She’s lying on the kitchen floor next to a couple of bin bags containing vomited food, staring up at the fridge. The open ventilation window in the kitchen combined with the window open in the living room is making the pieces of paper on the fridge door flutter in the cross breeze. If she screws up her eyes they look like flies’ wings, buzzing against a mosquito net.
Beside her is a table laid for a party, with dirty plates and unwashed cutlery.
Nature morte.
Once bright candles, now remnants of wax.
Sofia knows that she won’t remember anything tomorrow.
Like when she once found that glade down by the lake, in Dala-Floda, where time stood still and which she spent weeks trying to find again. She has lived with gaps in her memory since she was a small child.
She thinks about Gr?na Lund and what happened the night Johan went missing. Images try to take hold within her.
Sofia shuts her eyes and turns her gaze inward.
Johan had been sitting beside her in the Free Fall cradle, and Jeanette had been standing outside the railing watching them. Slowly they had risen, metre by metre.
Halfway to the top she got scared, and when they passed the fifty-metre mark vertigo was welling up. Her irrational response had come out of nowhere.
She hadn’t dared to move. And hardly dared to breathe. But Johan had laughed and swung his legs. She had asked him to stop, but he had just grinned at her and carried on.
Sofia remembers thinking that the bolts holding the cradle were being put under unnaturally great pressure, and would eventually come loose. And they’d crash to the ground.
The cradle had been swaying and she had begged him to stop, but he hadn’t listened. Arrogant and smug, he had just swung his legs harder.
And suddenly Victoria had been there.
Her fear had vanished, her thoughts cleared, and she was calm again.
And then it all went black once more.
She had been lying on her side. The grit on the tarmac chafing her hip, through her coat and top. Eating its way through.
A smell she had recognised. A cool hand against a hot brow.
She had screwed up her eyes and through the wall of legs and shoes she had seen a bench, and beside the bench she had seen herself from behind.
Yes, that was it. She had seen Victoria Bergman.
Had she been hallucinating?
But she hadn’t been delirious. She had seen herself. Her fair hair, her coat, her bag.
It was her. It was Victoria.
She had been lying down, and had seen herself twenty metres away.
Victoria had gone up to Johan and taken him by the arm.
She had tried to call to Johan, to tell him to look out, but when she opened her mouth no sound came out.
Her chest feels tight, as if she’s going to suffocate. A panic attack, she thinks, and tries to breathe more slowly.
Sofia Zetterlund remembers seeing herself pull a pink mask over Johan’s face.
She’s lying on her kitchen floor in Borgm?stargatan and knows that in twelve hours she won’t have any recollection of having lain on the kitchen floor in Borgm?stargatan thinking that in twelve hours she would have to get up and go to work.
But right now Sofia Zetterlund knows that she has a daughter in Denmark.
A daughter named Madeleine.
And right now she remembers that she once went to find Madeleine.
But she doesn’t know if she’s going to remember that tomorrow.
Denmark, 1988
IT COULD HAVE been good.
Could have been fine.
Victoria doesn’t know if she’s in the right place; she feels confused and decides to take a walk round the block to collect her thoughts.
She’s got a surname to go on, and now she knows that the family lives in Hellerup, one of Copenhagen’s smarter suburbs, full of detached villas. The man is managing director of a company that makes toys, and lives in Duntzfelts allé with his wife.
Victoria takes out her Walkman and switches the tape on. A recently released Joy Division compilation. As she walks along the avenues ‘Incubation’ plays, and the music rattles monotonously in her earphones.
Incubation. Brooding, hatching. Baby birds, snatched away.
She has been an egg-laying machine.
All she knows is that she wants to see her daughter. Then what?
Who cares if it all goes to hell? she thinks as she turns onto the next road, yet another tree-lined avenue.
She sits down on a junction box next to a dustbin, lights a cigarette and decides to sit there until the tape stops.
‘She’s Lost Control’, ‘Dead Souls’, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’. The cassette changes side automatically: ‘No Love Lost’, ‘Failures’. People walk past, and she wonders what they’re staring at.
When Victoria walks up to the family’s villa she sees that there’s a brass sign on the stone wall beside the gate, and she knows she’s found the right place.
Mr and Mrs Silfverberg and their daughter, Madeleine. She smiles. How ridiculous. Victoria and Madeleine, like the Swedish princesses.
She looks around to make sure no one’s watching, then climbs over the wall and drops down the other side. There are lights on downstairs, but the upper two floors are dark. She sees that the balcony door on the first floor is open.
A drainpipe makes a useful ladder, and soon she’s opening the door wider.
A study, full of bookcases, and on the floor is a big rug.
She takes off her shoes and pads carefully out onto a large landing. There are two doors on her right, and three on her left, one of which is open. At the far end of the landing is a staircase leading to the other floors. From downstairs comes the sound of a football match on television.
She looks in through the open door. Another study, with a desk and two shelves full of toys. She doesn’t bother with the other rooms, since she assumes no one would leave a baby behind a closed door.
Instead she creeps over to the stairs and starts to go down. The staircase is shaped like a U, and she pauses halfway to look down at a large room with a stone floor and a door at the far end, presumably the front door.
An enormous chandelier is hanging from the ceiling, and against the left-hand wall there’s a pram with its hood up.
She acts instinctively. There are no consequences, nothing but the here and now.
Victoria goes down the flight of stairs and places her shoes on the bottom step. She’s no longer worried about creeping around. The noise from the television is so loud she can hear what the commentators are saying.
Semi-final, Italy against the Soviet Union, nil–nil, Neckar Stadium, Stuttgart.
A glazed double door stands open next to the pram. Through the doors she can see Mr and Mrs Silfverberg watching television, and in the pram is her baby.
Incubation. Egg-laying machine.
She’s not the bird of prey here, she’s only taking back what’s hers.
Victoria goes to the pram and bends over the child. The baby’s face is quite calm, but she doesn’t recognise it. At the hospital in Aalborg the child had looked different. Her hair had been darker, her face thinner and her lips less full. Now she looks like a cherub.
The baby is sleeping, and it’s still nil–nil in the Neckar Stadium in Stuttgart.