She's Never Coming Back (18 page)

‘It wasn’t that good,’ Sanna said.

‘It’s super good,’ Nour told her. ‘I look at it every day.’

Mike poured some wine and passed her a glass.

‘Sanna, Coke?’

‘Not just now.’

She wanted to try her new pens first.

‘Well, cheers and welcome to our humble abode,’ Mike said, and raised his glass.

They tasted the wine.

‘Mm, lovely,’ Nour said.

Mike looked at his daughter and mouthed
Thank you
to Nour. She shook her head.
It was nothing
.

‘And thank you for coming,’ Mike said. ‘Sounds a bit
silly, but that coffee with you the other day made my week. What does that actually mean – “made my week”?’

‘Enhanced?’ Nour suggested.

‘Yes. The coffee enhanced my week, it really did.’

Nour noticed that Mike’s eyelashes were wet. He turned round and looked in the oven. Nour pulled out a chair and sat down beside Sanna.

‘A cat?’

‘Horse,’ Sanna said.

‘Yes, right, now I see it.’

Nour looked up. Mike had turned towards the work top and was blowing his nose.

‘Hmm,’ he said, and threw the tissue in the bin. ‘I’m pretty pathetic really.’

He gave an embarrassed laugh.

‘And you have every right to be,’ Nour said.

‘Three of the four are dead,’ Jörgen Petersson said. ‘That can’t be a coincidence.’

Calle Collin didn’t manage to hold back a sceptical laugh.

‘You think there’s a connection?’ he chuckled. ‘Morgan died of cancer, Anders was found murdered up by Fjällgatan, and Johan died in a motorbike accident in Africa. Now please explain the connection to me.’

‘There’s connection and there’s connection,’ Jörgen said. ‘I see it more as proof that God exists.’

Calle held up his hand.

‘You shouldn’t say things like that, not even as a joke,’ he said.

‘But I mean it,’ Jörgen told him in all seriousness. ‘The world might not be better without them, but it certainly won’t be as bad.’

Calle looked at him sternly.

‘What did they do to you? How did they manage to leave such a mark that you can’t even sympathise that they’ve lost maybe forty years of their lives?’

‘Me?’ Jörgen said. ‘I kept out of the way as much as possible. But I still managed to get beaten up a couple of times. You could hardly say that they did any good. They terrorised everyone. The whole school bowed to their tyranny. I was terrified every time I had to go past them.’

‘I don’t remember it being like that.’

‘How do you remember it, then?’

Calle shrugged.

‘Last week I interviewed this guy who was paralysed from the waist down. He’d dived into shallow water and broken his neck. Eighteen years old. He was one of the most positive people I’ve ever met. I asked him whether he felt bitter about the fact that the accident happened to him. And do you know what he said? He said that there was no one
else to blame, accidents like that usually happened to people who take risks, who expose themselves to unnecessary risks. He had only himself to blame, it wasn’t even extreme bad luck. You should meet him. He might teach you a thing or two.’

‘I’m sure,’ Jörgen said.

Calle snorted in contempt.

‘A wife and healthy children and pots of money. And you sit here whingeing about some idiotic losers who had their heyday in secondary school. And who are no longer with us. How many successful people do you know who were actually happy at school?’

‘You’re right,’ Jörgen said. ‘You’re so right.’

‘Of course I’m right.’

‘But Ylva’s still alive?’

‘I don’t know,’ Calle said. ‘Can’t say that we’re in daily contact. Haven’t seen her since we were at school. I think she married someone from Skåne, or something like that.’

‘Someone from Skåne?’ Jörgen repeated.

‘There you go,’ Calle said. ‘A fate worse than death.’

Jörgen stared blankly into space.

‘Stop it,’ Calle snapped. ‘It doesn’t suit you.’

Jörgen didn’t understand.

‘What?’ he said.

‘Sitting there ruminating.’

‘I was just thinking—’

‘Well, don’t,’ Calle interrupted. ‘It won’t do you or anyone else any good.’

Jörgen waved his hand around and crossed his legs.

‘What you were saying,’ Jörgen continued, ‘about the boy who was paralysed, that it was self-inflicted …’

Calle wondered where he was going with this.

‘Maybe it was the same with the guys in the Gang of Four,’ Jörgen said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Morgan got cancer, probably due to an unhealthy lifestyle. Anders was murdered in central Stockholm, and we can only guess the reason for that. And Johan was killed in a motorbike accident in Zimbabwe, and probably wasn’t entirely sober at the time.’

Calle shook his head.

‘You don’t give up, do you?’ he said.

‘It’s strange,’ Mike said. ‘I almost think more about Dad than I do about Ylva. All the old stuff bubbling to the surface.’

He was in Gösta Lundin’s office on the fourth floor of Helsingborg hospital. Mike felt at ease in this setting and he had absolute confidence in his doctor.

‘Do you mean, what could you have done differently?’ Gösta asked him.

Mike cocked his head and pulled a face.

‘It’s not so much that, it’s the feeling.’

‘The feeling?’

‘Just after it happened, a lot of attention was focused on my mother and me. Family, friends, Dad’s funeral and all the details. Daily life was dramatic, heightened in some way. Maybe it sounds daft, but it was really exciting, a bit like the first day at school, or falling in love. Life was full of meaning, despite all the grief and helplessness. I presume that I … I don’t know, felt important or something. God, I sound awful.’

‘Not at all.’

‘Because that’s not what I mean.’

‘I understand. Carry on.’

Mike gathered his thoughts, tried to formulate what he wanted to say.

‘The other stuff came later,’ he said.

‘What other stuff ?’

‘The shame, the embarrassment, the looking away. People don’t know how to deal with grief. There are so few who actually understand what you really need.’

‘And what is that?’ Gösta queried.

‘Company,’ Mike said, and looked at him. ‘Or, at least, I think it is. Someone who asks you round for tea and is just friendly, normal, who calls and asks if you want to go to the cinema with them, who asks you to give them a hand with something. Whatever, just something to help the time go by.’

Mike smiled at his doctor.

‘After all the rituals and stuff were out of the way, when everyday life had started to catch up and people expected you to be over it all, at that time, I would have appreciated even an inappropriate joke, anything, just not distance and silence.’

Mike laughed, looked at his hands and then raised his eyes again.

‘I sound like some old talk-show presenter going on about his troubled childhood,’ he said. ‘And I assume that most people who sit in this chair do the same. You must think that we’re a sorry bunch of moaning muppets.’

Gösta shook his head. He leaned forward and folded his hands on the desk.

‘Your father,’ he said in a friendly voice. ‘Are you afraid that … well, that it’s hereditary, shall we say? His depression, I mean.’

Mike shook his head and leaned back.

‘Mum thinks it was the alcohol that killed Dad. It was a vicious circle. In the end she didn’t know whether he was drinking because he was depressed or whether he was depressed because he was drinking. I’m pretty careful with alcohol, take after my mother in that regard. And as long as I’ve got Sanna, I would never even contemplate anything like that, never. Even though I must say I can understand Dad in a way, now. I mean, the pain was deep and the future was bleak. I understand why people commit suicide, I just don’t want it to be those who are close to me.’

‘What do you think happened to Ylva? Do you think she committed suicide?’

‘No.’

‘What do you think happened?’

‘I think …’

He turned his face and looked at the wall.

‘I think she was murdered. Possibly by accident. It might have been a sex game with the wrong person, a sexual assault, I don’t know.’

‘So you don’t think she’s alive?’

‘No, I don’t,’ he said, after a while.

‘You don’t have any hopes left?’

Mike shook his head.

‘I’d lose my mind then,’ he said.

‘Both the scenarios you mentioned involve sex,’ Gösta pointed out.

‘We’ve talked about that,’ Mike said, curtly.

‘Was she excessively flirtatious?’

‘Yes.’

Mike had to strain himself to control his voice.

‘And do you think that led her into the arms of the wrong person?’

‘I have no idea any more. Ylva has gone, and she’s never coming back. I actually don’t want to think too much about what might have happened.’

‘I’m sorry, I apologise,’ Gösta said.

Mike pulled himself together and calmed down.

‘Have you ever lost anyone close to you?’ he asked, eventually, and locked eyes with the doctor.

‘I had a daughter,’ Gösta told him.

Mike’s face shifted from angry to apologetic in a split second. Gösta held his gaze.

‘It was twenty years ago. She was sixteen.’

‘Cancer?’

Gösta didn’t say anything for a long time.

‘I’d rather not talk about it,’ he said in the end. ‘Not any more, and not with you. You’re my patient, not the other way round.’

It wasn’t good. Short contracts and the odd bit of freelancing. The only constant in Calle Collin’s life was the bills. He expended more time and effort on picking up work than he did on doing it. He needed a steady job, regular pages to fill, someone to commission him to write a series of articles.

He logged on to the Internet and surfed in the hope of finding ideas. Death and misery, never anything else. That was basically all the news consisted of these days: unusual ways to die.

Which celebrities were hot? What was on TV?

What was it the old actor had said? That he beat others up so they wouldn’t beat him. And of course he hadn’t wanted the only interesting thing he’d revealed in the whole interview to be published in the magazine. Calle would have got more out of interviewing the actor’s former classmates and writing about their recollections of him. Schooldays, childhood. You never got away from the past. Hence Jörgen Petersson’s fixation with the Gang of Four.

The Gang of Four – three of the four were dead. Only Ylva was still alive. As far as Calle knew, anyway. Maybe he should interview her? Under the headline:
My Friends Die Young!

She wouldn’t have many friends left after an article like that.

On the other hand, it touched everyone. Who didn’t know someone who’d died prematurely? Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad idea. A series of articles about people who had died young and left family and friends bereft and mourning. What would it be called?

Out of the Blue. No, no, no. It needed to be something poignant. She Danced One Summer? Perhaps not. So a Day Passes, Never to Return? A Moment in Time? The Lord Giveth and the Lord Taketh? In Your Shadow? Garden of
Remembrance? Left Behind? The Days are Numbered? Seize the Day? It Happened Suddenly …?

Shit, come on.

Then the Game Was Over.

Calle mumbled the words to himself. Sounded good. Fatalistic, but still positive.

Then the Game Was Over.

Totally fucking perfect.

*

There was a world outside, and the only thing that separated Ylva from it was the cellar walls. She tried to remind herself of that, to recall the feeling she had had at first, before all her ambitions were thwarted. When she still
imagined it was possible to escape. When she still tried to think logically.

Before she understood the price of her futile attempts, and the blows and threats had made her shrivel and accept. Her situation and who she was.

To clean the house.

The thought of being allowed up and being able to feel the sunlight had aroused something in her.

In her dreams, she jumped out of the window and ran across the grass to her own house and …

She never got any further. Her mind refused to dream on. Presumably it was trying to spare her the pain.

To clean the house.

They would never let her. It was just another way to torment her, a promise they waved in front of her eyes. They would snatch it away at the last minute. Just as they had done before.

Ylva looked around, thought about what was at risk, everything she had worked for.

The TV screen that gave her an eye on the world, food, water, electricity. Books to read.

The only thing they demanded of her was obedience. Otherwise, she was her own boss. The fact that Gösta took
her body a couple of times a month didn’t bother her any more. His pleasure showed that she was good. As long as Gösta wanted her, she was safe. As long as Gösta came back for more, she would be kept alive.

If that was what she wanted.

In her darkest moments, she thought about the rope. That was what Gösta and Marianne expected from her in the end. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.

But Ylva wasn’t there yet. And Gösta’s half-promise about letting her up to clean the house had kindled a spark. She could almost visualise it. How, under supervision of course, she would go round with a vacuum cleaner and be blinded by the light that poured in through all the windows. Filled with colours and sounds from outside. Even in her dreams, Ylva felt overwhelmed.

She knew every nook and cranny of the cellar, every unevenness in the brickwork was etched in her mind. The cellar was her security.