The last time he was here there was a light on, but now the room is in darkness. It is like a black cave, apart from the odd light on the electricity meter and the washing machines, glowing like the red eyes of animals lurking in the gloom. Fans are whirring softly in the background; the air is warm and heavy.
Jan steps inside, still clutching his map.
He is looking for a wide door, but doesn’t want to switch on the light. Or rather he does want to, but dare not. He gropes his way forward, past rows of padlocked metal cupboards and a table littered with dirty coffee cups. Then he is in a smaller room with no lights at all, and he has no choice but to use the Angel.
The beam falls on an enormous washing machine with a metal face and a round, gaping mouth in the middle. The walls are lined with long shelves containing bundles of laundry; up at the top there is a steel rail with a row of vests on coat hangers; they look like slender white angels.
Jan carries on searching, and eventually he discovers a broad, black steel door.
The door to the drying room, according to the map. A few metres to the left there is a narrower wooden door with a round knob; Jan goes over and opens it.
The rooms in the laundry have been getting smaller and smaller, and this is the smallest of them all. A storeroom with stone walls. There is an old light switch by the door, and he decides to risk it in order to save the Angel’s batteries.
A dusty bulb illuminates a windowless room full of rubbish: old wooden crates, empty soap-powder boxes, a broken coat hanger. But next to one of the shelves is exactly what Legén promised: a lift door with an iron handle. A very small door — more of a hatch, really. It is barely a metre wide and not much taller, and when Jan goes over and opens it, he realizes that this is not a lift meant for people. It is a wooden lift built many years ago to send baskets of clean laundry up to the various floors in the hospital.
There isn’t much room inside; it would be impossible to stand upright. Jan stares at the opening and hesitates. Then he stoops down and pushes his head and shoulders inside. It’s like crawling into the luggage compartment on a bus. Or into a big chest.
It is seriously claustrophobic, but still he squeezes himself inside.
Fluffy dust balls swirl away from his hands and knees; he can’t stand up, but with a little bit of effort he can move his legs and turn around.
Before Jan closes the hatch he glances down at the Angel. What will he do if one of the children wakes up and calls out to him now? But he can’t think about that; he is too close to Rami.
Fourth floor, seventh window.
He switches on the Angel’s torch. The wooden walls are pressing in on him, and his shadow is dancing on the ceiling. He sees a number of black circles in front of him. Seven buttons. They are old and cracked, they might even be made of Bakelite, and one of them is marked EMERGENCY STOP. The other six are not numbered, but he takes a chance and presses the fourth button from the right.
He hears a clunking sound somewhere above him, and slowly the lift begins to move. Upwards. The wall in front of him slides downwards as the lift shakes and rattles.
Jan is on his way up through the hospital. His destination is by no means guaranteed, but he hopes it is the fourth floor.
He closes his eyes. He doesn’t want to think about it, but the lift feels like a wooden coffin.
After more than a week in the Unit Jan started to talk about why he had jumped in the pond. Not to some psychologist, but to Rami. It was a long story, told behind the closed door of her room.
Rami was restless that evening. She jumped up on to her unmade bed, then lay down with the pillow over her face. Then she got up again, grabbed her guitar and stood right at the edge of the mattress facing the black curtains, as if she could see an audience out there in front of her.
‘I love chaos,’ she said. ‘Chaos is freedom. I want to sing in praise of insecurity... as if I’m standing on the very edge of the stage, and sometimes I just fall off.’
Jan was sitting on the floor, but said nothing.
Rami didn’t look at him, she just went on: ‘If I ever get to record an album, it will be like a suicide note. But without the suicide.’
Jan looked at the floor for a while, then said, ‘I’ve done that.’
Rami struck a chord on the guitar, fierce and dark. ‘Done what?’ she said.
‘I tried to kill myself,’ Jan said. ‘Last week.’
Rami played another chord. ‘People should die for music,’ she said. ‘A song should be so good that people want to die when they hear it.’
‘I wanted to die before I came here... And I almost managed it.’
Now it was Rami’s turn to be quiet; she seemed to be listening at last. She took a couple of steps backwards and leaned against the wall. ‘You wanted to die? For real?’
Jan nodded slowly. ‘Yes... I would have died anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They would have killed me.’
‘Who would?’
Jan held his breath and didn’t look at Rami. Talking about what had happened was difficult, even though the door was closed, even though the fence was protecting him. He felt as if Torgny Fridman were sitting on the other side of the wall, listening.
‘A gang,’ he said eventually. ‘A gang of lads at my school... They’re in the year above me and they call themselves the Gang of Four, or maybe that’s just what everybody else calls them. They rule the place — in the corridors, anyway. The teachers haven’t got a clue. They don’t do anything about it... Everybody just does whatever these lads say.’
‘But not you?’
‘I was stupid, I didn’t think,’ Jan says. ‘One day in the lunch queue, Torgny Fridman told me to move out of the way. He wanted to go in front of me, but I wouldn’t let him in... I stayed put, and in the end one of the teachers came and spoke to him and sent him right to the back of the queue. He never forgot it.’ Jan sighed. ‘From then on it was just a campaign of terror; it was war between me and Torgny. He used to have a go at me every time he saw me, either by shouting out what a worthless little shit I was, or by knocking me over.’
Jan paused.
‘So I kept away from the gang. I counted the days, and I thought I might just make it.’
Friday afternoon, a bitterly cold day in March. Jan’s last lesson today was PE, and now it’s over. It’s the end of the school week, and it’s actually been pretty quiet. No fights.
He is the last person in the boys’ changing room. He might even be the last person in the sports hall. It is a few hundred metres away from the rest of the school, and everyone else has gone. All the boys in his class waited for their friends. No one waited for Jan.
It’s OK, it’s always the same.
He picks up his flimsy towel, winds it around his waist and heads for the showers, where the dripping water echoes in the four small cubicles. He hangs up his towel and goes into the cubicle next to the pine door of the sauna.
He turns on the hot water, stands under the shower and begins to rub shower gel over his body.
‘I was just standing there in the shower; my legs were tired after PE, and my head was completely empty,’ Jan told Rami. ‘I wasn’t thinking about anything at all... Sometimes when you’re having a hot shower it’s as if you’re dreaming, you know what I mean? I might have been thinking about the weekend; I was going to be on my own at home because Mum and Dad were going away somewhere... When I finished and turned to reach for my towel, I suddenly smelled cigarette smoke in the air. And then I saw that someone was standing outside the shower. It was Torgny Fridman.’