls do this or that, and you never give me a moment’s peace, and Mum, you’re dead now, gone, you don’t exist, but you’re going to be with me for as long as I live. You’ve done that to me, how can I move on from that?
You have to forgive.
Forgive the one who’s still here. Make the most of the time we have.
I know what I have to do, she thinks, and gets up. She pulls on a pair of jeans, doesn’t bother with a bra, just pulls a pink cotton top over her head.
Her tiredness is gone.
Her body had got a second wind.
She goes in to Tove.
Shakes her daughter awake. Tove sits up bewildered, looking around the room in the dim lighting from the hall.
‘I’m going to see Dad,’ Malin says.
‘Don’t,’ Tove says. ‘He’ll be with that girl.’
‘I mean Grandad.’
Tove gives her a hug, and whispers in her ear: ‘I’ll be fine on my own. Be gentle with him.’
And fifteen minutes later, tired and cold after a chilly walk, at a quarter past three in the morning, Malin is standing outside the building on Barnhemsgatan, and she hesitates, doesn’t want to tap in the code, but her fingers move by themselves, as if the whole of her being knows that it has to hear her father tell the story of her little brother, Stefan.
The stairwell smells of mould and disinfectant, and Malin walks slowly up the stairs, feeling annoyed at having to be here, at this moment.
Thinks: I’m going to put you on the spot. I’m going to make you tell the truth, Dad.
Her dad is sitting in the large armchair in the living room of the flat, or the sitting room, as her mum used to call it. The green fabric of the armchair envelops his increasingly slender frame, and her dad’s thin face, which usually radiates self-confidence and forcefulness, is now radiating a peculiar mixture of weariness and fear, a new sort of hesitancy that Malin is inclined to put down to loneliness.
She rang the doorbell.
He opened the door after the tenth angry ring, not annoyed at being woken – he actually seemed pleased to see her. As for her, she really didn’t feel anything when she saw him.
They sat down opposite each other in the living room. Malin in the red chair where she’s sitting now, feeling the rough fibres of the cheap oriental carpet under her feet. She’s looking at her father, who knows what is expected of him, and he starts to talk, beginning with an apology, or at least an attempt to explain himself.
‘I should have told you a long, long time ago. You had a right to know. But you know how it is, the way things can turn out.’
The way things can turn out? Malin thinks, and feels like interrupting, him but stops herself and lets him go on.
‘The years pass and in the end the secret somehow grows bigger than it really is, we never spoke about it between ourselves, and we’d never agreed how we were going to tell you when you got older. Even when your mum died, I couldn’t bring myself to say anything to you, even though I knew perfectly well that the truth was bound to catch up with us now. I was simply very weak, and I’d like to think I did it for your mum’s sake, she wouldn’t have been able to handle what had turned into the biggest lie of her life.’
You’re not even referring to him by his name, Malin thinks. You’re talking about him as a secret. A thing.
Her dad leans forward.
And Malin feels her anger take hold of her, and she feels like shouting at him again, but manages to suppress the outburst by digging the fingers of one hand deep into the stuffing of the armrest.
For Mum’s sake? Or your own?
Don’t you see, haven’t you seen, the way I’ve been feeling? The way I’ve spent the whole of my fucking life feeling? And you’ve been aware that I needed to know, that I’ve been searching for something I felt was missing. My mother’s love, or the brother I never even knew I had.
Malin sits in silence.
Her dad’s voice is like an empty sarcophagus, an echo from someone who accepts their mistakes and shortcomings, and carries on living with them, without placing any specific demands on themselves as far as improvements and the truth are concerned.
A note of resignation.
A note that has more to do with death than life.
How the hell could you let me down like that? Let him down?
‘You mum had an affair with an unmarried office supplies salesman. She met him at Saab, and then one night she was out at a dance with one of her girlfriends. One night at the Freemasons’ Hotel where he was staying. You were three, almost four years old at the time, and she got pregnant, and the man was killed in a car crash a few months into the pregnancy. There was never any talk of a divorce. It was all going to be managed. And I forgave her, and then she moved out during the pregnancy, when it started to show . . .’
I know all that, Malin feels like screaming.
Tell me something I don’t know!
How could you just hide my own brother away from me? Why couldn’t you adopt him, seeing as his father was dead?
She listens to her dad. The words come flying at her like shards of glass, razor-sharp, red-hot.
‘Adoption wasn’t an option, no one wanted him, he wasn’t mine, and he was handicapped, I couldn’t have stood it, it was better to pretend he didn’t exist, never say anything . . .
‘Then, after so many years, it was as if that had become the truth,’ her dad says, and goes on, ‘that the secret didn’t exist. That it was just us, you and me and Mum, and she got obsessed with social status, her own life, her choices, with the fact that everything had to be so damn perfect and lovely when it was really just ordinary and built on shaky foundations. And I went along with it.’
Her dad falls silent, and Malin looks out of the window, at the slowly breaking dawn, thinking that her dad sounds strangely calculating, almost deceitful.
‘Say something, Malin.’
‘How could you just leave him there, alone, even if he wasn’t yours, didn’t you feel any responsibility?’
Her dad looks at her, tries to catch her eye, and Malin realises he wants her to say she understands, but she doesn’t.
‘Didn’t you think I had any right at all to know about my own brother? You know how much I missed having a brother or sister, how the hell could you deny me that right?’
‘He’s severely handicapped, Malin.’
She gets to her feet and shouts: ‘Like that’s got anything to do with anything! For fuck’s sake, couldn’t you have said you were his father? Or didn’t Mum want that? Or were you the one who forced her to abandon him? Gave her an ultimatum and tried to make her look like the cold, heartless villain, when you’re actually no better yourself? You didn’t want him either, did you? Maybe Mum did want him, and you just said no? It wasn’t that fucking easy in those days to just leave your husband, was it?’
Her dad sinks lower into his armchair, holds out his hands, then quickly withdraws them, and it looks as though he’s thinking, then he says, without a trace of denial in his voice:‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Don’t say anything,’ Malin yells. ‘You’ve been silent for thirty years, so you might as well keep quiet for a bit longer.’
‘I understand why you’re angry. But times have changed, as you pointed out.’
She looks at him.
Times have changed? she thinks. You forced Mum to give him up, didn’t you? And maybe she didn’t want to? And that’s why she ended up so cold?
A thin layer of snow melting. Still hiding the truth. Then the next layer melts, and a completely different reality is revealed. Then what? Layer upon layer of ice, of denial and life.
Malin sinks onto the sofa.
Catches her breath.
/>
‘I’m not angry, Dad. Well, yes, I am. But most of all I’m just fucking sad. I’m sad for my own sake. For his, my brother’s sake. I’m sad for Tove’s sake. For Janne’s sake, and yours too, and Mum’s, because this has affected us so much more than you can possibly imagine. You and Mum, together and individually, have trampled all over my life, and that makes me sad.’
Her father stands up, and the insecurity and fear have been replaced by a grown man’s look, and she’s seen it before, that look, in criminals confessing their crimes and prepared to take the consequences, but who still think, deep down in the bottom of their souls, that it was right to commit them.
He turns towards her.
‘What am I supposed to do, Malin? What do you want? What’s done is done, and it can’t be undone. Obviously, I hope you can forgive me.’
You’re crazy, Malin thinks. Completely fucking mad, and she stands up again and leaves her father alone in his living room without another word. She leaves him alone in the flat, surrounded by silence, by the memories of choices made, hours and days lived in the milky, thin air of the lie, and she realises that his loneliness is aggressive, malignant, like cancer, and that she can leave him trapped in it without a second thought.
‘I want to see Tove,’ he calls after her. ‘Let me see Tove.’
She doesn’t want to see you, Malin thinks.
Lundsberg School like a fortress inside her.
Tove doesn’t want to see anyone. She’s on her way away from us.
And me, I know where I’m on my way to.
The first morning light breaks on the empty, scrubbed hospital room. Blue-and-white crime-scene tape is already stretched across the doorframe, and Sven must have called Karin Johannison after their meeting, and got one of her colleagues to go through the room. But they can’t have found anything, today hospital rooms are disinfected the moment the dead and cured alike have made way for another patient.
The nurses on night duty were reluctant to let her into the room, even though she showed her ID.
She couldn’t help herself, and asked after Peter Hamse, even though she knew he was hardly likely to be there at half past four in the morning, and the nurses seemed to have a fair idea of why she was really asking.
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