7

HE TRAVELLED. LIKE a worm, he moved in distinctive patterns beneath the city. He had got it into his head that these underground shapes formed letters, a subterranean script identical to the text on the reverse of his page. The text that was growing increasingly legible. That was becoming clearer and clearer – and increasingly impenetrable.

Simultaneously.

He was nearing ninety, professor emeritus. As a former brain scientist, he had made a conscious decision not to go senile in his old age, not to let his brain cells wither away. He had deliberately devoted his time to mental gymnastics, keeping his cerebral cortex in shape. He enjoyed literature and read the news in four different languages, he solved the most difficult crosswords in Dagens Nyheter, forced himself through at least one differential equation a day, and viewed the world with a sober, analytic, penetrating gaze.

Until a few days ago. When a vague, shifting presence had found its way into his life.

It was death.

Death didn’t normally make demands. Death didn’t normally walk alongside you for days, waiting for something to happen.

He was starting to understand what was expected of him.

Once upon a time, more than fifty years ago, he had turned a new page in his life. The old page had been full. It told a story which couldn’t go on. One which had reached its conclusion. He had realised that to keep on living, he had no choice but to turn to a new page and pretend it was blank. Doing so would mean he could keep writing. Could keep living.

And so he had turned the page. He had left the past behind him and consciously – with precise, deliberate mental gymnastics – eradicated it. The text on the reverse of the page disappeared and a completely new life began. A Swedish life.

But now that his Swedish life was also about to end, he understood what was required of him. He had to turn the page once more and reread his old story. The problem was that it wasn’t something you could just do. His old story came towards him like a punch, like a blow from an axe, like a metal wire jammed into his temple.

He hadn’t realised that such old people could experience such intense feelings. It went completely against the very latest brain research.

He looked at his arm. The numbers were peeping out from beneath the sleeve of his coat. The numbers on his arm. As soon as he looked at them, they began moving. Just like he was. They were on their way away from him.

It was one of the things he didn’t understand.

And then came the pictures, like a blow from an axe.

There were arms on top of him, legs on top of him, thin, thin legs, thin, thin arms. He was moving through a pile of people. Dead people. He saw an upside-down face and he saw a thin wire being pushed into a temple, he saw the upside-down face contort in pain. And he wrote in a book. He read the words which he himself had written and the book was talking about pain, about pain, pain, pain.

And then he saw another image. One which took his breath away. He opened a door. The outer door to his own house. Here. In Sweden. That picture didn’t belong. He opened the outer door from within and found a man without a nose waiting on the step outside.

And then the man without a nose was dead on the floor in front of him.

He woke up. He was sweating more than a ninety-year-old should be able to sweat. The metro was speeding through the dark tunnels, on and on. He had no idea where he was. It didn’t matter. The pattern was all that mattered.

He didn’t understand. The pages were mixed up. The front and the back of the page were mixed together. Why?

Then he saw an extremely pale man dressed in uniform. The extremely pale man in uniform was holding a thin metal wire in his hand.

The image vanished.

His train was approaching a station. He was alone in the carriage.

He closed his eyes for a moment. Mental gymnastics. Come back. You don’t have the right to close your eyes. You’re not allowed to close your eyes to anything.

He returned to the pattern his journey beneath the city had been creating. He was increasingly convinced it was forming symbols, letters. The Stockholm metro system was hardly as complex as the network of streets in New York, but symbols could still be formed. And formed they had. He had travelled and he knew how he had travelled. Not where, but how.

The first day’s journey appeared slowly before his eyes. First a vertical line.

The train stopped at the station. The doors opened. The station was almost completely deserted. He didn’t know where he was.

First a vertical line and then three horizontal. A letter.

On the first day, he had travelled in the shape of a letter.

A lone woman was standing on the platform, talking on her mobile phone. A group of teenagers spilled out of the carriage behind his.

It was an E. An upper-case E.

The train doors closed. The teenagers were approaching the woman. As the train gathered speed, he saw the flash of a knife.

He couldn’t do a thing.

Other than reconstruct the second day’s letter.

Sometimes, the right conditions just came together entirely by chance.

Usually, though, it needed lots of planning: the right time, the right place, the right person. You had to bide your time – waiting, watching and sneaking glances. You had to spread out and make it seem like you weren’t together. That was when you struck. Once you’d grabbed enough, you went straight online. Sometimes there was as little as an hour between theft and sale.

‘Freshly nicked phone for sale.’ And then the time.

The responses always came quickly. As though there were people just sitting at their computers, waiting for their moment. The pigs didn’t stand a chance.

But then, every once in a while, one of those chance occurrences appeared. They were the best. Unplanned openings. Some bird all by herself on a platform, for example.

Hamid saw her straight away. He exchanged a quick glance with Adib and stepped off the train. The small fry tagged along. There were five of them and they were dangerous. No one ever put up any resistance. They just handed over their phones. If anyone tried to be clever, they got a punch. If anyone put up a fight, they got a cut.

Sometimes people shat themselves. It was disgusting.

She was good-looking, the woman. He could see that even though she was standing with her back to him, talking on her phone. Long black hair, red leather jacket, tight black trousers, black trainers. She turned round and caught sight of them. She ended the call.

She really was good-looking. If they had been somewhere more secluded than the station, he would have given her a little extra treatment.

The adrenalin had started pumping through his body. Hamid pulled out the knife. Her lower lip should be starting to tremble right about now.

In the distance, he could hear a train coming from the other direction.

‘Phone, you whore,’ he snarled.

Her lip wasn’t trembling. It tightened. Her dark eyes narrowed.

The knife went flying. He didn’t know what was happening. Suddenly, she kicked him in the face. He saw the bottom of her shoe. Reebok. He felt his teeth bend inwards. Upside down, and as though at high speed, he saw Adib being thrown onto a bench and then slumping to the floor. He heard the small fry running away.

He found the knife and struggled to his feet. Fucking hell, he thought, running his tongue along his front teeth. They were angled towards the roof of his mouth. He could feel a broken root poking through his upper lip.

All he could taste was blood.

‘You slut,’ he lisped, grabbing the knife from the platform and holding it out.

She was standing opposite him, completely motionless. He threw himself forward and grabbed the phone. In return, she kicked him hard in the stomach. Unable to breathe, he felt himself being pushed away, across the platform. He heard the train. He saw the lights appear in the tunnel.

He was struggling like a madman. His arms were flailing, his chin grazing the platform. He was fighting for his life but there was nothing to fight against. His body was pushed out over the edge, slowly, inexorably slowly, and the increasingly loud noise from the metro became a deafening, maddening scream – the last sound Hamid would ever hear.

And just like that, he became a split personality.

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