The Beast (5 page)

    The
town was never more silent than a few minutes past four in the morning. After
the last customers had left Hörnans Bar to make their way noisily from the harbour
along the Promenade towards the old bridge to Toster Island, there was this
quiet space, until the newspaper boys delivering the
Strängrtäs Gazette
fanned out to sprint along Stor Street, opening porch doors and letterboxes.

    Fredrik
Steffansson knew it all, he hadn't slept through the night for ages. He kept
the window open, so he could lie in bed and listen to the little town falling
asleep and waking again, to the movements of people he mostly knew, or at least
recognised. That's how it is when your world is small-scale. Everything crowds
in on you. He had lived here almost all his life. Sure, he had read a lot of
books by the right people and gone off to live in Stockholm's South End,
studying comparative religion at the university. Then he had worked in a
kibbutz in northern Israel, a few miles from the Lebanese border. But once all
that was over and done with, he returned to Strängnäs and the people he knew,
or at least recognised. He'd never truly got away, never left growing up here
behind him. His memories and his lasting sadness at the loss of Frans tied him
to this town. It was here he had met Agnes. He had fallen madly in love with
her, she was so sophisticated, exclusively dressed in black, always searching
for something. They started living together, but had been about to part when
Marie arrived and made them rediscover each other, so that, for almost a year,
the three of them were a family. Then Fredrik and Agnes separated for ever, not
as enemies, but they spoke only when Marie was to be delivered or collected.
She had to travel from one city to another, because Agnes had moved to
Stockholm, living among her beautiful friends, where she really belonged.

    Someone
was walking down there in the street. He checked the time. Quarter to five.
Bloody nights. If only he could think of something that made sense, his next
piece of writing, just the next two pages, but no, it seemed impossible. He
couldn't think at all, the empty time passed as he listened to what seeped in
through the window, taking note of when doors closed and cars started.
Meaningless accountancy. He had hardly any energy left for writing. When he had
delivered Marie to nursery school and settled down at his computer with the day
stretching ahead of him, the hours without sleep attacked, tiredness engulfed
him. Three chapters in two months was simply disastrous, his powerful publisher
wouldn't put up with it and was already sending out feelers to find out what
was up.

    A
truck. That sounded like that truck. But it usually didn't run before half past
five.

    Such
a thin partition to Marie's room. He could hear her. She was snoring. How come
little children snore like fat old men? Fragile five-year-olds with piping
voices, as cute as anything? He used to think it was just Marie, but whenever
David slept over they made twice as much noise, filling the silences between
each other's breaths.

    It
wasn't a truck. A bus, that was it.

    He
turned away from the window. Micaela slept in the nude, blanket and sheet
bundled up at her feet as always.

    She
was just twenty-four, so young. She made him feel loved, often randy, and, at
times, so old. It would hit him suddenly, often when they were talking about
music or books or films. One of them would make a remark about a composition,
or someone's writing, or a play, and it would become obvious that she was young
and he was middle-aged. Sixteen years is a long time in the life of guitar
solos and film dialogue; they age and fade away and get replaced.

    She
was lying on her stomach, her face turned towards him. He caressed her cheek,
planted a light kiss on a buttock. He liked her very much. Was he in love? He
couldn't bear the effort of working it out. He liked that she was there, next
to him, that she agreed to share his hours, for he detested being lonely, it
was pointless, like suffocating; surely solitude was a kind of death. He moved
his hand from her cheek to stroke her back. She stirred. Why did she lie there,
next to an older man with a child, a man who wasn't that good-looking, not ugly
but certainly not handsome, and not well off, and, arguably, not even fun to be
with? Why had she chosen to spend her nights with him, she who was so
beautiful, so young and had so many more hours left to live? He kissed her
again, this time on her hip.

    'Are
you still awake?'

    'I'm
sorry. Did I wake you?'

    'I
don't know. What about you, haven't you been asleep?'

    'You
know what I'm like.'

    She
pulled him close, her naked body against his, sleepily warm, awake but not
quite.

    'You
must sleep, my old darling.' 'Old?'

    'You
can't cope if you don't sleep. You know that. Come on. Sleep.'

    She
looked at him, kissed him, held him.

    'I
was thinking about Frans.'

    'Fredrik,
not now.'

    'I do
think about him. I want to think about him, I'm listening to Marie next door
and I'm thinking about how Frans too was a child when he was beaten, when he
watched me being beaten. When he caught the train to Stockholm.'

    'Close
your eyes.'

    'Why
should anyone beat a child?'

    'If
you keep your eyes closed for long enough you go to sleep. That's how it
works.'

    'Why
should anyone beat a child, who will grow up and learn to understand and judge
the person who's been beating it? At least, judge the rights and wrongs of that
beaten child.'

    She
pushed at him to turn him on his side with his back towards her, then moved in
close behind him, twisting into him until they were like two boughs of a tree.

    'Why
keep hitting a child, who will construe the beatings as Daddy's duty and look
to its own failings for the reason. I'm not good enough, not tough enough. The
child will tell itself that it's his or her own fault, partly at least. Christ
almighty, I was into that kind of crap myself. I forced myself to believe it,
not to feel violated and abandoned.'

    Micaela
slept. Her breathing was slow and regular against the back of his neck, so
close that the skin became damp. Through the window came the sounds of another
bus. It stopped outside, reversed, stopped again, reversed. Perhaps the same
one as yesterday, a large coach.

    Lennart
Oscarsson carried a secret. He wasn't alone in this, but felt as if he were.
The pain of it rode him, curled up on his right shoulder, slept inside his
chest, occupied all the space inside his stomach. Every evening he decided to
let it out the following morning. Once he had set it free, he could sit back
quietly, contemplating days without a secret for company stretching out ahead.

    He
didn't have the strength, couldn't do it. He was screaming, but nobody
listened. Maybe to scream properly you actually had to open your mouth?

    He
did the same things every morning. Sat in the kitchen at their round pine
table, spooning yoghurt into his face. Karin was always there at his side. She
was his life, this beautiful woman, whom he had loved beyond reason ever since
he'd met her for the first time, sixteen years ago. She drank her usual coffee
with hot milk, ate rye bread and butter, read the arts pages in the morning
paper.

    Now.
Now!

    He
should tell her now. Then it would have been said. She had every right to know.
Others didn't, but she did. It was so simple. A couple of minutes, a few
sentences, that was all. They could finish their breakfasts, leave for their
daily work. He would return home that night freed from having to hide it. He
put the spoon down, drank the last of the yoghurt straight from the container.

    Lennart
took pride in his work at Aspsås prison. He held a senior post, chief officer
in charge of a unit, and had ambitions to advance further. He took every
opportunity for study leave, joined every course, reckoned you had to show
willing, and he did, in the knowledge that somewhere, someone was taking notes.

    Seven
years ago he had taken over the running of one of Aspsås's two units for sex
offenders. His working life had become focused on people locked up for violating
those whom they had been charged to protect. These men had broken the strongest
taboo left in society, they were outcasts; he was responsible for them and for
the staff who were employed to care as well as to punish. Punishing and trying
to understand, this was what they were meant to do, care and punish and remain
aware of the difference. His views were his own, he felt what he felt, but he
did show willing, and someone, somewhere, kept notes on his progress.

    At
the same time his bloody awful secret had started growing. How he wished he
could tell. The outcome couldn't be any worse than now, when the betrayal lived
inside his marriage and made every word he and Karin exchanged suspect, filthy.

    He
got up, picked up the dirty dishes and stacked the dishwasher. Wiped the table,
rinsed the cloth.

    He
wore a blue uniform. Officers' uniforms looked the same throughout the Swedish
prison service, rather like a cab driver's outfit. He dressed for work in the
kitchen: trousers, tie, shirt. Meanwhile he hoped that Karin and he would
exchange a few words, about anything as long as it stopped him feeling so
bloody hypocritical.

    'Look
at the weather, Lennart. It's windy outside. They say it'll stay like this all
day. You need your gloves.'

    Karin
came close to him and stroked his cheek. He pressed his face against her hand,
rubbed against it, needing the contact. She was so beautiful. He wished she
knew.

    'It's
not cold yet. And I've only got a few hundred metres to go.'

    'You
know that's not the point. You'll regret it afterwards, when your joints start
hurting.'

    She
held out his leather gloves. He put them on. Kissed her, first her lips, then
her shoulder. Put on his jacket and stepped outside, looked across to Aspsås.
It was only two minutes' stroll away. Its grey concrete wall dominated the
village.

    When
Åke Andersson climbed out of the driver's seat, he was propelled by an emotion
different from anything he had felt before. His rage, his damned hatred, had
overwhelmed him.

    He had
taken a lot of crap from prisoners for thirty years, hated them but stayed in
control, silently driven them from police cells to courts, from hospitals to
prisons. He had ferried the lowlife but left the talking to his mates, just
kept his eyes on the road and minded his own business. But that fucking beast
was too bloody fucking much.