Let the Old Dreams Die (12 page)

He got up and took a walk around the ship.

No immediate danger.

But he wasn’t convinced. At least the boat had stopped listing, and Lasse’s comments had made Joel feel calmer. He would have a couple of glasses of wine, watch TV for a while, then go to bed. He went into the bathroom and scooped some wine into a jug from the big plastic container. Sometimes he took the trouble to decant the wine into bottles, but he had noticed that it matured almost as well in the container, and he didn’t have to bother fiddling about with a load of empty bottles.

The container was half full. When it was empty he would start a fresh batch, drinking wine from boxes in the meantime. He didn’t have room for two containers side by side in the bathroom. Perhaps he was a bit of an alcoholic; he drank three glasses of wine each evening, but seldom more. Alkie lite.

A person has to have something.

When he lifted the toilet lid to pee, he noticed that the water level in the bowl was low, much lower than usual. He wouldn’t have paid much attention if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was all part of the same problem. There was something wrong with the building. He had a pee anyway, and the flush worked normally. He’d give the company that owned the building a call if it got any worse.

The evening passed in the usual way. He watched a debate about Economic and Monetary Union in the EU, with both sides predicting a disaster if they didn’t get their way. At a quarter to ten he rang Anita, but there was no reply. Perhaps she’d gone away on a course or something. He thought about using his key and going downstairs to sleep in her apartment, but decided against it. It wasn’t a lasting solution.

When he did get to bed, he lay tossing and turning for a long time. Thought he could hear mice scrabbling and scuttling through the pipes. Or maybe it was the building creaking as it bent down further towards the ground.

The first thing he did when he woke up in the morning was to go into the kitchen and check the spirit level. Unfortunately he had forgotten to make a mark, but still, he was more or less certain that the bubble had moved towards the window. The feeling in his stomach told him the same thing: the tilt had got worse. He couldn’t manage any breakfast before he went to work.

When he reached the spot where he had spoken to the man with the earphones, he turned around and studied the building. At first he thought nothing had changed: the top intersected with the building next door in the same place. Or did it?

Hang on a minute…

It wasn’t that the angle had increased; it had
changed.
The sides of the buildings no longer formed an upside down V, but rather an extended D or a bow, with his own block forming the bow and the other the string. The top had been pushed back towards its original position, while the middle now bellied out towards the west. If you measured with a plumb line now, you wouldn’t notice anything.

From the point of view of balance, it was no doubt better, but… there was something deeply unsettling about a structure made of concrete and steel behaving as if it were made of rubber. Particularly when you lived in it.

He took the subway to Vällingby and managed to suppress his worries during the day. After all, Lasse had said there were often problems in blocks like his; perhaps fluctuations in the angle of inclination were part of the normal pattern.

The only time the anxiety pushed its way through was when a customer came in to buy a reinforcing bar for a tool shed he was
building at his summer cottage. The customer weighed the bar in his hand, his expression sceptical.

‘Will this really be strong enough?’ he asked.

‘Definitely,’ Joel replied.

The customer did a quick sketch on a piece of paper to show what he was planning to do.

‘You see what I mean? All the weight will be resting on the bar from directly above.’

Joel hesitated briefly, then went to check the product catalogue just to be on the safe side. As he ran his finger over the figures showing the strength of the various dimensions, he thought:
I wouldn’t have done this yesterday. Yesterday I would just have guaranteed that it would hold.

He showed the figures to the customer.

‘It will tolerate a load of three tonnes. If you’re planning on putting a Sherman tank in the shed it might not hold, but otherwise…’

The customer laughed, shook his head.

‘No, it’s just the lawn mower, that kind of thing.’

‘In that case it’ll be strong enough, no problem.’

When the customer had left Joel stood at the counter looking at the columns of impressive figures. The strongest flat bars they sold would bear seven tonnes. They were as thick as a broom handle.

How much does an apartment block weigh?

He had been out a couple of times to look at projects Lasse was working on. It was fascinating to think that the steel structure that looked so fragile from a distance would carry the lives and walls of hundreds of people, but you could hardly get both arms around those girders, and they were arranged in a self-bearing triangular system.

Lasse had pointed to the crane that was as tall as the building they were constructing, and said, ‘Buildings are nothing. But the crane—now
there’s
the miracle! Just thin metal struts, as if it
were made out of your matchsticks. If it was built in rectangles, it wouldn’t even be able to lift an elephant. It would collapse. But the triangles…everything presses on everything else, so all the weight goes down into the ground. Unbelievable. It’s hardly surprising that Pythagoras was religious.’

Joel closed the catalogue and thought about the World Trade Center. The buildings hadn’t collapsed, they hadn’t even bent after the planes crashed into them. It was the fire that had done for them. The power that was needed to bring down a tall building.

He finished work at three and caught the subway home. He wasn’t keen on going back to his apartment, so instead he went up the steps leading to the square, intending to go to the pizzeria, have a couple of beers and read the papers. He had hardly got through the door before Berra shot up from his table, holding out his hand. Joel took it, shaking his head enquiringly.

‘Congratulations,’ said Berra. ‘You’re three thousand kronor richer. Three thousand two hundred and sixty-one, to be precise.’

‘We won?’

‘We certainly did. Six right, thirteen thousand and forty-four kronor. Come and sit down.’

Joel sat down with the regulars and ordered a beer. They were all a bit bleary-eyed, having started the celebrations a couple of hours earlier. The winning coupon was in the place of honour in the middle of the table. Joel got his beer, took a swig and looked at the coupon where certain numbers were circled.

‘Was it…Black Riddle?’ he asked.

‘Oh no,’ said Berra. ‘That bag of bones bolted after two hundred metres and was disqualified. If we’d gone with Morgan’s nag we’d have had four hundred and twenty thousand between us.’

Joel looked at Morgan, who pulled a face, finished off his beer and stood up. Despite the fact that he was in his sixties he was
wearing a denim jacket over a Hawaiian shirt. His thinning hair was slicked back with something that was presumably Brylcreem. He picked up a battered cowboy hat from the back of his chair and plonked it on his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of this. Hard to celebrate three thousand when it could have been a hundred.’

‘Don’t be like that,’ said Berra.

‘I tried, I tried,’ said Morgan, pointing to his empty glass. ‘I just can’t bring myself to feel really happy. Sorry. See you.’

He went out and headed across the square with his hands pushed deep in his pockets.

‘The thing is,’ said Berra by way of explanation, ‘life hasn’t been all that easy for Morgan. Cheers, Joel.’

Joel stayed for an hour, chatting to Berra and Östen who both, unlike Morgan, regarded Joel as a lucky mascot. They hadn’t won anything for over a year; along came Joel, and hey presto—their biggest win since they started picking numbers together. He was welcome to join them in future, as long as he left the actual selection to them.

‘That Black Riddle,’ said Berra. ‘It’s practically a hamburger factory on legs.’

Joel didn’t really think he should have a share of the winnings; he suggested they should just give him back his hundred kronor, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They had already collected the money and Berra counted out Joel’s share on the table, down to the last krona.

They parted with slightly drunken protestations of friendship. The beer swilling gently around their stomachs, the comforting sense of companionship and the lingering feeling of happiness made Joel less than keen to deal with the Problem, and he didn’t even look up as he walked down the hill. The apartment block was still there, anyway.

He rang Anita’s doorbell, and when no one answered he pushed
open the letterbox and peered in. There were letters and junk mail lying on the floor behind the door. He took out her key and stood there deliberating for a moment. Anita worked part time as a cleaner down at the hospital, and…a course? What kind of bloody course would she be on? New cleaning products?

But still he put the key back in his pocket. He only had it for safekeeping, really. Just in case she locked herself out. He had no right to come and go in her apartment as he wished. He stood motionless outside her door, listening.

It might have been his imagination, but he thought the building was…vibrating. His heart rate increased and he had the urge to hurl himself out of the main door before the whole place collapsed on top of him. The moment passed. The block was still standing. He went over to the list of names.

He should have had something to eat at the pizzeria instead of just drinking beer. When he looked at the white plastic letters that were a representation of the apartment block in miniature, he thought they too were tilting, twisting. Sanchez bent down towards Lundin, seeking contact. He placed his hand on the concrete wall. Nothing was moving. And yet it was as if a creeping horror was crawling up his back. He swung around. He felt as if someone was looking at him. As if someone was
here
.

But the hallway was empty. He looked at the list of names again and was seized by a sense of loss. He wished he could speak to these people who were only names, his fellow inhabitants of the village on the hill. If there had been more of them, they could have compared experiences with each other, talked. Formed a village council.

Instead he took the lift up to his apartment, alone. However, when he reached the top floor he decided to defy the taboo that prohibited contact, and rang the bell of Lundberg’s apartment opposite. But no one answered. He could already feel the tilt out here on the landing.

Why doesn’t anybody say anything? Why doesn’t anybody do anything?

For the same reason that he wasn’t saying or doing anything. People didn’t want to seem difficult, awkward. He unlocked his door and made a decision: if Lasse said that what was happening to the building wasn’t normal, he would ring the company that owned it the very next morning. They could say what they liked, he didn’t care.

For once, the very first thing he did was to scoop a couple of glasses of wine out of the container. There was no water in the toilet bowl. When he flushed it water poured in and stayed there. He didn’t need to wait for Lasse’s verdict: there was something wrong here, and it needed sorting out.

He was number twelve in the queue when he rang the company. After ten minutes he had reached number eleven, and hung up. No doubt people all over the building were on the phone right now, hence the queue. The problem would be sorted.

He couldn’t shake off the feeling that had come over him downstairs, the feeling that he was being watched. It wasn’t until he had drunk the wine that he started to chill out and stop worrying. He lay down on the sofa and felt the movements of the building, which might well have existed only inside his own head.

At a quarter past seven the doorbell rang; Lasse was standing outside with a DVD in his hand.

‘Evening,’ he said, and gave a start when he saw Joel. ‘How are you?’

‘Not too bad,’ said Joel, running a hand over his face. ‘Did you bring some of your…kit?’

‘Sure. Left it downstairs. I see what you mean.’

‘The building’s listing?’

‘Yes. I mean, there’s nothing to worry about. But it does seem
quite pronounced. Shall we have a look at it straightaway?’

They went down in the lift and Joel felt as if he was moving through a sloping shaft. Lasse took up virtually no room. He wasn’t a rough builder with hairy armpits, but the small sinewy type. He said, ‘As I mentioned before, it’s nothing unusual, but I thought you said it was listing towards the east. It just seemed to me to be more… well, bowed.’

‘It was listing yesterday.’

Lasse looked at him and grinned. ‘Maybe tomorrow it will have turned around.’

Joel didn’t crack a smile. ‘Yesterday it was listing, and today it’s bowed.’

‘Yes, yes,’ said Lasse in a tone of voice that suggested Joel’s judgment might not be entirely reliable.

They went outside and Lasse mounted a theodolite on a stand; it was calibrated by turning small wheels.

‘We’ve got digital versions nowadays, but I prefer these.’ He patted the theodolite and looked through the lens. Joel kept his eyes fixed on the façade of the apartment block. Windows in darkness, windows with the lights on. They were trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t grasp it. Anita’s apartment was still in darkness.

Lasse puffed and turned the wheels. He took a step away from the theodolite, stood beside Joel and looked at the apartment block.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s quite something. It’s like a bow. Incredible. As I said before: the building isn’t about to fall down, it’s a long way from that, but I think you should be prepared to move out quite soon. This will have to be sorted out, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they have to knock the whole lot down. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

Windows in darkness, windows with the lights on. What does it mean?