Autumn Killing

2

Thursday, 23, Friday, 24 October

The key in the lock.

Malin fumbles, her hands won’t obey even though they stopped shaking a good while ago.

Miss.

Hit.

Miss.

Like everything else.

The flat became vacant the previous week, but she told Janne that she’d got new tenants, another group of evangelical students. This evening’s explosion, unavoidable, anticipated, postponed until it was feasible.

Malin goes inside, shaking the raindrops from her blonde bob. There’s a smell, a mixture of damp and detergent, and Malin can feel that the autumn has crept through the cracks in the windows and spread across the walls, floors and ceilings.

She’s shaking.

Must turn up the radiators.

Another feeling here now.

A lonely feeling. But also a feeling of something new?

The furniture is all where it should be.

The Ikea clock on the kitchen wall is still broken, the second hand lying still at the bottom of the face.

She stands in the living room, wanting to turn on the light, but she can’t be bothered to press the switch. Better to slump onto the sofa in the welcoming darkness. A darkness that is all her own.

Tove.

Fifteen years old this year.

Still mad about books and top of her class, but all that has a heavier tone now, as if the game has become serious, as if time is taking its toll on her.

You’re too young for that, Tove.

A few boyfriends have come and gone during the course of the year.

Goodbye, Peter. Hello, Viggo.

Can I let her go? I can’t punish her with my own feelings of guilt. And she seems to be fine. Malin can see it in her daughter, the glow in her eyes, the way her girlish posture is becoming that of a woman. Malin’s hopes, unexpressed: Hold your ground, Tove, you don’t want to become a mother for many years yet.

Concentrate on your education.

Aren’t I supposed to be giving a talk in a school sometime soon? Malin thinks. The very thought of babbling in front of a group of tired, disinterested students makes her feel miserable, so she brushes it aside.

Malin lies down on the sofa.

Feels the damp clothes against her skin.

The tequila burned out of her body now.

It feels as if the evangelical students’ sanctimony is still clinging to the flat, making her feel slightly nauseous.

Janne. She wants to say she’s sorry, but doesn’t know where to start. And Tove, how can I explain to you? Could you even understand?

What do I really know about your life now, Tove? I have no idea at all, except that this flat is your home, you can move in here with me, anything else is out of the question.

Your books, out at Janne’s.

I’ve tried sitting down beside you a thousand times over the past year, on the sofa, on your bed, asking you how you are, but the only words I get out of you are: ‘I’m fine,’ accompanied, soundlessly, by: ‘Leave me alone, Mum.’

And what do I want from you, Tove?

Your forgiveness? Reassurance that everything’s all right?

Can things ever be all right? That woman, the murderer, held you down on the floor with her bloody hands and was about to kill you.

And I’m the one who brought that scene into being.

There are a thousand wretched ways for it to rain. Raindrops can have any number of colours, even at night, they can take the copper of autumn leaves and make it their own, the rain can become a shower of sparks in the glow of the street lamps, sparks like flying cockroaches.

Malin has slumped to the floor of the living room.

Watching the red, orange and yellow cockroaches flying through the air, hearing their jaws snapping, and she forces them away, chasing them with a flame-thrower, and she can smell charred cockroach corpses as she hounds them from her sight.

Nothing but mundane reality out there now.

Clouds.

Weeks, weeks of different shades of grey over her head, no blue in sight. Record rainfall, and television weather forecasters talking about a flood of biblical proportions.

She found the bottle at the back of the cupboard above the microwave. She knew those buttoned-up religious types wouldn’t so much as have sniffed at it. So she had left it there, consciously or unconsciously, for future use.

She drinks straight from the bottle.

Who gives a damn if she’s hungover tomorrow? It’s been a quiet autumn since she caught the father and brother who planned and carried out the murder of their daughter, their sister. She’d had a Swedish boyfriend. And that was enough.

Vomit.

Sometimes it can actually be nice to be hungover. I’ll have to get to grips with everything tomorrow, get my things from Janne. Isn’t he on duty, so I won’t have to see him? I’ll bring Tove’s things. Talk to her about moving back in.

I’m drunk, Malin thinks, and it’s nice.