‘Really? What for?’ Jeanette squeezes Johan’s arm as the queue they’re standing in moves a few steps forward. The thought that Sofia and Johan will soon be hanging up there makes her dizzy.
‘Someone at some fair in the States had their feet cut off by a wire. They had to close this one to do a complete safety check.’
‘Christ … stop it! Now really isn’t the time to mention that, when you’re about to go up.’
Johan laughs and nudges her side.
She smiles at him. It’s been a long time since she last saw him this excited.
Over the past few hours Johan and Sofia have worked their way through the Kvasten roller coaster, the Octopus, Extreme and the Catapult. They’ve also got photographs of themselves screaming on the Flying Carpet.
Jeanette had stayed on the ground the whole time, with a lump in her stomach.
They reach the front of the queue, and she steps aside.
Johan almost backs out, but Sofia steps up onto the platform and he follows her with an unsteady smile.
An attendant makes sure their safety harnesses are fastened properly.
Then everything happens very quickly.
The cradle starts to move upward, and Sofia and Johan wave nervously.
Just as Jeanette sees their attention being drawn to the views of the city she hears the sound of breaking glass right behind her. Agitated voices.
Jeanette turns round and sees a man about to hit another man.
It takes Jeanette five minutes to calm the situation down.
Three hundred seconds.
Popcorn, sweat and acetone.
The smells are confusing Sofia. She’s having trouble working out which ones are real and which imaginary, and as she passes the radio-controlled cars the air feels stiflingly electric.
An imaginary smell of burned rubber merges with a real, sickly sweet gust from the men’s toilets.
It’s started to get dark, but it’s a mild evening and the sky has cleared. The tarmac is still damp after the sudden downpour and the flashing coloured lights reflected in the puddles hurt her eyes. A sudden scream from the roller coaster makes her start, and she takes a step back. Someone walks into her from behind, and she hears them swear.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
She stops and closes her eyes. Tries to filter out her sensory impressions from the voice in her head.
What are you going to do now? Sit down and start crying?
What have you done with Johan?
Sofia looks around and realises she’s alone.
‘… he said he wasn’t scared of heights but when the safety harness folded down it started to rain and when they were sitting tight she could tell he was shaking with fear and when the gondola started to move he said he’d changed his mind and wanted to get down …’
Her cheek stings, and she can feel that it’s wet, salty. The hard gravel is scratching her back.
‘What’s wrong with her?’
‘Can someone call a medic?’
‘What’s she talking about?’
‘Does anyone know any first aid?’
‘… and he was crying and was scared and at first she tried to comfort him when they rose up higher and higher and could see right across Uppsala and all the boats on the Fyris River and when she told him that he stopped whining and said it was Stockholm and the Djurg?rd ferries they could see …’
‘I think she’s saying she’s from Uppsala.’
‘… and right at the top there’s thunder and lightning then everything went quiet and the people below were like little dots and if you wanted to you could squash them between your fingers like flies …’
‘I think she’s going to faint.’
‘… and right at that moment your stomach flies into your throat and everything comes rushing towards you and it’s just like you want it to be …’
‘Let me through!’
She recognises the voice but can’t quite place it.
‘Get out of the way, I know her.’
A cool hand on a hot forehead. A smell she recognises.
‘Sofia, what’s happened? Where’s Johan?’
Victoria Bergman closes her eyes.
Free Fall
THE NIGHTMARE IS dressed in a cobalt-blue coat, slightly darker than the evening sky over Djurg?rden and the Ladug?rdsland inlet. It’s fair-haired, blue-eyed, and has a little bag over its shoulder. Its too-small shoes are red and chafe her heels, but she’s used to that and the wounds are now part of her personality. The pain makes her alert.
She knows that if she can only find it in her to forgive, they will be free, both she herself and those who are forgiven. For many years she has tried to forget, but has always failed.
She can’t see it herself, but her revenge is a chain reaction.
A snowball was set in motion a quarter of a lifetime ago in a tool shed at the Sigtuna College for the Humanities, and she got caught up by it before it continued its journey towards the inevitable.
One might ask what the people who made the snowball know of its onward journey. Nothing, in all likelihood. They’ve probably just moved on. Forgetting the occurrence as if it were nothing more than an innocent game that both began and ended there in the shed.
She herself is trapped, frozen in the moment. For her time is immaterial, it has no healing effect.
Hate doesn’t thaw. It hardens, to sharp ice crystals surrounding the whole of her being.
The evening is slightly cool, and the air damp from the scattered showers that have succeeded one another all afternoon and evening. Cries can be heard from the roller coaster. She stands up, brushes herself off and looks around. Stops, takes a deep breath and remembers why she’s there.
She has a task, and she knows what she has to do.
Just below the tall, renovated lookout tower she watches the fuss a short distance away.
The fair’s coloured lights cast sharp reflections on the damp tarmac.
She realises the moment when she must act has arrived, even if this wasn’t how she had planned it. Fate has made it easier for her. So simple that no one will be able to understand what’s happened.
She sees the boy a short distance away, alone outside the railings of the Free Fall ride.
To forgive something that can be forgiven isn’t really to forgive, she thinks. Real forgiveness is forgiving something unforgivable. Something only a god can do.
The boy looks confused, and she walks slowly over to him as he turns away from her. That makes it almost laughably simple to get close, and now she’s only a few metres away from him. He is still standing with his back to her.
True forgiveness is impossible, mad and unconscious, she thinks. And seeing as she expects the guilty parties to show contrition, it can never be accomplished. The memory is and will remain a wound that can never heal.
She grabs the boy hard by the arm.
He jerks and turns round as she pushes the syringe into the top of his left arm.
For a couple of seconds he looks into her eyes, confused, before his legs crumple beneath him. She catches him and puts him down gently on a bench.
No one has seen her manoeuvre.
Everything is perfectly normal.
She takes something out of her bag and carefully pulls it over his head.
The mask is made of pink plastic, shaped like a pig’s snout.
Gr?na Lund – Fair