At the weekly planning meeting, after the menus and cleaning rota had been discussed, he put up his hand and suggested a little excursion into the forest, a joint outing for the children in Lynx and Brown Bear. He also suggested a date: the Wednesday of the following week, when he knew that he and Sigrid would be on duty. He looked at her encouragingly across the table. ‘Shall we sort it out, Sigrid — you and me? Make packed lunches and take the children out for a couple of hours?’
She smiled at him. ‘Absolutely — brilliant idea!’
He had counted on the fact that she would react positively.
And Nina, who was in charge of the nursery, nodded her agreement. ‘We need to make sure they’re all wrapped up warmly,’ she said, writing the excursion into the timetable.
Jan smiled in turn. The bunker was now clean and well equipped; almost everything was prepared. He just needed to sort out the food.
But the next day he saw William’s mother arrive at Brown Bear to pick up her son, and something trembled inside him. She didn’t look at Jan, but he thought she seemed stressed and tired. Problems at work?
The weariness made her seem more human, and for the first time this didn’t feel like just a mind game any more. For the first time, Jan hesitated. He would be risking his job at Lynx — but then again, it wasn’t much of a job to lose. It was a temporary post, and he had less than two months left.
What was worse was the thought that he could harm a little boy, and he spent a lot of time brooding over that in the days leading up to the excursion. He made the final preparations up in the forest: he left the metal door of the bunker and the iron gate in the ravine wide open, and put up arrows made of red material, like a kind of paperchase along the hillside.
The bunker was going to feel like a hotel room — clean and cosy — and full of food and drink and toys. And lots and lots of sweets.
13
‘Jan! Jan!’ The children shout happily. ‘Over here, Jan!’
Jan really likes the children at the Dell, and they have accepted him completely. Everything feels fine.
His first late shift starts at one o’clock on Wednesday afternoon and ends at ten in the evening. It almost feels like a practice for the night shift, when he will be alone with the three children who are staying at the pre-school all the time at the moment: Leo, Matilda and Mira.
Andreas and the children are out in the playground when Jan arrives. The temperature is only six degrees today, and Andreas has a thick blue woollen scarf wound around his neck.
‘Hi there!’ He is standing there with his hands pushed down into the pockets of his jeans, steady as a rock in the autumn wind.
‘Everything OK?’ says Jan.
‘Absolutely fine,’ says Andreas. ‘We’ve been outside most of the time.’
They let the children play for another fifteen minutes or so, then they go inside where it’s warm and hand out the lunch boxes which have been prepared over in the hospital kitchen.
Andreas stays on for an extra half-hour, but Jan doesn’t want to ask why. Perhaps he’s following orders from Marie-Louise; has she asked him to keep an eye on Jan?
Eventually Andreas leaves; the sun is low on the horizon. Jan is now solely responsible for the Dell.
But everything will be fine; he will take good care of the children.
First of all he gathers them together in the playroom. ‘What would you like to do?’
‘Play!’ says Mira.
‘And what would you like to play?’
‘Safari parks!’ Matilda shouts, pointing. ‘Like over there!’
Jan doesn’t understand until he grasps that she is pointing at the window and the fence outside. ‘That’s not a safari park,’ he says.
‘Oh yes it is!’ Matilda says firmly.
She doesn’t seem to connect her visits to the hospital with the high fence, and Jan decides not to tell her that there is a link.
The most important duties during the evening shift are to serve the evening meal, make sure the children brush their teeth, and put them to bed. So Jan makes cheese sandwiches for Matilda, Leo and Mira, gets out their pyjamas and asks them to get changed. It is pitch dark outside by now; the time is half past seven. All three children are quite tired, and they scramble into their little beds in the snuggle room without protest. He reads them a bedtime story about a hippopotamus who changes places with an ordinary man and finds himself looking after the man’s little girl, then Jan gets to his feet. ‘Goodnight everyone... See you in the morning.’
He can hear suppressed giggles once he has switched off the light. He waits for a moment, wondering whether to say something, but soon everything goes quiet.
Another evening duty is to air the building, so at eight o’clock he gently closes the door of the children’s bedroom and opens the other windows wide, letting the cold evening air rush in.
Jan can hear music coming from outside, but it is not the thump of a disco beat from some party — rather the gentle, slightly melancholy sound of an old Swedish pop classic. It is coming through the window at the back of the pre-school, and when he looks out he can see a glowing dot in the shadows down below St Patricia’s. The dot is moving up and down — someone is standing outside the hospital, smoking and listening to the radio.
The hospital is not full of bellowing lunatics, Dr Högsmed had said. The patients are often calm and completely capable of interaction.
Is the smoker a patient or a nurse? Jan can’t tell in the darkness.
He closes the windows. What can he do now? He goes into the playroom to have a look through the book boxes. Josefine had taken The Animal Lady from the middle of the box on the left; Jan kneels down beside it.
The Animal Lady has provided him with a task. This morning he completed the drawings on three more pages. When it is finished he will put it back in the box — but he wonders if there are any more handmade books in there.
Slowly he goes through each box, past Pippi Longstocking and Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Right at the back he finds more thin books that look handmade; there is no author’s name on them. Jan pulls out three and reads the titles: The Princess with a Hundred Hands, The Witch Who Was Poorly and Viveca’s House of Stone.
He slowly turns the pages in each book, one by one, and sees that these too are handwritten, illustrated here and there with pencil sketches. Just like The Animal Lady, all of them seem to be sad tales about lonely people. The Princess with a Hundred Hands is about Princess Blanka, whose palace has sunk down into a bog. Blanka has managed to reach safety in one of the towers, but she has no control over anything except the hands of other people; she has to get them to do things for her.
The main character in The Witch Who Was Poorly is a sorceress sitting in her cottage deep in the forest, no longer able to cast her spells.
And the third book is about an old woman who wakes up alone in a big, dusty house, with no memory of how she got there.
Jan closes the books and puts them in his bag.
An hour later Marie-Louise arrives.