The Accidental Further Adventures of the Hundred-Year-Old Man

Sweden

Allan and Julius stood in the arrivals hall of Terminal 5 at Arlanda Airport, looking around. Julius summed up the situation: they were freshly kitted, well rested, full – and had twenty dollars in assets.

‘Twenty dollars?’ said Allan. ‘That ought to be enough for a beer each.’

Two small beers. Then they were out of cash.

‘Now we’re freshly kitted, well rested, full, and not quite as thirsty as we just were,’ said Allan. ‘Do you have any ideas about what to do next?’

No, Julius didn’t, not off the top of his head. Perhaps they should have considered this before drinking the last of their money, but what was done was done. The bit about personal finance was probably at the top of the agenda.

The hundred-and-one-year-old nodded. Money made life easier in many ways. How were the asparagus funds? They had reached Sweden: didn’t Julius have a whole bunch of asparagus contacts here? Allan wasn’t familiar with the details of how Indonesian Swedish asparagus was sent this way and that, all over the world, but he assumed it made a stopover in this country. Wouldn’t anything else have been verging on unethical?

Brilliant! Julius didn’t have a whole bunch of contacts, but he did have Gunnar Gräslund.

‘Who might he be?’ asked Allan.

Gunnar Gräslund was an acquaintance from the past. Most people knew him by the name ‘Gunnar Grisly’ because that was what he was. He never showered; he shaved once a week; he did snuff and swore. And he had spent his entire life swindling people (Julius didn’t blame him for that last part). He was the one who’d been handed the task of selling Gustav Svensson’s locally grown asparagus onwards and, however grisly he was otherwise, he fulfilled his commitments.

‘All we have to do is travel to Gunnar, explain our situation, and he’ll take out his wallet.’

‘Travel on what?’ asked Allan.

‘On foot,’ said Julius.

Sweden is sixteen hundred kilometres in length, but not quite so wide. A relatively enormous surface for a trifling ten million people to share.

In most of the country, you can wander for hours without meeting another person, or even a moose. You can buy yourself a valley including your own lake for an amount that wouldn’t get you more than a shabby studio apartment on the outskirts of Paris. The downside to this purchase is that you will soon discover it is 120 kilometres to the nearest store, 160 to a pharmacy, and even longer to limp if you step on a nail and require a hospital. If you want to borrow cream for your coffee from the nearest neighbour, there’s a good chance they’re a three-hour walk away. And three hours back. The coffee will have gone cold long before you return home.

Not everyone wants that sort of lifestyle. Those who want it least have made a silent pact to gather in Stockholm and its immediate surroundings. With them come the businesses. H&M, Ericsson, and IKEA prioritize the areas where two and a half million potential customers live over places like the village of Nattavaara north of the Arctic Circle, where seventy-seven people still haven’t left.

So it wasn’t particularly surprising that the regional warehouse for Julius Jonsson and Gustav Svensson’s asparagus operation was located outside Stockholm and nowhere else. For a firm that has no need of direct contact with the consumer, yet moves imports and exports by plane, the area around Arlanda Airport poses an advantage. More specifically, Märsta. Even more specifically, a two-hour walk from Arlanda Airport. Two and a half if you’re old.

The alternative was a fifteen-minute taxi ride, but that possibility had been drunk for breakfast.