The Invoice (11 page)

“You're kidding?!” I said. “You mean to say that you've managed to miss Sunita?”

I stood up, my body felt sluggish. Every step I took seemed jerky, like an ultra-rapid film sequence. But I couldn't help feeling a glimmer of hope. Had they really missed Sunita? Was it even possible that they hadn't taken account of the greatest sadness in my life? Maybe there had been more mistakes.

“She broke my heart, for God's sake,” I went on, in as reproachful a voice as I could muster. “That's affected my whole life. There's not a day goes by without me…I mean…Have you really not taken that into account?”

I could hear Maud's breathing speed up as she clicked between various documents.

“Er…Not as far as I can see.”

“Holy shit,” I said. “No wonder the invoice ended up being so expensive.”

“When was this?” she asked.

I wondered if she was typing on her laptop. Had she logged in from bed? Or was she taking notes the old-fashioned way with pen and paper?

“1998,” I said. “To 2000. January 5, 3:25 p.m. We first met in '97, but didn't start seeing each other until the following year. Okay, hang on a minute, something like this has to be taken into account, even retrospectively, surely?”

I heard her moving at the other end.

“You're sure you're not getting mixed up with some film you've seen?”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “This is the biggest tragedy of my life.”

She tapped at her computer again.

“But this has to be taken into consideration!” I said.

I was pacing up and down in the apartment now.

“This could…Bloody hell!” I said.

She was breathing hard. I could tell things were serious this time.

“Yes. I think it would be best if you came back in again,” she said.

On my second visit to W.R.D. a man came down and met me in the vast entrance hall. Everyone seemed extremely troubled by the mistake with Sunita. I was assured that a thorough internal investigation would be carried out, and led to believe that such occurrences were extremely unusual, and that it must have happened because she was a foreign citizen and the relationship hadn't been registered anywhere, as well as being kept secret from family and friends. Correspondence with their South Asian office hadn't been entirely without friction, and the systems there probably needed to be reconsidered. It had long been a problematic area.

On the way out of the lift by the reception desk on the eleventh floor I was met by an older woman in a jacket and tight skirt, who made a rather girlish impression in spite of her age. She smiled and tilted her head as she spoke. She had a little scarf tied round her neck, a bit like a flight attendant. She thanked me for my cooperation and promised compensation for the intrusion into my working hours. I didn't mention the fact that I had simply swapped shifts with Tomas, who wanted all the extra hours he could get before he went off on holiday to Torremolinos. It was no problem at all. He had told me I could have the following day off too.

The woman in the scarf handed me an unwieldy bundle of forms, which she told me to fill in before the meeting. She led me through the open-plan office to the far end of the building, to another small room with glass walls. In one corner was a plant that looked like it was made of plastic. She pulled out a chair for me and asked if I'd like anything to drink while I went through the paperwork.

“I don't know,” I said. “Some water, perhaps?”

“Still or sparkling?”

“Er…sparkling.”

I sat down on the chair and began to fill in the forms.

The questions were concentrated around the years 1997 to 2002. I made a real effort to answer as truthfully as possible this time, and not exaggerate.

After a while the woman returned with a bottle of mineral water, a glass, and a coaster. She put them down on the table a short distance from my papers.

“I'll be back shortly with a bottle opener.”

I thanked her and went on answering the questions as best I could.

It got quite warm in the little room when the sun came out, and I had to take off both my jacket and sweater and sit there in just my T-shirt. I checked a few times to see if I could smell sweat. It was much quieter in there than in the last meeting room—presumably at the expense of any ventilation. Every so often I looked around to see if I could catch a glimpse of Maud, but then I remembered that they had said something about her working down on the second floor. Anyway, I had no idea what she looked like. Even if I imagined that I'd know who she was as soon as I laid eyes on her.

The woman in the scarf stayed in the vicinity the whole time after she'd brought the bottle opener. As soon as I was ready with one of the forms she would come in and get it. Otherwise she stayed outside the room. At one point Georg appeared and exchanged a few words with her. They both looked in my direction and I nodded slightly, but he showed no sign of returning my greeting.

After an hour or so inside the stuffy room I started to get tired. The questions were of various sorts: Describe an event. What happened first? What did you do next? Option 1, 2, or 3, and so on. There were various scales I had to make marks on. Circles and semicircles that I had to fill in or tick in the appropriate place. The questions kept probing into greater and greater detail. And into increasingly peripheral events. In the end my head was spinning and I was no longer sure if I was describing the truth or just a fantasy. How much of this had actually happened, and how much had I constructed in hindsight?

I tried to remember as many setbacks as possible. I made sure to give high points to anything related to pain and suffering.

Most of it was to do with my relationship with Sunita, but I also managed to squeeze in some of my and Roger's failed attempts to pick up girls.

Roger often dragged up “that disastrous night” many years ago when he and I had met Linda and Nicole. To him this was just more evidence of all the hardships he had to endure, but I wasn't sure if it ought to be regarded as entirely negative. We had been sitting in a bar and caught sight of two attractive girls a few tables away. We were both focused on the tall blonde with the incredibly pretty smile, whose name turned out to be Linda. During our discussion of tactics about who was going to go for which one, Roger argued that he should go for the blonde—the one we both liked most—because, as he put it, he deserved something nice for once. He thought I ought to be prepared to support him in this and set my own sights on the brunette in the cap, and maybe even put in a good word for him so she could pass it on to her friend later.

I pointed out that it was a bit difficult to sort that out when we had no idea of their opinion on the matter, and that we should probably count ourselves lucky if they wanted to talk to us at all. Roger said I was just trying to make excuses, and in the end I agreed to try to set things up as best I could for him and the tall blonde.

After a couple of beers we plucked up the courage to go over to them, and luckily they asked us to sit down. I stuck to the agreement and mainly talked to Nicole, who turned out to work in comics and was great fun to talk to, while Roger and Linda had a separate conversation. All in all it was a very pleasant evening, and a couple of days later we started dating our respective girls.

I liked Nicole more and more. She taught me all about drawing and comics. She was very engaged with the environment and animal rights. She was a vegan too. Ate soy mince and You-can't-believe-it's-not-chicken, but occasionally her concentration would lapse. Sometimes she was halfway through a bag of sweets before realizing that they contained gelatin. She would check the list of ingredients, then go and spit them out into the toilet. I enjoyed the afternoons and evenings I spent in her apartment, lounging about on her sofa talking to her while she drew her cartoons. Sometimes she answered, sometimes she didn't. Sometimes she went off on long rants about society and Swedes and people in general. Her cartoons weren't all that nice to look at, or even particularly comprehensible. They weren't very realistic, but they were produced with passion and care. I loved them. We ended up getting together, and went out for at least a month.

Roger and Linda embarked on a relationship as well, but I soon started to get reports about her failings. She talked too much, laughed too loudly, devoted too much time to her appearance. She was far too interested in his background. She would “interrogate” him, as he put it. Wanted to know what he thought about all sorts of things. She wanted to go out a lot too, and do fun things in the evenings, but these rarely turned out to be all that much fun, although they still cost a great deal of money. When she eventually—after Roger, on my suggestion, had told her that he wasn't comfortable doing all those expensive things and proposed that they stay at home and do things there instead—floated the idea that they experiment with more adventurous sex, he dumped her.

He came round to see me and Nicole and went on about how awful it was for him. He sat there on the sofa claiming that the world was against him.

“I was always going to end up with the nutter!” he said. “Typical. You had all the luck, as usual,” he said to me, glaring at Nicole over at her drawing desk.

He also went into great detail explaining the difficulty he had had in telling Linda that he didn't like cream in spray cans, or blindfolds, and then—once he'd told her—finding a decent way to end it. He later declared that at least I hadn't had any of those problems, seeing as Nicole dumped me a few days later.

Once I'd described a number of occurrences with the help of an outline of the body on which you had to indicate where you felt your emotions were based, I had to fill in a load of forms with preprinted questions where you had to rank different types of experiences. Once again, they began with general issues and gradually became more specific.

I might have exaggerated slightly. Maybe I answered a little more negatively than I would have done under different circumstances.

For instance, in the column marked “Social Competence / continuing ed.” I ticked the options connected to alienation, bullying, and deficient group dynamics.

Under “Social Competence / dating / early rel. / sex. exp.” I took the opportunity to emphasize as much insecurity and performance anxiety as I could. They could probably work everything out themselves, down to the smallest detail, but I couldn't be entirely sure, seeing as they had missed the whole story of Sunita. Besides, I reasoned that it wouldn't do any harm if I added a bit of extra confusion with condoms and colliding front teeth.

Under “Work life / prev. empl.” I ticked lots of boxes relating to irregular working hours, poor conditions, and unpaid overtime.

When I was something like halfway through the pile of forms I went to the door and asked if I could have another bottle of water, but the woman in the scarf just shook her head. As if someone had told her not to leave her post on guard outside the glass box. I struggled through the rest of the questions and handed over the completed forms, by which time it was long past lunch.

“Can I go now?” I asked.

“No,” she said, looking rather excited. “You have to come with me.”

She led the way to the reception desk and left my forms there. I sat down in the same armchair as before, and the woman in the scarf went and stood by the lift. A few moments later Georg emerged from the frosted-glass door. He went over to the desk, collected my bundle of papers, then disappeared into the secret room again. The woman and I were left in reception.

She must have stood there by the lift for two hours while I tried to find a comfortable position in the narrow armchair. I stretched out as far as I could, but it was obvious the chair wasn't made for long-term use. I felt tired and sweaty and a bit dazed after all those questionnaires. There were posters on the wall next to the lift, and the table in front of me was covered with all sorts of information leaflets from the campaign I had evidently missed. “Time to pay—have you checked your E.H. score?,” “Give or take?,” “Time to even things out!,” in large, slanting blue lettering printed over colorful pictures of children and adults. They were in a number of different languages. As I looked at them, it dawned on me that I may well have seen those leaflets at home somewhere, but had thrown them in the recycling without ever thinking that they concerned me. They looked disconcertingly similar to all the other advertisements that I usually ignored. I picked up one of the brochures and leafed through it. There was a short history, and an account of the big international agreement. Various politicians and leaders from different areas of society were quoted: short, punchy sentences.

It went on to give a description of the next step: the process of redistribution, when those with negative scores were going to receive compensation, and how this was going to happen. Toward the end were contact details for anyone wanting to lodge a complaint or who thought he or she had been unjustly treated.

From time to time, as I sat there reading, people went up to the reception desk. Some had similar questions to mine. Some wanted more detailed repayment proposals, some were angry. Some came to plead their case, others swore and gesticulated wildly. I wondered if my amount was higher or lower than the average.

A couple of times I almost dozed off, and once I was roused by a voice that seemed strangely familiar. After a while I realized that it was the girl with the necklaces from the lift in my building, the one whose phone call I had overheard a few days before, standing and talking over at the desk. She seemed really on top of things as she spoke to the receptionist. She took out some papers and a loan agreement, and explained the repayment schedule she had worked out for herself. I couldn't help but be a bit impressed by her proactive attitude. I was struck by the advantage people like that had in society. She was probably already saving for her retirement, compared electricity suppliers, and had registered her children—born or unborn—for the best schools. And now she was here to get the lowest interest rate possible. For a moment I felt a little envious, and thought that I ought to be more like her. The sort of person who could look after themselves and sort things out. Then I would probably never have ended up in this situation. As it was, I had to stake everything on Sunita.