‘That was seriously good,’ she agrees. ‘I hardly had time to see it!’
After a short discussion of the goal and the passing play that preceded it, they fall into a silence that Jeanette feels is similar to what she and Hurtig often share, a silence that makes her feel relaxed. While she’s trying to find a way that doesn’t sound too stupid and motherly to say how nice she thinks the evening has been, he pre-empts her.
‘Shit, Mum. Nice that we don’t have to talk the whole time.’
She feels warm all over. She’s not even bothered about him swearing, but then she’s never particularly aware of her own language. ?ke was often quick to point that out.
‘It’s more fun watching football with you than Dad,’ he goes on. ‘He always has to talk the whole time, and he moans at the referees even when they’re right.’
She can’t help laughing. ‘Yep, I have to agree with you there. Sometimes I can’t help wondering if he thinks the matches are all about him.’
Maybe that was a bit mean towards ?ke, she thinks. True, though. But she takes deep satisfaction from what Johan has just said, and she knows why. She wonders if he’s noticed that she and ?ke seem to have slipped into a sort of competition. A parental contest to see who deserves Johan’s loyalty most. She presumes that she’s leading at the moment by a goal or two, maybe.
‘Poor Dad,’ Johan says after a while. ‘Alex isn’t very nice to him.’
Three–nil, Jeanette thinks in an attack of schadenfreude that’s immediately replaced by a lump in her stomach.
‘Oh? How do you mean?’
He squirms. ‘Oh, I don’t know … She talks about money all the time and he doesn’t understand, just nods and signs everything without reading it. She acts like he works for her rather than the other way round, which is how it’s supposed to be, isn’t it?’
‘Do you like spending time with them?’ Jeanette regrets the question as soon as she asks it. She doesn’t want to fall back into the role of prying mother, but Johan doesn’t seem bothered.
‘With Dad. Not with Alex.’
At half-time in the match he clears the table and pours what’s left of the crisps into a bowl. She’s noticed that he’s started to leave the lid down on the toilet these days. Little gestures that show he wants to make a good impression. Be a good son.
Little things, she thinks. God, how I love you, little Johan, even if you’re not that little any more.
‘Er, I …’ He’s just sat down again and has a shy smile on his face.
‘Yes?’
He fumbles in his pocket and pulls out his little black leather wallet with the team logo on it and looks through the note compartment until he finds what he’s looking for.
A small photograph, passport size. He takes a quick look at it, then pushes it across to her.
It’s a picture of a pretty girl with dark, messy hair, trying her best to look hard.
Jeanette gives Johan a quizzical look, and when she sees the twinkle in his eyes she realises that the girl in the photograph has a similar picture of him.
Observatory Hill
SOFIA ZETTERLUND WALKS into the large, bright rotunda of the Stockholm City Library, slows down and listens to the silence. It’s early in the morning, and the library is almost empty. Just a few people walking, heads tilted, along the shelves that line the circular walls of the three-storey central hall.
The collection houses almost seven hundred thousand books, and in here she won’t be distracted by anyone. Everyone is immersed in their own business. All you can hear is slow footsteps, the rustle of paper and, every now and then, the sound of a book being quietly closed. Sofia looks up and begins to count shelves, sections, books with brown spines, red, green, grey and black. She glances down at the floor, shaking off the compulsive thoughts, and tries to focus on the reason she’s here.
The biographies are what interest her most. And an older work on sadism and sexuality. She goes over to one of the catalogue terminals to see if the books are available, discovers that they are, and walks up to an information desk.
The librarian is a middle-aged woman with her hair and shoulders covered by a hijab, and her dark complexion makes Sofia assume she’s from the Middle East.
The woman looks familiar.
‘How can I help you?’ Her voice is cool and soft, and Sofia can only detect a faint trace of an accent that sounds like a Norrland dialect. Persian, perhaps, or Arabic?
‘I was wondering if you could help me find Richard Lourie’s book about Andrei Chikatilo, and Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing?’
When the woman begins typing the titles without a word, Sofia notices that one of her eyes is brown while the other is pale green. She’s probably partially blind. Possibly pigment damage after an accident. A violent past. Someone might have beaten her.
‘Your parking permit has expired,’ the woman says.
Sofia jerks. The woman is talking, but her lips aren’t moving, her head is still bowed, and those strange eyes are still concentrating on the screen, not her.
It’s time to get it renewed. And you ought to park in the garage instead. The car won’t like standing out of doors this long.
Parking permit? She can’t remember when she last used her car, or even thought about it, still less where it’s actually parked.
‘Sorry, are you OK?’ The woman is looking up at her. The pupil of her injured, pale green eye is much smaller than the healthy one. Sofia doesn’t know which eye to focus on.
‘I … It’s just a headache.’
All of a sudden she’s certain she’s never seen the woman before.
The librarian’s smile looks worried. ‘Would you like to sit down? I could get you a glass of water and an aspirin …’
Sofia takes a deep breath. ‘Nothing to worry about. Have you found the books?’
The woman nods and stands up. ‘Come with me, I’ll show you where they are.’
As she follows in the librarian’s quiet footsteps she thinks about her own healing process. Is this how it works? Piece by piece, the ghosts in her brain are being revealed.
Everything becomes a game of identities, which includes strangers as well. Her own ego is so narcissistic that she thinks she knows every single person, and that they know her. She herself is at the centre of the world, and her ego is still that of a child.
This is how Victoria Bergman’s ego feels, and it’s a significant insight.
She now realises that the woman with her hair in a tight bun, the one she’s seen walking down the street several times, was just a projection of her own ego.
She was seeing her own mother, Birgitta Bergman. Obviously one of her suppressed mental ghosts.