Authors: Johan Theorin
43
‘IS EVERYONE FEELING
OK?’ Marie-Louise asks.
There are a few indistinct mumbles.
The response is muted. Winter is on its way. It is late autumn, a weary grey Monday morning at the Dell, with an excess of darkness and very little light.
Jan says nothing, but no one seems to notice his silence. His night shift actually finished an hour ago, but in spite of his tiredness he has stayed on to attend the morning meeting. He wants to know if his visit to the hospital has been discovered – if Dr Högsmed has sent over a report about an
intruder
. The security guard was quite a long way from him, she can’t possibly have seen his face all that clearly, but …
Marie-Louise doesn’t mention it. She is behaving exactly the way she always does, except that she is slightly more subdued. Perhaps it’s because of the autumn darkness outside the window.
Lilian is positively drooping. Her head is bent over her coffee cup so that the red hair covers her face; she seems to be half asleep. When Marie-Louise turns to her, Lilian doesn’t look her in the eye.
‘Lilian,’ Marie-Louise says tentatively. ‘What’s that?’
‘Sorry? What’s what?’
Lilian raises her head and Jan sees that she still has the snake on her cheek. Her weekend tattoo.
‘On your cheek … Have you painted something on your cheek?’
‘This?’ Lilian runs her fingers over her face, and seems surprised
when
she notices that her fingertips are slightly black. ‘Oh, sorry, that was for a party … I forgot to get rid of it. Sorry. I’m really sorry.’ She coughs loudly and suppresses a belch, and the smell of alcohol spreads across the table.
Marie-Louise frowns. ‘Lilian, could I have a word with you in private?’
Lilian closes her mouth. ‘What for?’
‘Because you are far from sober.’ Marie-Louise’s voice is no longer gentle.
Lilian looks at her for a few seconds, then she gets up and leaves the table, her lips tightly pressed together. She walks out of the room after pausing to address the others: ‘I am not drunk,’ she mutters. ‘I am
hung-over
.’
Marie-Louise follows her. ‘Back in a moment.’
Both women seem to have repaired to the cloakroom; that’s where their voices are now coming from. The conversation begins as a quiet discussion, but the volume rapidly increases. Marie-Louise’s voice remains controlled, but Lilian responds with loud questions.
‘Can’t a person go out and
relax
after work?
Wind down
a little bit? Or are we all supposed to
dedicate our lives
to the kids, just like you’ve done?’
‘Calm down please, Lilian – the children can hear you …’
‘I am fucking calm!’
Around the table you could hear a pin drop. Hanna and Andreas keep their eyes lowered, and Jan can’t think of anything to say.
The tirade continues: ‘You’re sick, that’s your problem! You need to get some help!’
Is that Lilian or Marie-Louise? Jan can’t tell; the voice that is yelling is too shrill.
‘And you’re so fucking
perfect
! I just can’t do it any more, I can’t be like you … The nut jobs can look after their own fucking kids!’
That must be Lilian, Jan realizes.
Marie-Louise’s response is cold and curt: ‘Lilian, you’re hysterical.’
Hysteria is no longer an acceptable term
, Jan hears Dr Högsmed saying inside his head.
The quarrel is making Andreas look ill; he shudders and gets to his feet. ‘I’ll go and see to the children.’
He goes into the playroom and soon Jan hears jolly nursery rhymes from the CD player, drowning out the loud voices from the cloakroom.
But like most arguments, this one soon comes to an end. After a few moments the front door slams shut; there is a brief silence, then Marie-Louise is back, smiling once more.
‘Lilian has gone home for the day,’ she says. ‘She’s going to have a little rest.’
Jan nods without speaking, but Hanna asks softly, ‘Is she getting any help?’
Marie-Louise stops smiling. ‘Help?’
‘To cut down on her drinking,’ Hanna says calmly.
Jan can feel the tension in the air.
Marie-Louise folds her arms. ‘Lilian is not a child. She is responsible for her own actions.’
‘But the employer also has a certain level of responsibility,’ Hanna insists. She sounds as if she is quoting from some legal document when she goes on: ‘If an employee is drinking too much there should be a treatment plan for their rehabilitation.’
‘For
their rehabilitation
,’ Marie-Louise repeats. ‘Well, doesn’t that sound marvellous?’
Hanna doesn’t look amused. ‘Is there a rehabilitation plan for Lilian?’
Marie-Louise stares at her. ‘There are many eyes on us here, Hanna,’ she says eventually. ‘Just bear that in mind.’
Then she turns and walks out of the staffroom.
There are only the two of them left at the table now. Hanna rolls her eyes at Jan, but he shakes his head.
‘Now she’ll think you’re a troublemaker,’ he says quietly.
Hanna sighs. ‘I care about Lilian. Don’t you?’
‘Well yes … obviously.’
‘So why does she drink so much? Have you given it any thought?’
Jan hasn’t given it any thought. ‘To get drunk,’ he says eventually.
‘But why does she want to get drunk?’
Jan shrugs. ‘I suppose she’s unhappy. But there’s unhappiness everywhere, isn’t there?’
‘You don’t know anything … you just don’t understand,’ Hanna says, getting to her feet.
Jan stands up too. It feels good to leave the table, and equally good to think that he can soon go home. This has not been a pleasant Monday morning; the feelgood meeting was more about feeling bad.
He just wants to go home and get some sleep. He wants to be normal. He wants to look to the future, make a life for himself.
Never to be shut in again
, he thinks.
He has no one to make a life with. Perhaps that is the worst thing of all. Not having someone to listen.
The Unit
Rami had climbed off her bed and sat down on the floor next to Jan. In the end his story about the Gang of Four had captured her attention.
‘Had they locked you in the sauna?’
‘Not locked … there was no lock,’ he said. ‘But they’d jammed something up against the door. I didn’t know what it was, but it wouldn’t move. It was rock-solid.’
‘So you were trapped in the heat,’ Rami said.
He nodded.
‘How did you get out, then?’
‘I didn’t,’ Jan said. ‘It was Friday … Everyone had gone home.’
The silence in the sauna goes on and on. No doors slam. No caretaker pokes his head around the door and shouts ‘Hello?’ into the empty shower room
.
The door refuses to move
.
And the sauna is hot now. The air could get hotter, but it is hot enough already. As hot as the desert. Forty degrees perhaps, or fifty
.
All he can do is grope around in the darkness, feeling his way across the pine floorboards. His hand touches a plastic bucket; he hears the water lapping against the sides
.
There is wood everywhere inside a sauna. Bare wood on the floor and on the walls, with long planks fixed to the walls at two different levels. That is where you sit when you are having a sauna, or a crafty smoke
.
Jan sits on the lower plank for a while. He is sweating now
.
Someone is bound to come
.
Then he stops thinking for a while; his head feels kind of empty. The skin on his bottom is a bit sore, but he is calmer now. The Gang of Four have gone
.
No one else comes. There isn’t a sound outside the door
.
And it just keeps on getting hotter and hotter
.
Jan was sitting on the floor in Rami’s room with his head bowed. She was holding his hand and he could feel her beside him, but in his mind he was alone. He was still inside the sauna.
‘I was unlucky,’ he said. ‘It was Friday, and the gym wasn’t due to open again until Monday.’
‘So what happened?’ Rami asked.
Jan looked at her. ‘I don’t know.’
He didn’t really remember very much, but now he started to think back. What did he actually do? How do you survive several days in a hot sauna?
Bang on the door. Keep on banging and banging, until you are quite sure that no one is coming. Peter Malm and his gang won’t be coming back. They have jammed the door and cleared off; they have already forgotten you
.
Then you can try shouting and banging on the door for a little bit longer, until you eventually give up. Your hands are aching and smarting; they are full of splinters from the coarse wood of the sauna door
.
Fumble around and realize that you can actually see a little bit in the darkness – a faint strip of light is showing underneath the door, and there is a tiny shimmering patch in an air vent just below the ceiling. So you are not completely blind. You can see your hands in front of you like patches of pale grey
.
You reach out and climb upwards. The heat increases as you get closer to the ceiling. Suddenly your fingers are touching something, something cylindrical, with a smooth metallic surface
.
A beer can. Here in the near darkness it is impossible to see what brand it is, but you can hear the liquid slopping about when you pick
it
up. It feels as if it is about half full, but when you bring it up to your nose a sour, disgusting smell emanates from the little hole in the top. Someone has left it on the bench in the sauna; it could have been there for days, or even weeks
.
Put the can down. Sit on the top bench and think. Try to think. How are you going to get out?
Don’t expect anyone in the Gang of Four to come back and open the door; that’s not going to happen
.
Don’t expect your parents to come looking for you either. They were supposed to be going away with your younger brother, to stay with some aunt. They might ring you, but when you don’t answer they will just assume you are at a friend’s house – even though you don’t have any friends that you might visit. They live in a dream world where their son is happy at school, and you don’t want to wake them from their dream
.
No. You just have to assume that you are trapped in here, presumably until Monday morning. At least it was meatballs with mashed potato for lunch in the school canteen today, and you sat at a table all by yourself and ate ten of them
.
You won’t get any more food until Monday
.
You should be pleased that you don’t have any clothes. Standing naked in the shower room was horrible, you felt like a little frozen piglet out there, naked and surrounded by the Gang of Four in their new sweatshirts and expensive jeans. But in here you won’t miss your clothes at all
.
It is pretty hot up on the wooden bench. Frying tonight. The heat rises, and you are sweating more and more
.
Climb down and sit on the lower level with your feet on the floor. It’s a little bit cooler down here
.
Sit there and bow your head
.
Don’t think, just wait
.
Close your eyes
.
Carry on waiting
.
Raise your head and wonder whether you might run out of air. It is difficult to breathe … is that because of the heat, or is there some other reason? You once read a story about someone who was buried
alive
in a coffin, and almost died from lack of oxygen. A sauna is a kind of coffin
.
You take a deep breath and sniff the air – does it smell bad? Not yet. Fresh air is probably coming in through the gap at the bottom of the door, and through the vent up by the ceiling. Not much, but you hope it will be enough
.
Lie down on the bench
.
Close your eyes
.
Don’t think
.
Just wait
.
Wait …
Wake up with a start!
Have you been asleep?
It is still dark. How much time has passed since they shut you in? You have no idea. You have a watch with a luminous face that your grandmother gave you for your tenth birthday, but it is in the pocket of your trousers in the changing room
.
Unless of course the Gang of Four really did take your boots and clothes with them and chucked them in the pond
.
The sauna is still switched on
.
The sweat is pouring off your body in the heat. You are incredibly thirsty
.
Slide down on to the floor and crawl over to the bucket; it is there so that people can throw water on to the hot stones and fill the sauna with steam. There is actually a little water left in the bottom
.
Don’t be too hasty. You have no idea how long this water has been standing here. Every explorer knows that stagnant water can be poisonous, but in the end you scoop up a little and have a drink. It’s not good. It’s lukewarm and it tastes stale, but you have another drink. And another
.
Then you put down the bucket, because you need to ration your resources
.
‘
Ration your resources’: that sounds like an adventure story with a hero, but you are no hero. You are completely powerless, you cannot breathe. You curl up on the floor and wait and wait and wait. The
gym
is a short distance away from the school, on the outskirts of town – nobody passes here by chance
.
You cannot hear a thing apart from a slight rushing sound in your ears, and from time to time a faint clicking from the heater. You get to your feet and bang on the door anyway, you shout and bang and shout. The door is thick and solid; it doesn’t move a millimetre
.
Then you curl up again, but the floorboards are getting hotter and hotter. Underneath the benches there is a cement floor which should be cooler, but you don’t want to crawl in there. You know how filthy it must be. Thousands of people have sat on the benches up above, year after year, their sweat trickling down on to the floor. They have spat through the gaps in the benches, dropped their snuff, shed hairs and flakes of skin
.
But you have to get away from the heat, and eventually you crawl in there anyway. You are a naked little piglet, crawling in among the damp filth beneath the benches. And it is cooler. It’s dirty, but you can breathe
.
You wait on the cement floor, dreaming of a friend. A tough guy. A man who begins to realize that something is wrong. Perhaps you arranged to meet at a restaurant in town – why haven’t you turned up? You don’t know his name, and you don’t have any paper to draw his picture, but you start to conjure up this man inside your head
.
He is known as the Secret Avenger. The Secret Avenger chooses not to reveal himself, he blends into his surroundings. If you look carefully you will see him there, but in a crowd he is invisible
.
You know that the Secret Avenger has grown tired of waiting. He gets up from the table, pays for his whisky and decides to go looking for you. He transforms himself. He becomes the Righteous Avenger, with burning eyes and fists of steel. You know exactly what he looks like. Be careful, Torgny!
You lose consciousness, then come round
.
You are not sweating as much now, but you are just as thirsty as before. You crawl over to the bucket and drink a little more water. By the sound of it there are perhaps ten or eleven gulps left in the bottom of the bucket. You drink three, then lie down on the cooler cement once more
.
You close your eyes, dreaming in the darkness. Time passes. Sometimes you raise your head and you really believe that the Secret Avenger is on his way, that he has somehow tracked down the Gang of Four and beaten them up in order to find out what they have done with his best friend – but most of the time you know that no one is coming to save you
.
You sleep, and you have no control over your dreams this time. Afterwards you cannot remember whether they were peaceful out-of-body experiences or nightmares, but at least they can’t have been any worse than lying awake in the darkness
.
Sooner or later you are awake again, and totally dehydrated. You have no idea if it is morning, but breakfast consists of a little water from the bottom of the bucket. It is slightly gritty, with hairs floating around in it, but you drink it anyway. Every last drop
.
Is that a rumbling noise? You put down the bucket and listen. No, it isn’t the Secret Avenger opening the door. Perhaps it was a car driving past the back of the gym
.
You are going to die here in the sauna. You know that now. There is no more water. It is a little bit like lying in a dark desert. A night of tropical heat. Your body is gradually drying out
.
Is it possible to drink sweat? It doesn’t really matter, because you are so dehydrated that you have stopped sweating – there is just a greasy film coating your skin
.
Is it possible to drink urine? You are naked and you need to pee, so it isn’t difficult to test the theory, all you have to do is let a little bit trickle into your hand
.
It tastes bitter, but you drink a mouthful anyway. One mouthful. That’s all you can get down
.
You crawl over to the door. The gap at the bottom is tiny, but you push your face up against it and try to see out. The lights are still on. The shower room looks just the same as it always does, with its shiny tiled floor. Out there the whole world is going about its business as if nothing terrible has happened, as if the Gang of Four does not exist
.
Eventually, at some point when you are almost unconscious, you slowly clamber up to the top bench and the beer can – the one that is half full of some unidentified liquid. And you drink that too. It
is
warm and sour and slightly viscous, but you drink and drink and empty the can. You are too thirsty to care what is sliding down your throat
.
When it is all gone you swallow again, hard
.
Clamp your lips together, you mustn’t be sick. You must retain the liquid in your stomach, otherwise you will die
.
But by now you want to die. So why do you go on fighting here in the darkness, minute by minute?
You lie down on the floor again. Is it Saturday or Sunday? You have given up, you simply lie there
.
‘Perhaps I died right there on the floor,’ Jan said. ‘Perhaps the Unit is heaven.’
Somehow he had ended up lying on the floor, with his head on Rami’s lap. He looked up at her, but she shook her head.
‘You didn’t die.’
She bent her head and opened her mouth. Jan saw the tip of her tongue and was expecting the second kiss of his life, but Rami was aiming for his eyes.
She closed his eyelids with her tongue, first the right, then the left.
And when his eyes were closed she pushed her tongue into his mouth. This kiss felt better than the first one, like a journey across the vault of heaven. He felt her upper body pressing against him. It was soft, not hard as he had expected.
Rami released his lips eventually, exhaled with a gentle sigh and looked at him. ‘But somebody rescued you in the end?’
Jan nodded without speaking. He wanted to lie here for the rest of his life; he didn’t want to think about the sauna.
At long last you hear noises through the wooden door; someone is moving around in the changing room
.
You open your eyes. The sauna is still as hot, but you are shivering
.
More noises. Shoes stomping across the tiled floor
.
‘
Hello?’ a man’s voice calls out
.
You try to stand up and manage to get to your knees, but then you
run
out of strength. You fall forward, straight into the door. Your arms and your forehead hit the wooden panel and you stay there, leaning against the door, trying to bang on it
.