Midwinter Sacrifice

The children playing on the other side of the nursery windows are gone. A yellow, Calder-inspired mobile is swaying gently beneath the checked curtains.

Blue, fat-mottled skin.

Beaten and alone in the ice-cold wind.

Who were you? Malin wonders.

Come back and tell me who you were.

6

Now they have erected a tent beneath me, its green colour turned grey by the evening. I know they are warm in there, but none of that warmth reaches me.

Can I even feel warmth any more? Could I ever? I lived in the land beyond, free in one way from your world, but what a freedom it turned out to be.

But I no longer have any need of your warmth, not as you understand it; there is warmth around me. I am not alone, or rather I am exactly that, alone, I am loneliness, I am the core of loneliness. Perhaps I was the core of loneliness when I was alive? The most basic substance of loneliness, the mystery whose solution we are approaching, the chemical reaction, the seemingly simple yet all-encompassing process in our brains that gives rise to perceptions which in turn give us consciousness, the precondition for the reality we believe to be our own. The lamps burn late in researchers’ laboratories. Once we have cracked that code, we will have cracked them all. Then we can rest. Laugh or scream. Stop. But until then?

Wandering, working, searching for the answers to all manner of questions.

It’s hardly surprising, the way you carry on.

The snow melts, trickling away, but you won’t find anything, so get rid of the tent, bring in a crane and get me down. I’m a strange fruit, I’m not supposed to hang here; it spoils the balance, and it’s starting to make the branch creak. Even the tree is protesting, can’t you hear it?

Well, exactly, you’re all deaf. Just think, how quickly we actually forget. Think what the meanderings of our thoughts can do to us, where they can lead us.

‘Mum, have you seen my eye-shadow?’

Tove’s voice from the bathroom sounds desperate, annoyed and resigned all at the same time, yet simultaneously full of a resolved, focused and almost frightening determination.

Eye-shadow? That hasn’t happened for a while. Malin can’t remember the last time Tove wore any make-up, and wonders what’s going on this evening.

‘Do you want eye-shadow?’ Malin calls from her place on the sofa. The news has just started, with the man in the tree as the third item, after a statement from the Prime Minister and some meteorological expert who says that the current spell of cold weather is conclusive proof of climate change, that we’re heading for a new ice age which is going to cover the whole of Sweden under metres of granite-hard crystals.

‘Why else would I be asking?’

‘Are you seeing a boy?’

There is silence from the bathroom, then a single ‘Damn’ when the make-up bag balanced on the bathroom cabinet evidently tumbles to the floor. Then: ‘It’s here. I found it, Mum.’

‘Good.’

A male reporter from the Ostgota newspaper is standing at the darkened crime- scene, floodlights illuminating the tree in the background, and you can just make out the body in the tree, but only if you know it’s there.

‘I’m standing in a frozen field several miles outside Linkoping. The police have . . .’

Throughout the region people are watching the same pictures as me, Malin thinks. And they’re wondering the same thing: Who was he? How did he get there? Who did it?

In the eyes of the television viewers, I am the provider of television truth, I make sure that evil people are locked up behind bars. I am the person who is expected to transform anxiety to security, but things are never so simple in reality, outside the screen. Out here everything is a test card, rich in nuances where it is impossible to take in everything, where meaning is everywhere and nowhere, with a clock ticking away and everyone waiting for something new, something clearer, better, to take over.

‘Mum, can I borrow your perfume?’

Perfume?

She’s got a date, Malin thinks. Which would be a first. Then: Who? Where? When? A thousand questions, thoughts, anxieties in myriad forms run through her in a fraction of a second.

‘Who are you seeing?’

‘No one. Can I borrow your perfume?’

‘Of course.’

‘. . . the body is still hanging here.’

The camera moves to one side, and in the abrupt darkness above the tent the body sways back and forth and Malin wants to change the channel, but at the same time she wants to watch. Cut to that afternoon’s press conference. Karim Akbar in a well-pressed suit in the large meeting room in Police Headquarters, his black hair slicked back, his face serious, but his eyes can’t conceal how much he loves the spotlight, how it seems to validate him.