Babylon (30 page)

Suddenly she was furious. She had to be strong where he was weak; it was a role she had adopted because it seemed to be the only dynamic he could cope with. And yet her own vulnerability was ignored.

But Christian didn’t know the extent to which his doubts affected her. When they first met, Seja had been living in the shadow of a recent break-up. She had been tied to a house in need of renovation, on an income consisting only of a student loan. On her way out of a period of debilitating confusion, she had chosen to turn things around completely. It was the only way to survive. Make the Glade a symbol of her own innate strength.

Christian had met a woman who was slowly building a life around herself; a self-sufficient, capable individual who attracted him. By falling in love with the woman she wanted to be, he had drawn out more of that integrity and independence. Now she was afraid that she was as emotionally dependent on Christian as she had been on Martin. That, if he left her, she would fall straight back down into the black hole she had only recently crawled out of. Relationships were strange.

But still, you know you’re not going to die, she mumbled to herself as she walked past the school playground.

A group of people were standing outside the local museum chatting animatedly about things Seja couldn’t quite hear. She walked past quickly, wishing she was back in the isolation of her garden. She didn’t
like crowds. When the 520 bus pulled into the stop outside the preschool, she took a detour. Lyckåsvägen ran along the low stone walls of the community centre.

As long as the dependence wasn’t practical or financial, she wasn’t particularly disturbed by the idea of being dependent on another person – in theory, at least. In fact, emotional dependence had to be the only real form of love. It was just so bloody risky.

This isn’t good for me, she realised. It isn’t good for me to be in a relationship with a man who isn’t sure what he wants, whether he wants me or not. That’s not what I need. This relationship is not what I need.

Seja nodded to the librarian. The place was empty apart from her.

‘I’m looking for information on the Iraq war.’

‘Did you have anything more specific in mind?’

He turned the screen so that she could see the innumerable hits.

‘Well . . .’ She hesitated. ‘It’s partly to do with thefts from museums. And I was thinking of writing something about what the country looks like today, maybe something to do with ethnic conflict. Or criminality in the post-war era. I could . . .’

The question made her think. What did she actually want to write about? Her article about the illegal trade in cultural treasures wasn’t even half finished. She thought about what she had read so far. ‘Perhaps I could write something about the effect on civilians, especially on women?’

The librarian glanced at Seja before turning his attention back to the screen. ‘We do have a number of articles . . . quite a lot has been written about the political prelude to the war, if that’s any use?’

He disappeared behind the shelves.

The library windows could have done with a good clean. Dust formed a spotty grey film against the light, making the ground outside look frosty. Windows covered in fly droppings brought back memories of her grandmother’s barn in northern Finland. Seja had been there only once, when she was . . . six years old, perhaps. The ground had been grey and frozen, despite the fact that they had left Gothenburg in the warmth of late summer. Most things had been grey: grey tree trunks and grass nipped by the morning frost. Unpainted, windswept wooden buildings. The place where her mother’s parents lived had
been bathed in light; a tall, undisturbed pillar of light. The land of a thousand lakes. Her mother’s land.

Her mother’s longing for her homeland was restrained but still palpable. She didn’t talk about it much; that was just the way she was. It was only when she became an adult that Seja realised how much her mother’s homesickness had affected her upbringing.

Seja dreamed of a fairy-tale land, a thousand lakes, murmuring brooks and gilded bridges over water.

When Seja was very small, she used to curl up by her mother’s side to listen to stories: the very name was magical,
The Land of a Thousand Lakes
. Perhaps even more so because her mother often seemed distant. Her mother had always had a great sense of empathy and understanding for those whose hearts were elsewhere.

The first and only time Seja visited her mother’s farm, the family Saab behind her, she was disappointed. No gilded bridges, no silky-soft fairy-tale grass. Not even a single lake as far as the eye could see.

She found it upsetting now to think of how her mother’s unspoken suffering had cast a cloud over her childhood, and that the family had visited Finland only once as far as she could remember. As a child she had thought that the land of the lakes was at the end of the world, when in fact it was no more than a day’s journey away. And her mother had chosen to be a martyr and to forgo visits home. She had chosen her exile.

Seja had never tried to share these thoughts with her mother. It became a vicious circle with Seja avenging her mother’s silence with her own, when really she should have just spoken her mind: ‘Why couldn’t you have chosen your life, Mum? Nothing good came of the sacrifices you made; you might as well have been happy.’

Everything works out in the end
, Seja thought. Perhaps that’s why I’ve ended up in my little cottage. Why I’ve worked so hard to be able to choose my life. I’ve seen what happens when you don’t make that choice. Maybe that’s why I get so annoyed with Hanna; she daren’t choose because she’s afraid of failing.

Contact with her parents was now restricted to birthdays and the odd obligatory phone call. Those dutiful, clumsy pats on the head spoke of a series of betrayals. Betrayals that no one put into words. Seja would never be able to put them into words. After all, she had never wanted for anything, in material terms. She had kind, thoughtful
parents who always did their best. But they had never given voice to their problems. And certainly not that Saturday morning when her mother wasn’t sitting by the fan with her cigarette.

Seja suddenly had an idea. She took her notepad from her rucksack and wrote:
She had immediately realised that nothing was the same as usual when her father kept pacing to the window and looking down at the street
.

He’d waited until he thought Seja was asleep, but she wasn’t asleep. In fact, she had buried her face in the pillow to avoid having to hear her father hide the anxiety in his voice – he didn’t want people to gossip. Seja put her hands over her ears so she wouldn’t have to hear Daddy’s galloping heart. She didn’t move until he fell asleep in front of the TV, then she crept out of bed and lay down beside him, head to toe.

The next morning, sitting on the kitchen worktop, she watched her father wander from room to room, listening to the reassuring things he was saying: Mum must be with some friend I’ve forgotten about. Or perhaps a friend we don’t know about. Then, suddenly, he forgot that Seja was there and the words poured from his mouth, tumbling over one another, spilling forth his fears: ‘What’s happened to her? What if she doesn’t come back?’

He hid his face in his hands then, before becoming aware of Seja again, and trying to calm himself down. ‘There’s nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘She just needed a break. Sometimes grown-ups get tired. They just need a break.’

Seja hunted for clues and searched among her mother’s things. On the dressing table: eau de cologne and balls of cotton wool for removing her mascara. Boxes of different-coloured eye-shadow, although her mother used only blue. The tweezers she used to pluck out a single, stubborn hair on her chin. The jewellery box containing fake pearls and clip-on earrings.

The well-thumbed novels in Finnish were next to the bed, along with the knitted woollen jumpers that cleaned themselves and never needed washing. They exuded that Mummy-smell. Seja took one of the jumpers to bed when she started to realise that her mother might not come back. She slipped it inside a thin pillowcase because the wool was prickly and made her itch, but the smell came through. Mummy
was dead or had disappeared, but the Mummy-smell remained. In a way it made sense. Mummy had gone to the land of the lakes and, suddenly, in her mind, the thousand lakes became the sky. Mummy became an angel of happiness. Seja did drawings of Mummy, the same subject but in different colours, and covered the walls of her room with them. They watched over her as she slept.

During the day, Seja and her father were united in silence; a stubborn determination to get through everyday life. Neither of them knew what else to do. Seja noticed that her father’s face had grown set in silence because he didn’t know how to talk to his child about the fact that her mother had chosen to leave them. In the evening, in front of the television, he would sometimes weep, in short, sudden bursts. There came a time when Seja’s tears dried up. Sleep came even when she didn’t think it would, whisking her away; she wanted to dream about the Mummy-country, but in the mornings she had no memory of whether she had dreamt or not.

On the seventh day, her mother reappeared at the door with rosy cheeks and a suitcase in her hand. Seja froze, her pen poised above the paper. She didn’t remember what she had been writing, but she did remember the strange feeling of mute disappointment that had washed over her; she stared at her mother, then slid down from her chair and went to her room. She looked at the Mummy-angels in the land of the thousand lakes gazing down at her. The angels’ eyes no longer had any life in them; they were just badly drawn circles with black dots for pupils, the drawings of a six year old, and she tore them all down. She meticulously ripped them into tiny pieces.

Sitting on the edge of Seja’s bed, her mother explained that she had gone to her farm in Finland. She said that she had always intended to come back. That she just wanted to visit Granny and help out on the farm. That she had kept meaning to get in touch, but other things had got in the way.

She fell silent, then tried again; she said she hadn’t been thinking straight because she was tired and sad and had convinced herself that nothing mattered. She said if the transport links hadn’t been so bad, if the weather hadn’t been so awful, she would have come back even sooner. Seja said nothing. Later that evening, her mother wept and Daddy asked Seja to forgive her; he said things weren’t so bad after all, Mummy hadn’t meant any harm, but Seja stuck her fingers in her ears
and felt a devastating icy chill spread through her body. Enough. She didn’t want to hear any more.

The following morning, when she got up for breakfast, she found a trail of dolls and cuddly toys snaking across the kitchen worktop, from the little shelf where the telephone stood, all the way to the sink. Seja looked at every single one and established that they were new; she turned them upside down and saw that most of them still had the price ticket on. Some were from the Shell garage.

The librarian placed a pile of books on the table in front of her with a thud.

‘Thanks.’ Seja opened the first book and had managed to read the first paragraph before he got back to his computer.

When Martin left, Seja recognised her reaction immediately: her heart seemed to miss several beats before exploding into a turmoil that was impossible to show or measure, while at the same time the icy chill spread like poison through her bloodstream, affecting every word and action. And yet it was simply impossible to let the pain show.

She closed her eyes. The dusty window panes were imprinted on her cornea.

That’s exactly what I’m doing now, she realised. I’m pretending that it doesn’t matter if Christian lets me down, if he doesn’t have the courage to commit, to believe in us. And she was just waiting for the words to release their icy chill; the chill was her only coping mechanism. The only way to retain her pride.

They had decided to go away on a short break, and all she could think about was the extent to which she had
persuaded
Christian to go, against his will.

No, it was too difficult to get a grip on her thoughts.

She ran her hand over the closely-written pages and suddenly realised that it would be easy to carry on. Just a few more pages, then another one or two. If she continued, the text would pour over the pages until her story was told, not only in actions but in words. The story was splashing around inside her, unspoken, but it was definitely there. And it might not be remarkable, no more remarkable than anyone else’s story, but it was hers, and she longed to write it without any demands or limitations. As a side project, at least.

After all, she wasn’t the one who had a problem with words.

46

Gothenburg

Tell had finally managed to get a couple of hours’ sleep as morning approached.

He might have to come back to Copenhagen in the near future, even if Dragsted and his team took on some of the workload. At the moment, however, he had other priorities. He had zigzagged along the motorway from Malmö to Gothenburg, stopping only to buy a hamburger which he shovelled down with one hand on the steering wheel. Some level of self-preservation made him let his mobile ring out, after he had checked each time that it wasn’t Seja. She hadn’t called, even though they hadn’t yet made plans for their break.

He wished she had rung, even though they hadn’t been apart for very long, and even though he hadn’t called her and wouldn’t have had time to talk, or barely even answer. He wasn’t thinking logically.

The display showed three missed calls: he knew what Beckman and Karlberg had found in Rebecca Nykvist’s empty boiler. In the bloody boiler! Beckman’s inspired hunch, which had been brewing at the back of her mind since she heard Rebecca’s phone call, then overshadowed by the drama with Mads Torsen, had been activated when she heard his brief summary of Dorte Sørbækk’s confession. Just a couple of sentences, spoken at the right moment, had taken them to the end of one trail, although there was still work to be done.

While some pieces of the puzzle fell into place, others were snatched away, leaving a picture which was clearer in many ways, yet lacked the key points. Like a photograph with the wrong focus, where the figure in the foreground is obscured and the eye is drawn to the backdrop.