Let the Old Dreams Die (36 page)

The woman was about my age. Grey, semi-permed hair, glasses that were slightly too big and mended with tape on one side. The coat she was wearing looked expensive, much too expensive. You know what I mean. A checkout assistant who’s had a winning scratch card.

As I approached her I thought she looked boring. Dreary. Like me, probably. But just before I handed over the carrier bag our eyes met, and my impression of her altered.

Her eyes were blue. Their colour was probably intensified by the scarf, but for a brief moment it was like looking into a welding flame. I don’t mean to exaggerate, but there was a
light
in them that the context couldn’t explain. It came from within, and it was so powerful that I gave a start, hesitating with the bag half-raised.

She nodded briefly, took the bag, handed me a package and walked away.

I suppose I’d vaguely thought that
if
things turned out as Majken had said, I would follow the woman, but it just didn’t happen. I simply stood there like an idiot with the gift-wrapped package in my hand, staring after her.

After a minute or so I put the package in my handbag and went down to the subway.

I couldn’t wait. Since there was no one else near the disabled seat I’d chosen, I dared to open the package on the train. What was there to worry about, after all? I don’t know, it was as if I’d got mixed up in something that demanded watchfulness, secrecy.

The woman’s eyes still hovered before me, as a light does for a few seconds after you’ve switched it off. Why hadn’t I said anything to her? It hadn’t seemed appropriate, that’s all. And I had been stunned by those eyes.

The package contained the nightdress I had seen in Åhlén’s
the previous day, along with a note.

Hope it’s the right size. Talk to you soon. M
.

I looked around and unfolded the nightdress. It was wonderful. Black, with tiny, tiny red roses, not too close together, not too sparse. Fine silk. And the right size.

I folded it up again, wrapped the paper around it and tucked it in my bag. The train was just emerging from the darkness at Thorildsplan. The Dagens Nyheter building sparkled in the sunlight. A woman on the platform smiled at me.

I had almost expected the phone to be ringing as it had done the previous day, before I got through the door. It wasn’t. But I only just had time to go to the toilet, wash my hands and see to Börje before it began to ring.

I went into the hallway, reached for the receiver and stopped myself. It rang twice, three times, four times. On the fifth ring I grabbed the receiver, but let go before I picked it up. It kept on ringing. Six, seven, eight times. It became more and more impossible to pick up the receiver. I went into the kitchen and stared out of the window. Some children were playing down by the eco-cottage. One of them had climbed up onto the roof. The telephone kept on ringing.

I had stopped counting. Presumably I must have dozed off somehow. When I came round, there were no children by the ecocottage, but the phone was still ringing. I could be wrong, but the sky might have grown darker too.

Börje was sitting motionless in the semi-twilight of the living room, his expression unchanged—just as if a constantly ringing telephone was part of his everyday life. I don’t know why, but I felt a sudden stab in my stomach and I started to cry. It was something to do with the desolate sound of the telephone ringing, echoing between the walls like someone drowning, dying, screaming and screaming with no one there to respond.

I pressed my hands to my head, staring at the telephone and trying to get it to stop. I was the telephone. I was the one calling out. It was so horrifically sad that I couldn’t bear it. The salty tears ran down into my mouth, and suddenly a totally clear thought flashed through my mind:

You’re wrong. It’s the other way round. Someone else is calling out, and I am the one who isn’t responding!

I wiped away the tears and picked up the phone.

‘Dolly speaking.’ There was silence at the other end. ‘Hello? Majken?’

No one answered. But the line wasn’t dead; I could hear that the receiver at the other end was off the hook, and that it was probably a public phone because I could hear the roar of traffic.

‘Majken?’ I said again, a little louder this time.

Nothing. I pressed the receiver to my ear and—now don’t laugh—tried to guess from the sounds where the phone box might be. Cars, footsteps. A bus or truck drove past. Someone shouted something. It sounded like: ‘Roooger!’ A street appeared in my mind’s eye, but which street? No idea. I was just about to put the phone down when there was a clattering sound and a man’s voice in my ear.

‘Hello?’ it said. ‘Is there anyone there?’

I slammed the phone down and everything went red before my eyes. For a moment I thought I was going to faint. My heart expanded, pushing the blood up into my head.

I’m getting worked up for no reason,
I tried to tell myself.
I’m making things up.

And yet I still felt afraid. Of what? I don’t know. A feeling that I’d got mixed up in something I didn’t…I don’t know. Anyway, I went in to see Börje, sat down beside him and took his hand in mine.

‘Börje,’ I said. ‘Help me.’

He didn’t help me. That is the curse of the strong: when a strong
person does fall, everyone is so surprised it doesn’t occur to them to hold out their arms to receive her. I’m not just talking about this situation, about Börje. I mean, he’s…incapable. Always has been, really.

And I’ve been hard. Yes, I have.

When Lena died…I said before that I wasn’t as understanding as I should have been.

You see, what a memory. You don’t actually need to record this, I can repeat it word for word, ha ha.

Not as understanding as I should have been? No, I was hard. He tried to reach me, wanted to share the grief. But I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t grieve like him. I probably pushed him away many, many times. Physically pushed him away, sometimes.

Perhaps I can’t grieve. Perhaps I’m incapable of accepting things that are terrible. Yes, incapable. There’s that word again. But in my defence I must say that I had Tomas to look after. If I had buried myself the way Börje did, I don’t know how things would have turned out.

So it’s no surprise that Börje didn’t rush to my aid when the weakness came over me. So I just sat there beside him as twilight fell. It was some small consolation.

When the telephone rang again I got up calmly, went into the hallway and picked up the receiver. It was Majken.

‘Was it you who rang before?’ I asked. ‘About half an hour ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘Where were you? I answered, but there was no one there.’

‘No,’ said Majken. ‘I had to go. You did well today.’

‘Thank you. It wasn’t too difficult. Thanks for the present.’

‘Does it fit?’

‘I haven’t tried it on yet. But it’s my size, so I’m sure it will.’

‘Good.’

There was a brief silence.

‘Majken,’ I said. ‘As you probably realise, I’m wondering about a lot of things.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Of course. I just want to ask you to do me one more favour, then we can talk and I’ll tell you everything.’

I don’t need to bore you with the details of how hesitant I was, and how I went along with it in the end. The task was exactly the same as before, except that the bag was to be picked up at eleven-thirty the following day.

Actually, no. There were two other things as well. First of all, I had a good look inside the bag this time before taking it with me. My suspicions were well founded. There wasn’t a single item of clothing in the bag with a price ticket showing less than three thousand. The total value was around thirty-five thousand.

I remember thinking something along the lines that the clothes seemed to have been chosen purely on the basis that they should be as small and thin as possible, and as expensive as possible. On that point I would turn out to be absolutely right.

Secondly, it was a different woman when I handed over the bag. The same type of woman, if you know what I mean, but this one had brown eyes. And the light was there, but it didn’t burn quite so fiercely. Perhaps the blue scarf didn’t intensify the colour of her eyes in quite the same way.

I had decided not to say anything, not to ask any questions, and I didn’t. I went home and waited for Majken to call.

One thing is bothering me. If I’m going to be stuck in here for a long time, what’s going to happen to Börje?

Could you possibly ring for someone to call round and see to him? You just have to ring the home care service on Brommaplan, and they’ll send someone.

The key, yes. I’ll just get…

I haven’t got it. It’s downstairs, in the handbag they took off me when I…could you? Oh, thank you. There are only three keys on the ring—the front door, the deadlock and the eco-cottage. The one for the front door—

Yes, of course you’ll sort it out. Sorry. I’ve always been a bit of a fusspot.

Anyway. How’s this going to work out?

Could I have another glass of water, please?

Where was I?

Oh yes, Majken. She rang a little while after I got home. It occurred to me that the first time she rang, if you remember—that perhaps the phone had been ringing for a long time before I arrived home and heard it. I once read about some celebrity or other. Some major celebrity, it was, not here in Sweden.

And this…man, I think it was, his number was in the phone book. So of course people rang up all the time. So he had the ring tone switched off. And as soon as he felt like talking to someone, if he was feeling a bit lonely, he just picked up the phone. There was always someone there.

Sorry. That’s got nothing to do with this. Did you ring about Börje? Oh, good. Thank you.

I’d been given a present this time too, I forgot to mention that. A bottle of good Cognac. Majken and I had joked about it on the phone the previous day: I was very fond of Cognac, but it’s difficult to shoplift in the state-owned liquor outlets, because all the bottles are kept behind the counter.

So now I had my Cognac. I told Majken straightaway that I wanted to know what all this was about.

‘Did you like the Cognac?’ she asked.

‘I’m sure I will,’ I replied. ‘But right now I want you to tell me what’s going on.’

She took a deep breath and asked, ‘Dolly. Do you think life has treated you fairly?’

‘It depends what you mean by fairly.’

‘Let’s not split hairs. Life, society, people, whatever you want to call it. Has it or have they given you what you deserve? Have you been able to shape your life in the way you wanted, or have you lived under a constant pressure that basically involves earning money for
other people
?’

If I’m honest, this was delivered in a tone of voice that sounded rather too rehearsed for my liking. It smacked of rhetoric to a certain extent, if you know what I mean. It wasn’t what I’d expected.

‘Majken,’ I said. ‘I’m not a fool. You don’t need to talk to me like some kind of evangelist.’

I had expected her to be offended. Instead she burst out laughing so loudly that I had to hold the receiver away from my ear.

‘Sorry,’ she said when she’d finished laughing.

‘No problem.’

‘Sometimes we call ourselves shoplifters united, as a joke. Perhaps we ought to rename ourselves the church of the latter day shoplifters instead.’ I didn’t say anything, and she went on, ‘Anyway, that’s what it’s about. We help each other to pick things up. Sometimes there are two or three of us working together, sometimes more.’

I waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, I asked, ‘Why?’

‘Why? Well, because it’s so much more effective if you work in a group. Diversionary tactics, all the things I mentioned. There is no so-called criminal who is as exposed as a shoplifter. Alone, unarmed, working in broad daylight surrounded by other people. And if we get caught, there’s no one to support us. We’ve changed all that. One for all and all for one.’

‘That wasn’t what I meant,’ I said. ‘I wondered why you do this at all.’

‘But Dolly, surely that’s obvious?’

‘Is it?’

‘Hm. I thought you just said you were no fool. Look around you. I’m not going to preach, but do you think anyone loves us? All the members are women between the ages of…sixty-three, I think Eva is, and eighty-four. Ragna, you’ll be meeting her, she’s…special. We’ve got the whole gamut: divorced, injured at work, taken early retirement, dependent on medication, ordinary pensioners and so on and so on. And I think that’s our greatest common denominator: nobody loves us. We’ve built up society, and now we’re all used up, worthless. Of course we could get involved in the national pensioners’ movement, but that wouldn’t fit in with our aims.’

‘And what would those be?’

‘I thought you might ask that. Revenge, pure and simple. Revenge. To make ourselves feel a little bit better by harming whatever has hurt us. Perfectly straightforward.’

‘So is it the department stores that have hurt us?’

‘Among others. They’ll do. It works. Didn’t you feel it yourself?’

Yes, I did. Apart from the sheer satisfaction of walking out of a department store with something you hadn’t paid for, the relief at having got away with it, there was also that bitter gratification at having swindled the giant out of a little bit of his hoard. At the thought that you had gone up against him and won.

‘But what about all the stuff?’ I asked. ‘What do you do with it all? I looked in the bag today, and I mean it was all really expensive stuff. What do you do with it?’

‘Some of it we sell. To cover running costs. Most of it we burn.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘No. Don’t you understand? That’s the whole point. One of our members, Eva-Britt, has a place in the country up near Sigtuna. We meet there once a month and burn almost everything we’ve picked up. It’s our little ceremony, our…service. If there’s something special
someone wants to keep, that’s fine, but by and large most of it ends up reduced to ashes.’

I actually fell silent for a little while then, if I remember rightly. Majken didn’t say anything else. When I had gathered my thoughts, I asked, ‘Isn’t that a terrible waste?’