Silenced (21 page)

I need a hobby, she thought as she walked from Kungsholmen to her flat by Vasa Park. And more friends.

Neither thing was really true. She had more friends than she had time for, and more leisure activities than she could ever fit in. But how did she end up with these voids of acute loneliness and inactivity? Fredrika had been wondering about this for several years and had concluded that the answer was actually quite simple: the problem was that she did not come first for anybody. There was no one for whom she took priority over everything else, and so from time to time she found herself feeling lonely and abandoned when all her friends’ diaries were full and they had no time to meet up with her, just when she needed their company most.

But was this evening really one of those times? It had been her own decision not to arrange anything with a friend while she was waiting for Spencer. On the other hand, no friends had rung, either.

The lonely, forlorn feeling had greatly intensified since she got pregnant. The exhaustion and nightmares played their part. And the wretched pains that sometimes made her want to scream.

She arrived home to a silent, empty flat. How she had loved this place when she found it. Big windows letting in huge amounts of light; polished pine floors. The original kitchen with a tiny maid’s room opening off it that she could turn into a little library.

This was where I was reborn, thought Fredrika.

The lights glimmered into life as she went round the flat turning them on, one after another. She put her hand on a radiator and found it cool. Spencer always objected to how cold she liked to keep the flat.

Spencer. Always Spencer.
What does it mean, the fact that you and I were destined to meet?

The ringing of the phone cut through the flat. Her mother clearly had something on her mind.

‘Are you sleeping any better?’ was her opening gambit.

‘No,’ said Fredrika. ‘But I’m not in as much pain now. Haven’t been today, at any rate.’

‘I had an idea,’ her mother ventured.

Silence.

‘Perhaps you’d feel better if you started playing again?’

For a moment, time stood still and Fredrika was drowning in memories from the time before the Accident.

‘I don’t mean lots,’ her mother quickly added. ‘Not lots, just a little bit, to help you feel more in harmony with yourself. You know I always play when I can’t get to sleep.’

There was a time when conversations like that would have been natural for Fredrika and her mother. Back then, they used to play music together and draw up guidelines for Fredrika’s future. But that was then, before the Accident. Now, Fredrika’s mother no longer had a right to discuss Fredrika’s playing with her, and sensed as much when her daughter did not respond.

She decided to change the subject.

‘You’ve got to let us meet him, now.’

Firm but with a note of entreaty. Asking to be part of her daughter’s life again.

Fredrika felt shocked.

‘Your dad and I are trying, trying really hard in fact, to reconcile ourselves to the situation you’ve faced us with. We’re trying to understand the way you must have thought about this and planned it out. But we feel dreadfully excluded, Fredrika. Not only have you had a secret relationship with a man for over a decade, but now you’re expecting his baby as well.’

‘I don’t know what I can say,’ sighed Fredrika.

‘No, but I do,’ he mother said briskly. ‘Bring him round. Tomorrow.’

Fredrika weighed this in her mind and concluded that she could no longer keep Spencer and her family apart.

‘I’ll talk to Spencer when he gets here this evening,’ she promised. ‘I’ll let you know.’

Then she sat on the settee for a long time, brooding on the fateful question that had been haunting her for so long. What was the point, really, of falling in love with a man twenty years older than her who, married or not, would be leaving her long before she finished living her own life?

Alongside the darkness, fatigue and boredom came a soft call from a room she thought she had locked years before.

Play me, whispered a voice. Play.

She could not really explain afterwards what impulse it was that finally prompted her to get up, go into the hall and get out her violin for the first time since sentence was passed on her after the Accident. But suddenly there she was with the instrument, feeling the weight of it in her hands, so familiar and so infernally missed.

This was all I wanted to be.

By the time Spencer arrived a few hours later, the instrument lay in its case again. Newly tuned and played.

They came for him late in the evening. It was a procedure not unlike some he remembered from his past. Strangers arrived in the darkness with keys to a door only he should have been able to open. He lay stiffly between the sheets in the bed, with nowhere to go. Then he heard the man’s voice, the Swedish one who spoke such good Arabic.

‘Good evening, Ali,’ said the voice. ‘Are you awake?’

Of course he was awake. How much had he actually slept since he left Iraq? He guessed it did not amount to more than ten hours all told.

‘I’m here,’ he said, climbing out of bed.

They came into the room, all of them at once. The woman was not with them this time, but the man had two other men with him, strangers to Ali. He felt embarrassed standing there in his underpants. And socks. His feet were always so cold. He had stopped worrying about the smoky smell in the flat. The fresh pungency of newly painted walls that had met him when he first stepped into it was long gone.

‘Get your clothes on,’ said the man with a smile. ‘You’re going to stay somewhere else until Sunday.’

Relief spread through his body. He was going to get out of here – at last. Feel the coolness on his cheeks, breathe the fresh air. But the news also came as a surprise. No one had said anything about a change of accommodation.

He looked at his watch as he was pulling on his jeans and jersey; it was nearly midnight. The men moved around the flat like restless spirits. He could hear them in the kitchen, opening cupboards and the fridge. The food was all gone. He fervently hoped there would be more to eat at the new place.

They went down the stairs. The Arabic-speaking man went first, then Ali and the others brought up the rear. Out onto the pavement. Ali looked up and got snowflakes in his eyes. So much rain of that kind in this part of the world.

It was a bigger car this time, more like a minibus. Ali was to sit right at the back between the two strangers. The men put the bag he had been given in the boot. One man had a long overcoat on and reminded Ali of someone he had seen in a film. The other had a rather gruesome look. His face was strangely deformed. As if someone had slashed it down the middle with a knife and then sewed it back together. The man sensed Ali looking at him and turned his head slowly to meet his stare. Ali instinctively averted his eyes.

They drove through an estate where all the blocks of flats were the same. Then out onto a main road where the cars were going faster. Ali looked out to the right, then to the left. And suddenly, on the right. In the distance, but clearly visible. Something that looked like a gigantic golf ball, lit up like a temple.

‘The Globe,’ said the man beside him.

Ali looked straight ahead instead. How often did you travel in a car and not know where you were going?

Night closed the car in its embrace. His eyelids felt heavy.

Sometime, he thought wearily. Sometime I shall reach the end of this never-ending journey.

BANGKOK, THAILAND

They could not force her to hand herself over to the police. But nor could they offer her any protection. Advising her to contact the local police straight away, they threw her out into the street. She ran for her life, heading randomly down Sukhumvit. The exertion proved too much. With no food or drink inside her and the temperature nearing forty degrees Celsius, she only got a few blocks before she had to stop, trying to get her bearings. Her sense of direction had deserted her; she had no idea which direction she had run in.

Someone, she thought dully, someone – it did not matter who – should be able to vouch for who I am.

All her plans were in tatters. It was no longer a question of picking and choosing between friends and acquaintances and weighing up which of them she could confide in. Now she just needed all the help she could get.

Her knees gave way and she sank down onto the pavement. She tried to squeeze out one last drop of rational thought.

Think, think, think, she urged herself. What’s my main problem right now?

Her lack of money was acute, but manageable. The lack of contact details for her nearest and dearest now that she had no access to her mobile phone or email was harder. But there were other ways of getting hold of telephone numbers, and she could open new email accounts.

The priority had to be getting hold of her father. There was a risk that he, too, might be in danger.

Her eyes misted as she thought of her father. Why wasn’t he answering his phone? And her mother? Where had they both got to?

She counted her currency, and found she had enough baht for half an hour’s internet use and a couple of international calls.

Then that’s it, I’ll have nothing left, she thought, fighting to keep down the rising wave of panic that was threatening to overwhelm her.

The café owner was a kindly man who served coffee on the house once you were at your computer. She worked fast and efficiently. Found the telephone numbers of a handful of people she trusted and noted them down. Went to the hotmail homepage and opened a new email account. On consideration she decided not to use her own name in her new email address and opted for a more cryptic pseudonym. Her fingers moved nimbly over the keyboard, writing a brief, concise email to her father. She sent it to both of his email addresses, the private one and the church one. She felt ambivalent about contacting the friend who had not got back to her. Was it a mistake to discount him at this point? The thoughts swarmed like eager wasps in her tired head. She wrote him a few words:

Need urgent help. Contact Swedish Embassy in Bangkok and ask to fax them my personal ID and a print-out of my passport record.

When she had finished her emails, she felt an impulse that she could not explain when she looked back. She went to the website of one of the Swedish evening papers. Maybe to feel closer to her own country for a moment, maybe to feel less like a fugitive.

But she felt neither of those things, because when the page came up it told her that her parents had been found shot dead three days before, and that the police could not discount the theory that they had been killed by someone else. Mechanically, convinced that nothing she was reading could be true, she clicked her way through various articles. ‘Possible suicide’, ‘history of mental problems’, ‘devastated by daughter’s death’. Her brain stopped working. She quickly switched to the homepage of another newspaper. And then another. Ragnar Vinterman was quoted in several of the pieces. He was dismayed and upset, said the Church had lost one of its leading figures.

The scream trying to find its way out got stuck somewhere in her throat, refused to leave her body. But she felt as if she were suffocating, and the headlines smashed into her like the front of a truck that had failed to stop at the lights and ploughed across the carriageway to crash head-on into a much smaller vehicle. An all-pervading sense of horror made her shiver with cold despite the heat.

Look after me, she entreated in silent desperation. Deliver me from this nightmare.

Disconnected words came to her, forming prayers she had said with her parents as a child, making her want to get down on her knees by the computer.

‘Don’t cry,’ she whispered to herself, feeling her cheeks flaming and her eyes misting. ‘Oh God, don’t start crying or you’ll never stop.’

Her acute need to breathe drove her out into the street to inhale the intolerable, overheated city air.

She was back in the café a minute later. Sat down at the computer. The café owner looked uneasy but did not say anything. She read two more articles. ‘Jakob Ahlbin is said to have been told of his daughter’s death at the weekend . . .’ She shook her head. Impossible. Things like this just didn’t happen. Losing your entire family in one go.

On trembling legs she went over to the café owner and asked to borrow a telephone. At once.
Emergency. Please hurry.
He passed the receiver to her across the bar and insisted on helping her make the call.

She gave him the number, one digit at a time. The number she had not rung for so long but would still never forget.

Sister, sister dearest . . .

It rang and rang, and no one answered. Then the answering machine message cut in, the voice that reminded her of everything that felt so incredibly distant right now. And that was it. The tears flowed. Among all the thoughts swirling around in her head, there was only one that passed her by. The one that told her she had not read the newspaper properly, not grasped who was supposed to have died. When the beep went and she had to leave her message, she was sobbing.

‘Oh please, please answer if you can hear this.’

SATURDAY 1 MARCH 2008

STOCKHOLM

The realisation that age was creeping up on him came with the night and woke him early. He had never been pursued by thoughts like that before, so he had no idea how to deal with them. It started when his wife pointed out that the lines on his brow had deepened into furrows. And that his grey hairs were getting whiter. A glance in the mirror confirmed her judgement. The ageing process was accelerating. And ageing was accompanied by fear.

He had always been very sure of himself. Sure about everything. First about where his studies were leading him. Then his choice of career. And then his choice of wife. Or had
she
chosen
him
? They still bickered about it good-naturedly when things were going well between them. But that was increasingly rarely.

Thinking about his wife temporarily banished his worry about getting old. Maybe that said something about the scale of his anxiety about their marital problems. They had met around midsummer, just before they both turned twenty. Two young, ambitious people with their lives ahead of them, imagining they shared everything. His interests were hers, and her values were his. They had a solid platform to stand on. He reminded himself of that over the years, when he could not think of a single rational reason for his choice of companion in life.