instead.
Their awe was boundless. The most incredible part about it was that one button had several functions. If you pressed it once, it did one thing, if you pressed it twice, it did something else. Even though it was the same button. No one understood how it worked.
‘What do you reckon?’ he said to his daughter, thirty years later. ‘Are you ready?’
Sanna nodded.
Ylva Zetterberg was conscious.
She lay on the back seat and saw the world pass in the shape of familiar treetops and roofs. She recognised the geography from the movements of the car, knew the whole time where they were.
She was nearly home when the car slowed down to let another car pass and then swung into a gravel drive in front of the newly renovated house. The woman opened the garage door with a remote control, then drove in. She waited until the door had closed behind them before getting out of the car and opening the door to the back seat. Together with her husband, the woman steered Ylva down into the cellar without so much as a word.
The man and woman lay Ylva down on a bed and handcuffed her to the frame.
The man then produced a remote control and pointed it at a TV that was mounted just below the ceiling.
‘You like watching,’ he said, and turned it on.
7
‘We have to go to the supermarket and do some shopping,’ Mike said.
‘Can I sit in the front?’
Sanna looked at him, full of hope.
‘Of course,’ Mike said.
‘Which way shall we go?’ he asked, once he’d helped his daughter to belt herself in.
‘By the water,’ Sanna decided.
‘The water,’ Mike repeated, and nodded to himself as if to emphasise that it was a wise choice.
He drove down Sundsliden, braking down to second gear on the steepest part. The water stretched out unashamedly in front of them, almost showing off. It was more open here now than when Mike had been a child, even though there were more houses. As property prices climbed, the view in itself became an asset and the trees were cut down. Snug houses that were built as protection against the wind and weather had been replaced by aquariums designed to display wealth.
‘We can go swimming again soon,’ Mike commented.
‘How warm is it?’
‘In the water? I don’t know, maybe fifteen or sixteen degrees.’
‘You can swim then, can’t you?’
‘Absolutely,’ Mike said, ‘but it might be a bit chilly.’
He swung to the left by the house that he’d named Taxi-Johansson’s as a child. The owner of the town’s only taxi, a black Mercedes with a good many years under its bonnet, had lived in the house and had driven the schoolchildren to the dentist in Kattarp every year. Someone else lived there now and there weren’t many who remembered Taxi-Johansson, though there was still an old sign that said TAXI on the garage.
A lot had changed since Mike moved home from the States. Women no longer sunbathed topless and there was a decent variety of TV channels, financed by advertising. Unnecessarily large cars had made an appearance and these days there was no embarrassment in wearing jeans that weren’t Levi 501s.
Soon after they’d come back from the US, his mother opened a clothes shop in Kullagatan. Jeans and T-shirts with UCLA and Berkeley on the front. Nearly everyone in Mike’s class bought clothes there. His friends got a discount.
The business had been going well and his dad had a job.
As an adult, Mike struggled to remember at what point everything started to go wrong. Sometimes he thought he knew the answer, but as soon as he tried to focus and remember, something else popped up that had been just as decisive.
His father’s death was obviously the main cause. He drove into the side of a bridge outside Malmo when Mike was thirteen. His mother always talked about it as though it was an accident, unfortunate and unnecessary.
Mike was seventeen when he realised that it was probably a planned suicide. He’d heard it other places. When he asked his mum, he understood from her rather vague answer that he’d been kept in the dark for four years.
He still remembered the feeling of alienation and emptiness. The utter loneliness. Of having no one. His stomach was empty and there was a metallic taste in his mouth.
‘It’s impossible to know for sure,’ his mum said. ‘He didn’t leave a letter or anything like that. And he seemed to be so happy.’
According to the experts, that wasn’t so unusual. As if a flame flared up and gave the person who had decided to take their own life a brief period of peace.
Mike had long since come to terms with his mother’s betrayal, but the knowledge that he was basically alone and couldn’t trust anyone was forever branded on his heart.
That sounded a bit stupid, it really did. Nothing had happened to him. And how good were things now? With a wife and daughter and a well-paid job.
And if he was honest, Mike had felt the change long before his father’s death. Wrong, it wasn’t a change so much as a slide from good to bad.
A couple of years after they’d moved back to Sweden, his dad had lost his job. The jeans shop, which previously had been a lucrative hobby for his mum, became the family’s sole source of income. And things started to go downhill when customers chose to go to the shopping centre in Vala instead of buying clothes in town.
It became harder to keep up with the neighbours in a posh part of town where a watch without hands was no longer impressive.
‘Can you speak?’
The man slapped Ylva lightly on the cheek.
‘Water,’ she slurred.
‘Makes you thirsty,’ the man said.
He’d had the foresight to take a glass of water with him. He held it to Ylva’s lips, let her taste it. Some trickled out of the corners of her mouth and Ylva instinctively tried to put her handcuffed hand up to wipe it away.
‘You can drink by yourself,’ the man said.
He took out a key and undid the handcuff around Ylva’s right hand. She pushed herself back against the end of the bed until she was sitting up. She took the glass and drank it down in one go.
‘More?’ the man asked.
Ylva nodded and held the glass out to him. He went over to the sink and filled it again. There was a kind of kitchen, the sort you get in barracks and building sites and student bedsits. Two built-in hot plates, a sink and draining board, and a fridge-freezer underneath. Ylva thought they were maybe called kitchenettes. She wasn’t sure. Nor was she sure why she was thinking about it at all, given the situation she was in.
The man came back, handed her the glass and went over to the TV.
‘Why am I here?’ Ylva asked.
‘I think you know.’
Ylva turned round and tried to pull her left hand out of the handcuff.
