Fire (27 page)

They didn’t want to know about how badly he felt, didn’t even want to see the scars on his arms. It was after Linnéa’s phone call to tell them of his failed suicide attempt that they
reluctantly opened their eyes for the first time and saw to it that he was given help.

And it was also the time when they began systematically to blame her for all his problems.

Some type in a yellow polo shirt grabs hold of Linnéa’s arm, but she keeps going, almost gets there. And then Helena suddenly turns round.

‘Hi there, Linnéa,’ she says with a brittle smile.

Linnéa would dearly like to read Helena’s mind but she doesn’t dare to take the risk in case Viktor is hovering nearby. ‘Anything else you want to tell me?’ Helena asks and some of the yellow shirts laugh.

‘The couple you were schmoozing with, do you know who they were?’ Linnéa asks. ‘Ida and Erik, who made life worse for Elias than anybody else. It wasn’t any kind of negative energy that ruined everything for him, but people like them.’

Helena’s face is still lit up by her 10,000-watt smile, but she tilts her head a little sideways and sighs, as if steeling herself to cope with a stroppy toddler.

‘I am sorry for you, Linnéa. You do let your destructive emotions run your life. Sadly, your approach infected my son’s mind, too. If he had not kept company with friends who pulled him down, he might still have been alive today.’

The blow is too heavy. Linnéa can’t utter words, hardly draw breath. Of course she had guessed that Helena would think along these lines, but to hear her say it is something else.

Helena stretches out her arms in a gesture to gather her flock. They all move off towards the main door. Linnéa just stands there. Tries to persuade her heart to start beating again, her lungs to remember how to breathe.

‘Linnéa …’

Vanessa’s voice breaks the spell that turned her into stone.

Linnéa looks around and sees her standing there. Minoo is with her. None of them speaks. There is no need.

When Minoo steps out from the assembly hall, together with Vanessa and Linnéa, Anna-Karin is waiting for her.

‘I was thinking, perhaps we’d better talk,’ she says.

‘You’re right. But not here,’ Minoo replies.

The pupils slowly drain away from the main lobby. Most people are dragging their feet as they drift along to their classrooms. Minoo feels a pang of anxiety about being late for her biology lesson, but the feeling is mostly an old conditioned reflex. Besides, Ove Post, the biology teacher, is so batty he’ll probably never notice that she isn’t there. He still believes that her name is Milou.

They walk downstairs to the girls’ toilets and check that they are alone.

‘What’s going on?’ Minoo can’t think of anything else to say.

‘Something is up,’ Vanessa says. ‘But I didn’t sense any magic. Did anyone else?’

Anna-Karin and Linnéa shake their heads. Minoo shrugs.

‘I was in their centre yesterday,’ Anna-Karin says. ‘Somebody who knows Mum took us along with her. I didn’t pick anything up there either. Though it can be hard to work out what the difference is between what she’s doing to people and actual magic. Do you know what I mean?’

Minoo understands very well what she means. She, too,
had felt how easy it was to be carried along by the mass hysteria in the hall. After this, Gustaf will surely realise that Positive Engelsfors is a cult?

‘There’s something very fishy about all this,’ Linnéa says. ‘Last Friday, Adriana is sacked. Today, Tommy Ekberg is principal and is already collaborating with Positive Engelsfors.’

‘I saw him in the centre,’ Anna-Karin tells them.

‘Do you think that Helena is behind the action to get rid of Adriana?’ Minoo asks.

‘Perhaps it’s the Council,’ Anna-Karin suggests.

‘Why should the Council want her kicked out?’ Vanessa asks.

‘Perhaps they suspect her of acting behind their backs,’ Anna-Karin says. ‘Like that time when she phoned Minoo.’

‘I don’t know,’ Minoo says. ‘But, if it had been the Council they would hardly have picked Tommy Ekberg as acting head. They would have wanted to control the school. Which is meant to be the seat of evil and so forth.’

‘Fuck!’ Linnéa says. ‘I’m so fucking thick. Elias’s father is the town hall super-boss. Of course it was no problem for him and Helena to fix it so that Adriana got the sack.’

Minoo feels that she has been just as dumb. Krister Malmgren is the local authority’s ‘strong man’ and known for getting his way at all costs.

‘That’s so true,’ Minoo says. ‘They were saying to Adriana that it had been a local authority decision. And that the basis for it was what happened to Rebecka and Elias.’

‘But Helena really wants to help people,’ Anna-Karin says.

‘How can you be so bloody naive?’ Linnéa snaps.

‘Calm down,’ Vanessa says. ‘Anna-Karin doesn’t know what happened after the meeting.’

Minoo tells Anna-Karin. It is hard to have to repeat what Helena had said.

‘Why can’t something that seems good actually
be
good, just for once?’ Anna-Karin mumbles.

Perhaps because we live in Engelsfors, Minoo thinks.

‘It must have been Helena that Matilda warned us about,’ Linnéa says.

‘Could be,’ Vanessa says. ‘Or else the Council. Or both one and the other. Or something else altogether that we haven’t even caught a glimpse of yet.’

‘Do you think one can see that this is me?’ Olivia says and holds up her drawing.

Their task is to capture their mood on the paper and, as usual, Olivia has drawn a self-portrait. The face has only one set of features, two large eyes weeping black tears. A razor blade is suspended above her. The blade has slashed bloody lines across the sky.

‘I’m sure. Only you would draw stuff like that,’ Linnéa says.

Olivia looks at her in her typical Olivia way. It’s as if she pauses briefly to work out if she’s to laugh or get angry.

This time, her face opens up in a big grin.

‘Let me see yours,’ she asks.

Linnéa pushes her drawing across, wishing she didn’t have to, hoping that Olivia won’t ask what it means.

She has drawn a heart-shaped flower arrangement, a romantic gift. But among all the flowers lies a bleeding, anatomically correct heart, as if just torn out of the body.

So maybe it’s over the top, but it is how she feels when she thinks of Vanessa.

‘Wow, you’re so good,’ Olivia sighs. ‘When I see your work I never want to draw again.’

Linnéa rolls her eyes heavenwards.

‘How did that assembly hall session go?’ Olivia asks and
starts colouring in the hair on her self-portrait to make it look like flames of blue fire.

‘Be pleased you weren’t there.’

Olivia doesn’t speak for a long while.

‘I’ve been thinking about something,’ she says without taking her eyes off the paper. ‘It feels as if we’re slipping apart.’

Linnéa lowers her ink pen and looks at her.

‘How do you mean?’

Olivia mixes the watercolour to get a darker shade of blue. ‘We don’t seem to care for the same things any more.’

‘Are you cross because I wouldn’t chuck school and go with you?’

‘It was the last straw.’ Olivia looks up. ‘I’ve given you loads of chances, Linnéa. Now I feel I can’t carry on. I’ve got to learn to set boundaries. I don’t mean we would be enemies or anything like that. But perhaps stop socialising.’

‘Maybe it hasn’t occurred to you, but we haven’t actually
socialised
since the end of last term.’

‘Precisely,’ Olivia agrees seriously.

‘Right. Let’s decide to do what you say.’

‘Listen, you two. Try to keep your minds on the job,’ Backman calls from the teacher’s desk.

Linnéa registers that his eyes are caressing Olivia’s breasts and carefully avoids picking up any of his thoughts.

‘I must go to the loo,’ she says, picks up her bag and walks out.

It is always a kind of liberation to leave the classroom during a lesson, even just for a few minutes. As if you have managed to steal a little time for yourself, to take a break from reality.

Linnéa hurries upstairs and along the short passage that leads to the toilets near the door to the attic.

She started to go up there again after the toilets were reopened in the spring. She didn’t want to keep being afraid to go there. It had been Elias’s and her place during the few weeks when they were in senior school together. Now, she has come to regard it as the place where he lived, not where he died.

She opens the door. A half-dead bouquet of flowers and burned-down candles on the windowsill. A photo of Elias in a cheap frame. Linnéa knows that Olivia and a few others from their old gang got together up here on the day Elias died to honour his memory. She had honoured him in her own way by spending hours when she listened to his favourite songs and read through all the letters he had sent her when she was in the care home. She has saved them, a whole boxful. Long, funny, sad, page after page tightly filled with writing and with drawings in the margins.

She almost wishes that she could believe that Helena was right. That it was possible to focus only on the positive sides of life. To forget and carry on.

After Elias’s death, Jakob went on about how she should enter into her grief and make it part of her. Let emotions out, instead of fleeing from them.

At first, she hadn’t listened to him. Instead, she had rushed straight to Jonte and tried all the easy escape routes he had on offer. But she had finally understood that none of all that worked. The harder she tried to lock the monsters out, the bigger and stronger they grew.

This is how she came to know that to remind yourself of what is bright in life is a good thing to do. But it is totally different from pretending that the darkness does not exist.

She sits down on the toilet seat inside one of the cubicles. Then she takes the
Book of Patterns
and the Pattern Finder from her bag.

She tries to work out how to ask the question in the best way. Then she opens the book, leafs through it and concentrates.

Is Helena our enemy?

She twists the Pattern Finder until it is focused. What she sees is like nothing else she has ever found in the book.

The signs are moving restlessly on the page, whirling and twisting in and out of each other. Linnéa turns the pages but wherever she looks, the signs are behaving the same way. They are rushing across the page as if about to overflow the edges.

She tries to concentrate on the question, but all it does is to create new waves of activity in the book.

In the end, she shuts it briskly, puts it back in her bag together with the Pattern Finder and opens the cubicle door.

Viktor Ehrenskiöld stands in front of the cubicle where Elias died. Linnéa had not even noticed him coming in. He looks paler than ever in the cold light from the window.

‘It was here it happened, wasn’t it?’ he asks.

Linnéa doesn’t reply. She wonders if he understands by some magic that she has tried to read the book.

‘It is so tragic that Elias never found out why he died,’ Viktor says thoughtfully. ‘Or who he was.’

‘He knew who he was.’

‘You know what I’m talking about. Elias was one of the Chosen—’

‘Don’t speak his name,’ she interrupts him. ‘You have no right to.’

‘Perhaps you had better examine your attitude,’ he says calmly.

‘Perhaps you should join that yellow-shirt brigade.’

‘Hardly my kind of crowd. My world view is rather more realistic than that. And I believe that is something we have in common, you and I.’

‘I can’t accept that the words “you”, “I” and “have in common” could possibly exist in the same sentence,’ Linnéa says.

Viktor stares straight at her with his dark blue eyes.

‘I was adopted,’ he says. ‘My mother was a heroin addict. She died of an overdose when I was seven. No one knows who my biological father is. I had been through five foster homes before Alexander found me.’

Linnéa watches Viktor. She feels certain that he is lying, trying to manipulate her.

She sends out a probe, but he gets there first.

Linnéa. You know it counts as practising magic, don’t you?

A small smile curls one corner of Viktor’s mouth.

‘I promise not to tell,’ he says. ‘This time, that is.’

The little brass bell rings when Vanessa steps into the Crystal Cave and shuts the door behind her. The shop is full of customers and Mona Moonbeam stares irritably at Kerstin Stålnacke who stands at the till rummaging in her purse.

‘You’re late,’ Mona says to Vanessa when she catches sight of her. ‘We’re closing soon.’

‘All you said was that I should turn up today. You didn’t give me a time.’

Mona shuts her eyes tightly and sighs.

‘Excuse me just one moment,’ she says to Kerstin who nods and carries on putting coins down on the counter, one by one.

Mona picks up a cardboard box from the floor and comes over to Vanessa.

‘And I told you to wear something classy,’ she hisses.

Vanessa checks out Mona’s baby-pink jeans skirt and glittery green top embroidered with a unicorn motif in gold thread. But she doesn’t comment. They need Mona’s help.

‘Take this,’ she says and places the box in Vanessa’s arms.

It is surprisingly heavy and Vanessa’s shoulder-bag slips down to her elbow and makes her drop almost everything.

‘What am I supposed to do with this?’

‘Unpack it, of course. Put them on the shelf next to the angels.’

Mona returns to the till. The spurs on her cowboy boots rattle as she walks.

Vanessa clenches her teeth. She carries the box to a corner, puts it down on the floor and starts trying to peel the brown tape off.

The box is full of mirrors set in garish, octagonal brass frames. The centre of the round mirror glass is either bulging outwards or inwards.

Vanessa starts placing the mirrors on the shelf and glances at the china angels. The chubby one playing the harp is still there. A year has passed since she and Linnéa were laughing at it.

So ugly it’s wonderful.

Vanessa smiles at the memory.