The Invoice (3 page)

I looked at the payment reminder from the collection company. I ran my finger across the ice-cream stain. I felt foolish. Unmasked, somehow. I felt the same way I used to feel back in school many years ago when the teacher would ask questions designed to reveal how wrong your reasoning was. The children were heading off down the street, they were about to disappear round the corner. The sound of the moped was increasingly distant. A man had arrived on a bike and was busy chaining it to a lamppost.

“But I've always paid my taxes?” I said.

She laughed. I sank back down onto the floor. Somehow that felt like the most comfortable way to sit right now.

“This isn't a tax,” she said.

She was silent for a few moments, as if she were expecting me to comment, but I didn't know what to say so she carried on talking of her own accord.

“Tax. That's barely enough to cover day-to-day maintenance. Besides, I presume you don't belong to the group that—”

She stopped again, and I heard her tapping at a keyboard.

“Let's see, what did you say your date of birth and ID number were?”

I told her, and heard her type in the numbers. She drummed her fingers gently against the phone as she waited.

“Right. Let's see, you're…thirty-nine years old. Hmm…and you haven't made any payments at all?”

“No, I had no idea that—”

She interrupted me midsentence. “Well, obviously it's going to amount to a fair sum.”

I heard her clicking, as if there were more pages to look through.

“Hmm,” she went on, “that's a lot of money.”

Several rays of sunlight were falling across the kitchen floor. One of them reached my legs. I stretched my hand carefully back and forth, in and out of the light. Why hadn't anyone said anything? I wondered, and as if the woman at the authority could hear my thoughts, she went on in a rather strict tone of voice: “I'm so fed up of hearing people say they didn't know anything. We've run several online campaigns over the past year, we've had ads in the papers and handed out information leaflets at schools and workplaces. You'll have to be a bit more observant in the staff room or cafeteria next time.”

“The staff room?”

“Yes, that's usually where the notices get put up. About things like this.”

“But,” I said, pulling my hand out of the light, “there's absolutely no way I can pay.”

She was completely quiet for a while.

“No?”

I considered the meager income from my part-time job in the video shop. The little that was left over from my wages, which were paid partly cash in hand, plus a small inheritance that was gradually shrinking, made up the sum total of my savings.

On the other hand, I'd never had any particularly large expenses. My apartment was small and old-fashioned, and the rent was low. I had no one but myself to support, and I didn't have a lavish lifestyle. A few computer games every now and then, music, a bit of food, hardly any phone bill to speak of, and I got films free from the shop. Sometimes I would pay for a beer or lunch for Roger, but that didn't happen often these days. I always imagined I was free of extra financial responsibilities of that sort. Other people had careers and acquired houses and families and children. Got married, divorced, started their own businesses and set up limited companies. Employed accountants, bought property, leased cars, borrowed money. I was pretty happy on my own, without a big social circle, or anyone to cause any problems.

“It's completely impossible,” I said. “At most, I've got about forty thousand in the bank.”

“What about your apartment?” she said.

“Rented.”

She said nothing for a moment. Then she said abruptly: “Hold on a moment and I'll check…”

She put the phone down and I heard her walk away. In the background there was the sound of keyboards being tapped, other people who seemed to be talking on the phone. A couple of telephones ringing. She was gone for some time. Eventually I heard her come back and pick up the phone again.

“Do you own anything of value?”

“Er, no…the television, maybe.”

“Hmm,” she said, “television sets aren't worth anything these days. Is it big?”

“Thirty-two inches, maybe.”

“Forget it. That's nothing. No car?”

“No.”

“I see,” she said, and sighed. “You'll have to pay what you can. Then we'll start with an inventory of your home and see what that comes up with. That will give us an idea of what level of debt we're going to end up at…”

“And what happens then?”

“That depends entirely on the amount.”

“In what way?”

“Well, we do have a debt ceiling.”

“What does that mean?”

“That means we can only permit debts up to a certain limit…I mean, in order to maintain continued access…”

“To what?”

“To…everything.”

“Are you going to kill me?”

She laughed. It was evidently a stupid question and I felt rather relieved at her reaction.

“No,” she said, “we aren't going to kill you. But I'm sure you can appreciate that you can't carry on enjoying experiences if you don't have the means to pay for them?”

I held my hand out toward the shaft of light again and felt the heat of the sun. There really was a big difference in temperature, even though it was actually only a matter of a few centimeters. The woman at the other end of the line interrupted my thoughts.

“What on earth have you been thinking? All these years? Hasn't it ever occurred to you that you should be paying your way?”

“Well, I didn't actually know that we had to pay. Why—?”

She interrupted me again. She had obviously heard all this before. She knew it wasn't going to lead anywhere. She'd run out of patience for excuses and explanations. I could hear voices in the background, and got the impression that my time was running out.

“Let me put it like this: Have you ever been in love?”

“Er, yes.”

“When?”

“A few times, I suppose.”

“More than once, then?”

“Yes. I mean, well, once properly.”

She was running on autopilot. Probably already thinking about the next conversation. But she still sounded friendly, in a professional way. “There, you see, you must have experienced some wonderful things.”

I thought about Sunita, whom I had been with for several years back in the nineties. A small wave of memories coursed through my body. A pang of melancholy.

“Yes, I suppose so,” I said.

She was obviously in a hurry to hang up now, there was no mistaking it. As if she had suddenly realized that we had exceeded our allotted time. As if it had struck her that she didn't have time to make idle conversation with me.

“Well, if there's nothing else, thank you for calling.”

“Hang on a moment,” I said. “How do I…? What can I do?”

She must have loads of calls waiting.

Maybe she could see the constantly rising number of people in the queue. She probably had a boss who was eager for her to move on. She was talking faster now.

“Have you checked with your bank?”

“No, but…It doesn't really seem very likely that I…”

“No, I suppose not.”

She sighed audibly, and someone said something in the office where she was sitting.

“Do you know what?” she said. “Take a thorough look at your finances in peace and quiet—people usually manage to come up with something—and then call me again.”

“But,” I said, “the queue to get through is really long…”

“You can have my direct number.”

“Okay.”

I got her number and wrote it on the bottom of the ice-cream tub.

“My name's Maud,” she said.

We hung up and I sat there for a long time with the phone in my hand. The sun had passed behind a cloud. The warm ray of light across my knees was no longer there.

I could hear ringing in my ears. The sort of sound you get after a concert or a sinus infection. I'm not sure when it started. Maybe it was just that long phone call. It was already as hot as Greece inside the apartment. And I knew it was only going to get hotter when the sun moved completely round to this side of the building later in the afternoon. I wondered if it was best to carry on leaving the windows open, or if I was only letting in more heat. An overwhelming feeling of tiredness washed over me. I hauled myself up onto the sofa, thinking that somewhere at the back of my mind I'd always had an inkling about this. The feeling that life couldn't really be this simple.

I leaned back, took some deep breaths, and felt a weak breeze just about reach me as I sat there on the sofa. I surrendered to the heavy, numbing tiredness and felt myself slowly drift from consciousness and into a wonderful drowsiness where time and space and thought gradually dissolved. After a while I fell asleep, and only woke up when my phone buzzed.

It was a text from Roger.
Call me
, it said. But I didn't feel like calling. Not just then.

I stretched out my legs and lay back on the sofa. The fabric was warm. I felt warm, right down to the roots of my hair. Everything was warm. For a brief moment I got the impression that everything was just a dream, until I caught sight of the ice-cream tub and the number written on the bottom. All of a sudden it felt pretty irresponsible that I'd gone out to buy ice cream when my financial situation was so precarious.

I had a bit of a headache when I stood up and wandered aimlessly round the apartment until I finally ended up in front of my collection of vinyl records. What could they be worth? There were quite a few genuine collector's items. I had a number of limited-edition Blu-ray films, and then there were my instruments, of course, but no matter how I tried I couldn't get anywhere close to the amount required. 5,700,150 kronor was more money than I could even imagine.

I toyed with the idea of simply running away. Leaving the country. How many resources would they devote to tracking down someone like me?

I could take the bus to Nynäshamn, then the ferry to Gotland, and hide out there on some pebbly beach. Or get the train to Copenhagen, then hitchhike down to Germany…What then, though? I could get all my money out of the bank, buy a plane ticket to the USA, and stroll about Manhattan drinking milkshakes and eating pastrami sandwiches. In a way, the thought of just taking off like that was quite tempting. But what would I do once I'd actually got there? And the thought of never coming back…No, I was happy here, after all. I had my friends here. All my memories. I liked my apartment, the changing seasons. I liked lying on the sofa…But of course if there was no other option…

I picked up my phone and held it in my hand for a while. If Mum was still alive I would have called her. That would have cheered her up, something as simple as that, even if she'd have been worried about the size of the debt. Maybe she'd have been able to come up with a solution. She usually could. I stood for a while tossing my phone from hand to hand. In the end I rang the only number I could think of.