Savage Spring (2 page)

She can smell the newly opened tulips, a desperate smell, as if the flowers are whispering to her: Why are our lives so short when yours, all of yours, are so long?

You take the present for granted, the mother thinks as she looks at her girls. Her thoughts run on: I don’t take anything for granted, I know that everything can be lost.

A man in a black hooded jacket, with the hood up, parks a bicycle next to the cashpoint machine. He doesn’t lock the bike, and carefully adjusts a rucksack on the parcel rack with his gloved hands.

The man leaves the rucksack, but doesn’t stop to withdraw any money, and carries on across the square towards Bokhållaregatan.

The mother doesn’t wonder who the man is. Why he has his hood up in the spring sunshine, why he leaves the bicycle and rucksack.

The girls have reached the cashpoint now. They turn to face her and smile, and she feels like rushing over to them, picking them up, one in each arm, and kissing and hugging them, and making them understand all the love she feels, the love she hopes will make them feel safe and free in the world.

Then they catch sight of the hotdog stand. And habit and hunger make them run past her over to the man under the parasol with his steaming cauldrons and photographs of hotdogs.

They jump up and down in front of the man, and she hurries after them.

Have I got enough change?

There ought to be two ten-kronor coins in her bag. She hunts for her purse, and the man with the black beard has already given the girls a hotdog each by the time she arrives, and he nods to her in recognition.

And drinks, they like the pear flavour, don’t they?

Pear. Or apple.

The man has a strong foreign accent. She hunts through the bottom of her black leather handbag and there they are, just as she thought, the coins, cold against her fingers. She hands them to the man behind the hotdog stand, who thanks her, bows his head slightly, and says he hopes to see them again soon.

The girls trot off towards the bollards by the cycle racks outside the Central Hotel, the ones that look like sugarlumps, next to the canvas sail of the pavement café.

The girls’ shadows lengthen and their mother hurries after them, calling to them to take care not to spill ketchup on their new jackets, then she remembers and walks back towards the hotdog stand, and the man is standing with his arm outstretched, holding some napkins out to her.

She shakes her head at her own absent-mindedness, and then she is sitting in the cool sunlight on a sugarlump beside her girls, watching them eat, watching them pull their lips back and chew their way through the fatty sausages with practised movements.

The sun strokes their cheeks, making the blood rise to the surface as if to warm itself.

The people at the pavement café.

Who are you? the mother wonders. Trying to keep her mind from things she can’t bear to think about or feel. A neatly dressed pensioner in a blue blazer, beige wool trousers and with water-combed hair. Did he used to be an engineer in Saab’s aeronautical division? A professor at the university? Or perhaps a consultant in neurosurgery, or the burns unit at the University Hospital? Or is he just an ordinary old man, a worker in the traditional mould, who enjoys adding a bit of sparkle to old age by dressing smartly? Elevating his own existence in order to cope with the death that is inexorably creeping closer.

She chides herself for her thoughts.

At a table on Mörners’ terrace four middle-aged immigrants are playing dice. There are matchsticks on the table, and she assumes they’re playing for money. Some high-school kids playing truant are sitting at another table, they must be skipping school, unless they’ve got a free period? There are people of all ages at the other tables, probably unemployed, having lost their jobs in the thousands of lay-offs that have swept the region’s businesses. Resignation in their eyes, anxiety, will I ever get another job? Am I finished, will I be able to support my family, give my children a decent start in life?

A young, heavily made-up woman in a white coat is smoking.

I recognise her, the mother thinks, she works in the beauty parlour down on St Larsgatan.

Three men in dark suits go past Mörners, possibly solicitors from one of the city’s four law firms. Or financial wannabees. There are still a few of those, even in Linköping. They adjust their ties, shining in the sun in the cheap way that poor-quality, machine-woven silk does. Maybe they’re photocopier or mobile phone salesmen, or work in one of the banks here in the square, or at the provincial insurance office.

Some stereotypical university students are clustered around a table at the Central Hotel; science students, to judge by their awkward yet intelligent appearance. Jeans and knitted sweaters, and very clean trainers. Presumably they have their laptops in their little briefcases. Cups of regular coffee on the table, nothing fancy.

What do I know about the people in this city? the mother thinks as she leans towards her girls and wipes their mouths, the hotdogs are all gone and now her beloved darlings are taking it in turns to slurp up the green, artificial-tasting juice that they’re so fond of.

I don’t know anything, really, she goes on to think, except that we all live side by side, all of us so different, and we manage to get on simply because we’ve decided to tolerate each other. And we’re all bound together, no matter how much money we have in our bank accounts, or where we come from, or what we do, by the fact that we share the same basic dream of happiness.

But sometimes we bite each other. Just not now. Not here. Nothing bad can happen on a wonderful spring day like this. At times like this, Linköping is the safest of all safe cocoons for human life.

One of the local bus company’s red and orange buses stops beside the statue of Folke Filbyter, the progenitor of Sweden’s first royal dynasty. A few people get on before the bus heads off towards the castle. A beggar, a middle-aged woman with greasy hair, sits outside the shopping centre with her hand outstretched.

‘Are you feeling full now?’

‘We’re full, Mummy.’

‘Then let’s go and get some money out.’

‘Can I press the buttons?’

‘Me too, I want to press the buttons too.’

‘We’ll do it together.’ And they set off across the square, towards the cashpoint machine, where the bike with the rucksack is still parked.

The mother sees the posters in the bank windows. She recognises them from adverts and flyers, doesn’t want to think the name, but can’t help herself.

Kurtzon.

Kurtzon Funds.

The SEB bank has allowed its windows to be used by the company owned by the supposedly brilliant but extremely publicity-shy financier. The girls have reached the cashpoint, and beside them the automatic doors to the bank slide open and a man wearing a leather waistcoat, with bare, suntanned arms, comes out with a black briefcase in one hand. He looks around and smiles at the girls before disappearing off in the direction of the old courthouse.

The mother is rapidly catching up with the girls, but she stumbles on a paving stone that is slightly higher than the others and drops her bag.

Her purse tumbles out and falls open.

Her green Visa card shines up at her.

Still plenty in the account. It’s a long way from the end of the month, and she hasn’t touched the insurance money yet.

She kneels down, feeling her joints creak.

The children are standing at the cashpoint now, and the mother sees them playing as if in slow motion, as they pretend to put a card in, press the buttons and then pull out some huge, magical treasure from the machine.

Her bag.

Back in her hand again, and just as she is about to stand up she hears a hissing sound that turns into a bleep. Like a rattlesnake vibrating so furiously that it starts to whistle.

She sees the girls stiffen and hold their ears, and she realises that the sound is coming from the rucksack on the parcel rack of the bicycle, and she wants to run to them but she can’t move, her body is locked in a hopeless posture and she sees the girls’ faces change and the sound from the rucksack bites into all three of them, like the teeth of poisonous monitor lizards.

Then the mother screams.

She screams her girls’ names, but the names disappear into an icy blue-white lightning, followed by a heat more intense that she ever thought possible, and she is thrown through the air. Then there is nothing but a silence that drowns out the infinitely painful thunder that carries across the whole city and on across the newly awoken forests and sprouting fields, open water, and dwellings of Östergötland.

For the girls it is as if the world disappears, torn to shreds by millions of ravenous, salivating beasts, only to dissolve into an all-encompassing light that shifts into something else, into a frothy white heaven with no beginning and no end.

2

Are you in heaven now, Mum?

As Malin Fors steps towards the coffin containing her mother, she feels the ground tremble slightly beneath her feet. She hears a dull rumble, but neither the vibration nor the sound manage to make the windows of the Chapel of the Resurrection rattle.

They’re blasting at the roadworks out in Lambohov, Malin thinks, and looks down at the lacy hem of her long, black dress from H&M.

There’s a lot of construction work in Linköping, because of the government’s investment in infrastructure designed to counteract the impact of the financial crisis, and there’s a lot of blasting going on. Unless this is something else, is it you, Mum, trying to say something, trying to crack the world open with the concentrated power of denial?

It’s a long time since the last of the snow melted, uncovering the muddy surfaces where grass was waiting impatiently to break through, when Malin had stood in the living-room window watching the bare, apparently dead branches of the trees sway in the tremulous spring wind, and she could almost hear the life flowing through the branches, trying to turn the stiff blackness into green, turning it into something new. Yes, maybe it was life itself singing in the tree’s branches, and Malin could sense that something was about to happen, that this spring was going to uncover things that had been hidden in dark and chilly souls.

She had taken a deep breath by that window. Watching the arrival of spring with confidence after seeing out the winter’s unquenchable longing for alcohol, struggling against it in isolation, and sure enough, something seemed to have happened, the spring had lived up to the promise it made that day.

A red rose in her hand now.

She looks at the distempered walls of the chapel, placating shades of orange and pale blue, and the raised platform holding the white coffin, positioned beneath the highest point of the roof to maximise the impression of sanctity.

The vibrations and thunder have gone. She is standing with her back to the congregation and thinking that it can’t have been thunder, because the sky outside is blue, free from any smudges of white, and the trees and bushes and ground are sculpting forth life one more time after the winter, hoping to show their vitality.

The rose’s stem has been stripped free of thorns, safe and comfortable to hold. All pain removed, and was that what you wanted, Mum, was that your secret?

Malin stops beside the coffin. She can hear the silence, the other people breathing.

Not many people there, Mum mourned by Dad, by me, by her granddaughter Tove. But do we really miss you, Mum, Tove and I? The fact that I’m even whispering the question when I’m standing by your coffin is a sort of blasphemy, isn’t it?

I can’t hear anyone sniffing behind me, no sobbing. Instead I can smell the musty scent of the chapel, and the heat as the sun forces its way through the delicate curtains is warming the whole room, but not this moment, and I close my eyes, see your face, Mum, those hard, downward-pointing wrinkles around your mouth, and the look in your eyes that never dared to meet mine.

I see you, Mum, as I turn to face the others sitting in the pews, and I wish I could say that I feel grief, but I don’t feel anything at all.

The call had come on a rainy Saturday morning three weeks before, when she was alone in the flat making vegetable mash, one of the therapeutic tasks she did these days to keep the longing for tequila at bay. Or for any damn alcohol at all, come to that.

Dad sounded upset at the other end of the line, fretful but still together, factual yet sad, but Malin still imagined she could detect a note of relief somewhere in his voice.

He began to cry after the first words, then he pulled himself together, and said that he and her mother had been at the Abama golf course, and that at the third – or was it the fourth? – hole she had hit a ball over the edge of the cliff and watched it disappear into the waves of the Atlantic, and he could see that she was in a bad mood, but trying not to show it. And then, on the next stroke, she cracked when she sliced the ball and it flew off into the bushes under some palm trees. ‘And I saw her face turn red. Then she clutched at her throat, as if she couldn’t breathe, and fell to the grass, it had just been cut, and she didn’t move, Malin, she didn’t move, and she wasn’t breathing, do you understand what I’m saying, do you understand, Malin?’

She had understood.

‘Dad, where are you now?’

‘Tenerife Hospital. They brought her here by ambulance.’

She asked the question, even though she knew, she’d heard it in the peculiar tone of her father’s voice, a tone she recognised from the dozens of next-of-kin she had informed of deaths in the course of her work as a detective inspector.

‘How is she now?’

‘She’s dead, Malin. She was dead by the time they put her in the ambulance.’

Dad.

His lanky, uncertain figure alone on a bench in some waiting room in a Spanish hospital. His hand moving restlessly over the grey-black hair on his head.

She had wished he was with her, so she could comfort him, and then, as she stirred the saucepan of bubbling root vegetables, she realised that she wasn’t worried, scared, or even sad. In fact, it felt more like a huge mountain of practical difficulties was rising up in front of her. She was holding the phone in one hand, stirring the pan with the spoon she was holding in the other.