Suddenly there was a knock on the door, and a second later it opened, before Jan even had time to answer.
A man in a grey woollen sweater looked in. Not Jörgen. This man had a beard, but his head was completely bald. ‘Hello there, Jan. Good to see you up and about.’
Jan didn’t answer.
‘My name’s Tony... I’m a psychologist here. We’re just going to check you over.’
A psychologist. That meant they were going to start digging away at him.
Tony stepped aside and a young male nurse came over to Jan with a stethoscope and hard hands. He took Jan’s blood pressure, listened to his chest, and pulled his bandages to one side to look at the sutured wounds along his wrists.
‘He seems fine,’ the nurse said over his shoulder. ‘Almost back to normal.’
‘In physical terms,’ Tony said.
‘Absolutely... You can take care of his soul.’
Neither of them spoke directly to Jan, and the nurse didn’t notice his burn marks. He stood up without another word when he had finished.
‘Will I be going home soon?’ Jan asked.
No reply. Tony had already closed the door.
Jan stopped drawing after only five frames. He lay back down on the bed and stared at the ceiling. He would be stuck in the Unit until someone let him out. Other people were making decisions for him, but he was used to that.
He stayed where he was; he had no desire to go out.
The sound of guitar music was coming through the wall. The girl in the room next door was still practising her chords, over and over again, but she was getting quicker now. And she had started to sing along.
Jan turned his head to the wall and listened. The words were in English, but he understood most of them. Rami was singing quietly about a house in New Orleans they called the Rising Sun, which had been the ruin of many a poor girl. She sang the same lines over and over again, before admitting to God that she was one of those poor girls.
The more Jan heard, the more he wanted to go next door. He didn’t just want to listen, he wanted to watch the girl singing as well.
He suddenly sat up and went over to the chair by his desk. It was made of wood with a thin seat, and he started drumming on it, keeping time with the chords of the guitar. It went pretty well and he managed to hold the beat — he had played the drums in the school orchestra. None of the boys in school had ever asked him to be in their rock band, of course, but at least he had played Swedish and German marching music for two years. It had been pretty good fun.
Jan had nothing to live for, but he was good at keeping the beat.
His drumming on the chair grew louder and louder. He was so caught up in the four-beat pattern that he didn’t notice that the guitar in the room next door had fallen silent. He didn’t stop until the door suddenly flew open.
It was the guitar girl. ‘What are you doing?’ She didn’t sound angry, just curious.
Jan froze with his hands above the chair. ‘I’m drumming.’
‘You’re a drummer?’
‘Kind of.’
The girl was still looking at him, a thoughtful expression on her face. She was tall and skinny, Jan noticed; she was pretty, but she had hardly any curves.
‘Come with me.’ She turned on her heel as if it was understood that Jan would follow her. And he did.
They went into the empty corridor and turned left; the girl opened the second door on the left-hand side, marked STOREROOM.
‘You can, like, borrow stuff from here,’ she said.
The storeroom was small but packed with shelves full of different things. There were books, table-tennis bats, and piles of board games and chess sets.
There were pens and paper and notebooks too; this must be where Jörgen had got the drawing paper from.
‘Do you write?’ the girl asked.
‘Sometimes... I draw as well.’
‘Me too,’ she said, picking up a thick black notebook. ‘There you go... Now you can keep a diary.’
‘Thanks.’
Jan had never written about himself, but he took it anyway.
There were musical instruments on a couple of the shelves, and the girl moved across to them. ‘This is where I found the Yamaha.’
‘The Yamaha?’
‘My guitar.’
Beside the shelves stood a drum kit. It was very small, just one battered bass drum and one crash cymbal, but the girl picked it up. ‘You can take this.’
She carried the drum, Jan took the cymbal and the sticks. The girl led the way back to her room. ‘Come in.’
Jan hesitated briefly, then went inside. He looked around in amazement; whereas his room was white, this one was coal-black. It looked like some kind of studio; the girl had covered the walls with huge pieces of black fabric.
She sat down on the bed with her guitar. ‘Shall we give it a go?’
‘OK.’
‘You start.’
Jan picked up the sticks and began to play. He started off with a steady four-beat tempo on the drum, tapping the crash cymbal on the first and third beats. After a while he really got into it; it sounded pretty good.
The girl was nodding her head in time with the music. She was listening — and that gave him confidence. He wasn’t used to it. The girl opened her mouth and began to sing, in the same slightly hoarse voice as when she spoke:
It was obviously the only verse she had, because she sang it twice, then fell silent. Jan stopped drumming at the same time. They looked at one another.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Shall we do it again?’
‘What’s your name?’ asked Jan.
‘Rami.’
‘Rami?’
‘Just Rami right now. Does that bother you?’
Jan shook his head. Then another question popped out before he had chance to think about it: ‘Why are you here?’
But Rami needed only half a second to consider and then answer, as if it weren’t particularly important. ‘Because my older sister and I did something... something stupid. It was mostly my sister. She took off and went to Stockholm, and she’s keeping out of the way. But I couldn’t go with her, so I ended up in here.’
‘What did you do?’
‘We tried to poison our stepfather. He’s disgusting.’
The room fell silent. Jan didn’t know what to say, but suddenly he heard someone calling his name.
‘Jan? Jan Hauger?’
He jumped, but was relieved at the interruption, and opened the door.
It was the nurse who looked like Jesus, but whose name was Jörgen.
‘Phone call, Jan.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Some friend of yours.’
Friend? Jan glanced at Rami.
She nodded. ‘We’ll carry on afterwards.’
The staffroom was at the other end of the Unit. Jörgen showed him the way, then closed the door. There was a bed, a table, a telephone.
The receiver was lying on the table; Jan picked it up. ‘Hello?’
‘Hauger? You wanker. You fucking loser...’
Jan recognized the voice. He didn’t say anything; all the air went out of his lungs.
But the voice on the other end of the phone had plenty of air. ‘So you’re alive, are you?’ it went on. ‘You should have died... we thought you were dead. You couldn’t even manage to die, could you?’
Jan was listening and sweating, just as if he were in a sauna. His hands were the worst; his palms were so wet that the receiver almost slipped out of his grasp.