She's Never Coming Back

by Hans Koppel

  ‘You like watching,’ he said, and turned it on.

  7

  ‘We have to go to the supermarket and do some shopping,’ Mike said.

  ‘Can I sit in the front?’

  Sanna looked at him, full of hope.

  ‘Of course,’ Mike said.

  ‘Which way shall we go?’ he asked, once he’d helped his daughter to belt herself in.

  ‘By the water,’ Sanna decided.

  ‘The water,’ Mike repeated, and nodded to himself as if to emphasise that it was a wise choice.

  He drove down Sundsliden, braking down to second gear on the steepest part. The water stretched out unashamedly in front of them, almost showing off. It was more open here now than when Mike had been a child, even though there were more houses. As property prices climbed, the view in itself became an asset and the trees were cut down. Snug houses that were built as protection against the wind and weather had been replaced by aquariums designed to display wealth.

  ‘We can go swimming again soon,’ Mike commented.

  ‘How warm is it?’

  ‘In the water? I don’t know, maybe fifteen or sixteen degrees.’

  ‘You can swim then, can’t you?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Mike said, ‘but it might be a bit chilly.’

  He swung to the left by the house that he’d named Taxi-Johansson’s as a child. The owner of the town’s only taxi, a black Mercedes with a good many years under its bonnet, had lived in the house and had driven the schoolchildren to the dentist in Kattarp every year. Someone else lived there now and there weren’t many who remembered Taxi-Johansson, though there was still an old sign that said TAXI on the garage.

  A lot had changed since Mike moved home from the States. Women no longer sunbathed topless and there was a decent variety of TV channels, financed by advertising. Unnecessarily large cars had made an appearance and these days there was no embarrassment in wearing jeans that weren’t Levi 501s.

  Soon after they’d come back from the US, his mother opened a clothes shop in Kullagatan. Jeans and T-shirts with UCLA and Berkeley on the front. Nearly everyone in Mike’s class bought clothes there. His friends got a discount.

  The business had been going well and his dad had a job.

  As an adult, Mike struggled to remember at what point everything started to go wrong. Sometimes he thought he knew the answer, but as soon as he tried to focus and remember, something else popped up that had been just as decisive.

  His father’s death was obviously the main cause. He drove into the side of a bridge outside Malmö when Mike was thirteen. His mother always talked about it as though it was an accident, unfortunate and unnecessary.

  Mike was seventeen when he realised that it was probably a planned suicide. He’d heard it other places. When he asked his mum, he understood from her rather vague answer that he’d been kept in the dark for four years.

  He still remembered the feeling of alienation and emptiness. The utter loneliness. Of having no one. His stomach was empty and there was a metallic taste in his mouth.

  ‘It’s impossible to know for sure,’ his mum said. ‘He didn’t leave a letter or anything like that. And he seemed to be so happy.’

  According to the experts, that wasn’t so unusual. As if a flame flared up and gave the person who had decided to take their own life a brief period of peace.

  Mike had long since come to terms with his mother’s betrayal, but the knowledge that he was basically alone and couldn’t trust anyone was forever branded on his heart.

  That sounded a bit stupid, it really did. Nothing had happened to him. And how good were things now? With a wife and daughter and a well-paid job.

  And if he was honest, Mike had felt the change long before his father’s death. Wrong, it wasn’t a change so much as a slide from good to bad.

  A couple of years after they’d moved back to Sweden, his dad had lost his job. The jeans shop, which previously had been a lucrative hobby for his mum, became the family’s sole source of income. And things started to go downhill when customers chose to go to the shopping centre in Väla instead of buying clothes in town.

  It became harder to keep up with the neighbours in a posh part of town where a watch without hands was no longer impressive.

  ‘Can you speak?’

  The man slapped Ylva lightly on the cheek.

  ‘Water,’ she slurred.

  ‘Makes you thirsty,’ the man said.

  He’d had the foresight to take a glass of water with him. He held it to Ylva’s lips, let her taste it. Some trickled out of the corners of her mouth and Ylva instinctively tried to put her handcuffed hand up to wipe it away.

  ‘You can drink by yourself,’ the man said.

  He took out a key and undid the handcuff around Ylva’s right hand. She pushed herself back against the end of the bed until she was sitting up. She took the glass and drank it down in one go.

  ‘More?’ the man asked.

  Ylva nodded and held the glass out to him. He went over to the sink and filled it again. There was a kind of kitchen, the sort you get in barracks and building sites and student bedsits. Two built-in hot plates, a sink and draining board, and a fridge-freezer underneath. Ylva thought they were maybe called kitchenettes. She wasn’t sure. Nor was she sure why she was thinking about it at all, given the situation she was in.

  The man came back, handed her the glass and went over to the TV.

  ‘Why am I here?’ Ylva asked.

  ‘I think you know.’

  Ylva turned round and tried to pull her left hand out of the handcuff.

  ‘What do you think of the picture?’

  The man pointed to the TV screen.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Ylva said.

  ‘A bit grainy, but it’s on maximum zoom. You might not appreciate it now, but just wait a few days, a week. It’ll be different then. I bet you’ll be setting your watch by it. Just sitting there, staring, without being able to do anything. But that isn’t a problem for you, is it? To just stand by and do nothing, I mean.’

  Ylva looked at him, not moving.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  The man struck her across the face with the back of his hand. It was sudden and completely without warning. Ylva’s cheek burned, but it was more her surprise at the violence than actual pain that made her gasp.

  ‘Don’t play stupid,’ the man said. ‘We know exactly what happened. Morgan told us. Confessed on his deathbed. In great detail. We’d blamed ourselves until that day. And in fact it was you lot. The whole time, it was you.’

  Ylva was shaking. Her eyes were warm and she blinked furiously. Her lower lip trembled.

  ‘Do you think it hasn’t haunted me?’ she said feebly. ‘A day doesn’t go by without me—’

  ‘It haunts you?’

  The woman had come in through the door.

  ‘It haunts … you?’ she repeated as she walked over to the bed and stared down at Ylva, who automatically cowered.

  When she eventually looked up, it was with pleading eyes.

  ‘If I could change one thing in my life,’ she tried, ‘just one …’

  ‘Morgan only had a few days left,’ the man said. ‘That made me so angry. That he got away with it so lightly. I suppose you’ve read about Anders?’

  Ylva didn’t understand.

  ‘The hammer murder in Fjällgatan,’ the man said. ‘No? Well, I guess it’s easy to exaggerate your own importance when you’re part of something. But it got its own tag: “the hammer murder”. The papers really went to town on it.’

  Mike and Ylva had met at work. Naturally. That was where people usually met, in a sober state and with a function to fulfil. Mike had just started at the pharmaceutical company in Stockholm. Ylva worked in the marketing department and had been asked to interview him for the company’s internal magazine.

  Neither of them fell head over heels, but they were attracted to each other, and had a good time together. Mike’s childhood had bee
n happy compared to Ylva’s. Unlike him, she’d never met her biological father, and her mother was a heavy drug user. When she was six, Ylva was placed with foster parents and, following some very stormy years in her teens, she decided to leave home. She hadn’t been in touch with them since.

  Mike wanted to explore the Stockholm archipelago that his dad had always spoken about with such enthusiasm, so he bought a six-metre sailing boat and they spent the next three summers on it. Mike read the navigation charts. Ylva held the rudder. They had sex in every natural harbour between Furusund and Nynäshamn.

  When Ylva got pregnant, they promised each other that, no matter what, things would be just the same as before. Nothing would stop them, certainly not a small child that they could easily take with them.

  By the time Sanna was six months old, the boat had been sold and the money invested in a flat.

  A year later, Mike was offered a better job in his home town and, to his mother’s delight, moved down to Skåne with his family.

  Having a small child meant change, a significant transition to a new phase in life. From public transport to a car, from evenings out to dinners with friends, from a mattress on the floor to a double bed and no time to lie in it. The porn films that they’d enjoyed so much were cleared out after Ylva, half asleep, had helped Sanna, then three, to put in a DVD and instead of Gummi Bear cartoons, they ended up in the middle of a blow job.

  Ylva had lurched forward and turned off the TV.

  ‘What was that?’ she’d asked, embarrassed.

  ‘Ice-cream!’ Sanna suggested, an obvious association.

  It was another life, very different from the summers on the sailing boat. But it was a good life.

  8

  ‘No, no, no, it’s Morgan who’s dead,’ Jörgen Petersson said. ‘I remember because I was ashamed of how glad I felt when I read the notice. Cancer of the pancreas, dead within a couple of months.’

  Calle Collin nodded.

  ‘Quite possibly,’ he said, ‘but Anders is dead now, as well.’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘He was murdered.’

  ‘Cool.’

  ‘No, I’m serious. The hammer murder up at Fjällgatan. The papers were full of it. That was Anders.’

  ‘The hammer murder?’ Jörgen repeated, while he searched his memory in vain.

  Calle nodded.

  ‘Never heard about it,’ Jörgen said. ‘When did it happen?’

  ‘About six months ago.’

  ‘You mean murdered, as in killed on purpose?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who by?’

  Calle shrugged. ‘Don’t think it’s been solved.’

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’

  ‘I didn’t know it was him until a few days ago.’

  ‘Was it a fight or something like that?’

  ‘No idea.’

  Jörgen was silent for a moment. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Jörgen let out a long breath. ‘I can’t say that I’m sorry.’

  Calle turned his face away and held a hand up to his friend. ‘That’s pushing it.’

  Jörgen took a drink of beer and then put the glass down.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘But you’ve got to admit, it couldn’t have happened to a bigger bastard.’

  ‘You don’t know that,’ Calle said. ‘People change.’

  ‘Do they?’

  Calle didn’t answer. Jörgen looked at the class photograph, nodded to himself.

  ‘Morgan and Anders, dead,’ he said. ‘Then there’s only Johan and Ylva left. The Gang of Four reduced to a dynamic duo.’

  ‘The Gang of Four?’ Calle snorted. ‘Johan lives in Africa,’ he continued.

  ‘Africa?’ Jörgen exclaimed. ‘What’s he doing there?’

  ‘What the fuck do I know? What do Westerners do in the Third World? No doubt he’s wandering around in weird clothes and half-cut most of the time.’

  ‘Sounds just like the archipelago,’ Jörgen said. ‘What does he do?’

  Calle leaned back in his chair.

  ‘How should I know? I haven’t seen him in twenty years. What’s with the obsession? Do you really go around thinking about them? Your old tormentors.’

  Jörgen didn’t look happy.

  ‘When I opened the yearbook it was like going back in time,’ he said.

  ‘You wanted to wave your bank book under their noses?’

  ‘At least a balance statement from the cashpoint. I thought I might just happen to stand in front of them in the queue and leave my receipt in the machine. What d’you reckon?’

  Calle Collin shook his head and smiled.

  ‘Do you understand the extent of your illness?’

  ‘Everyone else is invited to class parties and reunions all the time, but not us,’ Jörgen said.

  ‘And I’m bloody grateful for it,’ Calle retorted. ‘And you should be too. Didn’t you see that film, The Reunion? The same shit over and over again, everyone reverts back to their old roles. It doesn’t matter whether you’ve done time or earned your first billion.’

  ‘I thought it was done automatically with some kind of database,’ Jörgen said, in a distant voice.

  ‘What?’ Calle asked, without any real interest.

  ‘The invitations,’ Jörgen replied, ‘to class reunions.’

  Calle sighed loudly, finished his beer and pointed at Jörgen’s half-full glass. He nodded. Calle got up and went to the bar. Jörgen pulled the yearbook over and studied the class photo again. They were so young in the picture. But he still wanted to hold them to account, each of them, for all the shit they’d put him through. In Jörgen’s eyes, there was no time limit. Even though there were plenty who’d had it worse.

  Calle put the two beers on the table and sat down.

  ‘You’re completely fixated,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Haven’t you got more important things to think about?’

  Jörgen shrugged. ‘It’s not that, it’s just …’

  ‘Just what?’

  ‘I don’t know. It would just be so cool to know what’s happened to them all.’

  ‘Because you’re a big cheese now?’ Calle said.

  ‘No, not at all.’

  Jörgen pretended to be insulted. Calle sent him a cynical look.

  ‘Well, maybe,’ Jörgen said, eventually. ‘But is that so strange? Look at me.’ He tapped the yearbook with his finger. ‘I don’t exist.’

  Calle scrutinised his friend for a long time. He didn’t smile.

  ‘What?’ Jörgen asked.

  ‘I don’t think it’s very nice.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘What you’re doing,’ Calle said. ‘Look at me: unmarried, no children, a reporter for a weekly. I do saccharine interviews with washed-up TV celebrities and village eccentrics, write racy short stories about young women at their peak, twenty-seven years old. Short stories that are read by women who are seventy-two. Same numbers, just inverted. I have no ambitions, no prospects. My only luxury in life is ice-cream in summer, a beer in the pub and sometimes, when the urge takes me, a trip to the cinema in the middle of the week.’

  ‘And you’re complaining?’ Jörgen said.

  9

  Breaking-in violence

  Nearly all women who are forced into prostitution give evidence of breaking-in violence and rape by their pimp. Violence is used to establish a clear power structure, and the perpetrator effectively breaks down the victim’s initial resistance. Anyone who has been subjected to violence or threats of violence knows what the long-term psychological consequences of this are. Violence is the clearest expression of power.

  The woman released the handcuff that kept Ylva’s left hand locked to the head of the bed. Ylva massaged her wrist and pulled up her knees.

  The man and the woman stood on either side of the bed. Ylva didn’t know who to look at.

  ‘Listen,’ she tried, ‘we need to …’r />
  The woman leaned forward with feigned interest.

  ‘Need to what?’

  ‘Talk,’ Ylva said, and turned to the man with pleading eyes.

  He had his hand down his trousers. What was he doing?

  Ylva looked at the woman, who was smiling at her.

  ‘Yes, talk, certainly. You can talk and we can listen. Sit here and listen to what you’ve got to say, try to understand. That’s certainly one way of doing it.’

  The man played with his penis, got an erection.

  ‘Give me your hands,’ the woman said to Ylva.

  The man undid his trousers and stepped out of them, pulled down his pants. His hard-on was visible under his shirt.

  ‘Your hands,’ the woman repeated.

  Ylva threw herself off the bed, in the direction of the locked door. The man quickly caught up with her. He grabbed hold of her arm, spun her round and hit her across the cheek again with his open hand. He twisted her arm up behind her back and pushed her in front of him over to the bed.

  Ylva kicked and screamed, which only seemed to make the couple more determined. The woman pulled Ylva’s jeans down to her knees. The man shoved her across the bed. The woman went round to the other side and yanked Ylva’s head up by the hair.

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ Ylva cried.

  ‘No,’ the woman said. ‘You didn’t.’

  Just then, Ylva felt the man force himself into her.

  Her eyes smarted with the pain and her vision blurred. But still she could see the woman smiling at her.

  ‘When’s Mummy coming home?’

  ‘I don’t know, sweetheart. She said she might go out with some people from work.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘She didn’t know for sure.’

  ‘She’s always out.’

  ‘No, sweetheart, she’s not.’

  ‘Always, all the time,’ Sanna said, and flounced off to the sitting room and the TV.

  She stopped in the doorway and turned round.

  ‘What’s for supper?’

  ‘Spaghetti and mince.’

  ‘Red?’