countryside alike: Come out, come out, mischief and malice, come out from your cold, flooded holes, and show us what your loveless world looks like.
Janne’s pathetic excuses echo inside her head and in the sounds she hears.
No more Christmases like that one. She has promised herself that much.
‘I have to go.’
They had talked about it again on Christmas Day, Malin had a hangover and hadn’t felt like fighting, she was just quietly furious and sad that everything was turning out the way it always used to.
‘They need me there. I couldn’t live with myself if I turned it down. They need my experience to set up the latrines in the refugee camp; if that doesn’t happen thousands of people will die like flies. Have you ever seen a child die of cholera, Malin? Have you?’
She had felt like punching him when he said that.
They had made love one last time the night before he left.
Hard and without any warmth, and she had a sense of Daniel Hogfeldt’s hard body above her, the journalist she had carried on having sex with sometimes, and she had scratched Janne’s back, biting his chest and feeling the metallic taste of his blood, and he hadn’t objected; he seemed to enjoy being tormented by her rage.
There was steel in her that night. Hard, rigid steel.
Janne had come home a month later, and she had been immersed in her work on the Maria Murvall case, spending the weekends interviewing the officers in Motala who had dealt with the investigation.
Tove was living her own life alongside theirs. Somehow this was how things had turned out.
‘She’s never home. Have you noticed?’ Janne asked one evening in April when they were off at the same time and Tove had gone to the cinema in the city.
Malin hadn’t noticed, how could she have noticed when she herself was never at home?
They talked about seeing a counsellor, trying to get some family therapy.
Several times Malin had stood with the phone in her hand, ready to call psychoanalyst Viveka Crafoord, who had offered to see her free of charge.
But her tongue was paralysed.
That spring Malin had watched them working in the garden again, father and daughter together, she herself merely a physical presence, her soul taken up with a complicated honour killing.
‘How the hell could a father ask his son to kill his daughter? Janne, tell me?’
‘OK, no more tequila tonight.’
‘I hate it when you give me orders. It sounds as if I belong to you.’
Linkoping is enveloped by ice-cold rain.
What exactly is this city, other than a cocoon for people’s dreams? Side by side, the inhabitants of the country’s fifth-largest city push on with their lives. Watching each other. Judging each other. Trying to love each other in spite of their prejudices. The people of Linkoping mean well, Malin thinks. But when a lot of people’s lives are governed by a constant anxiety about keeping their jobs and making their wages last till the end of the month, while a minority live lives of excess, solidarity doesn’t hold up. The city’s inhabitants live side by side, separated by thin geographic lines. You can shout to the council flats of the sixties and seventies from the gardens of lovely villas, and call back from the shabby balconies.
Autumn is a time of decay, Malin thinks. The whole world is scared, waiting to be enveloped in the chill of winter. At the same time the colours of autumn are like fire, but it’s a cold fire that only cold-blooded animals can love and take any pleasure from. The only promise held by the beauty of autumn, the leaves like flames, is that everything is going to get worse.
Her hands are no longer trembling on the steering wheel.
All that is left is the damp chill against her thin body. It’s strong, my body, she thinks. I may have let everything else slip, but I haven’t neglected my training, I’m strong, I’m so fucking strong, I’m Malin Fors.
She drives past the old cemetery.
She sees the reflection of the cathedral spire hit the windscreen like a medieval lance ready to impale her.
What happened tonight?
What words were spoken?
What raised eyebrow, what nuance in whose voice made them start again?
She has no idea; she’s had a bit to drink, not much, but probably far too much to be driving this car at this moment.
Am I drunk? Adrenalin has erased any intoxication. But I’m not quite sober. None of my colleagues will be out tonight, will they?
You bastard. You pathetic, cowardly bastard, always running away. Calm down Malin, stop being ridiculous, stop it, no more drink, for fuck’s sake stop drinking, why don’t you leave, and did I hit him? Did I hit you in the kitchen, Janne, or did I just have my clenched fist in the air, pissed off at all your fucking ‘don’t’s?
I was flailing at the air, I remember that now, now that I’m pulling up in the car outside the front door on Agatan.
The clock of St Lars Church, enveloped in a brittle fog, says it’s quarter to eleven. A few shadowy crows stand out darkly against the sky.
No one in sight, and I don’t want to think about this evening, this night. Beside the church’s dark-grey stone, on the waterlogged grass, sit great piles of raked leaves. In the darkness it looks as if they’re rusting, surrendering their beautiful colours and letting themselves be consumed by the millions of worms emerging from the drenched ground.
You jerked back, Janne, dancing out of the way — you’ve had plenty of practice with worse blows than mine — and I yelled that I was leaving, leaving and never coming back.
You can’t drive in that state, Malin, and you tried to take the keys, and then Tove was there, she’d fallen asleep watching television on the sofa but had woken up, and she shouted, Surely you can see you can’t drive like that, Mum?
Calm down now, Malin, come here, let’s have a hug, and I lashed out again, but again there was nothing but air where I hoped you were standing.
I pretended I’d asked if you wanted to come with me, Tove, but you just shook your head.
And you, Janne, you didn’t stop me.
You just looked at the kitchen clock.
Then I ran to the car.
I drove through the blackest autumn weather, and now I’ve stopped. I open the car door. Black tentacles tear at the grey-black sky. Open holes of fear where the starlight ought to be seeping through.
My shoes on the wet tarmac.
I’m thirty-five years old.
What have I done?
2
The key in the lock.
Malin fumbles, her hands won’t obey even though they stopped shaking a good while ago.
Miss.
Hit.
Miss.
Like everything else.
The flat became vacant the previous week, but she told Janne that she’d got new tenants, another group of evangelical students. This evening’s explosion, unavoidable, anticipated, postponed until it was feasible.
Malin goes inside, shaking the raindrops from her blonde bob. There’s a smell, a mixture of damp and detergent, and Malin can feel that the autumn has crept through the cracks in the windows and spread across the
