Midwinter Sacrifice

9

‘Malin, have you watered the plants? They won’t make it through the winter otherwise.’

The question is so obvious, Malin thinks, that there was really no need to ask it. And the explanation just as unnecessary: his tendency to be overtly pedagogical to promote his own interests.

‘I’m on my way to your flat to do it now.’

‘Haven’t you done it already?’

‘Not since we last spoke, no.’

She got the call just as she was leaving Police Headquarters, waiting for a green light at the corner of the cemetery and the old fire station. The Volvo had deigned to start today, even though it was just as cold.

It was like she knew it was Dad by the way the phone rang. Annoyed, lovable, demanding, self-centred, kind: give me all your attention, I’m not giving up until you answer, I’m not interrupting anything, am I?

The meeting of the investigating team had been largely concerned with waiting.

Waiting for Börje Svärd who was late, something to do with his wife.

Waiting for someone to ask about Nysvärd’s broken arm, injured when the body fell from the tree.

‘On sick-leave for two and half weeks,’ Sven Sjöman said. ‘He seemed cheerful enough when I spoke to him, just a bit shaken up still.’

‘It’s a bit bloody macabre, having a hundred-and-fifty-kilo frozen-solid corpse land on you,’ Johan Jakobsson said.

Then waiting for someone to say what they all knew. That they had nothing to go on. Waiting for Skoglund the funeral director to finish his work, get the picture taken and sent out.

Börje: ‘What was it I said? That no one would recognise him from those first pictures.’

Waiting for waiting itself, all energy sucked out of tired police officers who know that the case is urgent but who can do little but throw up their hands and say, ‘We’ll see!’ When every citizen, every journalist, wants to hear the police recount what happened, and who did it.

Waiting for Karim Akbar, who was late as well, if only late answering the phone out in his villa in Lambohov. Waiting for his son’s stereo to be turned down in the background, then waiting for Karim’s voice to stop resounding from the speakerphone.

‘This isn’t good enough, you know that perfectly well. Sven, you’ll have to arrange another press conference tomorrow where you let them know what we’ve got so far. That’ll calm them down.’

And you get another chance to show off, Malin thinks. Then: but you do stand there and soak up the questions, the aggression, and make sure we can work in peace and quiet. And you do stand for something, Karim. You understand the power of the group when everyone has a well-defined role.

Sven’s tired words after Karim had hung up. ‘If only we were like Stockholm. With our own press officer.’

‘You’re the one who’s been on the media management course,’ Zeke said. ‘Couldn’t you do it?’

Laughter. Release. Sven: ‘I’m close to getting my pension and you want to throw me to the hyenas, Zeke? Thanks a lot.’

The red light turns green, the Volvo hesitates then rolls off along Drottninggatan into the city.

‘How’s Mum doing, Dad? The plants are fine, I promise.’

‘She’s having a nap. It’s twenty-five degrees and glorious sunshine down here. How is it up there?’

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Yes I do.’

‘Well I’m not going to tell you, Dad.’

‘Well, it’s sunny here in Tenerife, anyway. How’s Tove?’

‘She’s with Jan-Erik.’

‘Malin, I’m going to go now, otherwise it’ll get expensive. Don’t forget the plants.’

The plants, Malin thinks as she pulls up outside the ochre-coloured building on Elsa Brännströms gata where her parents have their four-room apartment. The plants must never be kept waiting.

Malin moves through her parents’ apartment, a ghost in her own past. The furniture she grew up with.

Am I really so old?

The smells, the colours, the shapes can all get me going, make me remember things that make me remember other things.

Four rooms: one for best, a dining room, a living room and a bedroom. Nowhere for their grandchild to stay the night. They took out the contract on the apartment when they sold the villa in Sturefors thirteen years ago. In those days the housing market in Linköping was very different. If your affairs were in order and you could afford a decent rent, you had options. Today there’s nothing, only shady deals can get you a contract. Or improbably good contacts.

Malin looks out of the sitting-room window.

From the third floor there is a good view of Infection Park, named after the clinic that was once housed in the barracks that have now been turned into housing.

The sofa she was never allowed to sit on.

The brown leather shines like new to this day. The table, lovely then, overblown now. The shelves full of books from Reader’s Digest. Maya Angelou, Lars Järlestad, Lars Widding, Anne Tyler.

The dining table and chairs. Having friends over, children who had to sit and eat in the kitchen. Nothing odd about that. Everyone did the same, and children don’t like sitting round the table anyway.

Dad, the welder, promoted to team-leader, then part-owner of a roofing company. Mum a secretary at the county administrative board.

The smell of people getting old. Even if Malin opened the window and aired the place the smell wouldn’t go. Maybe, she thinks, the cold might make the apartment scentless at best.

The plants are drooping. But none of them is actually dead. She won’t let it go that far. She looks at the framed pictures on the bureau, none of her or Tove, just her parents in different settings: a beach, a city, a mountain, a jungle. ‘Can you water the plants?’

Of course I can water them.

‘You can come down whenever you like.’

And how do we afford that?

She sits down on the armchair in the hall and the memory of the silent springs is in her body: she is five years old again, kicking her sandalled feet; there is water a little way away and behind her she can hear Mum and Dad’s voices, not shouting at each other exactly, but in their tone of voice there is a chasm, and the gap between their voices conceals all that is painful, all that the five-year-old in the chair near the water feels but does not yet have a name for.

Impossible love. The coolness of some marriages.

Does it ever get a name? That feeling?

Then she is back.

The watering can in her hand.

Plant by plant. Methodically, in a way her father the team-leader would appreciate.

I’m not hoovering, Malin thinks. Dustballs on the floor. When she used to hoover, as part of her tasks in exchange for pocket money on Saturdays, Mum would follow her round the house, checking that she didn’t knock against the furniture or door frames. When she was finished her mum would hoover again, hoovering the same places, right in front of her as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

What can a child do?

What does a child know?

A child is shaped.

And then it is finished.

All the plants watered. Now they will live a bit longer.

Malin sits down on her parents’ bed.

It’s a Dux. They’ve had it for years, but would they be able to sleep in it if they knew what had happened in this bed, that this was where she lost, or rather made sure she got rid of, her virginity?

Not Janne.

Someone else.

Earlier. She was fourteen and alone at home while her parents were at a party, staying the night with friends in Torshälla.

Whatever. No matter what had happened in this bed, it wasn’t hers. She can’t walk through this apartment, alone or with other people, without a sense of loss. She gets up from the bed, forcing herself through the thick veils of longing that seem to hang in the air. What’s missing?

Her parents in pictures without frames.

In sun-loungers at the house on Tenerife. Three years since they bought it, but she and Tove have never been there.

‘You’re doing the watering?’

Of course I’m watering.

She has lived with these people, she comes from them, but even so the people in the pictures are strangers. Mum, mostly.

She empties the watering can in the kitchen sink.

There are secrets hidden in those drops, behind the green doors of the kitchen cupboards, in the freezer, rumbling away, full of last year’s chanterelles.

Shall I take a bag?

No.

The last thing she sees before she closes the door of her parents’ apartment behind her are the thick wool rugs on the floor of the sitting room. She sees them through the open double doors from the hall, average quality. They’re not as good as Mum always pretends they are. The whole room, the whole home is full of things that aren’t what they seem, veneers concealing a different veneer.

There’s a feeling here, Malin thinks, of never being quite good enough, of nothing ever being quite right. That we aren’t, that I’m not, good enough.

To this day she has difficulty with anything that’s truly good enough, with people who are supposed to be genuinely good enough. Not just rich like Karin Johannison, but doctors, the upper classes, lawyers, that sort of good. Faced with people like that, she sometimes senses her prejudices and feelings of inferiority rise to the surface. She decides in advance that people like that always look down on people like her, and she adopts a defensive posture.

Why?

To avoid being disappointed?

It’s better at work, but it can be stressful in her private life.

Thoughts are flying round Malin’s head as she jogs downstairs and out into the early, wretched, Friday evening.