Babylon
Contents
‘It is important to distinguish between envy, jealousy and greed. Envy is the spiteful feeling that someone else owns and enjoys something desirable – the envious impulse is to take it away or destroy it [. . .] Jealousy is based on envy, but affects at least two other people; it concerns principally the love to which the subject believes he has a right, but which has been taken from him [. . .] Greed is a violent and insatiable desire to possess something, above and beyond what the subject needs and what the object can or wishes to give. On the unconscious plane, the main aim of greed is to hollow out the breast completely, to suck it dry and eat it up.’
Melanie Klein,
Love, Guilt and Reparation
Gothenburg
‘I didn’t plan it all in advance. Somewhere in my mind I had a picture of his new Volvo covered in bird shit. But I didn’t think it through:
If I tip a bucket of prawn shells over the car, it will be worth significantly less in the morning. The paintwork will be scratched. The dried-on shit will be almost impossible to remove
. I didn’t think like that. I just did it. I just tipped the shells over the car.’
‘The window on the driver’s side wasn’t properly closed.’
‘Sorry?’
‘You told me the window wasn’t completely—’
‘Yes, I pushed some prawn shells through the gap too. I’ve told you that already.’
Rebecca Nykvist fiddled irritably with a feather she had pulled out of the armchair. Birger Warberg followed her movements as she extended her arm and allowed the feather to drift slowly to the floor, where it disappeared into the carpet’s pattern.
‘You were the one who brought this up again, Rebecca.’
‘Of course I knew I wasn’t doing him a favour. The whole point was to make life difficult for him. But it wasn’t
planned
. I’d had a couple of girlfriends round. We’d eaten prawns. I’d been talking about Magnus and how he’d let me down, I’d drunk a fair amount of wine and . . . I was bloody furious. I did it on impulse, I’ve told you so. I’ve said it over and over again, and it was a long time ago. I don’t see the point in digging it all up now.’
‘I thought it sounded like something you’d described before, in some way.’
‘Something? In some way?’
‘Now you sound annoyed.’
‘Sorry. So what are you getting at?’
‘You behave impulsively when you feel under pressure. You’re
jealous. I think it’s significant that you’ve brought up the business of Magnus’s car in relation to your fears about Henrik’s fidelity. And that you are possibly . . . how can I put this . . . underplaying your own part in the story.’
‘I am not underplaying anything!’
Rebecca raised her voice. ‘How could I? I had to spend hours going over the whole thing with the police; it was like a murder inquiry. And besides, the little bastard got the whole fucking car resprayed at my expense.’
‘I still believe I can see a connection. You talk about your fear of being treated badly by Henrik, just as you felt you were treated badly by Magnus . . . ’
‘Was. Just as I
was
treated badly by Magnus.’
‘ . . . and at the same time you are trying to work through your fear. To deal with your insecurities. But recently you have gone from acknowledging that your jealousy is a significant problem to questioning whether what you did to Magnus and Georg was in fact wrong. Whether Magnus and Georg had done something to deserve your rage.’
‘It’s cruel of you to bring up what happened with Georg. That was ten years ago, Birger. It’s old news. I’ll say it again: how could I underplay the situation? I was barely allowed to keep my job, and I had to give up everything I found fulfilling.’
‘Old news, then?’
‘Isn’t our time up soon?’
Rebecca glanced over her shoulder. A wry smile crossed her freckled face.
‘I see you still have that clock. I thought we’d agreed that it’s not healthy in a therapeutic environment. You know I find it distracting.’
‘I might be wrong, but I think you’re afraid of your own volatility. Of your impulsiveness. I think you’re afraid that your anger will bring destruction. Figuratively speaking.’
‘Oh, figuratively speaking. Thank you very much. I am a psychologist as well, you know.’
Rebecca got to her feet.
‘Three minutes left. I don’t think we’re going to make any more progress today.’
Rebecca ran her hand through her curly red hair and headed for the door, her high heels tapping loudly as she walked.
She still hadn’t fitted a new lock on her mountain bike. Having lost the key and cut off the old lock, she didn’t dare leave the bike in front of her house. They were like magpies, whoever
they
were. Instead she pushed the bike into the passage between the wall and the tool shed; it was going to be fenced in, but at the moment it was cluttered with rubbish: broken kitchen chairs, a garden hose, old pots. The washing machine that had broken last year; nobody had got round to taking it to the tip.
Rebecca swore as she banged her shin on the rotting stepladder, which was hidden in tall grass.
Henrik was sitting at the computer in the study, concentrating hard. She could see his back through the window. A second later he got up and went into the kitchen.
Even though her shin was throbbing and walking was painful, she still took the longer route around the fence and garden path up to the porch. Having bought the house quite recently, she loved looking at its façade from the street. She imagined she was seeing it for the first time: the narrow, pale-green house in a row of equally lovely, pastel-coloured homes; a picture postcard street in the middle of the city She loved the expensive paving stones, the way the path cut through charmingly overgrown flowerbeds and led up to the red door.
The first thing they did when they moved in was to buy a red door and a knocker in the shape of a lion’s head. Rebecca knew she wanted to live in a house with a red door and a doorknocker; she had always thought of herself as a homemaker. She had grown up in a fairly large house, and had been spoiled by having so much space. Even though the apartments she used to rent had been airy and attractive, she was never at ease with the fact that other people
were living and breathing under the same roof. Sometimes she would lie in bed at night imagining a stranger in the darkness, separated from her by just a thin wall. She had never been entirely comfortable with the thought.
Unsurprisingly, she was the driving force when they started talking about houses and they finally settled on the terraced property in Kungsladugård. The area lay to the west of the city; it was comparatively central and not far from the sea, just like the street in Billdal where she grew up.
She was pleased with how things had worked out. She could walk to work easily, through Slottsskogen Park and across Linnéstaden into the city centre. During their first year in the house she often went down to Röda Sten at the weekends, and would read on the jetties there before gathering her strength and taking the long way home via Nya Varvet and Kungsten. On a hot day she could cycle to the naturist beach at Saltholmen; they could manage perfectly well without a car and still enjoy the best the city had to offer.
Unfortunately they hadn’t been the only ones to see the advantages of the house. She had had palpitations all day while the bidding process was going on. Henrik had remained silent and tense. Since Rebecca already had a well-paid job as staff welfare coordinator at what was then one of Sweden’s largest companies, it was taken as read that she held the purse strings. Now, her post was restricted to an administrative role.
When Rebecca had met Henrik six years earlier, she had realised her ex-boyfriends were almost interchangeable. Like Rebecca, they had all grown up in well-off families and they had all followed in Daddy’s footsteps, training to become doctors or lawyers, with a sense of purpose but also a sense of anxiety. Some of them had been very easy to get on with. Some she had really liked. But when she met Henrik, she fell head over heels in love; he made every other man seem dull. He was proud and quick and excitingly charismatic; artistic and sensitive to a fault. She fell for him, and they moved in together.
They had a good life. Henrik was attuned to the feelings of others. He exuded love, warmth and positive energy. Women loved him for it, as did Rebecca, and a classic situation developed: the thing she loved most about Henrik quickly became one of their major stumbling
blocks. His charm made her jealous and this, in turn, made him evasive.
Their friends usually claimed the gender divide didn’t kick in until children came along. The house had been Henrik and Rebecca’s child; it was only when they had an attic, a cellar and a garden on their hands that Rebecca realised Henrik didn’t match up to
The Husband
she had imagined since she was a child. Her father had always managed to look after both the large house in Billdal and the summer cottage in Mollösund while doing a responsible and well-paid job.
It was clear, she thought, as she gritted her teeth and avoided the loose third step, that the same rights and obligations should apply to both men and women, at work and behind closed doors. From that point of view she was a feminist. But, in recent years she had experienced a creeping irritation at Henrik’s way of shirking traditional male responsibilities.
‘Hello?’
Rebecca kicked off her boots in the hallway and went into the kitchen. An open packet of cheese and half a loaf caught her eye. From the shiny surface of the cheese, she guessed it was a while since he’d eaten.
‘Hello?’
Henrik appeared in the doorway with a smile on his lips which immediately made her suspicious. He looked irresolute for a moment but, she thought, obviously aware of her scrutiny. He blew his long fringe from his face, a gesture so well practised that he owned it. He was wearing a tight T-shirt, no doubt deliberately a little too short, which emphasised his muscular body; given that he never set foot in a gym, he clearly had good genes. Perhaps no one else would call Henrik vain, but Rebecca sometimes thought he had a coquettishness about him.