Sofia thought the caller sounded drunk.
She took her USB memory stick out of her bag, plugged it into her computer and opened the folder about Victoria Bergman.
It was as if there were several bits missing from Victoria Bergman’s personality. During their conversations it had become clear that there were a lot of traumatic experiences in Victoria’s youth. A lot of their sessions had developed into long monologues that couldn’t be called conversations in any real sense.
Often Sofia actually came close to falling asleep from the sound of Victoria’s monotonous, droning voice. Her monologues acted as a sort of self-hypnosis that encouraged drowsiness in Sofia as well, and she had difficulty remembering all the details of what Victoria said. When she mentioned this to her fellow psychotherapist at the office he had reminded her about the option of recording the sessions, and had lent her his pocket tape recorder in exchange for a decent bottle of wine.
She had marked the cassettes with the time and date, and now she had twenty-five little tapes locked away in the cabinet at work. Anything she had found particularly interesting she typed up and saved onto the USB stick.
Sofia opened the folder she had labelled VB, which contained a number of text files.
She double-clicked on one of the files, and read on the screen:
Some days were better than others. It was like my stomach had a way of telling me in advance when they were going to start fighting.
Sofia saw from her notes that the conversation was about Victoria’s childhood summers in Dalarna. Almost every weekend the Bergman family would get in the car and drive the two hundred and fifty kilometres up to the little cottage in Dala-Floda, and Victoria had told her that they often spent four full weeks there during the holidays.
She carried on reading:
My stomach was never wrong and several hours before the shouting started I would take refuge in my secret den.
I used to make sandwiches for myself. I never knew how long they were going to fight and when Mum would have time to make food.
Once I watched through the gaps between the planks as he chased her across the field. Mum was running for her life but Dad was quicker and brought her down with a blow to the back of the neck. When they came back across the yard later on she had a big cut above her eye and he was sobbing in despair.
Mum felt sorry for him.
It was his unjust fate to have been burdened with the difficult work of educating his two women.
If only Mum and I could just listen to him instead of being so obstinate.
Sofia made a few notes about what needed to be followed up, then closed the document.
She opened another of the files at random, and realised at once that it was one of the encounters in which Victoria had disappeared inside herself.
The conversation had begun as usual: Sofia would ask a question, and Victoria would answer.
With each question the answers got longer and longer, and less and less coherent. Victoria would talk about one thing, which would lead her to something completely different, and so on, at an ever increasing rate.
Sofia dug out the recording of the conversation, put it into the tape player, pressed play, leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes.
Victoria Bergman’s voice.
Then I started to eat to put a stop to their bloody cackling and they fell silent at once because they saw what I was prepared to do to be their friend. Not that I was prepared to kiss their backsides. Pretending to like them. Getting them to respect me. Getting them to realise that I actually had a brain and could think.
Sofia opened her eyes, read the label on the cassette case, and saw that the conversation had been recorded a couple of months ago. Victoria had been talking about her time at boarding school in Sigtuna, and a particularly extreme incidence of bullying.
The voice went on.
Victoria changed the subject.
When the treehouse was ready I didn’t think it was any fun any more, I wasn’t interested in lying in there reading comics with him, so when he fell asleep I left the treehouse, went down to the boat, got one of the wooden planks, leaned it up against the entrance, and hammered some nails in until he woke up inside, wondering what I was doing. Just you stay there, I said, and carried on hammering until the box was empty …
The voice faded away, and Sofia realised she was on the verge of falling asleep.
… and the window was too small to crawl through, but while he sat inside crying I fetched more planks and nailed them across it. Maybe I’d let him out later, maybe not, but in the darkness he’d be able to think about how much he liked me …
Sofia switched off the tape player, got up from her chair and looked at the time.
An hour?
No, that can’t be right, she thought. I must have dozed off.
Monument – Mikael’s Apartment
AT NINE O’CLOCK Sofia decided to do as Mikael wanted and go round to his apartment on ?landsgatan, in the block known as Monument. On the way she bought things for breakfast, because she knew there’d be nothing in his fridge.
Once she got to Mikael’s apartment she fell asleep on his sofa, exhausted, only waking up when he kissed her on the forehead.
‘Hello, darling, surprise!’ he said quietly.
She looked around, startled, scratching herself where his coarse black beard had tickled her.
‘Hello. What are you doing here? What time is it?’
‘Half past twelve. I managed to catch the last flight.’
He lay a big bouquet of red roses on the table and went into the kitchen. She looked at the flowers with distaste, then got up and followed him over the expanse of the living-room floor. He’d already taken butter, bread and cheese out of the fridge.
‘Do you want some?’ he asked. ‘A cup of a tea and a sandwich?’
Sofia nodded and sat down at the kitchen table.
‘How’s your week been?’ he went on. ‘Mine’s been awful! Some journalist’s got it into his head that our products have dangerous side effects, and there’s been a huge fuss on television and in the press. Has there been anything about it here?’
He put down two plates of sandwiches and went over to the stove, where the water was already boiling.
‘Not as far as I know. There might have been.’ She was still feeling drowsy and taken aback by his sudden appearance. ‘I’ve had to listen to a woman who thinks she’s been abused by the mass media –’