'Hi, it's me,' he said.
He heard a faint sigh at the other end of the line. 'What do you want?'
Anders dragged his hand through his hair a couple of times, rubbed at his scalp. 'I have to ask you something. I have to say something. Maja wasn't horrible, was she?'
There was no reply, and Anders scratched at his scalp so hard that he drew blood.
'That's what they're saying,' he went on. 'That's what they think. But you and I…we know that's not true, don't we?'
With every second that passed without a word from Cecilia, something was growing inside his head, something that was so big and hurt so much that he could have ripped off his entire skull.
'Anders,' said Cecilia at last. 'Afterwards…you turned her into something else. Something different from what she was.'
Anders' voice sank to a whisper. 'What are you saying? She was wonderful. She was just…wonderful.'
'Yes, she was. That too. But-'
'I never thought anything else. I thought she was terrific. All the time.'
Cecilia cleared her throat, and when she spoke again there was a sharp impatience in her voice. 'If that's the way you want it. But that's not the way it was, Anders.'
'How was it, then? I always thought she was…the best you could imagine.'
'You made that up afterwards. You couldn't cope with her. You once joked about swapping her for-'
Anders slammed the phone down. It was dark outside the window now. He was so cold he was shaking. He sank to his knees and crawled to the bathroom, where he sat down with his back to the radiator again, staring into the washbasin and gnawing on his lips until there was a metallic taste in his mouth.
His hands lay loosely, the backs resting on the floor. There was a faint smell of piss and his mouth was sticky after a day without any liquid apart from wine and wormwood. He was a dried-up little nothing, the shrivelled remains of something that had perhaps not even existed.
'I am nothing.'
He said it out loud to himself in the darkness and there was consolation in those words, so he said them again, 'I am nothing.'
The fact that his life had been shit for the past few years wasn't exactly news. He knew that. But at least he had believed he had his memories of a life lived in the light, those precious years together with Cecilia and Maja.
But that wasn't true either. Not even that.
He sniggered. He sniggered a little more. Then he lay down flat on his stomach and licked the floor around the toilet, carried on up the pedestal. It tasted salty. Odd hairs stuck to his tongue, but he went on licking. He cleaned along the edges, licked off the coating on the seat and finished off by swallowing the gooey mess that had gathered in his mouth.
So. That was that. So.
He hauled himself to his feet, took a couple of deep breaths and said it again, 'I am nothing.'
There, he'd said it. All done. On steadier legs he went and sat down at the kitchen table again, looked over at Gåvasten which had begun to send its signals out into the night. He was floating on a sea in a state of dead calm. No waves of expectation or false memories obscured his view.
You have left me.
Yes. He had not been able to put his finger on the feeling when it was there, but now it had left him he felt its absence. Maja was no longer within him. He had driven her out. She had left him.
Nothing.
He sat for half an hour with his head resting on his arms, chilled to the bone as he accepted the way things had been. Maja had been dreadful. He had often wished they had never had her. He had said it out loud several times: that he wished she would just disappear. That they could swap her for a dog, a well-behaved dog.
I wanted her to disappear. And she disappeared.
She wept and screamed and kicked as soon as she didn't get her own way. She immediately smashed things that didn't behave in the way she wanted. She had no boundaries. They didn't dare let her watch children's programs after she threw a vase at the screen when a cartoon character said something stupid. How many hours had they spent sweeping up beads after Maja had tipped them on the floor, how many hours dealing with ripped-up drawing pads and comics?
That was the way it was. That was the way it had been. Like having a monster in the house, you had to be wary of every step, constantly on the alert to avoid provoking its fury. They had been to the clinic, they had seen a child psychiatrist, but nothing helped. Their only hope was that it would pass as she got older.
Anders' teeth were chattering, and he pulled the blanket more tightly around him.
This was the reason behind his enormous burden of guilt, the one he had tried to get rid of by drinking, then managed to suppress with patient effort: the fact that it was all his fault. He had wished she would disappear, simply disappear, and that was exactly what had happened. He had made it happen.
'All parents blame themselves when something happens to their children,' the family therapist had said when Cecilia forced him to go along with her.
No doubt that was true. But presumably those parents were able to arrive eventually at the conclusion that it wasn't their fault their child had been run over, developed cancer or got lost in the woods. At least they hadn't wished for it to happen. And if they had wished for it to happen, then at least their child had disappeared in a natural way, insofar as such a thing exists.
Maja had ceased to exist as if she had never been there, as if she had been…wished away. That couldn't happen, and therefore the explanation that Anders had wished her away was just as reasonable as any other, and that was the one he was sticking to. Whichever way he looked at it, he always came to the same conclusion: he had killed his own child.
It was only when Cecilia had left him and he had drunk himself into oblivion that a last glimmer of hope had appeared in the darkness: he began reshaping his memories. Through drunken days and nights he crafted a new past. One where Maja had been wonderful all the time and he had just loved her, pure and simple.
He had never had a bad thought about her, and therefore her disappearance was incomprehensible. It was a great tragedy that had
nothing to do with him, he who had loved his daughter more than anything else in the world.
That's how his past had looked. Until now.
Anders gave a start as the telephone rang. He couldn't cope with answering it, and after six signals it fell silent once more. He couldn't talk to anyone. He didn't exist, he was nothing.
He rested his head in his hands again and listed to the emptiness. A new thought occurred to him.
So if I wanted to get rid of her…why was it so terrible when she disappeared? I mean, I should have been…pleased. In the end. What I wished for happened.
He got up from his chair. His stiff, frozen knees creaked as he took a turn around the floor.
The answer was obvious: deep down, right down inside he had never wanted that to happen. However difficult she was there were better times, good times. And they had started to become more frequent, last for longer. The change they had hoped for was on the way. That last day, the trip to Gåvasten was an example. She had almost behaved like a normal child for several hours.
And he had loved that child, that questioning, intense, living child, he had been prepared to wait for her through the hysterical outbursts and the smashed possessions. Things had been heading in the right direction. Then she disappeared, and he could remember only his bad thoughts, until it tipped over in the opposite direction.
I never knew her.
No. As he stood here now in the middle of the kitchen floor with the blanket around him, he realised the heart of the matter could In- expressed in those terms: he had never known who Maja was. There had been too much wheeling and dealing. If children can be horrible, was Maja horrible, really? He had no idea. He didn't know her.