'Oscarsson's an arsehole! He's fucking lost it. Why won't that motherfucker believe me? I said I won't run! I told him at Aspsås!'
Lund was shouting through the hatch, then backed away only to throw himself against the windowless wall. The chains of his restraint thumped against the metal side of the van, making Åke momentarily think he'd hit something, turn to look for another vehicle that wasn't there.
'I fucking told him, you bastards! So you didn't know? OK, here's another deal. If you don't get this lot of chain- mail off me, I'll be away. Get that, cunts? I'll walk. Understood?'
Åke tried to meet his eyes. He adjusted the mirror to find Lund. He sensed the hatred welling up; he had to hit him, that scum had gone too far, had just said 'cunt' once too often.
Thirty-two years. A job a job a job. But he couldn't hack it any more. Not today. And sooner or later it would all go to hell, whatever.
He ripped off the seatbelt, opened the door. Ulrik realised what was up, but didn't have time to act. Åke was going to beat the shit out of the nonce. Lund would get it harder than any of them ever had. Not that Ulrik minded. He stayed where he was, smiling to himself.
The town was never more silent than a few minutes past four in the morning. After the last customers had left Hörnans Bar to make their way noisily from the harbour along the Promenade towards the old bridge to Toster Island, there was this quiet space, until the newspaper boys delivering the Strängrtäs Gazette fanned out to sprint along Stor Street, opening porch doors and letterboxes.
Fredrik Steffansson knew it all, he hadn't slept through the night for ages. He kept the window open, so he could lie in bed and listen to the little town falling asleep and waking again, to the movements of people he mostly knew, or at least recognised. That's how it is when your world is small-scale. Everything crowds in on you. He had lived here almost all his life. Sure, he had read a lot of books by the right people and gone off to live in Stockholm's South End, studying comparative religion at the university. Then he had worked in a kibbutz in northern Israel, a few miles from the Lebanese border. But once all that was over and done with, he returned to Strängnäs and the people he knew, or at least recognised. He'd never truly got away, never left growing up here behind him. His memories and his lasting sadness at the loss of Frans tied him to this town. It was here he had met Agnes. He had fallen madly in love with her, she was so sophisticated, exclusively dressed in black, always searching for something. They started living together, but had been about to part when Marie arrived and made them rediscover each other, so that, for almost a year, the three of them were a family. Then Fredrik and Agnes separated for ever, not as enemies, but they spoke only when Marie was to be delivered or collected. She had to travel from one city to another, because Agnes had moved to Stockholm, living among her beautiful friends, where she really belonged.
Someone was walking down there in the street. He checked the time. Quarter to five. Bloody nights. If only he could think of something that made sense, his next piece of writing, just the next two pages, but no, it seemed impossible. He couldn't think at all, the empty time passed as he listened to what seeped in through the window, taking note of when doors closed and cars started. Meaningless accountancy. He had hardly any energy left for writing. When he had delivered Marie to nursery school and settled down at his computer with the day stretching ahead of him, the hours without sleep attacked, tiredness engulfed him. Three chapters in two months was simply disastrous, his powerful publisher wouldn't put up with it and was already sending out feelers to find out what was up.
A truck. That sounded like that truck. But it usually didn't run before half past five.
Such a thin partition to Marie's room. He could hear her. She was snoring. How come little children snore like fat old men? Fragile five-year-olds with piping voices, as cute as anything? He used to think it was just Marie, but whenever David slept over they made twice as much noise, filling the silences between each other's breaths.
It wasn't a truck. A bus, that was it.
He turned away from the window. Micaela slept in the nude, blanket and sheet bundled up at her feet as always.
She was just twenty-four, so young. She made him feel loved, often randy, and, at times, so old. It would hit him suddenly, often when they were talking about music or books or films. One of them would make a remark about a composition, or someone's writing, or a play, and it would become obvious that she was young and he was middle-aged. Sixteen years is a long time in the life of guitar solos and film dialogue; they age and fade away and get replaced.
She was lying on her stomach, her face turned towards him. He caressed her cheek, planted a light kiss on a buttock. He liked her very much. Was he in love? He couldn't bear the effort of working it out. He liked that she was there, next to him, that she agreed to share his hours, for he detested being lonely, it was pointless, like suffocating; surely solitude was a kind of death. He moved his hand from her cheek to stroke her back. She stirred. Why did she lie there, next to an older man with a child, a man who wasn't that good-looking, not ugly but certainly not handsome, and not well off, and, arguably, not even fun to be with? Why had she chosen to spend her nights with him, she who was so beautiful, so young and had so many more hours left to live? He kissed her again, this time on her hip.
'Are you still awake?'
'I'm sorry. Did I wake you?'
'I don't know. What about you, haven't you been asleep?'
'You know what I'm like.'
She pulled him close, her naked body against his, sleepily warm, awake but not quite.
'You must sleep, my old darling.' 'Old?'
'You can't cope if you don't sleep. You know that. Come on. Sleep.'
She looked at him, kissed him, held him.
'I was thinking about Frans.'
'Fredrik, not now.'
'I do think about him. I want to think about him, I'm listening to Marie next door and I'm thinking about how Frans too was a child when he was beaten, when he watched me being beaten. When he caught the train to Stockholm.'
'Close your eyes.'
'Why should anyone beat a child?'
'If you keep your eyes closed for long enough you go to sleep. That's how it works.'
'Why should anyone beat a child, who will grow up and learn to understand and judge the person who's been beating it? At least, judge the rights and wrongs of that beaten child.'
She pushed at him to turn him on his side with his back towards her, then moved in close behind him, twisting into him until they were like two boughs of a tree.
'Why keep hitting a child, who will construe the beatings as Daddy's duty and look to its own failings for the reason. I'm not good enough, not tough enough. The child will tell itself that it's his or her own fault, partly at least. Christ almighty, I was into that kind of crap myself. I forced myself to believe it, not to feel violated and abandoned.'
Micaela slept. Her breathing was slow and regular against the back of his neck, so close that the skin became damp. Through the window came the sounds of another bus. It stopped outside, reversed, stopped again, reversed. Perhaps the same one as yesterday, a large coach.
Lennart Oscarsson carried a secret. He wasn't alone in this, but felt as if he were. The pain of it rode him, curled up on his right shoulder, slept inside his chest, occupied all the space inside his stomach. Every evening he decided to let it out the following morning. Once he had set it free, he could sit back quietly, contemplating days without a secret for company stretching out ahead.
He didn't have the strength, couldn't do it. He was screaming, but nobody listened. Maybe to scream properly you actually had to open your mouth?
He did the same things every morning. Sat in the kitchen at their round pine table, spooning yoghurt into his face. Karin was always there at his side. She was his life, this beautiful woman, whom he had loved beyond reason ever since he'd met her for the first time, sixteen years ago. She drank her usual coffee with hot milk, ate rye bread and butter, read the arts pages in the morning paper.