The Kindness, page 43
‘It’s okay.’
‘Yes. I guess it is.’
A group of boys who have finished playing are standing by the counter, and Johan goes over to sort them out. As he takes their money and prints off their scorecards he glances at Anna, who is now sitting with both hands cupping her cheeks, like a crying child in a mass-produced ‘art’ print. She doesn’t know why she has come here, and he doesn’t know why he’s pleased that she has, but that’s the way it is. He picks up a glass, gets a bottle of Coke out of the chill cabinet and joins her again.
‘Coke?’
‘Thanks.’ Anna frowns as she concentrates on pouring the drink. She takes a sip, then says: ‘It’s just that life, everything, it all seems so, I don’t know . . .’
‘Hopeless?’
‘Wow. Yes, hopeless. I’ve never used that word, but yes. No hope. It’s as if there’s a thick fog and I can only see a metre in front of me. One day at a time, kind of.’
‘Mightn’t there be something good beyond that fog, though?’
‘There might, but I can’t see it. I’ve got nothing to hope for. Have you?’
Johan can’t say that he has hopes for his novel, since he doesn’t have the courage to do anything with it, yet it is still there like a distant, shimmering possibility. The faintest glow, a lighthouse in the fog. However, this isn’t something he can consider putting into words while sober, so he replies: ‘No. One step at a time. Until you reach your final goal – the crematorium.’
Anna lets out a bark of laughter. ‘You’re even more depressing than me!’
They sit in silence for a while. Pins are knocked down and Olle chomps on his chips. Eventually Johan says: ‘Isn’t it possible to find something? Something to give you hope?’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know, but something that will provide . . . direction. Something to build up.’
‘Like training? Education?’
‘That’s one example.’
Anna chews on a strand of her black hair, then says: ‘Direction. Yes, maybe.’
‘This is the way I think.’ Johan is venturing into dangerous territory here. ‘That my life is a story. Is it a sensible story? Believable? Are the main character’s actions consistent? Do I care about him? It creates a kind of . . . order when I think like that. As if there is a line, a progression after all.’
‘And do you like it? This story?’
Now it is Johan’s turn to snort. ‘I wouldn’t exactly rush out to buy it, but it’s what I’ve got.’
Anna nods, finishes off her Coke, then places her hands decisively on the table and gets to her feet. ‘Time I went home.’
‘What are you going to do?’
The skin beneath Anna’s eyes no longer looks thin. ‘Clean.’ She raises her index finger as if to request silence. ‘One more thing. How does it go now . . . It trembles, your childish hound that I kissed . . . ’ Johan holds up his hand and Anna gives him a high five.
6
By quarter to ten the last players have departed, and Johan leaves it to Ove to close up. Walking home along Baldersgatan, he feels unusually contented. He doesn’t even stop to spit on the Social Services’ office sign, or to piss in their flowerbeds as he usually does. He just keeps going.
Johan’s comfort zone is so strictly limited that it closely resembles a padded cell. He is very reluctant to change his familiar routines, which allow him to live in a parallel reality inside his head. Anything that comes from the outside and disturbs the balance is potentially destructive.
And yet: Anna. Ever since high school he has avoided the type of person she represents. Those who laugh too loudly, who take up too much space in a thoughtless, slobbering way, who always get too drunk. White trash, if you like. So how come he found her visit to the bowling hall so uplifting?
Maybe his unexpected closeness to her means he is taking a step away from that padded cell, venturing into the corridor or maybe even the park, an opportunity to breathe a little fresh air. The fact that he originally despised her makes the step even greater, and creates a sense of freedom that Johan has not experienced for a long time.
The clusters of rowan berries glow red in the white light of the LED street lamps on the way down the hill leading to the bus station. He runs his fingers over them and thinks autumn , and the word doesn’t mean dying and withering, but open skies, multi-coloured leaves and a nostalgia that doesn’t hurt. He is in the bright part of his thoughts.
Your childish hound that I kissed.
He cuts through the bus depot and passes the library as expressions and song lyrics bounce around in his mind. I wanna hold your hound. He turns down into Hantverkargatan and continues towards the square. When he reaches the fountain he turns right for the bridge, texting Anna as he walks:
Five grubby little fingers on a grubby little hound.
The reply comes immediately in the form of a smiley and a thumbs up. Johan has never sent a smiley in his entire life. Imagine that.
‘Hey! Hey!’
Johan has almost reached Harry’s Restaurant when he hears a voice behind him. He stops and turns around. Two guys with what Johan thinks of as Afghan haircuts are jogging towards him from the direction of the square. One points to Johan’s hand.
‘Hey, can I check out your phone?’
There is nothing remarkable about Johan’s iPhone 6s, except possibly that the screen isn’t cracked, so he says: ‘Why?’
The guy shrugs. ‘I just want to look. Give it to me.’
As he holds out his hand, his companion takes a step closer to Johan, and there is no doubt about what is going on here. The second guy places a hand on Johan’s shoulder. ‘Don’t be stupid. Give him the phone.’
Johan’s heart begins to pound, and he presses the phone to his chest as it buzzes with an incoming text. He automatically glances at the screen and sees A bird in the hound is worth two in the bush . He laughs nervously, and all he can think of is that if he loses the phone, he will also lose Anna’s number. The hand on his shoulder tightens its grip and the outstretched hand makes a give it here gesture, at the same time as its owner says: ‘Swede smashed mine. I want yours. Give.’
The hand moves from Johan’s shoulder to the back of his neck and he feels invaded, as if someone has come stomping into his padded cell in muddy boots and he hates it, but he can’t do anything to defend himself. He is about to give up the phone when a large man in a leather waistcoat, his arms covered in tattoos, emerges from the tapas bar next door.
‘What’s going on here?’ he says, folding his meaty arms over his chest.
‘Nothing,’ says the first guy, lowering his hand as the grip on Johan’s neck loosens. ‘No problem here.’
‘Looks like a bit of a problem to me,’ the man says, turning back to the bar and shouting: ‘Hey! We’ve got some apes out here nicking bananas!’
Two men of the same calibre get up from their table and head for the door. The Afghan guys exchange glances, then take to their heels. Before the bikers have reached the pavement, the Afghans are in the square, heading for the harbour.
The man waves his friends away and pats Johan on the back. ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yes,’ Johan replies tonelessly. ‘Thanks.’
‘No problem. We have to stick together, fight the invasion of the apes. Look after yourself.’
The man goes back into the bar, says something that makes his friends guffaw. Only now does Johan realise his whole body is shaking. No one has ever tried to mug him before; he has never had his integrity damaged in the way that just happened.
The phone almost slips out of his sweaty grasp. He puts it in his pocket and continues on unsteady legs. On the bridge he is struck by the thought that the Afghans might simply have run around the block, and are waiting for him at the end of Tillfällegatan. His legs feel even weaker, and he leans on the railing.
The invasion of the apes.
Johan pictures an army of men with thick black hair, cropped at the sides and long on top, pouring in across the borders, breaking into houses, looting and raping as they laugh and jabber in Arabic. He sees them waving ISIS flags, forcing the residents of Norrtälje to their knees in the main square before going around and systematically cutting each person’s throat with their long knives, while their ape-chatter rises to the clock tower, which has been transformed into a minaret.
Fear turns to rage, and Johan stares down into the coal-black waters of the river as he sees himself attacking the telephone thief with a hammer, smashing his crooked fucking teeth to bits, placing his balls in a vice and tightening it until he howls for mercy and then squish and blood spurting and spurting everywhere. The whole fucking lot of them. Bring out a hundred thousand vices, squish all the apes’ balls. That will be a hymn of praise to Allah, thank you very much.
Strengthened by his burning anger, Johan lets go of the railing and crosses the bridge. He continues along the street, so preoccupied with increasingly bloodthirsty scenes of retribution that he forgets to be afraid. The worst of his fury cools as he makes his way up Glasmästarbacken, but he is still so cross that his neck feels constricted.
When he gets home he takes a beer out of the fridge and drinks it while pacing up and down. Then he has another, but the tension in his neck refuses to go away. There is only one thing he can do.
Johan opens his computer and logs into the Roslagen group under his alias, SvenneJanne. Then he writes a piece, a long piece about what has just happened to him and how he thinks certain problems should be solved. Slowly the constriction eases. By the time he copies and posts his contribution, he is completely relaxed.
7
If there’s one song Anna loathes, it’s the one about turning that frown upside down. The fantastic thing is that it’s her mother who created this antipathy. Sometimes when Anna was particularly cross or disappointed, Sylvia would croak out those lines without for one second changing her own miserable expression.
The bit about how the mouth ought to laugh and be happy is especially unpleasant. Anna imagines a gaping mouth, laughing and singing tra-la-la while terrible deeds are being planned within the body it is attached to. Hence the reason for the fear of clowns.
So how come Anna is humming that ghastly tune as she polishes the bathroom mirror? Layer after layer of ground-in dirt is transferred to the cloth in her hand, until her reflection is of HD quality and indistinguishable from the reality. And that reflection shows an Anna who is contemplating her work with a smile of satisfaction.
She has shaken out the rugs and vacuumed. She has done all the washing up and scrubbed the draining board with Ajax. She has taken out the rubbish and wiped down all the cupboard doors. She has not tackled the oven, which is another matter entirely, but in time it too will find itself under attack. Anna has made up her mind.
It was what Johan said about direction. At the moment Anna can’t see herself embarking on some kind of training course or making a radical change to her life that will enable her to progress. What she can do, however, is clean up the crap that is clouding her vision.
Maybe it all started with that thought about men . All those idiots with their stupid grins, a plug of snuff just visible beneath the top lip, who have stood in her way when she has wanted to move. Then there’s the alcohol, the booze that has made her wobble when she could have gone in a straight line. She wants to clean up, let the fresh air in, and the apartment was the closest task to hand. She needs to accept that this is what she has, and it is as good a place as any to begin.
In a way, Anna is turning that frown upside down with every stroke of the cloth. Whether it becomes a story that anyone other than a patient in a coma would listen to is debatable, but you have to start somewhere, and even a thousand-mile journey begins with a kick up the arse.
The question of Acke and the Djup brothers will have to wait; each day has enough trouble of its own, as the Bible says. She smiles as she squirts Toilet Duck beneath the rim of the bowl. Maybe she’ll become one of those wise old buggers who simply disgorge platitudes day after day? Unlikely but not impossible.
She gives a little snort of laughter as she thinks, Five grubby little fingers on a grubby little hound. For a play on words to be funny, it has to create a funny picture. Anna’s phone rings. The grubby little dog with a gloomy expression and fingers instead of claws lingers in her mind as she goes into the living room and picks up her phone. The screen gives her two pieces of information that should be incompatible. 1: It is one o’clock in the morning. 2: The caller is Siw. She has never phoned later than eleven, so the first thing Anna says is: ‘Hi, hun – how are you?’
A shuddering sigh, then Siw replies: ‘Okay. I just can’t sleep.’
‘Is this to do with Max?’
‘No. Yes. Maybe.’
Anna curls up and makes herself comfortable on the newly vacuumed sofa. Regardless of what she has decided about her own life, she has no intention of giving up her interest in gossip and relationship problems, which ultimately are the only things that are interesting.
A few years ago she might have said: ‘Spill the beans – give me all the juicy details,’ but she made a decision when she left her friends from Rimbo. Plus, she knows it wouldn’t work on Siw, with the coyness she regards as integrity. Instead, Anna simply says: ‘Tell me. How did it go?’
‘It went well.’ A subtle change in Siw’s voice lets Anna know that she is blushing. So it went very well. Then comes the inevitable: ‘But . . .’
‘But?’
‘But I just feel . . . I mean, what function would I fulfil in his life?’
‘Function?’
‘Yes. Everything has a function, doesn’t it? Last night when we . . . did what we did, and then when we sat and talked, I felt as if . . . I had the right to be there. I was fulfilling a function. But then this morning, I’m not sure . . .’
‘So do you want to be a function? Think about Sören – you weren’t much more than functional as far as he was concerned. A melon with a hole in it would have worked just as well.’
Siw lets out a little sob. ‘Don’t say that.’
Anna bites her lip and adds cynical banter to the list of things she is going to try to refrain from. ‘Sorry – that wasn’t fair. But you know what I mean. You’ve got it all wrong. Love isn’t about functions, it’s about . . .’
Anna pauses and Siw says: ‘Go on, Anna. Tell me what love is about.’
‘I don’t fucking know, but it’s definitely not functions.’
There is a silence as Anna tries to work out if she actually has a definition of love, but all that swirls to the surface are the platitudes she isn’t yet ready to disgorge, plus the grubby little dog.
Eventually Siw says: ‘I feel . . . unhinged. Displaced. I can’t sleep. It’s as if I’m a little bit outside myself. This is not good.’
‘Do you like him?’
‘Yes, I like him a lot. But it’s as if I can’t allow myself to feel that way.’
‘Because you don’t have a function?’
‘Yes.’
‘Even though your function is pretty clear.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yes – to be the one who likes him a lot. I reckon that’s the best function you can have.’
‘Although that kind of depends on him feeling the same way.’
‘Yes, that’s the tricky bit.’
‘Goodnight. I’m going to sleep now. Or at least I’m going to try.’
‘Goodnight. You’re right about one thing, anyway.’
‘Which is?’
‘You are unhinged. Goodnight, sweetheart.’
The memory of a memory
1
I t is Max who has sent out the question on Discord, and a dozen people have turned up for the raid at Brodds sten. Better than expected at seven o’clock on a Sunday evening, when the raid boss is no longer a novelty. Max himself already has four Entei, one with almost perfect stats, so the raid is mostly about collecting points and being part of a context.
Max has never understood why Brodds sten is there. The runestone, which stands on the slope leading down to the river near the bus station, is a replica of a stone that wasn’t even there in the first place. One hundred per cent fake ancient monument, yet it is still one of the sights of Norrtälje. Maybe those responsible hope that people will forget over time, and begin to treat it as the real deal.
Twilight has fallen and the temperature has dropped. Damp veils of mist are creeping up the slope, and the mood of the group beneath the bare elm trees is not the best. The usual small talk and comparison of captures just isn’t there. People are staring at their screens with grim concentration as the raid counts down to Start.
The countdown can be exciting, particularly when it involves a new raid boss, but for the first time Max thinks it seems ominous, as if it were counting down to some kind of catastrophe. He doesn’t understand where the thought has come from, but the closer it gets to zero, the more anxious he feels.
Ne edless to say, nothing happens. Entei leaps out and the players’ respective Pokémon stand in a circle and attack. Because Entei is fire, Max has mainly chosen water Pokémon, with a fully primed Vaporeon at the head. In less than a minute Entei has been defeated and the capture takes over.
Whether it’s down to some rotten logarithm, Murphy’s Law or plain bad luck, very few succeed in catching the fire dog. There is sighing, puffing and blowing, and lots of groans until a twelve-year-old boy raises his clenched fist and shouts: ‘Yes, yes, yes!’
‘Shut the fuck up,’ growls a forty-year-old man in a tracksuit, who doesn’t already have Entei and is about to throw the last of his balls.
A gasp passes through the group, and people glance at one another. It is perfectly acceptable to show one’s excitement, but ‘shut the fuck up’ is not part of the everyday vernacular. The boy looks frightened. The man continues to throw balls, and in spite of excellent hits, does not succeed in his mission.
‘There’s no need for that,’ a woman says to the man, who now appears to want to hurl his phone into the river.
‘What the fuck’s it got to do with you?’ The man waves his phone around, revealing the sweat patches under his arms. ‘It’s so fucking unfair. That kid over there, what’s he on? Twenty? He chucks a couple of balls that aren’t even nice , and he gets it. I’m on forty, I fire off four excellent curveballs in a row, and . . . nothing. It’s not surprising I’m annoyed.’
