walls, floors and ceilings.
She’s shaking.
Must turn up the radiators.
Another feeling here now.
A lonely feeling. But also a feeling of something new?
The furniture is all where it should be.
The Ikea clock on the kitchen wall is still broken, the second hand lying still at the bottom of the face.
She stands in the living room, wanting to turn on the light, but she can’t be bothered to press the switch. Better to slump onto the sofa in the welcoming darkness. A darkness that is all her own.
Tove.
Fifteen years old this year.
Still mad about books and top of her class, but all that has a heavier tone now, as if the game has become serious, as if time is taking its toll on her.
You’re too young for that, Tove.
A few boyfriends have come and gone during the course of the year.
Goodbye, Peter. Hello, Viggo.
Can I let her go? I can’t punish her with my own feelings of guilt. And she seems to be fine. Malin can see it in her daughter, the glow in her eyes, the way her girlish posture is becoming that of a woman. Malin’s hopes, unexpressed: Hold your ground, Tove, you don’t want to become a mother for many years yet.
Concentrate on your education.
Aren’t I supposed to be giving a talk in a school sometime soon? Malin thinks. The very thought of babbling in front of a group of tired, disinterested students makes her feel miserable, so she brushes it aside.
Malin lies down on the sofa.
Feels the damp clothes against her skin.
The tequila burned out of her body now.
It feels as if the evangelical students’ sanctimony is still clinging to the flat, making her feel slightly nauseous.
Janne. She wants to say she’s sorry, but doesn’t know where to start. And Tove, how can I explain to you? Could you even understand?
What do I really know about your life now, Tove? I have no idea at all, except that this flat is your home, you can move in here with me, anything else is out of the question.
Your books, out at Janne’s.
I’ve tried sitting down beside you a thousand times over the past year, on the sofa, on your bed, asking you how you are, but the only words I get out of you are: ‘I’m fine,’ accompanied, soundlessly, by: ‘Leave me alone, Mum.’
And what do I want from you, Tove?
Your forgiveness? Reassurance that everything’s all right?
Can things ever be all right? That woman, the murderer, held you down on the floor with her bloody hands and was about to kill you.
And I’m the one who brought that scene into being.
There are a thousand wretched ways for it to rain. Raindrops can have any number of colours, even at night, they can take the copper of autumn leaves and make it their own, the rain can become a shower of sparks in the glow of the street lamps, sparks like flying cockroaches.
Malin has slumped to the floor of the living room.
Watching the red, orange and yellow cockroaches flying through the air, hearing their jaws snapping, and she forces them away, chasing them with a flame-thrower, and she can smell charred cockroach corpses as she hounds them from her sight.
Nothing but mundane reality out there now.
Clouds.
Weeks, weeks of different shades of grey over her head, no blue in sight. Record rainfall, and television weather forecasters talking about a flood of biblical proportions.
She found the bottle at the back of the cupboard above the microwave. She knew those buttoned-up religious types wouldn’t so much as have sniffed at it. So she had left it there, consciously or unconsciously, for future use.
She drinks straight from the bottle.
Who gives a damn if she’s hungover tomorrow? It’s been a quiet autumn since she caught the father and brother who planned and carried out the murder of their daughter, their sister. She’d had a Swedish boyfriend. And that was enough.
Vomit.
Sometimes it can actually be nice to be hungover. I’ll have to get to grips with everything tomorrow, get my things from Janne. Isn’t he on duty, so I won’t have to see him? I’ll bring Tove’s things. Talk to her about moving back in.
I’m drunk, Malin thinks, and it’s nice.
3
Mum.
You’re so angry, Tove thinks, as she pulls the covers over her head and listens to the rain clattering on the roof, hard and fierce, as if there were an impatient god up there drumming millions of long fingers.
The room smells of the country. She was just looking at the rag-rugs, resting like flattened snakes on the floor, their pattern like a beautiful series of black-and-white pictures that no one will ever be able to interpret.
I know, Mum, Tove thinks. I know you blame yourself for what happened last summer, and that you think I’m bottling up all sorts of things. But I don’t want to talk to a psychologist, I don’t want to sit there babbling opposite some old lady. I’ve been chatting to other people on trauma.com instead. In English. It’s as if it all gets easier when I see my own clumsy words about what happened, and about how scared I was then. The words take the fear away, Mum, I’ve only got the images left, but the images can’t get me.
You have to look forward, Mum. Maybe you think I haven’t seen you drinking. That I don’t know where you hide the bottles around the house, that I don’t notice that your breath smells of alcohol behind the mask of chewing-gum. Do you think I’m stupid, or what?
She and Janne had remained at the kitchen table when Malin disappeared with all her rage.
Janne had said: ‘I hope she doesn’t crash the car and kill herself. Should I call the police? Or go after her? What do you think, Tove?’
And she hadn’t known what to say. Most of all she wanted her mum to come back, to rush into the kitchen in her very best mood, but things like that only happened in bad books and films.
‘I don’t know,’ she had said. ‘I’ve no idea.’
And her stomach had been aching, as far as her chest, a black pressure that wouldn’t let up, and Janne had made sandwiches, had told her things would sort themselves out once her mum had calmed down.
‘Can’t you go after her?’
And Janne had looked at her, then simply shaken his head in response. And the ache had found its way up into her heart and head and eyes, and she had to struggle to hold back the tears.
‘It’s OK to cry,’ Janne said, sitting down beside her and holding her. ‘It’s awful. It’s awful, because no one wanted it to turn out like this.’
‘It’s OK to cry,’ he had said again. ‘I’m going to.’
How can I help you, Mum? Because no matter what I say it’s like you’re not listening, don’t want to listen, like you’re trapped in an autumn river full of dirty torrential water and you’ve made up your mind to float off into the darkness.
I can see you in the kitchen, on your way to work, in the mornings, on the sofa in front of the television, or
