‘I want to stay up until she comes.’
‘No go, I’m afraid.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t know exactly when she’s going to come home. But by the time you wake up first thing tomorrow morning, she’ll be in her bed, I promise. And you’ll have to be a little bit quiet, won’t you, as Mummy will be tired.’
Ylva was still lying on the bed. She couldn’t get up. Only a couple of hours ago she’d wished her colleagues a good weekend and walked down the hill to catch the bus home. The man and the woman had been waiting for her, offered her a lift. Ylva couldn’t say no. You couldn’t really, could you, when new neighbours who’ve just moved in offer you a lift.
Everything had been planned, the rape as well. The cellar room she was in had been built especially for her.
Ylva was only a hundred metres from her own house, where her husband and daughter were waiting for her to come home.
Or maybe they weren’t. Ylva had mentioned that she might go out for a glass of wine with her colleagues after work. Would Mike dare to call? Probably not. He wouldn’t want to seem weak. When would he realise that something was wrong?
Ylva rolled over on to her side, with some difficulty. Her body was sore and it hurt to move. It took all her energy just to try. She lay there, gasping for breath.
The TV was on.
It was dark outside, the streetlamps glowed in a kind of white halo that made the rest of the picture dark and grey. It was difficult to see the silhouette of their house. But Ylva saw that the light in Sanna’s room was still on.
How long would it be before Mike called the police?
Would they let her go before then? They couldn’t keep her here.
Could they?
The thought was too much to take in. Of course she would report him. Ylva would report both of them. What had happened twenty years ago didn’t really matter.
Couldn’t they understand that what had happened had tormented her too? Not in the same way, obviously. But that didn’t make it any easier. In a way, it made it worse. They didn’t have the guilt, never needed to think about what they could’ve done.
A day hadn’t passed when Ylva hadn’t blamed herself. She had gone through all the stages of denial and self- loathing, without finding peace. Ylva would just have to live with it.
She manoeuvred herself off the bed, staggered over to the door on shaky legs, pushed down the door handle and pulled. It was locked. There was a peephole in the door. Ylva tried to look through it, but realised it was fitted the other way round. So that they could look in from outside.
She kicked the door but just hurt her foot and so started to hit it with the flats of her hands in the hope that the sound might be audible on the other side. She stopped to listen for footsteps, but only heard her own sobs. She ended up banging on the door hysterically and screaming as loud as she could.
Ylva didn’t know how long she did this for, but when she finally turned her back to the door and sunk to the floor, she had no feeling left in her hands.
She cried and cried, but eventually lifted her eyes and discovered that the cellar room she was in was done out like a studio apartment.
She put her hands flat on the floor and got up with great difficulty. She went over to the kitchenette and opened the fridge. It was empty, except for a half-tube of Primula.
There was a door in the wall opposite the kitchenette. Ylva opened it. A bathroom with a toilet, shower and sink. No window, just a fan, high up on the wall.
Ylva closed the door and looked around. The walls were plastered breeze blocks. The room was twenty square metres, max, just a small corner of the cellar.
Ylva remembered all the pallets of building materials that had been left outside the house, waiting for the new owners. The Poles, who spoke very little Swedish, had tried to answer the questions from inquisitive neighbours.
The cellar. They were going to do something in the cellar. Build a music studio, they thought.
When he’d finished the story, Sanna lay there and traced the pattern on the wallpaper with her finger, as she usually did. She’d asked again when Mummy was coming home and Mike had felt almost guilty.
‘Am I not good enough?’
He said it as a joke, but underlying the words was a hurt.
‘Mummy will be back soon. She just went out with some friends for a while. Grown-ups have to be allowed to play with their friends too, sometimes.’
Mike thought he sounded false when he said that, but Sanna didn’t seem to react.
Fifteen minutes later, he woke up and saw that she was asleep. He hoped that she’d fallen asleep before him, but had his doubts. Carefully, he raised himself up on one elbow. The bedsprings creaked and groaned under his weight but Sanna slept on.
Mike left the bedroom door open. He recalled the feeling of horror when he’d woken up in total darkness as a child with no idea where he was. He didn’t want Sanna to have to go through the same thing.
He went down to the kitchen, opened the fridge and looked at the contents without finding anything tempting. He went through the cupboards and was happy to discover a half-full bag of peanuts behind the cereal. He decided that he deserved them, as a brave and currently-as-good-as-single parent, and poured himself a whisky to go with them.
Mike took the nuts and whisky into the sitting room, switched on the TV and watched the end of a film he’d already seen. It was better than he remembered and gave him an inkling of why his daughter always wanted to watch the same film.
When the film had finished, he flicked through the channels without finding anything else to watch. He turned the TV off. There were no curtains in the sitting room and the blue glow of a television at this time of night might be misconstrued.
He went to get his mobile phone. No missed calls or apologetic texts.
It wasn’t fair that she hadn’t been in touch. After all, it hadn’t been definite that she was going out for the evening. She should have phoned to say whether she was coming home for supper or not.
In the end, Mike decided to give her a ring. Officially to make sure that everything was okay and to insist she got a taxi home. Simple concern, he convinced himself, nothing more. He wasn’t calling because he was in any way worried that she might be fluttering her eyelashes at someone, or chewing her lip in that deliberately provocative way.
Mike repeated to himself exactly what he was going to say before he picked up the phone.
But instead of extended ringing and then finally his wife’s voice, with a wall of loud music, laughter and happy shouts in the background, it went straight to voicemail. An automated voice told him which number he’d called and Mike pulled himself together.
‘Hi, it’s me,’ he said. ‘Your husband. Just thought I’d see how you’re getting on. I assume you’re out with people from work. Anyway, I’m off to bed now. Take a taxi home, please. I’ve had a drink and can’t drive. Sanna’s in bed. Big hug.’
He hung up and immediately regretted leaving the message. It didn’t sound natural, and saying ‘your husband’ sounded insecure, as if he was nervous and having a go at her, in a don’t-do-anything-stupid sort of way.
He sat there and stared at the display on his mobile phone. The screen image was of Sanna and Ylva on the
