She clutches the jug awkwardly—practically hugs it with both hands—and lifts it to her face. When she drinks, she does so feverishly, in big gulps.
It’s like watching a stranger.
“What has happened to you?” I ask. It’s formulated as a question, but I’m not expecting a reply.
To my surprise she puts down the jug and looks in my direction. Her eyes don’t meet mine, but it’s me she’s looking at—just my left arm rather than my face.
She shakes her head.
That’s something. It’s not much, but it’s something.
I have to ask her, I have to try.
“Was it you who blew up the vans?” I ask.
She says nothing.
It’s harder to look at her face than the rest of her. That terrible scab. It’s not just blood, I realize as I come closer, but dried-in soil and dirt, which have made a hard cake of her hair. The skin around it is red and looks slightly inflamed.
“How did you get that?” I ask. I stick to that practiced voice, stable and calming. I don’t know if it’s having any effect on her, but I’m almost managing to calm myself.
She still doesn’t respond. She has started rocking slightly again, making a sustained, quiet, guttural sound.
“Tone,” I say, pleading and slightly frustrated, because she’s right there in front of me but I can’t understand what’s going on inside her. I can’t align what I’m seeing in front of me with my friend. I can’t align her with what she’s done. It just doesn’t fit.
“Please just say something,” I say, my voice cracking slightly. “Just talk to me, for fuck’s sake. We can try to…”
Yes, what can we try to do?
Try to fix this?
It’s too late for that. Some things can’t be fixed.
I turn away and stare out of the window for a few seconds. The sun is nearing the horizon. In half an hour the whole sky will burst into flame.
One of the desk drawers is still half open. There’s nothing inside it but a few pencils. I pick one of them up. It has a classic yellow grip, and its tip is still sharp. On an impulse, I put it down on the floor and roll it over to Tone.
It stops just in front of her. She picks it up clumsily and holds it. Her grip is strange, her whole hand clenched around the pencil like a fist. The way a child would hold it.
Then she leans forward and presses the tip to the floorboards, so hard that it gouges out a trail in the wood.
“It’ll break,” I say. “Be careful, or it’ll break.”
I don’t know why I’m even trying; I know she’s not going to answer.
The pencil tip runs in sharp lines over the planks. A Y with two legs, topped by a head.
A human.
She draws hair around the head in gawky strokes, long, tangled lines that score the soft planks, then she places the tip in the middle of the oval face and starts moving it in a circle. Around and around and around. A mouth like a black, bellowing circle.
The tip of the pencil breaks, and she goes still.
She starts making that wordless hum again, the one that seems to come from somewhere deep in her chest.
She doesn’t look straight at me: her eyes are fixed somewhere to my side, which seems to be as close as they can come to my face. It feels like she’s trying to tell me something.
And yes, I know that figure. It’s a monster I’ve seen before. On a piece of paper and a worn tabletop.
She draws just like her grandmother.
“Just like Birgitta,” I say.
I don’t know if I’m saying it to myself or to her, but when Tone hears the name she looks me straight in the eye.
THEN
Elsa knows Aina won’t be home. It’s been days since she’s so much as seen her.
She races through the house like a whirlwind, hastily shoving clothes into a little bag without even looking at what she’s grabbing. She can’t take too much; it can’t look like she’s on her way somewhere.
By now they have hardly any money left, but Elsa grabs two necklaces she inherited from her mother. The chains are thin and silver, but they must be worth something. She should be able to sell or pawn them in Stockholm.
Elsa pauses over the half-written letter in her underwear drawer, but there’ll be no time to send it now. She leaves it where it is.
It’s when Elsa takes the little tea tin from the top shelf in the kitchen that she hesitates. She can hear her own heartbeats in her chest, fast and rattling and guilty.
It doesn’t feel right to take it.
The tin contains all that is left of their savings; almost one thousand kronor, in different denominations. If she takes it then Staffan will have nothing to live on.
But they will go with her, she tries to persuade herself; Aina will go with her.
It isn’t theft. It’s her money, too.
Elsa takes seven hundred kronor, folds the bills up neatly, and stuffs them in a sock in the mess that is her bag. She leaves the rest in the tin. It feels better this way, but it also feels like capitulation.
She casts a quick glance at the clock over the kitchen door. It’s almost 7:00 A.M. Which means Aina should still be in church.
When Elsa locks the door behind her and starts walking, she wants nothing more than to turn around and go back. She can hardly get her head around the fact that she won’t be coming home tonight to cook dinner. That she won’t be opening that green door as dusk approaches, stepping inside to hear Aina and Karin monkeying around upstairs, giggling over God knows what. To see Staffan in the kitchen with his feet on one of the chairs, and berate him for not taking off
