He sat beside the boy for a long time and waited. But nothing happened. August just stared at the numbers with his glassy look. In the end Balder left him alone, went upstairs and drank some fizzy water, and then settled down again at the kitchen table to continue to work. But now his concentration was gone and he began absent-mindedly to flick through the latest issue of the New Scientist. After half an hour or so he went back downstairs to August, who was still sitting on his heels in the same immobile posture in which he had left him. Then Balder noticed something intriguing.
A second later he had the sense of being confronted by something totally inexplicable.
Hanna Balder was standing in the kitchen on Torsgatan smoking a filterless Prince. She had on a blue dressing gown and worn grey slippers, and although her hair was thick and beautiful and she was still attractive, she looked haggard. Her lip was swollen and the heavy make-up around her eyes was not there purely for aesthetic reasons. Hanna Balder had taken another beating.
It would be wrong to say that she was used to it. No-one gets used to that sort of abuse. But it was part of her everyday existence and she could scarcely remember the happy person she once had been. Fear had become a natural element of her personality and for some time now she had been smoking sixty cigarettes a day and taking tranquillizers.
She had known for a while that Westman regretted having been so generous to Frans. In fact it had been a mystery from the start. Westman had been relying on the money Balder sent them for August. For long periods they had been living off it and often he would make Hanna write an email full of lies about unforeseen expenses for some educational expert or remedial therapy, which obviously the funds had never gone anywhere near. That’s what made it so odd. Why had he given up all of that and let Balder take the boy away?
Deep down Hanna knew the answer. It was hubris brought on by alcohol. It was the promise of a part in a new detective series on T.V.4 which had boosted his confidence still further. But most of all it was August. Westman found the boy creepy and weird, even though to Hanna that was incomprehensible. How could anyone detest August?
He sat on the floor with his puzzles and did not bother anyone. Yet he had that strange look which was turned inwards rather than outwards, which usually made people smile and say that the boy must have a rich inner life, but which got under Westman’s skin.
“Jesus, Hanna! He’s looking straight through me,” he would burst out.
“But you say that he’s just an idiot.”
“He is an idiot, but there’s something funny about him all the same. I think he hates me.”
That was nonsense, nothing more. August did not even look at Westman or at anyone else for that matter, and he surely did not have it in him to hate anybody. The world out there disturbed him and he was happiest inside his own bubble. But Westman in his drunken ravings believed that the boy was plotting something, and that must have been the reason he let August and the money slip out of their lives. Pathetic. That at least was how Hanna had interpreted it. But now, as she stood there by the sink smoking her cigarette so furiously and nervously that she got tobacco on her tongue, she wondered if there had not been something in it after all. Maybe August did hate Westman. Maybe he did want to punish him for all the punches he had taken, and maybe... Hanna closed her eyes and bit her lip... the boy hated her too.
She had started having these feelings of self-loathing ever since, at night, she was overcome by an almost unbearable sense of longing and wondered whether she and Westman might not actually have damaged August.
It was not the fact that August had filled in the right answers to the numerical sequences. That sort of thing did not particularly impress a man like Balder. No, it was something he saw lying next to the numbers. At first sight it looked like a photograph or a painting, but it was in fact a drawing, an exact representation of the traffic light on Hornsgatan which they had passed the other evening. It was exquisitely captured, in the minutest detail, with a sort of mathematical precision.
There was a glow to it. No-one had taught August anything at all about three-dimensional drawing or how an artist works with shadow and light, yet he seemed to have a perfect mastery of the techniques. The red eye of the traffic light flashed towards them and Hornsgatan’s autumn darkness closed around it, and in the middle of the street you could see the man whom Balder had noticed and vaguely recognized. The man’s head was cut off above the eyebrows. He looked frightened or at least uncomfortable and troubled, as if August had disconcerted him, and he was walking unsteadily, though goodness knows how the boy had managed to capture that.
“My God,” Balder said. “Did you do this?”
August neither nodded nor shook his head but looked over towards the window, and Balder had the strangest feeling that his life would never be the same again.
Hanna Balder needed to do some shopping. The refrigerator was empty. Lasse could come home at any moment and he would not be happy if there was not even a beer for him. But the weather outside looked ghastly so she put it off, and instead she sat in the kitchen smoking, even though it was bad for her skin and bad in general.
She scrolled through her contacts two, three times, in the hope that a new name would come up. But of course there were only the same old people, and they were all tired of her. Against her better judgement she called Mia. Mia was her agent and once upon a time they had been best friends and dreamed of conquering the world together. These days Hanna was Mia’s guilty conscience and she had lost count of all her excuses. “It’s not easy for an actress to grow older, blah, blah.” Why not just say it straight out?: “You look worn out, Hanna. The public doesn’t love you any more.”
But Mia did not answer and that was probably just as well. The conversation would not have done either of them any good. Hanna could not help looking into August’s room just to feel that stinging sense of loss which made her realize that she had failed in her life’s most important mission — motherhood. In some perverse way she took comfort in her self-pity, and she was standing there wondering whether she shouldn’t go out and get some beer after all when the telephone rang.
It was Frans. She made a face. All day she had been tempted — but did not dare — to call him to say that she wanted August back, not just because she missed the boy, still less because she thought her son would be better off with her. It was simply in order to avoid a disaster.
Lasse wanted to get the child support again. God knows what would happen, she thought, if he were to turn up in Saltsjöbaden to claim his rights. He might even drag August out of the house, scare him out of his wits and beat Frans to a pulp. She would have to warn him. But when she picked up and tried to say that to Frans, it was impossible to get a word in edgeways. He just went on and on about some strange story which was apparently “totally fantastic and completely amazing” and all that sort of thing.
“I’m sorry, Frans, I don’t understand. What are you talking about?” she said.
“August is a savant. He’s a genius.”