will get to play there, I feel that very strongly, against my own inclinations.
Then I’ll get to grips with the farming. Grow crops for biofuel and make the family a new fortune. I’ll show Father I know how it works, that I can create things and make them happen.
That I can be ruthless. Just like him.
That I’m not just a bank official who’s only good at losing money, that I can carry the family into the future.
Fredrik feels his cheeks burn as he thinks of the stock options, the losses, and how incredibly stupid he has been.
But now there’s money again.
I’ll show Father I’m good enough to have my portrait on the wall at Skogsa. And once I’ve shown him, I’ll tell him that his opinion of me doesn’t mean anything, that he can take his portrait and go to hell.
He gets up.
Feels the parquet floor sway beneath his feet as the cognac goes to his head.
He sits down again. Looks at the picture of his mother, Bettina, beside the clock. Her gentle face enclosed by a heavy gold frame. How Father has never been the same since she went. How he seems almost lost, left behind.
Fredrik was eavesdropping outside his mother’s sickroom at the castle during her last night of life. Heard how she made Father promise to look after him, their weak son.
His mother wasn’t at all like that female detective who arrested him out in the field after he tried to get away from the police in the city, yet Fredrik finds himself thinking about her for some reason.
Malin Fors.
Quite good-looking.
But trashy. Bad taste in clothes and far too worn-out for her age. She’s got that cheap look that all country girls from poor families have. What distinguished her from others like her was that she seemed completely aware of who she was. And that it bothered her. Maybe she’s intelligent, but she could hardly be properly smart.
Are you going to be back soon?
The old villa seems to have secrets in every corner, and the damp and rain are making the house creak, as if it’s trying to send him a message in Morse code.
Then Fredrik hears something.
Is that the car pulling up, his wife’s black Volvo? The clock strikes. Of course, it must be them. The children are probably asleep in the car now, if they were going to be spending the night with her parents Christina would have called.
He gets up.
Walks unsteadily out into the hall where he opens the double doors.
The rain is driving against him, but he can’t see any sign of a car in the drive.
Solid darkness outside.
And the rain.
Then a pair of car headlights come on over by the barn.
Then they go off again.
And on again, and he can’t see the car well enough to see what model it is, but it looks like it’s black, it is, and he wonders why his wife doesn’t drive right up to the house in weather like this, maybe the damp has caused engine trouble, and he steps out onto the porch and waves, and the headlights flash again, over and over again. His wife and children. Do they want him to run over with an umbrella? Or is it his father? His sister?
Flash.
Flash.
Fredrik pulls on his oilskin.
Opens the umbrella.
Flash.
Then darkness.
He heads through the rain towards the car, which now has its lights off, maybe fifty metres away.
Darkness.
He can almost feel his pupils expand, his eyes working feverishly to help his brain make sense of the world, as if the world disappears without the right signals.
He should have switched on the garden lights. Should he go back?
No, carry on towards his wife and kids.
He’s approaching the car.
His wife’s car.
No.
Tinted glass, impossible to see through.
Something moving inside the car.
An animal?
A fox, a wolf?
A quick sound from whatever it is that’s moving.
And Fredrik goes cold, his body paralysed, and he wants to run like he has never run before.
It’s only a dream, Malin thinks. But it never seems to end.
Fear only exists in the dream.
Something knocking deep inside me.
The fire, the fire I shall one day go into, is nothing to be afraid of.
I’ve given in. And that frightens me.
What I am, is my fear. Isn’t that right?
PART 3
The film doesn’t stop just because I want it to.
It’s endless, and the images become more and more blurred, indistinct, grey, as their edges smoulder.
No matter what happens, they won’t catch me.
I shall defend myself.
I shall breathe.
I won’t hold back any of the rage. I shall let the young snakes, the last of them, leave my body.
I have to admit that it felt good this time. It wasn’t a sudden outburst like the first time. I knew what I was going to do. And there were a thousand reasons. I saw your face in his, Father, I saw all the boys in the schoolyard in his face. I undressed him like they undressed me, I pretended I was laying him on an altar of young snakes.
It made me calm, the violence. Happy. And utterly desperate.
The darkness is getting thicker now, the raindrops are balls of lead crashing onto the ground, onto the people.
It’s my turn now. I’m the most powerful.
No one will ever again be able to turn away from me. And who really needs those pigs with their traditions, names, the sense of superiority they acquire at birth. The pictures flicker, black and white with pale yellow numbers. The story of me, the one firing out of the projector, is approaching its end now.
But I am still here.
Father embraces me again in the pictures, and he’s thin, and Mum won’t survive the cancer for much longer. Come to me, son, stand still so I can hit you.
I have a friend.
It’s possible to escape loneliness, captivity. The strangers and the fear, all the things that are unbearable.
