The Circle (Hammer)

28



VANESSA IS DRUMMING her nails on the worn tabletop at Café Monique.

Click-click-click-click. Click-click-click-click. Click-click-click-click.

An elderly couple looks at her with irritation. Vanessa glares at them.

Click-click-click-click. Click-click-click-click. Click-click-click-click.

They dig into their pastries. God, she hates the idea of getting old. But the alternative is worse. Not getting old. Vanessa’s fingers stop. She empties another packet of sugar into her coffee. She’d had a part-time job here until last summer when Monika said she couldn’t afford to keep her on. But she still treats her to free coffee.

A glass cabinet contains piles of several-year-old gossip magazines. Perched on top of the cabinet are dusty bouquets of dried flowers. And then of course there’s Monika, with her pert dresses and perpetual frown. She’s not very nice, but Vanessa respects her because she struggles on with her café in a town where most people feel they can drink coffee at home.

Vanessa takes a sip. The coffee is lukewarm. She hears the bell tinkle and a chilly gust of wind blows through the café. Linnéa walks in and sits down opposite her.

‘Hi,’ Vanessa says.

Linnéa doesn’t answer. She smells of fresh air, and Vanessa realises it’s probably stuffy in there.

‘Do you want anything?’ Vanessa asks.

‘No.’

Linnéa’s black eyes flare, and a series of unwelcome images pops into Vanessa’s head: Linnéa’s naked skin, Jonte’s hand groping her breast.

‘Well?’ Linnéa says. ‘What did you want?’

Vanessa had prepared herself for this meeting, tried out different things to say until she had composed a whole speech in her defence. It’s not her style and now she understands why. When the time comes to deliver it, her mind is blank. ‘Sorry,’ she says.

‘For what?’

‘You know.’

‘I want to hear you say it.’

Vanessa is so embarrassed she wants to run away.

‘I just wanted to be sure that you and Wille weren’t …’

‘And that’s why you followed Jonte into my apartment? Or were you there already?’

‘No. I waited outside. I don’t know why I followed him in.’

Linnéa leans back in her chair and folds her arms. ‘Okay,’ she says finally. ‘I can understand it might have been tempting. But if you spy on me like that again, I’ll kill you.’

Vanessa nods. She’ll never put herself through something like that again.

They look at each other for a moment. The windows behind Linnéa are fogged up. Vanessa twists her silver ring a few times. Linnéa says nothing, just stares at the ring.

Vanessa wonders if she understands. ‘Wille and I are engaged.’

‘Congratulations. Really,’ Linnéa says.

Vanessa gets angry. ‘Why the hell are you sleeping with Jonte?’

‘What?’

‘I just don’t understand it. Seriously. He’s so old. And you’re so pretty.’

‘Thanks … I think,’ Linnéa says. She grins widely.

Vanessa can’t help smiling, too. ‘You know what I mean,’ she says.

‘It’s hard to explain the thing with Jonte. Or maybe it’s too obvious.’ She leans forward across the table. Vanessa does the same. ‘When I was eleven I got drunk the first time,’ Linnéa says, ‘Jonte sold me the booze. When I was thirteen, I started getting stoned. By then he was selling weed. When I moved on to harder stuff, he sold me that, too.’

Vanessa has heard much worse rumours about Linnéa, but she’s surprised that she’s talking so openly about it.

‘Then I stopped. But Elias … couldn’t stop. I got Jonte and Wille to promise not to sell to him any more. Then I found out they’d broken their promise just before … Elias died.’

‘I know,’ Vanessa says quietly. She’ll never forget that afternoon. Did you hear about the priest’s kid? … He probably wanted to be completely out of his skull when he did it.

‘That first night at the fairground,’ Linnéa says, ‘I’d been over at Jonte’s place to have a go at him. But I never got the chance.’ She shakes her head. Her eyes are glistening, but she grits her teeth. She won’t show more than she has to. Vanessa knows how that feels. No one takes a crying girl seriously.

‘I was so lonely after Elias died,’ Linnéa says quietly. She blinks away her tears. ‘I’m so f*cking disgusting.’

‘No, you’re not.’

‘You don’t know anything about me,’ Linnéa says harshly. ‘And you don’t know anything about Wille either. He calls me sometimes, wanting me back. I’m sorry I lied to you before. I didn’t want to hurt you, but now that I’ve seen that ring … You can’t trust him.’

For once Vanessa is dumbstruck. She feels empty, now that it’s been confirmed.

‘I don’t want him,’ Linnéa says, softer now. ‘Just so you know. And I don’t think he wants me either, really. He just wants to know he’s got a chance. For his ego’s sake.’

‘Maybe that’s how it was before, but he’s changed. He loves me,’ Vanessa says.

‘You deserve someone better.’

‘So do you.’

They look at each other, and Vanessa thinks she ought to feel depressed. What Linnéa has said should have laid waste to everything. Instead she feels relieved in some strange way. And, as so often where Linnéa’s concerned, she has no idea why she feels the way she does.



Anna-Karin stares intently at her maths notebook in which she’s solving problems on Pythagoras’s theorem. Grandpa is sitting on the other side of the living room, browsing through the newspaper. Now and then he glances at the kitchen. A frenetic rattling, clattering and pounding is coming from it. ‘What’s she doing?’ he says.

‘She was going to boil the silver,’ Anna-Karin says, ‘to sterilise it.’

Grandpa folds the newspaper neatly and lays it on the little table by the armchair. ‘I know I should be happy that she has all this new energy,’ says Grandpa.

Anna-Karin pretends to be absorbed in the relationship between the hypotenuse and the opposite side.

‘It’s just so odd,’ Grandpa continues. ‘Before she barely had any energy at all. Now you can’t get her to stop.’ He sighs and takes off his reading glasses. ‘But there’s no point in complaining,’ he says. ‘It’s like in winter we go around complaining that it’s cold, wet and dark, but when summer comes we complain that it’s too hot.’

Now you can’t get her to stop. Anna-Karin could get her to stop. As soon as she’s got Jari she’ll stop everything. What the principal had said about the Council had made up her mind for her.

If only her mother didn’t look so healthy. There’s strength in her footsteps. She laughs, and is filled with energy. Wouldn’t she like to be that person rather than the woman who lay glued to the sofa every night, chain-smoking? Anna-Karin doesn’t want to go back to being the person she was a few months ago.

‘Was this what Mum was like before Daddy left?’ Anna-Karin asks.

‘What do you mean?’

‘That maybe she’s finally happy again. And that this is the person she was before Daddy … ruined everything.’

Grandpa gets up slowly from his armchair. He comes over to the sofa on which Anna-Karin is half lying. She pulls her legs underneath her to make room for him.

‘I sometimes forget that you don’t remember how things were before,’ he says, and pats Anna-Karin’s knee. Then he looks at her, a little too probingly. ‘I’ve never seen Mia like this before. Not even when Staffan was still around.’

For a moment she considers forcing him to tell her more about her father. It would be so easy, in the same way that it was easy to make Ida tell the truth about her Elias speech. But Anna-Karin feels sick just thinking about it. She could never, ever, do that to Grandpa. ‘I don’t even remember what Daddy looked like,’ she says. She’s seen photographs of him, of course. She’s looked at some so often that she feels as if she can remember the moment they were taken, but she knows that’s just her imagination. Beyond the frame of the photo, there’s nothing. She can’t see her father’s face move, can’t hear his voice.

‘I just don’t understand how someone can simply up and leave their family, like he did,’ she says.

Grandpa opens his mouth to answer, but her mother breaks into song in the kitchen.

Anna-Karin and Grandpa look at each other.

It’s as if her mother has heard them talking and wants to reassure them that everything is wonderful, just wonderful. She pronounces each word with exaggerated crispness, singing in a loud, chirpy and somehow far too young voice.

Suddenly the kitchen is silent. No singing. No clattering.

A scream cuts through the air. It’s shrill and full of pain, and reminds Anna-Karin of something she’s heard before.

Grandpa leaps up from the sofa, but she sits there petrified. That scream. When Anna-Karin was little they’d had pigs on the farm. When they were going to be slaughtered …

Grandpa flings open the kitchen door and Anna-Karin finally jolts out of her paralysis. She runs after him.

Her mother is standing at the stove, and turns to them with a smile. She’s wiping her hands frantically on her apron.

‘What, in God’s name …?’ Grandpa says.

‘Bah! I’ve been a proper lummox,’ her mother says cheerfully. She holds out her hands. The skin is a deep dark red, almost purple. Her fingers are so swollen that her rings are digging into her flesh. ‘I was just trying to take the silver out of the boiling water,’ she says, with an embarrassed laugh.

Grandpa’s frailty has disappeared. He grabs his daughter’s hands and shoves them under the tap to run ice-cold water over them. Anna-Karin looks at the pot on the stove and only now becomes aware of the bubbling sound coming from it. The steam.

I’m going to stop, she thinks. I’m going to stop it. Soon. I swear.

But, deep down, she doesn’t know if she can.