Stefan had nipped down to the 7-Eleven to buy milk for the coffee he always insisted on offering, leaving Sebastian alone. Sebastian pushed aside the left-hand curtain to give himself a clear view, then settled comfortably in the big armchair and watched the two men’s efforts with the piano for a little while. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes.
He felt almost expectant, probably because of what was going to happen very soon.
The return.
The moment when Sebastian took control once more and struck back. Hard. He opened his eyes and had a quick look at the piano fiasco outside. There was a break in the proceedings; the men seemed to be having a discussion on how best to move forward. Sebastian lost interest and picked up the daily newspaper from the table in front of him.
Something had happened abroad.
Something else had happened in Sweden.
He didn’t really care; he just needed something to occupy him.
He noticed the vase of flowers on the table. The whole thing summed up Stefan perfectly, somehow. The current edition of
DN
and fresh flowers. Freshly brewed coffee with milk. Stefan lived in the moment. As if every day had significance.
After a few more minutes Sebastian heard the outside door open, and a second later Stefan appeared with a carton of semi-skimmed milk in his hand. Sebastian put down the newspaper, still virtually unread, and welcomed Stefan back with a nod.
‘You will have a coffee, won’t you?’ Stefan asked as he headed towards the coffee machine.
‘As you went out specially to buy milk, I suppose I can’t really say no.’
‘You never have any problem saying no.’ Stefan smiled.
Sebastian smiled back. ‘In that case, no.’
Stefan nodded and poured himself a cup; he opened the carton of milk and added a dash to his coffee.
‘It’s not long since you were last here,’ he said, balancing the slightly overfilled cup carefully as he made his way to the other armchair.
‘I know.’
‘You look pleased. Has something happened?’
‘No, what makes you say that?’ Sebastian smiled his most disarming smile. He wanted to prolong the pleasure as much as possible.
‘I don’t know, it’s just a feeling.’ Stefan put his coffee on the table next to the flowers and sat down. There was silence for a few seconds. Sebastian decided it was time to begin.
‘I met Vanja today.’
Stefan looked weary rather than surprised. ‘I thought we’d agreed that you weren’t going to contact her. What did she say?’
‘She said: “What the fuck is he doing here?”’
Stefan shook his head. ‘You promised.’
‘It wasn’t like that. I was trying to get a job.’
‘Where?’
‘With Riksmord.’
‘Of all places . . .’
‘Come on, you said I ought to sort something out, and I want to get back to work. I need . . . structure. You’re right about that. But it has to be something interesting. Challenging.’
‘Not like everything you had to sit through yesterday evening?’
Sebastian didn’t reply. He glanced out of the window again. The men were sitting smoking. The piano remained in exactly the same place.
‘Group therapy works much better if everyone participates,’ Stefan went on. ‘Makes a contribution.’
‘It’s not my thing, I told you that. For God’s sake, they never stopped talking about their banal problems. How can you stand it?’
‘You get used to it. I have patients who are considerably more trying,’ Stefan said meaningfully. Sebastian allowed the irony to pass; he still had the heavy artillery in reserve.
‘Anyway, I’m not coming tonight.’
‘I think you should give it one more chance.’
‘I don’t think so. The thing is . . .’ A deliberate pause. He knew from his experience of giving lectures that sudden changes of topic are usually more effective when they follow an introductory pause. He was going for the maximum effect now. Time for the bombshell: ‘I slept with Annette after the meeting last night.’
Stefan’s face lost its colour. ‘Why the hell did you do that?’
Sebastian spread his arms wide in an apologetic gesture. ‘It was a mistake. I didn’t mean to do it.’
‘You didn’t mean to do it? What the fuck are you talking about, you didn’t mean to do it?’
Stefan tried to calm himself by leaning back in the chair. It didn’t seem to work all that well, Sebastian noted with satisfaction.
‘It was . . . something to do. A distraction. You know me. That’s the way I am.’ He looked at Stefan with feigned interest. ‘Do you know her well?’
‘She’s been my patient for a long time. She feels utterly abandoned by everyone. Her son, her ex-husband, everyone. She has issues with trust, and very low self-esteem.’
‘Yes, that was obvious. She absorbed intimacy like a sponge. But she went like a train in bed.’
Stefan leapt up from the chair, splashing coffee all over the table. ‘Do you realise what you’ve done? Do you have any idea how she must have felt when she woke up alone? I presume you didn’t stay for breakfast.’
‘No, I’ve had bad experiences when it comes to that kind of thing.’
‘And now you’re intending to avoid her?’
‘That’s the plan. It usually works.’ Sebastian opted for another deliberate pause, gazing at Stefan with obviously insincere sympathy. ‘I’m sorry, Stefan, but I did tell you I don’t belong in group therapy.’
‘The question is whether you actually belong anywhere. Get out.’ Stefan pointed to the door. ‘I can’t fucking look at you anymore.’
Sebastian nodded and got to his feet, leaving Stefan with the current issue of the daily newspaper and his cut flowers.
Stefan was right.
Every day did have significance.
The tall man was as close to excited as he could be when he got home. He had seen the placards and the headlines in the evening papers. The police had held a press conference. About him. He wanted nothing more than to start reading, but simply rushing indoors and opening the newspapers he had bought was out of the question.
The ritual.
He had to follow the ritual.
Sticking to the routine, he quickly switched on the light in the hallway and locked the door behind him. Took off his shoes, placed them on the shoe rack, put on his slippers, took off the thin jacket and hung it on the only coat hanger on the hat shelf, which was empty but for a large torch. When he had taken off what he intended to take off – in winter his scarf, hat and gloves would also be placed on the shelf, always in that order – he opened the door to the toilet and switched on the light. As always he felt a pang of distaste the second he looked into the thick darkness of the windowless room, before the fluorescent tube flashed into life. He went in, checked that the torch within reach on the small shelf was working, then unzipped his fly and urinated. He took the torch over to the basin and washed his hands, returned the torch to its proper place, and left the toilet door open when he went into the apartment. He switched on the main light in the living room as he turned left into the kitchen, and switched on the lights over the cooker and on the ceiling. Two torches to check in the kitchen. Both working. Only the bedroom left. Ceiling light, bedside light, check the torch on the bedside table.
All the lights were on. Not that it was necessary. Sunlight was pouring in through every window of the apartment. There was nothing to stop it or to subdue its effect. No shutters on the outside, no curtains on the inside. The first thing the tall man had done when he moved in was to remove all the blinds. No, the electric light wasn’t needed today. But it was part of the ritual. If you did it even when it wasn’t necessary, there was no need to worry about forgetting it when it was important.
Once, many years ago, there had been a power cut in the area where he was living. Everything had gone dark, not just in his apartment but everywhere. Pitch-dark. He had quickly found the nearest torch, but either the batteries were dead or the bulb had blown. He hadn’t checked it for a long time. That was before the ritual. The panic, the paralysing fear that had gripped him, had caused him to vomit, then lie motionless on the floor for several hours, until the power was restored.
He loved the summer. Not necessarily the heat, but the light. The best time was around midsummer, but it was the light he loved, not the celebrations. He didn’t like any celebrations. Particularly midsummer.
It was one midsummer’s eve when he first noticed that something was wrong.
That she wasn’t like everyone else.
He was three, perhaps four years old. They had all got in the car and driven down to the big meadow by the lake. The pole was already up when they arrived. There were lots of people, and they ended up quite a long way from the centre of the celebrations with their blankets and their picnic basket. From time to time fragments of folk music were carried over on the breeze as they sat with their sandwiches, a strawberry tart, and white wine for Mum and Dad. The dancing began at three o’clock. There were lots of people, and they ended up forming four or five circles. He loved dancing; some of the traditional dances were such fun. It might have started earlier, it probably had, but he had no memory of that. The first time was there. At midsummer. In the sun in the outermost circle. When she was dancing with him. His little hand in hers. He remembered feeling happy and looking up at her. She was staring straight ahead into the distance as she danced. She wasn’t really there. She wasn’t singing. Wasn’t smiling. Her body carried out the movements of the dance as if she were asleep. Completely without emotion. Indifferent. He remembered feeling a little afraid, tugging at her hand. She looked down at him and smiled, but the smile never reached her eyes. It was mechanical, learned behaviour, there to assure him that everything was as it should be. But it wasn’t. Not then, and definitely not since then.
‘Mummy’s not feeling very well at the moment.’ That’s what she would say to him when he wasn’t allowed to climb up on her knee, or when she was lying down in the middle of the day with the bedroom curtains closed. When she was sitting on the floor with her knees drawn up to her chin just weeping, and his father had to collect him from nursery because she simply hadn’t turned up. That’s what she would say when she couldn’t cope with preparing anything to eat on the days when he was at home with her, or just before she closed the door behind her, leaving him alone for several hours.
‘Mummy’s not feeling very well at the moment.’ That’s what his father would say to him as he tried to explain in a whisper why he must wear soft slippers indoors, why he mustn’t show that he was upset or worried or cross. To explain why he had to sit still, almost invisible for several hours on the days when she did actually manage to get out of bed. To explain why they never did things together, why he had to be a good boy and look after Mummy while Daddy went out to earn money.
That’s what he himself would say later on, when he was older and his classmates asked why he was away from school so often, why they couldn’t come round to see him, why he never joined in with anything after school, why he never came to parties or took up any kind of sport.
‘Mummy’s not feeling very well at the moment.’
Sometimes, when she was a little better, she said it was a shame he’d had to grow up with such a bad mummy.
But more often she would tell him that it was his fault she was ill. If only he hadn’t come along, everything would have been fine. He had destroyed her.
When he was ten years old it became impossible for her to remain at home. She disappeared. He didn’t know where she had gone. Oddly enough, his father spent more time at home after that, which was ironic because by then he was perfectly capable of looking after himself, partly because he was older and partly because he no longer had to take care of his mother. It was only much later that he realised his father had used work as an escape all those years. Stayed away. His father couldn’t handle her illness, and so passed the responsibility on to his son. He assumed he could have hated his father for that, but by the time the realisation came there was so much and so many others that he hated with far greater intensity.
His mother died six months after she left them. At the funeral, people spoke quietly of suicide, but he never knew for sure.
After another six months a woman he didn’t know turned up on his birthday. Sofia, her name was. He didn’t have a party. Who would come? After several years of virtually no social contact and a significant amount of absence from school, he had no friends. Sofia had brought him a present. A Super Nintendo. He had wanted one ever since it came out the previous year, but had always been told it was too expensive, they couldn’t afford it. But Sofia hadn’t seemed to think it was a particularly extravagant present. She gave him four games as well as the console! He realised immediately that she must have more money than them. More money than they had ever had.
She stayed the night.
Slept in the bedroom with his father.
They had met at the auctioneer’s where he worked, his father told him later. Sofia was both knowledgeable and interested. She had brought in a number of items to sell, but had also bid for quite a lot of beautiful pieces. Expensive pieces. He liked Sofia. She made his father happier than he had been for a very long time.
He saw more of Sofia over the next few months. A lot more. One weekend his father and Sofia went away, and when they came back they were engaged. His father sat him down for a serious talk. He and Sofia were getting married, and they would be going to live with Sofia, who had a lovely place in the middle of the city.
He never really doubted that his father was very fond of Sofia, but he realised that the money was not unimportant.
It was to be a fresh start.
A new life.
A better life.
He deserved it, after all that had happened. This time everything would be fine. Nothing and no one would destroy it.
A few weeks after the engagement he had been introduced to Sofia’s family for the first time. Her mother and father, Lennart and Svea, who were in their sixties, and her brother Carl. Dinner at Villa Källhagen. Very pleasant. He had spilled his drink and crept away, afraid of the consequences, but no one had been cross. The longer the meal went on, the more he had felt able to relax. Sofia seemed to have a nice family, no idiots there. As they were leaving, Sofia’s father had drawn him to one side.