He buttoned up his jacket and walked towards the subway.
He was terrified of the night, well aware of what was waiting. It was in the loneliness of his apartment that the control took over. The constantly nagging feeling that there was something important he had forgotten. The tap in the bathroom, had he turned it off properly? And the gas rings on the cooker? And what about the door, did he really lock it? Then the temporary calm when he had checked that everything was as it should be. But what if he had bumped into the light switch in the bathroom when he walked past without noticing it? Maybe he had managed to turn on the cooker just as he was checking that it was off. And he was no longer sure that he had locked the door. Had to check again.
The simplest thing was to stay away. Then he knew that everything was under control. Before he left the apartment he always turned off all the gas rings, unplugged the cords of all the electrical appliances and devices, and wiped the dust off the plugs. One never knew if a spark might start a fire. He stored the remote control for the TV in a drawer; it absolutely mustn’t be left out on the table so that a ray of sunlight through the window might strike the sensor and make it catch fire.
And then going out the door. For the past six months the locking ritual had become so complicated that he had to write it down on a piece of paper he kept in his wallet to make sure he didn’t miss something.
He stood down on the street looking up at the black windows of the flat. A man in his fifties he had never seen before came out the front door and gave him a suspicious look. He couldn’t bring himself to go up to the flat. Instead he took his keyring from his pocket and got into his car, turned the ignition and let the engine idle.
Only with Anna was he left in peace. Only she was strong enough to vanquish the annihilating fear.
And now they thought he would just let go and move on.
Where to?
Where was it they wanted him to go?
She was all he had.
It was after the accident that it started again. It came sneaking up, lying in wait for him, at first only as a diffuse need to create symmetry and restore balance. And later, when the gravity of her injuries had become more and more obvious, the pressure to perform the complicated rituals had intensified to an inescapable compulsion. The only way to neutralise the threat was to give in. If he didn’t obey the impulses properly, something horrible would happen. What, he didn’t know, only that the fear and pain grew intolerable if he tried to fight back.
When he was a teenager it had been different. Then the pressure eased if he just avoided touching door handles with his hands or walked backwards down the stairs or touched all the lampposts he passed. Back then it had been easier to handle, when it was possible to hide behind the self-centredness of a teenager.
No one knew, either now or then, and well aware of the insanity of what he was doing he had invented tricks and gestures to make the compulsory rituals look like a natural part of his behaviour.
Every day a secret war.
Only during the year with Anna had he been free.
He loved Anna. He would never leave her.
His mobile rang in his jacket pocket. He took it out and looked at the display. No number. Two rings. He had to answer after the fourth or forget it.
It might be Karolinska Hospital.
‘Jonas.’
‘It’s Pappa.’
Not now. Damn.
‘You’ve got to help me, Jonas.’
He was drunk. Drunk and sad. And Jonas knew why he was calling. It had been eight months since the last time he called, and it had been the same story then. It always was. He probably didn’t call more often to plead with his son because he was seldom sober enough to remember the number.
Jonas could hear the sound of people in the background. His father was drinking in some bar somewhere.
‘I don’t have time to talk right now.’
‘Damn it, Jonas, you’ve got to help me. I can’t go on living like this, I can’t stand it any more . . .’
His voice broke and there was silence on the line. Only the murmur of voices.
Jonas leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. His father had begun to use his tears as a last resort early on. And frightened by his father’s vulnerability, Jonas had tried to be loyal and thus was forced into betrayal.
He was thirteen years old when it started.
Thirteen years old and his father’s loyal coconspirator. The truth, whatever and wherever it was, had to be kept secret from his mother at all costs.
To protect her.
Year in and year out.
And then the constant question inside him of why his pappa did what he did.
There were plenty of people in town who knew. He remembered all the conversations that would suddenly stop when he and his mamma entered the grocer’s and that resumed again as soon as she turned her back. All the sympathetic smiles that were directed at her from neighbours and girlfriends, people she thought were her friends, but who year after year out of sheer cowardice held their tongues about the truth. And he, too, walking beside her and holding his tongue as well, he was the worst traitor of them all. He recalled a conversation he had heard once when she was sitting with a neighbour in the kitchen. His mother thought that he had gone out and didn’t hear, but he was lying in bed reading a comic book. He heard her in tears, talking about her suspicions that her husband had met someone else. Heard how she sat there at the kitchen table and overcame her own reservations enough to dare express her shameful misgivings. And the woman lied. Straight into his mamma’s face she lied as she accepted coffee and home-baked buns. Lied and said that his mamma was surely just imagining things and that every marriage had its ups and downs and that there was certainly nothing to worry about.
And then the slaps on the back from the men urging his father on to new conquests, and more overtime to keep alive his reputation as an irresistible ladykiller, while Jonas stayed at home covering for him. Constant lies that were compensated for by the growing pressure to perform his rituals to dull the sense of dread. And then new lies, to hide the compulsion.
How he had wondered about all those women. Who were they, what were they thinking? Did they know that his father had a wife and a son somewhere, waiting for the man they were seducing? Did it mean anything to them? Did they care? What made them give their bodies to a man who only wanted to fuck them and then go home and deny them to his wife?
He never could understand it.
The only thing he knew was that he hated each and every one of them.
Hated them all.
The bubble burst a few months before his eighteenth birthday. Something as trivial as a little lipstick on a shirt collar. After five years of lies the constant betrayal was revealed, and his father had used Jonas’s knowledge like a scared rabbit to protect himself from her pain. To avoid bearing all the guilt himself.
She had never been able to forgive either of them.
She was doubly betrayed.
The wound they gave her was so deep that it could never heal.
He had remained in the house in silence after his father moved out, watched her from a distance in the destroyed home. It reeked of shame and hatred. She refused to talk to anyone. In the daytime she seldom left her bedroom, and if she did it was only to go to the toilet. Jonas tried to make up for his betrayal by taking care of shopping for food and other errands, but she never came out to the table when he fixed their meals. Every night at two-thirty he set off on his moped to his job delivering newspapers, and when he came home at six he could see that she had taken something to eat from the refrigerator. The dishes she used stood carefully washed in the dish rack.
But she never spoke a word to him.
‘I don’t have time to talk now.’
