Frozen Moment (42 page)

    He
imagined staying away for years: they would meet by chance on the street one
day in twenty years' time. That was the only way she could be allowed to exist
in his consciousness. In the daydream he was twenty-five, dressed in a beige
summer suit which made him radiate the confidence he imagined came
automatically with age. For some reason the scene always took place in
Villastaden outside one of the gates to Annelund Park. He took her grey hands,
distorted with pain, and she would whisper,
Because of my stupidity I lost
you, Sebastian. I never want to lose you again.

    He
would forgive her, of course. In one version she said,
I have searched for
you all over the world,
but that was just too far from reality. In the
first place, Solveig would never manage to travel the world looking for him,
and secondly, the only hiding place he could come up with when he ran away was
Brasses flat. Brasse was the only person he knew who had his own flat.

    If
he'd gone to Krister's, his mum would have phoned Solveig the very first day.
Krister's mum would never allow him to turn up with his rucksack and announce
that he was staying - nor would any mum he could imagine. But given that
Brasse's flat wasn't exactly a
secret, that
would be
the first place Solveig would look. If she did decide to look for him, that is,
which in the daydream she did.

    
Which she had done.
She had found him. However heavy
the burden of his guilt, she had still found him. A strange warm energy flooded
his body and he realised that he had been frozen until now. For how long he
didn't know, but when the tired troll looked at him it felt like stepping into
a hot bath after being out skiing in a snowstorm.

    'What
are you doing here?' he said, just to make sure she hadn't come to accuse him
of murder or to throw a bomb into Brasse's crappy little one-room flat.

    'They
wanted me to think before I made a decision,' she said in a thin voice. She
looked like a child, so skinny in those grubby wrinkled tights and the long
pale yellow cable-knit sweater. On her feet she had nothing but her trainers,
which had once been white; the rubber soles were so worn they were virtually
splitting. Her toes were pointing inwards. Not even the lines on her face
beneath the hair peppered with grey could make her look like a middle-aged
woman.

    'You
must be half-frozen to death,' he said, pointing at her windcheater and the
shoes.

    'They
wanted me to think,' she said again, 'about whether to switch Maya off or not.'

    Her
voice gained a little strength, echoed through the stairwell. He heard the
outside door below open, and someone began to walk up the stairs.

    'Are
you coming in or what?' he said, relieved that Brasse was out. Solveig took a
surprisingly decisive stride into the little hallway. She was standing so close
that he could smell her breath: the throat sweets she always sucked, and
something else, something chemical. She was gripping his arm so tightly that a
bruise would later appear in the shape of her thumbprint.

    'They
think I would kill my own daughter. They don't know anything. Not about me. Not
about Maya. I said I didn't need to think about it. But they wanted me to go
home and think it over. I'm the only one who can decide, they said.'

    'But
Mum, she's already dead. Her brain is dead,' said Sebastian.

    He
didn't have time to react before the grip on his arm relaxed and a slap across
the face left his cheek burning. Solveig burst into tears and threw her arms
around his neck. She was sobbing.

    He
closed his eyes and tears squeezed on to his eyelashes.

    'We're
the ones who have to fight now, Sebastian,' she said.

    Her
hair was in his mouth. Suddenly he remembered what the comic book was called:
The Living Dead.

    He
moved back home.

    During
the night Solveig came into his room. She'd never done that before.

    Although
he had been deep in a dreamless sleep, he woke in a panic with the feeling that
a hand was on his throat, compressing his windpipe. It couldn't be Solveig's
hand, because she was standing in the doorway on the other side of the room.
The light was on in the hallway, and from the bed Solveig was no more than a
silhouette, long hair lying over her narrow shoulders.

    He
tried to slow his breathing and promised himself that he would sleep with the
light on from now on. He still didn't know where he was with Solveig, whether
she blamed him.
If she was on medication.
If she had fully understood the situation.

    'What
are you doing?' he asked her.

    She
didn't reply; she simply stood there. She looked as if she were swaying, as if
a wind were
blowing through the room and she lacked the
strength to fight it. For a moment he thought she was drunk.

    'Mum,'
he said, and he could hear the pleading note in his voice. He hated that voice.
He wanted to get up, stand beside her and feel that he was no longer a
defenceless child. Remind
himself
that he was a good
ten centimetres taller than her now, that he wanted to be less vulnerable.

    'Mum.'

    'You
should know how afraid you look when I look at you,' she said in a voice like
cracked porcelain. 'You're so scared of me, Sebastian. Because you think it was
your fault that Maya went out that night. Because you know that I know you
refused to come home with her, and that was why she died alone in the forest.
You think that you might as well have raped and killed her yourself. It doesn't
matter who struck the final blow. What matters is who set the ball in motion.
That's what you think. That's why you're afraid.'

    He
stared at the silhouette. It appeared to have stopped swaying. The words seemed
to bolster the feeble figure.

    'She
wasn't raped,' he said quietly. 'She fell and hit her head on a stone.'

    'You
don't need to be afraid, but I'll say what I used to say when you were little,
Sebastian,' the silhouette continued, turning slowly towards the hallway so
that, for a moment, he could see his mother's profile, her weak chin. 'You have
to confess, not deny everything. It's when you deny everything that I get
angry. You don't want me to be angry, do you? Remember, you're all I have now.
We have to stick together, you and me.'

    The
voice died away as she closed the door of her bedroom. Sebastian switched on
the bedside lamp and concentrated hard on the fish-shaped rug, trying to
breathe evenly. An indefinite amount of time passed before he became aware of
the ticking of the alarm clock.

    A
realisation of what the choking hand around his throat had wanted from him
began to take shape. He welcomed the feeling of strength as the idea came
closer and grew in power.

    The
fish rug had slipped to one side to reveal the stain on the lino, just the same
size as the one by the bed in Rydboholm. It struck him that this was very
strange, and it was probably the sign he had been waiting for.

    What
came first, the rug or the stain?
he
chanted to
himself until his heart stopped pounding in his chest.
What came first, the
chicken or the egg, the rug or the stain?

    When
he could see clearly once again he had decided to open himself up to other
signs. In order to do this he must get to the hospital.

    He
dressed as quickly as possible, crept out into the hallway and pulled on his
shoes and jacket. The door to Solveig's room was closed, but a strip of light
was showing underneath. He listened intently, but couldn't decide whether his
mother was fast asleep or whether the ragged breathing was his own; he had no
control over his body in this apartment.

    As
soon as he got outside his heart slowed to its regular beat. When he was
surrounded by the neon lights of the empty city streets, he stopped running and
spat the taste of blood out of his mouth.

    Nobody
keeps watch over a person who is brain dead; it was as he had thought.

    Nothing
anyone could do would make any difference,
he chanted,
so why keep
watch?

    Maya
was lying alone in her room, surrounded by all the apparatus keeping her alive.
A yellowing nightlight was burning for the benefit of relatives, or perhaps for
the nurse on night duty, who would presumably do her rounds sooner or later,
measuring the rhythm of the respirator and checking the monitors that provided
information on how things were going for the living dead.
The Living Dead,

    There
was very little chance that the night nurse would turn up during the next
half-hour. And in half an hour he would be out of there.

    Sebastian
lifted the limp hand from the blanket and was surprised at how warm it was, at
the fact that medical science was so successful at keeping the body alive by
artificial means. No doubt they were proud of themselves, the doctors who had
run all these tubes through his sister's body.

    They
knew nothing.

    
Nothing of the borderland between life and death, nothing of
restless fear and rootlessness.
Nothing of never coming in to land, of
having lost your right to this world without being able to enter the next,
because others had arbitrarily bound your hands and feet to prevent you from
letting go, from being set free.

    According
to the comic, there was one particularly agonising aspect of being in this
borderland, which was to do with the fact that the land of transition was
integrated with the normal world.

    He
thought Maya was whispering the words to him.

    The
people in the borderland, the unfortunates, are invisible but they surround us
all the time - they can see us, but we do not see them. Since there is no way
to see the difference between a normal mortal and the living dead, not even for
the living dead themselves, they live in constant fear of each other.
Rootlessness brings fear. Fear brings angst. Angst brings powerlessness.
Powerlessness brings anger, and the living dead seethe with rage but have
nowhere to direct this rage. They have no one to take out their anger on except
each other, and no fear can be worse than not knowing if, or when, something
terrible is going to happen.

    What
came first, the rug or the stain? Nothing could be worse than this restless
deprivation of a world.

    He
would never be
more sure
that he was doing the right
thing. He wouldn't be able to live with himself if he allowed his pathetic fear
to stand in his way.

    And
his limited preparations turned out to be more than adequate: the whole thing
went much more smoothly than he could have imagined. When the respirator
fell
silent and its final sigh sounded like a farewell, he
replied, 'Goodbye, Maya.' Suddenly he found it easier to breathe.

    Maya
had left the land of transition and entered into the kingdom of the dead.

    2007

    The
cordless phone lay next to her on the bench by the stable wall. She didn't know
how long she'd been listening to the constant beeping that told her the line
was open. She switched it off.

    By
this stage she knew the messages on Christian Tell's answerphone by heart, both
at work and at home. She could, if she wished, by imitating his dark melodic
Gothenburg dialect, produce a pretty good impression.
You have reached
Christian Tell's answerphone. Unfortunately I am not able to take your call…
But it would be just too pathetic to develop that particular talent.

    The
hands holding the telephone - this instrument of torture that had filled her
days of late, emanating malice - had become red and dry from the cold. She
pulled on her gloves, trying to sum up the energy to get up and make a start on
the stable. The box needed mucking out. Lukas needed grooming. The harness
needed oiling.

    
Here
I am again
, she thought. Tears of anger forced their way through her. She
had promised herself that she would never again end up humiliating and
belittling herself like this. When Martin left her she had refused to let the
cottage become a symbol of the fact that they had tried to achieve something
together and failed. Instead she had clung to the idea that this place
symbolised her new life as a strong independent individual.

    The
cottage, the horse, the cat and all the projects that were part of life in the
country placed demands on her, were sufficiently taxing to distract her from
being paralysed by the fear of finding herself alone and unloved, were
sufficiently manageable to enable her to maintain her new-found calm and save
her from going under due to stress and a sense of inadequacy. Even if she had
her low points at regular intervals - often triggered by anxiety over the
increasingly rapid deterioration of the cottage - she was generally happy with
her life.