Let the Old Dreams Die (50 page)

Tears sprang into Sture’s eyes. He positioned himself directly in front of Kalle and raised the glass cube. The man nodded. ‘Go for it.’

‘Stop,’ Flora whispered from the bed. She was getting up, the sheet still wrapped around her. ‘Stop.’

The man looked at her. ‘Is this some kind of negotiation? Are you offering to stop if I stop?’

Flora swallowed and said, ‘Yes.’

The man’s eyes locked into hers. He looked deep inside her for a second, then said, ‘You’re lying. Get back in bed.’

Driven by a will that was not her own, Flora lay down on the bed again. Kalle heard a drumming sound. Du-du-dunk, du-du-dunk. The only thing he could move was his eyes, and he searched the room, hunting for the source of the noise.

A sparrow was sitting outside on the window ledge, pecking at the glass. The bird hopped to and fro along the ledge as if seeking a point where the glass was less solid, then pecked again. The man glanced at it, then turned his attention back to Sture.

‘Let’s finish this.’

Sture’s arm was shaking as he raised it above his head to reach Kalle’s face. The bird let loose another burst of drumming on the windowpane. Sture drew back his arm, then jerked it forward with considerable force, as if he were going to throw the cube as far as he could. The solid surface hit Kalle right in the middle of
his nose. He heard a muted crunching sound, and burning heat radiated across his face like a spider web as blood poured down into his mouth.

Flora screamed, the cube fell to the floor and Sture covered his face with his hands. The man leaned closer to Kalle’s face, inspecting the damage. He nodded, said, ‘Good,’ and turned to Sture, whose body was locked in a hunched position. ‘I thought you might deal with the girl as well, but…you seem to have exhausted your strength.’

The man went over to the window and looked out. The sparrow’s drumming grew more feverish.

‘I must say this building is one of the most tasteless I’ve ever set eyes on.’

Blood was pouring down Kalle’s throat, inside his dressing gown, tickling as it trickled down the sides of his stomach. His face was a receptacle for red heat that just kept on pumping and pumping. He wanted to reach up and feel how bad it was, but he didn’t have permission to move.

The man turned the handle and opened the window. With a couple of rapid hops the sparrow was inside the room; it circled around Kalle’s head before swooping down towards the man, who opened his mouth wide. The bird flew straight in, and it was gone.

As if he had done nothing more than take a deep breath, the man exhaled and grabbed Sture by the shoulder.

‘Come along. I assume you have no interest in staying here to explain yourself.’

Sture shook his bowed head and they walked towards the door. Before he left, the man turned back to Kalle and Flora. He studied them for several long seconds, then said, ‘I don’t think there’s much to add.’

Then he walked out, with Sture trailing behind him.

The room remained completely silent for a long time after the man had disappeared. A faint breeze wafted in through the open window, making the curtains billow. It was Flora who first managed to extricate herself from the net of impotence in which they were caught. She got out of bed on wobbly legs, went over to Kalle and said, ‘Come with me…’

Kalle allowed himself to be led to the bathroom, where Flora gently washed his face with toilet paper and lukewarm water. Even his tongue felt swollen, and he had to form the words very slowly as he asked, ‘What. Was that? What. Happened. There?’

As if his slurred words had opened the floodgates to the real world, where Kalle stood with a broken nose after being attacked by his father, Flora let out a single sob and clamped her lips together to stop herself from bursting into tears.

‘I don’t know, Kalle. I don’t know.’

Kalle looked in the mirror. His nose had swollen to at least twice its normal size, and was pressed against one cheek. A fragment of bone was sticking out where the skin had split, and when he tried to breathe through his nose, it proved impossible.

Flora said, ‘We need to get you to the hospital. I’ll just…’

She dabbed at his cheeks, his throat and his chest with wads of paper, which she threw down the toilet when they were soaked in blood. Eventually she tore off a long length and folded it up to make a compress.

‘Here. Hold this against…’

She pointed and Kalle filled in the missing words: ‘…what used to be my nose.’

‘Nose’ came out as ‘dose’, and Kalle thought that was funny. He tried to laugh, but it came out as no more than a jerky, whistling sound through his mouth. Flora shook her head and gave him a hug.

‘You’re crazy. You’re laughing.’

Although it probably didn’t matter, they didn’t like the idea of going to Karolinska Hospital. Instead they headed out to Danderyd, where they had to wait only half an hour before Kalle was seen. His nose was straightened and a plaster dressing was applied, after which the doctor said Kalle should come back in a week for further adjustment, unless of course he wanted to end up looking like a retired boxer.

When they got out into the corridor Kalle looked at himself in a mirror and thought he looked like something out of a cartoon. The square dressing covering his nose, the long dreadlocks framing his face. The main character’s dopey friend in a Disney film, the one who says weird things and never quite knows what’s going on.

When they were sitting in the cafeteria, with Kalle drinking a milky coffee with some difficulty and pulling faces more than necessary just to find some humour in his situation, Flora said, ‘I think you’re weird. Aren’t you upset? I mean after all, it was your father who did this.’

Kalle shook his head. ‘No. In fact, I think it’s kind of…nice, in a way. Now we know exactly where we stand. I don’t need to bother about him anymore. He’s out of my life.’

‘But even so.’

‘I’ve hated him for years, actually. But I’ve never quite been able to admit it. It’s better this way.’

The cafeteria was virtually empty. A couple of tables away a very old lady sat slurping a cup of tea, her Zimmer frame by her side. A sad expression lost in the pastel-coloured walls. Kalle looked at her and thought:
I have no family either.

But, as he had said, this was a sadness he had carried for a long time now, not something new, merely a fact and a gnawing emptiness. He took a deep breath through his mouth, let it out again and said, ‘Have you given it any thought? That business this morning?’

‘I didn’t know it existed,’ said Flora. ‘I haven’t seen it before.’

‘What do you mean?’

Flora swept together a few sugar crystals that were scattered across the table as she tried to find the right words. When all the sugar had been gathered into a little pile, she said, ‘There’s a…representation of the other. An image. I thought it was only death who had one. And we both saw the same thing, didn’t we? Death…she shows herself in different ways to different people, depending on the image we have of her. But this…’

‘It was like a kind of magnetic pull.’

‘Yes. But it’s only an image. To enable us to see something. Of this…power. Or principle. It can’t do anything by itself.’

‘How do you know that?’

Flora gave a small shrug. ‘I just do.’ She reached across the table and Kalle took her hand. She looked at his square plaster and shook her head. ‘I’m sorry I dragged you into all this.’

‘Are you?’

‘For your sake, yes. Not for mine.’

‘That’s all right, then.’

They sat there holding hands. Out of the corner of his eye Kalle could see that the old woman had shifted her interest from the wall to them. She was resting her chin on her hands and staring at them. Kalle leaned over to Flora.

‘Are you scared?’

‘Yes. You?’

‘Yes.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘I think…’ said Flora, ‘we ought to speak to my grandmother.’

They were getting ready to go when the old woman got to her feet with some difficulty and shuffled over to them on her Zimmer frame. When she reached them she stood there for a few seconds with her toothless mouth hanging open, looking from one to the other. Then she said, ‘I’m scared too.’

Kalle didn’t know what to say. But Flora moved her face close to the woman’s and said, ‘You really don’t need to be.’

The woman’s eyes widened slightly. ‘Don’t I?’

‘No,’ said Flora. ‘I promise.’

The woman nodded, made a few chewing movements with her mouth, then dragged herself off towards the lifts.

Elvy’s friend Hagar had called round, and they were both appalled at what had happened to Kalle in a way that he found not entirely unpleasant. It was a long time since someone had cosseted him. He accepted an invitation to lie down on the sofa while Elvy brought him coffee and biscuits.

Flora had told Kalle that Hagar was more or less up to speed with the whole thing, and she went through everything that had happened since she and Kalle went to the Heath together for the first time.

When Flora got to the bit about how Kalle had dealt with the doctor, which won him an admiring glance from Elvy, Kalle’s phone rang. ROLAND was showing on the display. Kalle excused himself and went into the kitchen so that Flora could finish the story without him. He sat down and took the call.

‘Hi Roland.’

‘Hi there. I just wanted to…how did it all go?’

Roland’s voice sounded like the morning after the night before, and Kalle looked at the clock. Half past ten. Presumably Roland had just woken up; Kalle hadn’t even managed to take in his own tiredness yet.

‘Well, it went…it went…’

‘Have you got a cold?’

Kalle snorted, and only a small amount of air came out through the hole in the plaster with a whistling noise. He gave Roland a shortened version of the story, missing out the bit about the fly and the bird disappearing into the visitor’s mouth. He tried to gloss over the supernatural elements of the whole thing in general;
Roland already thought it was weird enough. But he had seen what he had seen.

‘OK,’ said Roland. ‘This is all completely crazy. But there’s a box in my garage. What am I going to do with it?’

That particular problem hadn’t crossed Kalle’s mind. After their experiences in the Heath, any other worries had seemed unimportant. But that wasn’t the case for Roland, of course, who had a box full of body parts in his garage.

‘I’ve got someone from one of the weekly celebrity gossip magazines coming at three, and…well, the whole place stinks even though the garage doors are shut.’

‘A gossip magazine?’

‘Yes, what can you do? But you can bet your life they’ll…the last time they wanted to know why I had a swing in the garden when I haven’t got any kids, I mean it’s there for my brother’s kids, but then the article made it look as if…anyway, that doesn’t matter, but they’re bound to ask questions.’

Kalle couldn’t help smiling.
What’s the smell in Roland’s garage? Roland says it’s so-and-so, but our reporter…

‘I’ll call you back,’ he said, and hung up.

In the living room Flora had finished telling her story, and the three of them were sitting talking, their heads close together. Flora looked up as Kalle walked in.

‘Who was that?’

‘Roland. It’s the box. He…he wants to get rid of it.’

Hagar, who was slightly hard of hearing, looking enquiringly at Flora. ‘Who are you talking about?’

‘Roland,’ said Flora. ‘Kalle’s boss. From Tropicos.’

‘Did he just call here?’

‘Yes, he—’

Hagar clapped her hands. ‘But that’s fantastic!’ She raised one forefinger in the air to emphasise her point: ‘Now
he’s
one of the few
really stylish men left in this country. What did he want?’

Elvy raised her eyebrows meaningfully; Kalle went over to Hagar and said in a louder voice, ‘He wants to get rid of that box!’

Hagar looked around as if she couldn’t work out what the problem was.

‘Oh?’ she said. ‘Well in that case we’d better go and get it, hadn’t we?’

On the way out to Roland’s place they stopped at Bauhaus and bought two sacks of peat-based compost. Hagar had an idea that it ought to be quicklime, but none of them knew where to get hold of it, or what it was actually used for. It had something to do with the decomposition process, but that wasn’t really the problem here.

Kalle still thought they ought to go to the police, particularly after seeing his father’s reaction when the police were mentioned, but both Elvy and Flora were dead against the idea.

‘I’m more or less one hundred per cent convinced,’ said Elvy, ‘that if we turn to the authorities we’ll end up being the guilty party. In one way or another.’

Kalle couldn’t suppress a huge yawn. The lack of sleep was beginning to make itself felt. Flora was resting her head on her hand, her eyes half-closed.

‘I don’t get it,’ said Kalle. ‘This Association. Who are they? What do they want?’

Elvy snorted. ‘We’d better ask your father.’

Before Kalle had the chance to say anything, she placed her hand on his shoulder. ‘No offence. The sins of the fathers and so on. I don’t believe in all that.’

‘Good,’ said Kalle, who had no idea what she was talking about.