She betrayed him. She lay there so innocent in her unconsciousness, but she had apparently not forgotten how to betray him. Once again she intended to leave him, alone. After all he had done for her.
Damn it.
He couldn’t trust her even now. Even now she wouldn’t do as he wished.
But he would show her. He wouldn’t let her go.
Not this time either.
She decided to go to the day-care centre. A purely physical need to attempt to evade the threat she felt. Her world was starting to come crashing down. She felt petrified, robbed of every avenue of escape. Somewhere an unknown enemy was forging secret plans, and the one person she thought she could trust had proven to be allied with someone on the other side of the battle line. Had proven to be a traitor.
The signal from her mobile forced her to pull herself together. She saw from the display that it was from the day-care centre.
‘Eva.’
‘Hi, it’s Kerstin from day-care. It’s nothing serious, but Axel fell and hit himself on the slide and would like to be picked up. I tried to get hold of Henrik, who usually collects him, but he’s not answering.’
‘I’m on my way, I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.’
‘He’s all right, he just got scared. Linda is sitting with him in the staff room.’
She hung up and set off in a hurry. The pavement on the old suburban street was broken up because they were installing remote heating and broadband, and she had to stop behind a queue of people as they let a car through.
Broadband.
Even faster.
She looked at the old turn-of-the-century houses lining the street. In this part of the neighbourhood they were big, like shrunken manor houses, not like at their end where the houses were smaller, starter opportunities for normal white-collar workers to have their own home.
A hundred years. How much had changed since then. Was there actually anything in society that was the same? Cars, aeroplanes, telephones, computers, the job market, gender roles, values, beliefs. A century of change. And it also encompassed the worst atrocities that humankind had ever devised. She had often compared her own life to how it must have been for her grandparents. So many things they had been forced to live through, learn, adapt to. Would any generation ever have to experience as much development and change as they had done? Everything changed. She could only think of one thing that was the same. Or was expected to be the same. Family and a lifelong marriage. It was supposed to function just as before, despite the fact that all external stresses and conditions were different. But marriage was no longer a common undertaking in which man and woman each took care of their own indispensable contributions. Mutual dependence was gone. Nowadays men and women were self-supporting units that were brought up to make it on their own, and the only reason they chose to get married was for love. She wondered if that was why it was so hard to make a marriage work, because the whole lifestyle depended on keeping love alive. And scarcely anyone in their child-bearing years had time to nourish it. Love was taken for granted and had to make it as best it could amongst all the things that required attention. And it seldom survived. More was needed for love to last. At least half of their friends had separated in recent years. Children who switched from one parent to the other every other week. Heart-rending divorces. She swallowed. The thought of other people’s relationship problems was not making her own any easier to handle.
As daily life became more and more grey in recent years, she had thought a good deal about what was missing. And she wished that she had had someone to share her thoughts with. She had her girlfriends, of course, but lunch with the girls usually ended in general complaints about life. A statement more than a discussion about why life was the way it was. But one thing they all had in common. The weariness. The feeling of inadequacy. The lack of time. In spite of all the time-saving devices that had been invented since the houses along the street had been built, time was increasingly a rare commodity. Now they were putting in broadband to help save them even more precious seconds. Mail could be answered even more rapidly, decisions taken as soon as the alternatives arose, information retrieved in a second, information which then had to be interpreted and properly pigeonholed. But what about the human being in the background, whose brain was supposed to handle all this, what happened to her? As far as Eva knew, she had not undergone a product upgrade in the last hundred years.
She thought about the story she had heard about the group of Sioux Indians who during the 1950s were flown from their reservation in North Dakota to have a meeting with the President. With the help of jet engines they were whisked thousands of miles to the capital. When they entered the arrival hall at Washington airport, they sat down on the floor, and despite insistent appeals for them to go to the waiting limousines, they refused to get up. They sat there for a month. They were waiting for their souls, which could never have moved as fast as their bodies did with the help of the aeroplane. Not until thirty days later were they ready to meet the President.
Perhaps that was just what people should do, all the stressed-out people who were trying in vain to make their lives work. Sit down and wait to catch up. But weren’t they already sitting there all together? Not exactly waiting for their souls, but they were all sitting in their own cosy living rooms, so that they could get completely involved in all the docu-soaps on their TV sets. Act shocked at the shortcomings of others and their inability to handle relationships. How did people cope, really? And then quickly change the channel to avoid taking a look at their own behaviour. So much easier to sit in judgement over others’ behaviour from a distance.
She opened the door to Axel’s section of the day-care centre and stepped inside, pulling on the light-blue plastic slippers and continuing towards the staff room. She saw them through the glass window in the door and stopped. He was sitting on Linda’s lap eating a ginger snap. His hand was wrapped around a lock of her blonde hair and she was rocking him back and forth with her lips against his head.
The anger that had kept her going sank away and again opened up to the devastating powerlessness.
How could she ever protect him from everything that happened?
Don’t cry here.
She swallowed, opened the door and went in.
‘Look, here comes Mamma.’
Axel let go of Linda’s hair and hopped down to the floor. Linda smiled to her, shyly as always. Eva made an effort to smile back and lifted Axel into her arms, as Linda got up and came over to them.
‘He got a little bump there, but I don’t think it’s too serious. I told them not to go on the slide after it rained, it’s so slippery then but . . . They probably forgot.’
‘Feel, Mamma.’
She felt the little swelling on the back of his head. It was hardly noticeable and definitely nothing Linda should feel guilty about.
‘It’s nothing serious. It could have happened anywhere.’
Linda smiled shyly again and went towards the door.
‘We’ll see you tomorrow then, Axel. Bye.’
They held each other’s hand on the way home. When Axel had got over his anger at having to walk and not ride in the car as they usually did, he seemed to enjoy the walk.
A welcome respite.
He was the only one talking. She walked in silence and replied in monosyllables when necessary.
‘And then when Ellinor took the ball we got mad and then Simon hit her on the leg with the stick but Linda said that you couldn’t do that and then we couldn’t play any more.’
He kicked at a pebble.
‘Linda is really nice.’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you think Linda is nice too?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘That’s good, because Pappa does too.’
Yes. When he’s not fucking someone in the shower at home.
‘Of course he does.’
He kicked the pebble again, farther this time.
