The last time she saw them was on the train from the Gare du Nord in Paris.
She pulls out the battered photograph album and opens the first page. She doesn’t recognise herself in the pictures. It’s just a child who isn’t her, and when she thinks back on herself as a little girl she feels nothing.
That isn’t me, nor that one who’s five, nor that one who’s eight. They can’t be me, because I don’t feel what they felt, I don’t think what they thought.
They’re all dead.
She remembers when the eight-year-old had just learned to tell the time, and would lie in bed pretending to be a clock.
But she never managed to trick time. Instead time had taken her under its arm and carried her away from there.
In the album in front of her she ages each time she turns a page. Seasons and birthday cakes follow on, one after another.
After the pictures from Sigtuna she had stuck in an Interrail card next to a ticket for the Roskilde Festival. On the opposite page are three blurred pictures, of Hannah, Jessica and her. She goes on looking at the pictures as she listens for sounds from the basement, but he seems to have calmed down.
They had been the Three Musketeers, even if the other two had turned their backs on her towards the end and proved themselves to be exactly the same as all the others. To start with they had shared everything and solved problems together, but when it really mattered they had let her down. When things got serious and it was time to show their character, they had burst into tears and run home to their mothers, like little girls.
She had thought they were completely stupid. Now she looks at their photographs and realises that they were just unsullied. They had believed the best of people. They had trusted her. That was all.
Sofia jumps when she hears banging and shouting from the basement. The sauna door opens, and for the first time in several years she hears his voice in person. ‘Not that I imagine for a second that you’re ever going to be clean, but at least this ought to get rid of the smell!’
She assumes that he’s grabbed Mum by the hair and pulled her out of the sauna. Is he going to scald her or force her to stand under ice-cold water for several minutes?
Sofia shuts her eyes and thinks about what she’ll do if they decide to get out of the sauna. She looks at the time. No, he’s a creature of habit, so the torment will continue for at least another half-hour.
Sofia wonders what Mum usually says to her friends. How many times can you split your eyebrow open on a kitchen cupboard, how many times can you slip in the bath? Shouldn’t you take more care on the stairs if you’ve managed to fall down them four times in the last six months? Surely people must wonder, she thinks.
On one single occasion he raised his arm to Victoria, ready to strike, but when she smashed him in the head with a saucepan he withdrew like a shark, and spent several months complaining of headaches.
Mum never hit back, just cried and came and curled up beside Victoria instead, looking for solace. Victoria always did her best, and lay awake until her mum fell asleep.
After one of their fights Mum had driven off and stayed in a hotel for several days. Dad didn’t know where she’d gone and got worried, and Victoria had to comfort him as he sobbed against her chest.
On days like that she didn’t go to school, and spent hours cycling around, and when the absentee notes appeared they would sign them without asking. There had been some advantages to all the arguments.
Sofia laughs at the memory. That feeling of having an advantage, a secret.
Victoria bore their weakness deep within her. They both knew that she could use it against them whenever she chose. She never did. She chose to think of them as air. She never paid them any attention, and so they never had an opportunity to defend themselves.
She sits down on the bed, picks up the little black dog made from real rabbit skin, and buries her nose in it. It smells of dust and damp. Its little yellow glass eyes stare at her, and she stares back.
When she was little she used to clutch the dog tight and look deep into its eyes. After a while a little world would open up, usually a beach, and she would explore this miniature world until she fell asleep.
But she’s not going to sleep now.
This journey will free her forever.
She’s going to burn all her bridges.
She hugs her dog again. It is as if she used to think no one could harm her back then as long as she held everything inside herself and played along, trying to be smarter. As if she had believed you won victories by destroying others.
That had been his logic when he suffered his attacks.
‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ she mutters to herself in an attempt to empty the word of all meaning.
He’s sitting downstairs in the sauna, and no one has ever dared leave him. No one but Victoria. The only thing he instilled in her was the desire to escape. He never managed to teach her to want to stay.
Escape, above everything, she thinks. Self-defence mechanisms hand in hand with destructiveness.
Memories attack her from within. They sting her throat. Everything hurts. She isn’t prepared for the deluge, or the images from a time she hasn’t thought about for more than twenty years. She realises that she ought to have felt much more than she did, but knows that she has gone from one thing to the next, always laughing. From one humiliation to the next.
She can still hear it, that laughter. The sound gets louder until it’s deafening. She rocks back and forth in her childhood bedroom. She hums quietly to herself. It’s as if the voice inside her head leaks out through her clenched lips. The sound of a deflating bicycle tyre.
She covers her ears with her hands in an attempt to shut out the manic sound, a sound she once thought was happiness.
The man downstairs in the sauna had destroyed everything that could have been, partly through his sick, sadistic desires, and partly through his lachrymose self-pity.
Sofia takes the envelope from the box. It’s marked with the letter M and contains a letter and a photograph.
The letter is dated 9 July 1982. Martin obviously had help writing it, but wrote his name himself, and says that it’s sunny and hot and that he’s been swimming almost every day. Then he drew a flower and something that looks like a small dog.
Beneath the drawing are the words SEA STACK AND SPIDER FLOWER.
On the back of the photograph she sees that it was taken in Ekeviken, on F?r?, in the summer of 1982. The picture shows Martin, five years old, under an apple tree. In his arms he’s holding a white rabbit that looks like it’s trying to get away. He’s smiling and squinting against the sun, with his head slightly tilted.