‘I’m going to have my hands full these next few days…’ she says and glances behind her, though not in my direction. I see her face, her lips. When was the last time we kissed? I won’t ask her. Laura returns to her painting and I stand on the spot for a moment. It’s as though an icy wind is blowing through the hall. My phone rings. I have to go. For some reason, leaving feels physically challenging. But I leave all the same.
‘Bye then,’ I say.
Laura turns, though she certainly does not spin right round. Her gaze brushes across me.
‘Bye,’ she says curtly, and it sounds like the same tone of voice someone might use when leaving a supermarket.
Later that day, after the park has closed its doors, I walk around the hall and look at Laura’s paintings. I am alone. I can smell the fresh paint, and there’s a strange pain in my gut. At first, I imagine it must be caused by the strong smell of paint, but I soon realise this is not the case. The walls are beautiful, but as I look at them something starts gnawing at my insides, a new, nagging uncertainty that grows with every minute and eventually feels like the cold grip of rats’ teeth.
It is so late that the bus I would normally take to the train station has already stopped for the night. I have to walk over a kilometre to the next stop. There is no traffic. It is late, and in this part of town the last shops close at ten o’clock. That was an hour ago. The cycle path is completely empty in both directions. A narrow strip of earth separates the cycle path from the road, and as the landscape is still and deserted, it feels as though I could walk right down the middle of the road. It wouldn’t shorten my journey, and it would represent a significant risk with regard to road safety, so obviously this wouldn’t be a sensible course of action. But as has happened so often lately, strange thoughts like this fly through my mind, like darting, unknown birds: they appear out of nowhere, flap their wings once or twice, and then they are gone.
The cycle path starts to tilt downwards, and I see a worksite up ahead. An intersection and an underpass beneath the highway are under construction. A lot of earth has been dug out and moved to the side. In some places there are piles of mud, in others potholes filled with water. I am walking beneath a streetlamp, at the brightest point of its fluorescent light, when I hear it. The sound of a motor. I notice it because I hear it differently from the cars on the highway. The sound hits my ears from ever so slightly the wrong direction. I turn and see a car moving at high speed.
The car – now with only one person inside – is driving along the cycle path, and it’s heading right towards me.
A lot can happen in a few seconds.
Of course, I can’t calculate everything precisely, but I know straight away that if a vehicle weighing a thousand kilograms is travelling at a hundred kilometres an hour, it represents the same scale of risk to humans as a hammer to a mosquito. There is only enough time to move in one direction.
I leap to my right and dive behind a grassy knoll on the embankment. The knoll is in fact part of the construction site. I estimate the height of the knoll at around forty centimetres, at an angle of around forty degrees. That should be enough.
The car follows me to the embankment, its front wheel hits the knoll. The motor howls, the tyre rises up from the ground. I lie flat against the ground, as though trying to burrow my way into the earth. I feel the tyre scrape across my back as the car flies above me. My spine feels as though it might snap in two, the skin on my back as though it will be torn off. The sound is like a jet engine flying directly overhead. And right now, that’s all that matters: that the car remains over my head.
Once the car has passed me, I turn my head.
Straight away, I see something has happened to the car. The relation of the tyre to the knoll is in direct correlation to the car’s speed and mass. There’s no need for any calculations here either; the result is right in front of me.
The car jolts, then flips onto its roof and slides ahead at breakneck speed. It even seems to accelerate. The car glides like an enormous, fantastical sled – all the way to the construction site. And there it comes to a halt with such power and precision, it’s as though that’s what it was aiming for all along.
The pit fits the car almost exactly.
The roof of the car splashes down into the pit and the car comes to an abrupt halt as though held in place by a giant magnet. I get up – first onto all fours, then my knees, and finally my feet – and try to comprehend what I see. The car’s motor has stopped, the lights have gone out. Everything is just as quiet as a moment ago.
In fact, everything is like it was a moment ago.
Except that, fifty metres ahead, is a car parked upside-down, like a giant beetle flipped on its back and pushed down into a puddle.
My back is burning, both inside and out. My heart is beating so frantically that I have to swallow and force myself to breathe. For a moment, all I can do is stand on the spot until, mustering my force of will, I realise I am alive and that the present danger is over. All the while I stare at the car, unable to process what I see.
I run up to the car. It happens instinctively. My legs ache, stiff with the after-effects of the adrenaline. The closer I get to the car, the better I appreciate how perfectly the pit fits the breadth and width of the cabin. There’s a roughly twenty-five-centimetre gap on either side, and at the ends there’s even less. I approach the edge of the pit and look down. At first, I can’t quite work out what it is I see beneath the water, but then I understand.
An arm dressed in a black tracksuit with three stripes along the sleeve is shaking a fist at me.
AK is behind the wheel.
The driver’s door won’t open, obviously. The pit is deep and narrow, and it is flooding quickly. Water gushes across the sharp edges of the pit. AK is stuck inside the car, the airbag and seatbelt holding him firmly in place. He is still making protestations at me. I think he’s been doing it ever since the first time he tried to run me over.
His fist punches through the water one last time.
Then it disappears into the depths of the pit, beyond the reach of the streetlights.
I walk around the car and can’t see any other passengers; AK is alone in the BMW. Then I look around. No traffic, not a single person, just a long, wide skid mark, first on the cycle path, then through the gravel, and right at the end of the mark, like the dot above an i, is the upside-down wreckage of the car.
My back hurts so much that I’ll either have to lie down or start moving. I consider this for a moment. I don’t see how AK, or I, or anyone else would benefit from me lying down next to the pit.
I take a few deep breaths and start walking.
23
‘Kid’s broken a leg.’
Esa’s expression is pained, as though the broken leg belongs to him. He runs up to me and has to catch his breath. His legs seem to be working fine.
In my hand is a broken step from Caper Castle. I place it on the floor and follow him back into the hall. I have just arrived at work – slightly late, again – after a night of barely any sleep, and during the few fragments of sleep I managed to get, my mind was plagued with nightmarish scenarios about being chased by expensive German cars and large angry fists rising up from construction pits filled with water. My back hurts with each step, as though someone were battering it with a club again and again. But, nonetheless, today I have decided to concentrate on physical work, for two reasons. First is the hope that this might focus my thoughts. The second is more practicaclass="underline" our maintenance man Kristian is yet again standing in for Venla at the ticket office and doesn’t have time to fix the broken step.