Let the Old Dreams Die (11 page)

Fear.

It was a form of fear. He hadn’t felt like this for a long time. He had read a series of articles in
Dagens Nyheter
last summer about panic attacks. They were most common among young people, but could affect a person at any age. The fear itself wasn’t dangerous, but the premonition led to panic, which led to…

A rose is a rose is a rose…

The tower blocks stood out like darker silhouettes against the grey sky. From where Joel was standing, the buildings were almost exactly in a line. He stopped, looked. Tilted his head to one side, squinted.

What the hell…

The sides of the buildings stood next to one another, two lines running from the ground to the sky. Joel blinked hard and looked again. No. He wasn’t seeing things: the lines were not parallel. They weren’t parallel because the closest block, his block…was at an angle. Only a degree or two, but enough to make the two sides next to one another form a very long, upside-down V instead of two Is.

He took a few steps back, a few steps forward, to the side, but however he looked, the phenomenon remained. The building was listing towards the east. When he stood at his kitchen window watching the sunset he had been standing on a sloping surface, about to fall over backwards.

People on their way home from the subway looked at him as he stood there motionless, staring up at the building. They looked in
the same direction to see if they could spot what he was gazing at, but didn’t seem to notice anything odd. Nothing was
moving
, thank God. The block wasn’t about to collapse. In the end he couldn’t help himself; he stopped a young man.

‘Excuse me?’

The man took off his earphones.

‘What?’

‘Sorry, but…would you mind looking at those apartment blocks and telling me if you can see anything strange?’

The man immediately did as Joel had asked. He stared for a few seconds, then shook his head. ‘No. Like what?’

‘It’s listing. The building nearest to us is listing.’

The man looked again. For a little while longer this time. Music was whispering from the earphones round his neck.

‘Yes,’ he said eventually. ‘Yes, it is. A little bit.’ Joel looked at him encouragingly and the man pushed his lips forward, repeated, ‘Yes, it is.’ He was about to put the earphones back on, but stopped and said, ‘Maybe that’s normal?’ He replaced the earphones and went on his way.

Joel stayed where he was. Did tower blocks list slightly? He couldn’t remember ever reading about any such building falling over all by itself. Not in Sweden, anyway. But the bad feeling had only come today. It must have happened overnight, during the storm.

He’d called Anita around ten, because he couldn’t stand the way the building
swayed
when the wind was strong enough. Couldn’t sleep. So he had called Anita, and as soon as he said who it was, she asked, ‘Is it the wind?’

‘Yes. Can I come down?’

He could. He had spent the rest of the night in her apartment. Been beaten at Scrabble then made love routinely, without passion or any sense that something was missing. It was fine just the way it was. Neither of them wanted more, neither of them wanted to stop. They
didn’t want to merge their lives. If differences of opinion arose, they simply stayed away from one another for a few days and let things settle down. Then they got together again.

They had parted in the morning with a dry kiss, a caress on the cheek, and Joel had gone off to the ironmonger’s feeling relatively happy. That was the state he was aiming for: relatively happy. Happiness could easily tip over into its opposite, and depression was hard to break. You could be relatively happy all the time, if you took it easy.

At the bottom of the stairs Joel stopped and looked at the list of names. Column after column of names he couldn’t put a face to. Right at the top of the left hand column: Andersson. Down at the bottom of the right hand column: Andersson. Between these known poles an undivided village on a hill. Plastic letters that could be swapped around all too easily, rearranged into new names without faces.

He didn’t bother ringing Anita’s doorbell because there were no lights on in her apartment; instead he went straight up in the lift. Now that he had something concrete to which he could attribute the bad feeling, it was no longer so strong. His building was falling down, that was all. Probably quite normal.

But he couldn’t shake off the thought. As soon as he got inside he took the spirit level out of the bottom drawer in the kitchen and placed it on the floor. He lay down on his stomach next to it so that he could see properly and studied the little air bubble. It was possibly a fraction of a millimetre closer to the window. He changed position and lay alongside the spirit level with his feet pointing towards the kitchen window.

Yes. He could feel it. He might possibly have been a little oversensitive, but his head was definitely lower than his feet. He took a pair of pliers, broke open a bearing that was lying among all the rubbish in the drawer and tipped the balls on the floor. They didn’t roll away.

Hard to stop once you’ve started. He thought for a while, then remembered what to do. He took out a reel of thick string and tied a heavy nut on the end, opened the kitchen window and lowered the nut until it reached the ground, tied the end of the string to the broom handle, fixed it in place with a stool and measured so that it was protruding exactly thirty centimetres through the window. Then he wound the string around the handle several times so that it was hanging free above the ground. A plumb line.

With the ruler in his hand he went back down in the lift. Outside he met the kids who had been sitting in the oak tree earlier on. They were looking up at his kitchen window. They were both wearing identical black jackets, and were presumably brothers. The older one pointed up at the window and asked, ‘What are you doing?’

‘Measuring,’ said Joel, unfolding the ruler.

‘Can we help?’

‘Come on then.’

The younger one held out his hand for the ruler. ‘Can I measure?’

‘No,’ said Joel, walking over to the weight that was slowly swinging to and fro among the bare rose bushes. He had had bad experiences with children and folding rulers. Five seconds and they were busted. The rulers.

He could have managed without the ruler. As soon as he stopped the weight from moving, he could see with the naked eye that it was less than ten centimetres from the wall. He measured anyway. Eight centimetres. A difference of twenty-two centimetres, therefore, between the ground and his apartment.

How tall is the building? Thirty metres? Twenty-two divided by three thousand makes…

No. What were you supposed to do? Joel turned to the older boy. He was about eleven or twelve years old, and looked clever.

‘How do you calculate degrees?’ he asked.

The boy shrugged his shoulders. ‘With a thermometer, I suppose.’

‘Not that kind of degree.’

‘What kind, then?’

The younger boy, who might have been about nine, pointed to the nut. ‘Can I have that?’

Joel tried to undo the knot. When he couldn’t do it he used his door key to break the string and gave the nut to the boy. ‘Just don’t drop it on anybody’s head.’

Together they stood looking up at the building. Joel wanted to tell the boys it was listing, but didn’t want to frighten them. The younger boy pointed halfway up, a few windows below Joel’s.

‘That’s where we live,’ he said. ‘There’s a mouse in our kitchen.’

‘There is not,’ said the older boy.

‘There is too! Daddy showed me the mousetrap so I wouldn’t hurt myself on it.’ The boy measured something in the region of twenty centimetres between his hands. ‘It’s this big.’

‘The trap,’ said Joel.

‘Yes,’ said the little boy and his older brother laughed out loud. The younger one realised some joke had been made at his expense, and looked crossly from Joel to his brother and back again.

‘Daddy said it had taken things from the bathroom, so there!’

‘In that case,’ said his brother, ‘why didn’t he put the trap in there?’

‘So we wouldn’t
stand
on it, of course!’

As if to emphasise the danger posed by the mousetrap, he stamped on the ground and marched off towards the sandpits. The older one looked at Joel and raised his eyebrows:
Kid brothers, what can you do,
and followed him.

Joel went back inside and rang Anita’s doorbell. When no one answered, he took the lift up to his apartment. As soon as he walked in he could feel the tilt.

Hasn’t anyone else noticed anything?

He considered going over to see Lundberg on the other
side—they were on nodding terms—but didn’t know how to explain the situation. Lundberg would probably react in the same way as the man with the earphones: ‘Yeah? And?’

He sat down and took out his modelling tools. Instead of gluing the matchsticks in place one at a time, he worked in the same way as a real shipbuilder: first of all he made a plank out of three hundred and twenty matchsticks, then hammered the plank in place with rivets and strengthened it with glue. He had half-finished one of the final planks for the deck. Since he didn’t have the heart to completely cover the construction of the hull on which he had spent so much time and effort, he was planning to leave part of the deck unfinished so that it would be possible to admire the intricate skeleton of the framework through the gap. He might even put a small lamp inside.

He had been working for perhaps half an hour and had put eight matchsticks in place when he looked up at the ship and the feeling of seasickness came over him again. The ship was listing to one side.

It’s my imagination. I’m listing as well, in that case. I can’t see it.

However, the unpleasant feeling was still enough to break his concentration. He took a turn around the ship; it was as if he was walking on a swaying deck, and he had to sit down. He picked up the phone and called Lasse, who answered on the fifth ring.

‘Yes?’ He sounded annoyed.

‘Hi, it’s Joel.’

‘Hi. Listen, I’m in the bath. I just got home. They’re absolute slave-drivers down there, you know. Was it anything in particular?’

‘No, I was just wondering how to calculate degrees.’

‘Degrees?’

‘Yes, the angle if a building is listing one way, that kind of thing.’

‘Were you away when we did that in school?’

‘I was probably standing in the corner.’

Lasse laughed. ‘I’ll ring you back in quarter of an hour, OK? Are you going to build something, or is it for your ship?’

‘No, it’s…I’ll speak to you later.’

Joel hung up and sat on the sofa for a while, rocking back and forth to relieve the churning in his stomach. Then he went into the kitchen and looked at the spirit level, which was still on the floor. He lay down on his stomach, put his ear to the floor and looked at the bubble. Had it moved a fraction? He would make a mark and check it again the following day.

He was about to get up and fetch a pen when he heard something. From downstairs. In order to hear better, he stuck his index finger in the ear that wasn’t next to the floor and closed his eyes.

It could of course be his neighbour downstairs doing something or other, but the boy’s talk of mouse traps immediately evoked the image of a mouse moving around under the floor. A slow, sinuous movement. Joel sat up and stared at the linoleum. He wasn’t scared of mice, but he couldn’t work out how they could possibly have got into an apartment block, all the way up to the top storey.

He knocked on the floor. The response was a dull, solid sound against his knuckles. Concrete. Mice were supposed to live in wooden buildings, in the spaces between the walls where they could build nests and do whatever it is mice do when they’re not shitting and eating and shitting. It was unthinkable that a mouse could have eaten its way through the concrete. It must be making its way through drainpipes, ventilation shafts.

Joel looked around the kitchen. It was easy to summarise the phenomena he had observed during the course of the evening:

This building is going to hell.

In his mind’s eye he could see an army of mice gnawing through the concrete, perforating the block like a roll of toilet paper, making it soften, tilt. Al-Qaeda mice, working with a long-term objective. He snorted at the image of bearded mice in turbans infiltrating the swanky buildings of the western world.

The telephone rang. Lasse was out of the bath.

‘So,’ he said. ‘What was it you wanted? Something about angles, you said.’

Joel told him about the unpleasant feeling he’d had that morning, how he could see the building listing to one side with the naked eye, the measurements he had taken. Lasse wrote down the numbers, and Joel could hear a faint tapping sound of fingers on a calculator.

‘OK,’ said Lasse. ‘If what you say is accurate, then you have a divergence of approximately one degree.’

‘Which means?’

‘You know that already. The building is listing about twenty centimetres.’

‘So how bad is it?’

‘Well, you say bad…It’s not
good
, definitely not, but I mean it’s not going to fall down tonight, if I can put it like that. It was built in the sixties, wasn’t it? Part of the Million Program, all that stuff?’

‘I think so.’

‘Mm. We’ve had a certain amount of trouble with those buildings. The strange thing in your case is that you say it kind of happened overnight. Are you sure about that?’

‘Quite sure.’

‘There ought to be cracks in the façade, down at the bottom. Concrete doesn’t like to bend, as you know. When there are problems it’s usually the main load-bearing girders. But the concrete cracks. Listen, I’ll come over and have a look tomorrow evening, I’ll bring a few bits and pieces with me. Maybe we could rent a film or something. Have you seen the new Coen brothers film, whatever it’s called?’

‘No. Sounds like a plan.’

‘OK. I’ll be there around seven, God and the boss willing.’

They said goodbye and hung up. Joel remembered the mice, picked up the phone again and started to key in Lasse’s number, but stopped. They could discuss it the next day. They were best friends,
admittedly, but Joel didn’t want to sound like some hysterical lunatic: ‘Lasse, the building’s listing! Lasse, there’s a mouse in the kitchen! Lasse, help!’ Clearly there was no immediate danger.