‘I don’t know. Something must have happened.’
Viveka pauses.
‘During that last year he would lie on that chaise longue where you’re sitting now, crying and raging in turn. He would often whisper, “Let me in, let me in, I’m freezing.”’
‘And what did you do?’
‘I tried to comfort him.’
‘And now?’
‘He stopped seeing me about a year ago. The last time we met he stormed out. Lost his temper again. Yelled that no words could ever help, that only action could put everything right, and now he knew, he’d found out something, he yelled, said he knew what needed to be done.’
‘And you didn’t contact him again?’
Viveka Crafoord looks surprised. ‘All my treatments are voluntary,’ she says. ‘My patients have to come to me. But I thought you might be interested in this.’
‘What do you think happened?’
‘His cup has overflowed. All his worlds have merged together. Anything could happen.’
‘Thank you,’ Malin says.
‘Do you want to know his name?’
‘I don’t need to.’
‘I thought as much,’ Viveka Crafoord says, and turns towards the window.
Malin gets up to leave.
Without looking at Malin, Viveka Crafoord asks, ‘What about you, how are you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s written all over you. You don’t often see it so clearly, but it’s like you’re carrying a sorrow, a loss, that you haven’t come to terms with.’
‘I really have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘I’m here if you want to talk.’
Outside great snowflakes are sailing to the ground; Malin thinks that they look like the remnants of beautiful stars that were pulverised far out in space, billions of years ago.
71
The disgusting little shit.
I’m putting a terry nappy on him.
I’ve padded the inside walls of the wardrobe. I might toss him an apple, a bit of dry bread, but he doesn’t scream any more. If you hit a kid on the nose enough times he learns that screaming means pain, and that it doesn’t help.
So I shut him in.
He cries silently as I put his two and a half years in the wardrobe.
Post-natal depression.
Thanks a lot.
Child benefit.
Thanks a lot.
Drowned father. One thousand, six hundred and eighty-five kronor every month. They bought it, the authorities, seeing as it was so tragic. Fatherless. But I didn’t want to give him up and not get the money.
My lies aren’t lies because they’re mine alone. I am creating my own world. And the interloper in the wardrobe makes it real.
So I lock up.
And go off.
They sacked me from the factory when they saw my stomach; we can’t have that at the chocolate conveyor- belt, they said.
And now I lock the wardrobe and he cries and I want to open up and tell him that he only exists here because he doesn’t exist; choke on the apple, stop breathing, then perhaps you’ll get away. Fucking little brat. And yet not.
One thousand, six hundred and eighty-five old riksdaler a month.
I saunter through town to the grocer’s, and I hold my head high but I know how they whisper – Where’s she put the boy? Where’s the boy? – because they know you exist, and I feel like stopping and curtseying to the ladies, telling them that the boy, the sailor’s boy, I’ve got him in a dark, damp, padded wardrobe. I’ve even put in an air-
