Feeling slightly queasy from the melted cheese and raw onion, she drove on. Powdery snow swirled in front of the headlights, making it hard to see, even though she was alone on the road. She drove a few kilometres, and then suddenly, out of the haze of snow, the ironworks appeared right above her. Illuminated jet-black steel skeletons that let off steam and looked almost alive. She let out a small yelp of surprise. It was beautiful! So weirdly… alive.
A viaduct took her across a goods yard, twenty or so rail tracks criss-crossing each other.
The final stop of Malmbanan, ‘the ore railway’, of course. The contents of the trashed mountains in the iron- field were rolled down here to the coast by those endless ore-trains she’d seen on television.
Astonished, she drove on until she reached an illuminated sign by the main entrance, and parked by what turned out to be the West Checkpoint.
The immense monster above her was blast-furnace number two – a growling, rumbling giant turning ore into steel. Further away were the rolling-mill, the steelworks, the coke ovens, the power station. The whole site was enveloped in a rolling, rumbling sound that rose and fell, humming and singing.
Anne Snapphane left the press conference with her knees trembling and her palms sweating. She wanted to cry, or scream. The rumbling headache only increased her anger at the MD who had taken off for the US and left the whole presentation to her. She wasn’t employed to take the flak for the whole of TV Scandinavia, just the programming.
She made it to her room, dialled Annika’s number and looked around desperately for a glass of wine.
‘I’m standing by the ironworks in Svartostaden,’ Annika yelled from Anne’s home territory. ‘It’s a real monster, absolutely amazing. How did the press conference go?’
‘Crap,’ Anne Snapphane said in a dull voice, feeling her hands shake. ‘They tore me to shreds, and the boys from your lot were worst.’
‘Hang on,’ Annika said, ‘I have to move the car, I’m in the way of a truck… Yes! I know! I’m moving!’
The sound of a car engine; Anne looked for her headache pills in the desk drawer, but the box was empty.
‘Right, tell me what happened,’ Annika said to her friend.
Anne forced her hands to be still, then put her right hand to her forehead.
‘They want me to personify every super-capitalist, war-mongering, American, multinational blood-sucking corporation rolled into one,’ she said.
‘The first rule of dramaturgy,’ Annika said. ‘You have to give the villain a face. Yours just happens to fit the bill. Although I think it’s strange that they’re so angry.’
Anne carefully shut the desk drawer and put the phone down on the floor, then lay down next to it.
‘Not really,’ she said, staring at the lights in the ceiling, breathing out and feeling the room sway. ‘We’re challenging the established channels on the only advertising market they’ve not yet conquered, the global brand market. But that’s not all. We’re not only taking their money, we’re going to take their viewers with our thoroughly commercialized shitty programmes that we buy in for peanuts.’
‘And the
‘Because we’ll be using the terrestrial digital network, yes,’ Anne said.
‘How’s your headache?’
Anne closed her eyes, seeing the strip lighting in the ceiling as blue stripes through her eyelids.
‘Same as before,’ she said. ‘I’ve started getting pretty wobbly as well.’
‘Do you really think it’s just stress? Couldn’t you take things a bit easier?’ Annika sounded genuinely worried.
‘I’m trying,’ Anne mumbled, letting out a deep breath.
‘Have you got Miranda this weekend?’
She shook her head, a hand over her eyes. ‘She’s with Mehmet.’
‘Is that good or bad?’
‘I don’t know,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know if I can do this any more.’
‘Course you can,’ Annika said. ‘Come round to mine tomorrow. Thomas is playing tennis, I’ll get some macaroons.’
Anne Snapphane let out a snort of laughter and dried her eyes.
When they had hung up Annika drove on with a nagging anxiety in her gut. For the first time she was starting to think that there was something physically wrong with Anne. Over the years her hypochondriac friend had been to Dr Olsson with every symptom known to modern medicine, and up to now she had only ever needed antibiotics twice. Once she got some cough syrup as well, and when she found out it contained morphine she had phoned Annika in horror, imagining that she had become an addict. Annika couldn’t help smiling at the memory.
Slowly she swung off the road and in among the residential area of Svartostaden. This really was another country, or at least another town. Not Lulea, and not really Sweden. Annika let the car drift through the shanty town, astonished by its atmosphere.
The headlights played across shabby wooden facades of yards and outhouses and sheds, leaning roofs and ramshackle fences. The buildings were small and misshapen, could have been built out of orange boxes. The paint was peeling off most of them, the uneven hand-blown glass in the windows twinkled. She passed a charity shop selling clothes in aid of the struggle for freedom, although whose freedom was unclear.
She pulled up behind a recycling site on Baltesgatan, left her bag in the car and got out. The noise from the ironworks was a faint song in the distance. She took a few slow steps, looking over the fences into the yards.
‘Are you looking for someone?’
A man in a woolly hat and work-boots was coming towards her from one of the gingerbread houses, glancing at her hire-car.
Annika smiled. ‘I was just passing and had to stop,’ she said with her hands in her coat pockets. ‘What an amazing place.’
The man stopped, straightening up.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is a bit unusual. An old workers’ district from the turn of the last century. Strong sense of cohesion. There’s real community spirit here. People often don’t want to leave.’
Annika nodded politely. ‘I can understand why people end up staying.’
The man pulled a cigarette from an inside pocket, lit it, then took the conversational bait and started talking.
‘We’ve got a nursery nowadays,’ he said, ‘with three classes. We had to fight for years before the council gave in. The school takes kids up to thirteen, and there’s a youth club with broadband. We’re going to have to fight to keep the old ironwork manager’s house; we never seem to get out of this obsession with pulling things down.’
He exhaled a hard plume of smoke, looking at her from under the rim of his hat.
‘So what are you doing here?’
‘I was supposed to be meeting Benny Ekland, but when I got here I found out he’d been run over.’
The man shook his head, stamping his feet. ‘Bloody awful business,’ he said. ‘On his way home, and he gets run down like that. Everyone thinks it’s terrible.’
‘Everyone here knows everyone else?’ she asked, trying hard not to sound too inquisitive.
‘For good and ill,’ he said, ‘but mostly good. We take responsibility for each other, there’s too little of that in the world today…’
‘Do you know where it happened?’
‘Down on Skeppargatan, on the way to the main road,’ he said, pointing. ‘Quite close to Blackis, that’s the big building at the edge of the forest. The kids went up there with flowers a bit earlier. Well, I really ought to…’ The man headed off towards the water.
Annika stood and watched him go.
