She stops. This is Sofia writing, not her, and she’s writing about Victoria. She doesn’t usually express herself this clearly. She’s even forgotten the wine; it looks like she’s hardly touched it.
‘She is a proactive person who lacks any driving forces in life apart from hate and revenge,’ Sofia concludes. ‘Her only chance to move on is to free herself from these driving forces. And there are no easy solutions to that problem.’
Sofia puts the pen and notepad down on the table.
She realises that Madeleine is going to come and see her, sooner or later.
She also realises what’s starting to happen between her and Victoria.
Sofia won’t resist any longer.
Vasastan – Hurtig’s Apartment
THE BUILDING JENS Hurtig lives in was built in the late 1800s, and belongs to the part of Norrmalm still known unofficially as Siberia, a name that comes from the fact that it used to be regarded as distant, and that moving from central Stockholm to its small workers’ housing was regarded as a form of exile. Now it is part of the city centre, and the small two-room apartment Jens Hurtig has been renting for the past two months isn’t exactly a gulag, even if the lack of a lift leaves something to be desired. Particularly when he has something to carry. Like now, a clinking bag of bottles in each hand.
He unlocks the door and is confronted by the usual mountain of advertising leaflets and free papers, even though he’s put a sign up over the letter box, politely asking not to receive them. But he can’t help feeling for the poor bastards who trudge around these buildings with heavy bundles of leaflets from the supermarkets, and on the sixth floor they are rejected by signs on every door.
He puts the bags down in the hall, and five minutes later he’s sitting in front of the television in the living room with a beer in his hand.
TV3 is showing old repeats of The Simpsons. He’s seen this episode so many times that he knows the lines by heart, and reluctantly admits to himself that the programme usually makes him feel safe. He still laughs in the same places as before, but today his laughter feels flat. It has no firm foundation.
When Jeanette told him about Linnea Lindstr?m’s suicide, all the old feelings washed over him again – his memories of his sister still haven’t left him. They never will.
It was the image of a young girl lying on a slab in the mortuary that sent him straight off to buy beer after work, and it’s the same image that is now making him lose interest in watching the antics of yellow cartoon characters on television.
The last time he saw his sister she had been lying on her back with her hands clasped over her stomach. She had looked determined, her lips had been almost black, and one side of her face and neck was bruised blue from the noose. Her skin had felt dry and cool, and her body had given the impression of being very heavy, even though she was so small and thin.
He reaches for the remote and switches the television off. Now the screen is showing only his own reflection, legs crossed in the armchair, a bottle of beer in his hand.
He feels lonely.
How lonely must she have felt?
No one had understood her. Not him, not their parents and not the psychiatrists, whose efforts had largely consisted of group therapy and trial medication. What was going on inside her remained out of reach to all of them, the hole she had fallen into had been too deep, too dark, and in the end she hadn’t been able to bear the loneliness, of being shut up inside herself.
At the time there hadn’t been any scapegoats, no one to blame except the depression itself. Today he knows that that isn’t true.
Society itself was and is responsible. The world outside was too hard for her. It promised her everything, but without actually offering her anything at all. Nor was it able to help her when she became ill. Then, as now, it had been politically dysfunctional. The strong survive, and the weak have to manage on their own. She had persuaded herself that she was weak, and she had gone under.
If he had understood that then, perhaps he could have helped her.
If she had had cancer, all the resources of the health service would have been thrown at her, but instead she had been subjected to a patchwork of treatment in which each of the various therapists hadn’t known what the others were doing. He’s convinced that her medication only exacerbated her illness.
But that wasn’t the real problem.
Hurtig knows that his sister’s great dream had been to be a musician or a singer, and she had had the support of her family. But the signals sent out by society were that that wasn’t a valid career choice. Nothing worth setting your sights on.
Instead of standing on a stage somewhere she had studied economics, the sort of thing you were supposed to study if you were clever, and it had ended with her hanging herself in her student room.
Simply because all the rest of us made her believe that her dreams weren’t worth following, he thinks.
Gamla Enskede – Kihlberg House
IT’S QUARTER TO nine when the football match kicks off, and they haven’t had time to watch the film she’s rented. Who cares if it’s a late night? she thinks. The evening has been such a success that she doesn’t want to spoil it by nagging at Johan about bedtime.
She glances at him, scarcely visible where he’s lying on the sofa behind the crisp packets, soft drinks and the takeaway cartons from one of the countless Thai restaurants on S?dermalm. The amount he can eat is quite incredible, she thinks, particularly when you consider that he never used to like Thai food. But on the other hand he’s growing so fast you can almost hear it, and his tastes and preferences are changing so quickly she’s having trouble keeping up.
As far as his taste in music is concerned, it started with hip hop, then slid unnoticed into Swedish punk, and for a while came dangerously close to hardcore skinhead on the fringes of the far right, before one day back in the spring she discovered him listening to David Bowie.
She smiles at the memory. The strains of ‘Space Oddity’ had confronted her when she got home from work, and at first she had trouble coming to terms with the fact that her son liked the same music she had listened to when she was his age.
But this evening is all about football, and his preferences in that are nowhere near as changeable.
He’s always supported the Spanish team, which is busy making its opponents look like temporary visitors at the top table. He has a favourite team in each of the top leagues, and they’ve always stayed the same, even if they could obviously never compete with his beloved Hammarby. Those stripes never wash out, she thinks with a smile.
The first goal in the televised match doesn’t take long. Johan’s team is celebrating, and he’s not slow to join in with the players, jumping up from the sofa. ‘Yes! Did you see that?’ His face is one big smile, and he leans towards her with his hand raised for a high five, which she returns, somewhat surprised. ‘God, that was good!’