Then that’s it, I’ll have nothing left, she thought, fighting to keep down the rising wave of panic that was threatening to overwhelm her.
The café owner was a kindly man who served coffee on the house once you were at your computer. She worked fast and efficiently. Found the telephone numbers of a handful of people she trusted and noted them down. Went to the hotmail homepage and opened a new email account. On consideration she decided not to use her own name in her new email address and opted for a more cryptic pseudonym. Her fingers moved nimbly over the keyboard, writing a brief, concise email to her father. She sent it to both of his email addresses, the private one and the church one. She felt ambivalent about contacting the friend who had not got back to her. Was it a mistake to discount him at this point? The thoughts swarmed like eager wasps in her tired head. She wrote him a few words:
Need urgent help. Contact Swedish Embassy in Bangkok and ask to fax them my personal ID and a print-out of my passport record.
When she had finished her emails, she felt an impulse that she could not explain when she looked back. She went to the website of one of the Swedish evening papers. Maybe to feel closer to her own country for a moment, maybe to feel less like a fugitive.
But she felt neither of those things, because when the page came up it told her that her parents had been found shot dead three days before, and that the police could not discount the theory that they had been killed by someone else. Mechanically, convinced that nothing she was reading could be true, she clicked her way through various articles. ‘Possible suicide’, ‘history of mental problems’, ‘devastated by daughter’s death’. Her brain stopped working. She quickly switched to the homepage of another newspaper. And then another. Ragnar Vinterman was quoted in several of the pieces. He was dismayed and upset, said the Church had lost one of its leading figures.
The scream trying to find its way out got stuck somewhere in her throat, refused to leave her body. But she felt as if she were suffocating, and the headlines smashed into her like the front of a truck that had failed to stop at the lights and ploughed across the carriageway to crash head-on into a much smaller vehicle. An all-pervading sense of horror made her shiver with cold despite the heat.
Look after me, she entreated in silent desperation. Deliver me from this nightmare.
Disconnected words came to her, forming prayers she had said with her parents as a child, making her want to get down on her knees by the computer.
‘Don’t cry,’ she whispered to herself, feeling her cheeks flaming and her eyes misting. ‘Oh God, don’t start crying or you’ll never stop.’
Her acute need to breathe drove her out into the street to inhale the intolerable, overheated city air.
She was back in the café a minute later. Sat down at the computer. The café owner looked uneasy but did not say anything. She read two more articles. ‘Jakob Ahlbin is said to have been told of his daughter’s death at the weekend…’ She shook her head. Impossible. Things like this just didn’t happen. Losing your entire family in one go.
On trembling legs she went over to the café owner and asked to borrow a telephone. At once. Emergency. Please hurry. He passed the receiver to her across the bar and insisted on helping her make the call.
She gave him the number, one digit at a time. The number she had not rung for so long but would still never forget.
Sister, sister dearest…
It rang and rang, and no one answered. Then the answering machine message cut in, the voice that reminded her of everything that felt so incredibly distant right now. And that was it. The tears flowed. Among all the thoughts swirling around in her head, there was only one that passed her by. The one that told her she had not read the newspaper properly, not grasped who was supposed to have died. When the beep went and she had to leave her message, she was sobbing.
‘Oh please, please answer if you can hear this.’
SATURDAY 1 MARCH 2008
STOCKHOLM
The realisation that age was creeping up on him came with the night and woke him early. He had never been pursued by thoughts like that before, so he had no idea how to deal with them. It started when his wife pointed out that the lines on his brow had deepened into furrows. And that his grey hairs were getting whiter. A glance in the mirror confirmed her judgement. The ageing process was accelerating. And ageing was accompanied by fear.
He had always been very sure of himself. Sure about everything. First about where his studies were leading him. Then his choice of career. And then his choice of wife. Or had she chosen him? They still bickered about it good-naturedly when things were going well between them. But that was increasingly rarely.
Thinking about his wife temporarily banished his worry about getting old. Maybe that said something about the scale of his anxiety about their marital problems. They had met around midsummer, just before they both turned twenty. Two young, ambitious people with their lives ahead of them, imagining they shared everything. His interests were hers, and her values were his. They had a solid platform to stand on. He reminded himself of that over the years, when he could not think of a single rational reason for his choice of companion in life.
Although their relationship had hit the rocks, they still occasionally laughed out loud together. But the boundary between laughter and tears was a fragile one and sent them into silence again. And then they were back to square one.
The problems first started around the time he got to know his father-in-law. Or maybe it was only then that he really got to know his own wife properly. Either way, the conclusion was the same: he should never have accepted that blessed loan. Never.
For although in their youth they felt they had so much in common, there were naturally some things on which they could not agree. And very often, as in this case, it was to do with money. Or his lack of it, and his wife’s demand to live in accordance with her station in life and be provided for by her husband, even though she planned to go out to work. Money was something he’d never had, or indeed missed. Not when he was a child growing up, nor as a young man. But then it seemed as though lack of money was going to be his misfortune and the woman he thought he loved would choose someone else.
Father-in-law, however, was well aware both of his daughter’s sense of priorities and of his son-in-law’s financial embarrassment and proposed a simple solution to a major dilemma: his son-in-law could borrow money to buy a house and that would sort everything out.
It sounded a great idea. The money was discreetly transferred to his account, and, equally unobtrusively, a repayment schedule drawn up. Not a word was said to the bride. It turned out that in signing the promissory note, he was also mortgaging his whole life. The promissory note was accompanied by a strict prenuptual agreement. When love faded and the first crisis was a reality, his father-in-law had a very serious conversation with him. There could be no question of divorce. If there were, he would immediately have to repay his loan, and would also not be entitled to his share of the property afterwards. When he said he was prepared to accept that, his father-in-law fired the salvo he turned out to have had ready from the outset.
‘I know your secret,’ he said.
‘I haven’t any.’
A single word:
‘Josefine.’
And that was the end of the discussion.
He gave a deep inward sigh. Why did all these wretched thoughts occur to him in the night? At the hour when any human creature had to let slip poorly hidden thoughts if they were to sleep soundly.
He looked at the woman asleep at his side, as if she were his wife. But she was not. Not while he still clung to his old fears. But she was carrying his child, and for that reason he would do everything right. Or at least as right as he could. Love was already there and it almost choked him to think of how much he loved her, and for how long he had done so, yet how rarely he had let her know it. As if he had been afraid it would all shatter if he expressed how much she meant to him. And if they had not met and things had not gone the way they did, he would never have endured it. That much was perfectly plain to him.