The Hanging Girl (42 page)

Friday, May 16th, 2014

When she accidentally pressed
the toilet flush, thereby flushing valuable water down the drain, Shirley lost the last of that one thing that can keep people going: hope. Without that to cling to, she was nothing. Throughout her life, hadn’t there always been a little bit of hope somewhere? Hope of recognition from her parents. Hope of weight loss. Hope that despite everything she’d find a partner, or at least a less ambitious hope that she’d be able to find a really good friend, male or female. Or even just a meaningful job.

But if she put all of these unfulfilled hopes in one equation, she had to admit that she’d never get the right answer. A hope in one direction had been constantly replaced by a new hope in another direction, which in turn was replaced by yet another. And now the final hope was gone. A small handful of water was all that was left in the toilet, and she’d been sparing with that, so what was there left to hope for?

No, she knew that even though this nightmare had lasted barely a week, it was going to be a short-lived process. All the statistics about people who survived for weeks without food and for a very long time with only a very meager supply of water didn’t apply to her. But strangely enough, it didn’t frighten her.

Despite the extreme dryness in her mouth and an unpleasant smell from the feces and her body, her state of mind improved hour by hour. Over the last day, her body had almost reacted with a feeling of euphoria, presumably because her organs no longer had to work so hard at digestion, and probably for other reasons she didn’t understand.

Since the fateful trip to the toilet in the middle of the night, she no longer felt the need to relieve herself. Her body was weak and tired, but her mind was more alert than it had been for years. She thought rationally and with a level head. She drew conclusions without sentimentality and inhibition. She was going to die, and the only thing she was going to fight for now was to make sure she didn’t go quietly, and that all blame would point toward Pirjo.

Many hours had passed in trying to coax one board free so she could create a hole to the outer cladding, but when she finally succeeded in making a gap wide enough to enable her to see what lay behind it, she gave up her quest. She was faced with an aluminum sheet, and had no idea what it was for apart from that it might have something to do with the thermal properties Pirjo had talked about. Yet another sliver of hope disappeared as she realized the impossibility of breaking through that layer with the miserable tools she had at her disposal.

Of course it came as a blow for a while, because the alternative meant certain death. And yet she quickly regained her courage, a condition probably triggered by the chemical processes now controlling her body.

She turned to the next plan and found her reading glasses from her toiletry bag. They were a hideous pair she’d bought in a Tiger discount store in the Southside Shopping Centre in Wandsworth, in the vain hope that she’d be able to apply her makeup so it looked more flattering.

Based on the sun’s current position, it was time. The question was whether her venture could be done in a day or if she’d need tomorrow to help it along.

She got down on her knees and tried to catch the sun’s rays in the glass to create a burning point on the wall.

For a while in her younger days, Shirley had had the idea that she should work as a volunteer paramedic, so she’d taken several first-aid courses as part of that plan. She found out, however, that she couldn’t stand the sight of blood and so decided to abandon the idea. But during her training she’d learned that people who die in fires normally don’t feel any pain due to being unconscious as a result of smoke inhalation.

If she managed to start a fire with her glasses, she’d jump into the
bathroom and hope that someone would sound the alarm and come running over to the house before the fire was so strong that it took her with it. And if this didn’t happen, then things would just have to run their course. The bathroom was a small room so the oxygen would quickly be used up.

Then she took Pirjo’s blue notebook containing Atu’s pearls of wisdom and ripped it apart, page by page, until there was a good pile of crumpled paper up against the wall that she could use as kindling.

When she had been sitting for five minutes and concluded that the burning point would under no circumstances reach the degree of warmth that a burning glass can reach under optimal conditions, she looked up at the skylight. In just under an hour, the sun would have passed far enough overhead that there would no longer be any direct sunlight entering the room, and her plan wouldn’t be achievable before tomorrow. And when she thought about it carefully, the question arose of whether it would ever be achievable regardless of the sun’s strength. Maybe the essential problem was that the windows refracted the light so much that it lost its power.

She pursed her lips. It just couldn’t be right. Should she just sit here and wither away? Should Pirjo come one fine day and dispose of her mummified body, by that time as light as a feather, and get away with murder?

Shirley clenched her teeth together and tried to judge the distance up to the skylight. She’d imagined it to be about six to seven meters, but maybe it wasn’t even as much as that.

She turned to her toiletry bag again, emptying the contents.

She weighed the toothpaste, her face powder, and her deodorant, judging that none of these objects were nearly as heavy as her jar of wrinkle cream. Actually, it was a relic from the days when she thought there could be a miracle hidden in the product. That ageing and loose skin would be a thing of the past, if only she remembered to apply it generously every day.

When she realized after a month that the only thing the cream did for her was to lighten her purse, she forgot about it in the bottom of her
toiletry bag. You don’t throw away that sort of cream, which cost almost two days’ wages if not more.

And now it was finally going to live up to its cost.

It was one thing to throw six to seven meters horizontally, that much was straightforward enough, even if like Shirley you hadn’t thrown anything since you were a child. But it was another thing altogether if you had to throw an object vertically up in the air with such precision and force that some of the windowpanes, which looked as if they could withstand more than a particularly heavy hailstorm, would smash.

Shirley’s jar was also made of porcelain, so if she made a mistake the first time around, there wouldn’t be a second chance.

She sat thinking about her dad, the electrician from Birmingham, who’d always given as good as he got, unless it was about general knowledge because he didn’t know so much about that.

“Try first,” he always said. “Damn it, woman, if you’re not sure, try first.”

Shirley smiled. He hadn’t been happy to be reminded of that sentence when she dragged home her third guy within the space of a week. She grabbed her face powder and took aim. The interior mirror might get broken on the way back down again, but just now she had other things to worry about than seven years’ bad luck.

The first throw hit the roof a good two meters from the skylight. The second hit a meter to the side. The third throw never made it that far, and she already felt a pain in her shoulder.

When she and her cousin used to play around as children, they always took their old aunt by her forearm under the pretence of wanting to help her up. The loose wobbly skin she had there, and which they were free to fondle, could make them laugh for hours. It was all so funny back then, but just now she realized that she wasn’t much better off than her old aunt had been. She certainly didn’t have any muscles.

She took a pause, decided to drink the last of the water in the toilet, dried her mouth, and stared threateningly at the window above.

She remembered how the mantra of every cricket coach at her school
had been that success depended on putting a bit of your soul in the target and the rest in the ball.

So she divided her soul in two and rammed the face cream up to the skylight with everything she had.

She heard a cracking sound from up above, so she’d hit her target. Encouraged by this success, she grabbed the jar of wrinkle cream and did exactly the same one more time. Whether it was the windowpane or the jar that made everything in the room rattle when it all tumbled down, was difficult to say. But the hole in the glass was established and the direct rays of the sun caressed her face.

She closed her eyes. “Horus, Horus, blessed by the star, infused by the sun, be now my servant, and show me the power you bestow on us. Let me follow your path and worship it, and never forget the reason for your presence,” she prayed.

Afterward, she screamed as loud as she could in a final hope that someone would hear her now that there was a hole in the skylight. She stopped after ten minutes. The house was so well insulated that no one heard her.

Logically, the situation should have made her sad and afraid, but it didn’t. Actually, she laughed about it for a moment. It felt totally crazy. If she’d known earlier what a feeling of euphoria came from hunger and thirst, and how light and free and strong you could be, she’d definitely have done it more often.

She got down on her knees, took her glasses again, and collected the rays of the sun in a small bright point, at first on the wall itself and then on one of the crumpled pieces of paper from the blue notebook that slowly but surely turned darker and darker.

—

When Pirjo was almost six years old, the summer turned out to be ideal for picking bilberries. The forests were abundant and Pirjo’s dad suddenly saw the chance for increasing his earnings. As everyone knows, bilberries from the forest are free, so if you multiplied this hundred percent
profit with the expected daily sales to tourists from Tampere, it had to add up to many, many Finnish marks in a single season. In fact, Pirjo’s dad sat every night working out what it might add up to
if
the hordes of tourists were supplemented by those from Turku and all the Swedes who sometimes strayed to these parts. The profit would be enormous, he said, as he dreamt of a delivery van and his own supermarket. Yes, he dreamt and dreamt, and all these profitable bilberries had to be picked for him by Pirjo and her mother.

They collected bucketsful, despite nasty bites from gadflies, horseflies, and mosquitoes, but the tourists stayed away, leaving the bilberries to sit and ferment.

“We’ll make schnapps, cordial, and jam from them,” said her dad and sent Pirjo off on her own after more, now that her mother was busy in the kitchen.

When she came home with the next bucketful, her mother was sitting in the kitchen with her hands in her lap and had given up. She couldn’t keep up and the sugar was too expensive.

“Eat the bilberries you’ve collected today, Pirjo, so they’re not wasted,” she said, and so Pirjo ate the bilberries until her fingers and mouth and lips were so blue that you wouldn’t believe your eyes.

It backfired in the days following when Pirjo suffered from an abnormal constipation that cost money in medical assistance and gave her indescribable pain.

Though not an exact comparison, it was a touch of the feeling Pirjo had just now. The pain in her stomach was indefinable but worrying. If it continued like this throughout the day, she’d drive to the hospital.

She put her hand on her stomach and felt to see if the kicking from the child inside her had changed. She didn’t think it had, even though it had become more moderate over the last few days. She looked out of the window, sure that this couldn’t be so strange given that room was getting tight now.

Outside her window, in the empty space facing the highway, the team that was building the bicycle sheds had been hard at it all afternoon. The
materials had arrived on time, and later in the week she was expecting the delivery of the first bikes.

It would be exciting to see if the project to missionize on the island would lead to anything. Pirjo wasn’t a daydreamer like her dad, but if they could just recruit fifty people here on Öland it would be a success.

Four days had gone by since she’d turned off the water to the house where Shirley was locked up. And even though she’d heard faint scratching sounds on the walls when she went down there to inspect, there was absolutely nothing alarming about the situation. In a few days the sounds would stop, and in a week from now she would assume that Shirley was dead.

In the meantime she’d just keep to herself and let time pass.

She got up and looked out at the men, who one by one stopped with their work. It was time for the communal assembly.

She nodded with satisfaction. In many ways the small building was a handsome and presentable feature out toward the road, where before it had been a little too open in her opinion. If they planted dog roses up against the cycle sheds, the view from her room wouldn’t just be beautiful and harmonious but the noise from the road would be lessened significantly as well.

And while she stood thinking this over, a car with Danish license plates drove very slowly past. The driver looked attentively out of the window toward the buildings but the car didn’t stop.

It wasn’t that unusual. An institution like theirs attracted a lot of curiosity due to the special buildings, the name of the place, and all the people in white robes. And yet this man’s gaze was more intense than they usually were. His age and type and the person next to him didn’t point to them being tourists. So what were they?

She felt a twinge in her side and her pulse soared.

Could it be the men from the Danish police she’d been warned about? The man behind the wheel could easily look like someone of that sort.

Worried, she remained standing for five minutes to see if she had anything to fear, and if the vehicle would turn back.

She was just about to leave the room and head to the assembly hall, relieved that her mind had played a trick on her, when she saw a couple of figures on foot on the other side of the road.

This time she felt the rush of adrenaline that put her entire system on a state of high alert. There was no doubt that the taller of the two was the driver from before and that the man next to him was an immigrant.