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

Sweden

The days came and went. Julius opened the shop each morning, while Sabine laid out breakfast for herself and the gentlemen one hour later. Then Julius and Sabine spent some time outdoing each other with sighs, as Allan took out the black tablet for reading-aloud time. After the meal, Sabine sat at the cash register while Julius went to work as a coffin-producer and Allan settled in on his sofa.

Now that the diplomats were making themselves at home, Sabine saw fit to come up with a few rules. Especially when it came to hygiene. She put out four sets of clothes, left behind by her grandfather, and required a shower followed by a change of clothes each day.

Quite strict, thought Allan and Julius. But they obeyed.

The luck Julius had brought, attracting four customers during one single breakfast, turned out to be temporary. The stream of people who thought they needed food to live was limited. As for customers who wanted to prepare for death instead, not one turned up.

Julius walked around in his socks while his heels healed. With Sabine’s permission, he did some product development on the coffins: he painted them different colours, because he had seen somewhere that some people did so. He decided there was nothing to lose, aside from the cost of paint. Sabine adjusted her calculations so the budget would continue to be the right shade of red for the coming quarter.

The shop window was now arrayed with five coffins of solid pine, in white, pigeon blue, pink, olive green and grey. There were also a few finished but untreated coffins in the carpentry shop, and another two in production.

The market for coffins north of the northern suburbs of Stockholm, however, seemed to be dead. When Julius asked Sabine about her reasoning behind the pricing and positioning, he received an evasive answer. When he wanted to know about nearby competition, she said she would be thrilled to know the same.

After two weeks, Julius’s blisters had healed, while total coffin sales remained at zero. Via the internet he identified Berglund’s funeral parlour as the closest competitor in a geographical sense. Sabine promised to take care of all the customers who wouldn’t appear, and he set off on a reconnaissance mission.

It was a comfortable twenty-minute walk to Berglund’s. Julius stepped inside and was greeted by a woman in a black jacket and checked skirt. She welcomed her customer, introduced herself as Therese Berglund, proprietor of the business with her husband, Ove, who was, unfortunately, unavailable at the moment. Julius took her hand but saw no immediate reason to give his own name.

‘How may I be of service?’ asked Therese Berglund.

‘I’m curious about your coffins,’ said Julius.

Therese Berglund was not used to such a start to her client relationships. Usually the first thing that happened was that she was told who had died and countered with a suitable amount of condolences. ‘Okay,’ she said, rather uncertainly.

‘I see you offer them in various colours. May I ask what you use for material?’

Therese Berglund said that the caskets the gentleman was pointing at were made of Masonite and were therefore a very good bargain. But no shortcuts had been taken on the surface treatment, and in that way Berglund’s was always able to offer caskets that radiated the utmost dignity yet didn’t cost as much as you might think.

‘And how much do they go for? The pink one and the blue one?’

‘Six thousand four hundred kronor apiece.’

‘Oh, damn,’ Julius said spontaneously.

His and Sabine’s coffins of solid pine had to be priced somewhere around fifteen thousand to break more or less even. The Masonite coffins looked just as nice.

‘Although we’re happy to offer complete solutions, with various funeral packages including the casket, of course, but also such things as invitations, programmes, casket decorations and thank-you cards. There’s a lot to think about when a loved one has passed away, and you’re weighed down with sorrow. The level of our engagement and therefore the cost is determined with the bereaved.’

‘Well, there you go,’ said Julius. ‘Although in this case there is no deceased loved one.’

Funeral director Therese Berglund looked at the customer, who apparently was no customer. ‘So why…’ she began.

‘Oh, well, death is always just around the corner, so it’s wise to be prepared. Do you make the coffins yourselves, by the way?’

‘Or, again, the caskets,’ said Therese Berglund. ‘No, they’re produced for us in Estonia. For special orders there’s a two-week delivery time, but we have most items in stock. I just don’t quite understand your interest in our caskets if no one—’

‘I won’t trouble you further,’ said Julius. ‘Thanks for the peep. Very nice coffins, really. Fun to see. And a good price! See you once I’ve pegged it. Or I won’t, exactly, but you know what I mean.’

The bad news was that the quality of the coffins at Berglund’s was equal to their own, but for less than half the price. The even worse news was that the package deals Berglund offered made it even more irrelevant to turn to Julius, Sabine and the guy with the black tablet. And apparently they couldn’t be called coffins any more: they were caskets.

Sabine felt they could call them whatever they wished, as long as they upped their sales. The two participants in the emergency meeting were unanimous that there were two paths forward. Either they buried the coffin idea or they expanded it.

‘Let me think,’ said Julius.

‘Ugh,’ said Allan, from his sofa.

Julius thought.

He thought that someone who ordered a pink coffin, for instance, did so for a reason. The funeral industry liked to call it ‘powder pink’.

A coffin you could identify with… Julius kept thinking. Different theme coffins: might that be an idea?

A rainbow coffin for someone who, even in death, would defend their right to prefer embracing someone of the same sex?

A Harley Davidson coffin for someone of that persuasion?

A Jesus coffin, even?

A protect-the-environment coffin?

A football-team-of-my-heart coffin? To many people, football meant win or die. And maybe, when one died, one would prefer it to look like a win.

An Elvis Presley coffin? In his youth, Julius had known an Elvis impersonator whose singing was uniquely bad and who also looked more like Gustav V of Sweden than The King. There were rumours that someone had beaten him to death at a karaoke bar for that very reason many years later. But if he was still alive, and starting to think about rounding it off, he would obviously be an example of a potential client.

‘Now we’re starting to get somewhere,’ Sabine said, when Julius shared his thoughts. ‘I could paint everything you’ve listed. And much more besides. I could handle a Harley Davidson coffin in two or three days. Elvis might take a week. Early Elvis would be preferable, I think – he wasn’t quite as fat when he was young so it wouldn’t use up as much paint.’

Julius was delighted with the indirect praise he had received from Sabine. The next step would be to find a way to get their message out. An ad in the local Märsta paper probably wasn’t worth another shot, was it?

‘No,’ said Sabine. ‘I think our concept is rather more international. Do you think there might be a trade fair for us? A coffin fair?’

Julius had never heard of a coffin fair, but the world was nuts, so why not?

‘Let me do some searching,’ he said, and asked to borrow Allan’s black tablet.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Allan from his sofa. ‘Then who would tell you about what is and is not happening in the world?’

‘How about no one?’ said Julius.

Sabine warded off a fight between the old men. ‘I’ll fetch my laptop. Back in a minute.’

An international trade fair it would be. It was reasonable to expect that 99 per cent of the potential in an Elvis Presley coffin was to be found outside the borders of Sweden. Just as one example.

Julius found what he was looking for. In the German city of Stuttgart. The world’s biggest travel and tourism fair would take place there in the near future. It fitted their purpose, like a hand in a glove: two thousand exhibitors from ninety-nine countries. Travel agents, hotel chains, tourist organizations, RVs, camper trailers, campgrounds, tents, backpacks, and a couple of hundred more items.

‘Coffins?’ said the German fair organizer, when Julius called to book a booth. ‘We don’t usually get involved in what the exhibitors wish to communicate, but it really should be somehow relevant to the overarching theme of the fair.’

‘Oh, but it is,’ said Julius. ‘The final journey is, of course, its own sort of travel – perhaps the most important one of all. Don’t you agree?’

The fair organizer, who earlier that day had received an application from a Slovenian manufacturer of shoehorns, realized that nothing could surprise him any more. ‘Of course, sir. I’ll send over the documents. We look forward to giving you and your… coffins a warm welcome.’

Now it was time to prioritize. They would have to take a number of samples. Which theme would be best from an international perspective?

Sabine wondered what Germans in particular might get excited about. A ‘Say No to Nuclear Power’ coffin?

Allan had been listening with one ear. Now he interfered to say that this wouldn’t work. Not in Germany, and not anywhere else. The Germans had already decided to do away with nuclear power, so what would be the point of protesting against it? To everyone else, the nuclear accident in Fukushima was already old news. People preferred to worry about things to come, as opposed to what had been or, in this case, was utterly ongoing.

Perhaps, however, they would be able to market an anti-nuclear-weapons coffin in Japan. There, the half-life of what people remember is not quite as short. After all, the level of radioactivity in ocean fish off the coast of Fukushima was still two thousand times the allowable limit. And recently levels of more than five hundred Sieverts per hour had been measured in the destroyed reactor.

‘So what does that mean?’ asked Julius, who didn’t really want to know: he had already dropped the anti-nuclear power coffin idea.

‘If the level had instead been three, it would have been survivable,’ said Allan.

‘Three hundred?’

‘No, three.’

Sabine muttered that this sounded cheerful. Was there anything in Allan’s black tablet that could benefit their business instead?

‘Maybe,’ said Allan.

What the tablet offered was, essentially, news from every corner of the world, a little bit of music and some naked ladies. For his own part, he focused on the first. ‘The prevailing sentiment right now is that those of us who have it good want to avoid dealing with those who have it bad.’

‘And what does that business model look like?’

Allan wasn’t sure, but any number of people were drowning in the Mediterranean each day, and when they floated ashore here and there, they would certainly need a coffin.

Sabine said that even living refugees probably weren’t their primary target group. Drowned ones, even less so.

Allan tended to agree.

Julius was impressed by the words Sabine was tossing around. ‘Business model’ and ‘primary target group’ within the span of a few sentences. ‘I think you have a nose for business,’ he said.

‘A nose for bad business,’ Sabine corrected him.

‘Do you have any experience with trade fairs?’ Julius wondered.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact.’

Once, twenty years earlier, her mother had taken her on a trip to Las Vegas. There, they had attended a ‘spiritual insight’ fair, which, loosely translated, involved a giant meeting between her mother and twenty-five thousand like-minded people from all over the world.

The main attraction for her mother had been the presentation on ‘Healing with Spiritual Energy’ but she’d managed to miss it – and just about everything else – because she had immediately discovered that LSD was sold in all imaginable forms in the neighbourhood. The Americans called it ‘acid’, and Sabine’s mother had explained to her daughter that she had no choice but to try out all the American varieties to see what sort of new spiritual insights she could find.

What happened next was that her mum stayed in their hotel room for three of the four fair days in a series of attempts to teleport herself and Sabine back to Sweden. She’d managed to get there time and again, she’d said, but her daughter, ever the rigid thinker, kept being left behind in Vegas.

Julius thought he was almost on his way to falling in love. ‘Poor wonderful you,’ he said. ‘The things you’ve had to deal with!’

‘Oh,’ said Sabine, blushing.

LSD trips over there hadn’t been much different from those at home. While her mother – or at least her spirit – was travelling back and forth across the Atlantic, Sabine had walked around the booths at the fair, learning the basics of how to communicate with your own guardian angel. She was offered an entire starter package for 2800 American dollars, including a DVD, a handbook and a CD containing ninety minutes of silence.

Angel Talk, the CD was called. The cover explained that it was empty because angels, in general, don’t talk.

The involuntarily retired asparagus farmer was reminded that the world was full of endless business ideas.

‘If our coffin project fails, maybe we can breathe new life into your mother’s operation,’ he said.

‘Maybe,’ said Sabine.