47
The young man taps his finger against the silken paper of the law textbook.
He’s got plugs in his ears to shut out all the noise of his corridor in the block for students from Ostergotland in Lund. He uses his implacable blue eyes to photograph the pages of the book. Look, see, memorise. Law is the simplest of subjects for him, words to fix in his memory, and then use as required.
He is in Lund for three years. He doesn’t need any longer to accumulate the points and the marks he needs to serve at the district court in Stockholm. Three years of forgetfulness, to suppress the narrowness of a city like Linkoping, of a school like the Cathedral School, of a life like his has been.
Of course they are here as well, people with surnames that are inscribed with quill pens in the House of Nobility, but less notice is taken of them here.
He scales the facade of the Academic Association’s handsome building one night. Down below the girls stand and scream. The boys scream as well. He travels to Copenhagen to buy amphetamines so he can stay awake and study. He smuggles the pills beneath his foreskin, smiling at the customs officials in Malmo.
He keeps to the edges of the carnival that takes place during his second year. He arrives late at pubs and bars, shows his face, fuelling the rumours about who’s the smartest of all the smart students, about who gets the prettiest girls.
He is merely a body in Lund. Yet also whispers and guesses. Who is he, where does he come from, and one evening he beats up a boy from Linkoping in a car park behind one of the student union buildings. He had told anyone who wanted to know who Jerry Petersson really was: a nobody. A nobody from a nothing flat in a nothing area of a nothing city.
‘You know nothing about me,’ he screams as he stands over the prostrate boy, who is no more than a black shape in the light of a solitary street lamp. ‘So you won’t say anything. You let me be whoever I want to be. Otherwise I’ll kill you, you bastard.’ He leans over, picks up a piece of metal from the ground, holds it like a knife against the boy’s throat, screams: ‘Do you hear this, do you hear them? Do you hear the lawnmower, you bastard?’
He learns all about the female gender. Its softness, its warmth, and that they’re all different and can be transformed in different ways, and that they can act as his chrysalis and give birth to him time after time after time.
He learns what physical longing means as he lies in his student room and dreams about the woman who should have been his, the woman he still dreams will one day be his.
Those dreams are his secret.
The secret that makes him human.
48
It’s getting closer, Malin.
You can feel it in your black dream, spun of secrets.
People who can’t make sense of their lives, who never get to grips with their fear. Crying for help with mute snake voices.
Condemned to wander in misery.
They’re all in your dream, Malin. He’s there, the boy.
Malin.
Who is that, whispering your name?
The world, all human life, all feelings cremated, all snakes slithering around the bloated hairless rats in the overflowing gutters of the city.
Only the fear remains.
The most ashen grey of all feelings.
I want to wake up now.
Maria.
I fell asleep far too early.
Wide awake, Fredrik Fagelsjo thinks as he looks at the bracket clock on the mantelpiece, how its black marble pillars seem to melt into the black stone of the open hearth. The clock is about to strike half past eleven.
Raw weather outside, dry heat in here. Lake Roxen raging wildly just a few hundred metres away.
The fire is crackling, the logs shimmering in tones of orange and glowing grey, the whole room smells of burning wood, of calm and security.
He turns the cognac glass with an easy hand, raising it to his nose and inhaling the aroma, the sweet fruit, and he thinks that he will never drink anything but Delamain. That the last thing he will drink in his life here on earth will be a glass of Delamain cognac.
It was good that Ehrenstierna could use his contacts. Those nights in the cell were terrible. Lonely, with far too much time to think. And he realised something, it came to him as that stuffy old superintendent was going on about his family, about Christina and the children. He realised that the money and Skogsa and all that crap really didn’t matter at all. He’s got all that matters here, and Christina, their socially unequal love, and the children, are everything. What they have works, even if Christina has never got on with Father, even though she’s become one of them as the years have passed.
The children. He’s neglected them to get what he thought he wanted, what Father wanted.
I’ll have to cope with a month in Skanninge Prison next summer. I can do it. I know that now.
Christina and the children are staying with his parents-in-law. It was arranged long ago, and no time in custody would change that, they had agreed on that. But he would stay at home. Enjoy the Villa Italia in the autumn darkness.
They ought to be home soon.
Fredrik Fagelsjo loves the peace and quiet of the villa on an evening like this, but he’d quite like to hear the sound of the car pulling up now.
Hear the children rush up the steps in the rain.
Their footsteps.
Fredrik pours himself another cognac.
They’re still not back, and he wants to call his wife, but holds back the urge. They’ve probably just stayed to watch a film or they’re playing a game, one of those common parlour games that his mother-in-law, terrible woman, loves.
The castle.
It’s part of a dead man’s estate now, belongs to Petersson’s father. The police haven’t tracked down any other rightful heirs, but they’ve still got the money, thanks to some old bag in a branch of the family that they’ve never had anything to do with. Money that’s leaped out of their history.
Father’s going to make an offer.
The natural order restored.
Because who should live at Skogsa if not us? Even if it isn’t really that important, it’s ours. And we need to pass it on.
Jerry Petersson.
Someone who moved out of his class. Who didn’t know his place, who never knew his place. That’s the simple way of looking at it, Fredrik thinks.
He was drowned in his own ambitions.
A solicitor named Stekanger is in charge of his estate. A good, quick offer and the matter will be dealt with, if Petersson’s father accepts it. If he refuses, we’ll raise the offer a little. The land is ours, and no kids except mine
