Let the Old Dreams Die (43 page)

‘Look, I don’t know…’

‘What don’t you know?’

‘If I want to do it. Again. I just thought it was so…unpleasant.’

There was silence at the other end of the line. Kalle could picture his father chewing over his disappointment once again. Then it came: ‘Let’s say double, then. Six hundred. An hour.’

‘That’s…extremely well paid.’

‘Yes.’

‘What is it you want me to do?’

Kalle was to be outside the big community centre inside the compound at seven o’clock. If he showed his ID at the gate, he would be admitted.

‘…and Karl, a slightly pleasanter tone on this occasion would be greatly appreciated.’

‘Mm. Just one question: What’s your involvement in all this?’

A brief pause. Then his father replied, ‘I think the conditions that apply to this job have been explained to you—isn’t that correct?’

They hung up. Kalle turned to Roland. ‘Can I borrow the van again tonight? To go out to the Heath?’

‘Sure. What is it you’re moving?’

‘Just some stuff.’

Back home in his apartment Kalle wandered around like a cat on hot bricks, waiting for the phone to ring. From time to time he picked it up and carried it around with him for a while. It was so small in his big hand, ridiculously small. All his fingers had to do was press the numbers in the right order, and it would be done.

All
his fingers had to do. He had let himself be seduced by a special offer, and had ended up with a phone with such tiny buttons that he had to use his little finger to key in a number, and even then it was often wrong. Texting was out of the question.

He started to key in the number. Got it wrong. Deleted it. Put the phone down.

Why am I so nervous?

Presumably for the same reason he hadn’t wanted to talk to Roland about Flora. This was serious.

Kalle closed his eyes and pressed his mobile to his heart.

Come on, ring. Buzz. Do something.

Kalle had got together with Emilie when he was fifteen. Her home and her family had been his refuge from Sture and the silence in the big house in Djursholm, and later a sanctuary of comparative orderliness when he started moving around, staying for a while with a series of friends.

It wasn’t until he was twenty-one and renting his own apartment in Rinkeby that he realised what his relationship with Emilie had come to mean to him. Refuge. Sanctuary. And now he had his own. As for Emilie, she had started her university course and was tired of Kalle’s lack of ambition. They parted as friends, as the saying goes, in spite of the fact that they actually had nothing to say to one another, and therefore weren’t friends at all. But still. No bitterness, no recriminations.

Since then Kalle had had a couple of short-term relationships, but in the small hours when he sat alone gazing blankly at Jay Leno or
Sex and the City
, he acknowledged the truth: he had never experienced love. Therefore, the very idea terrified him.

He put some pasta on to cook, made a simple tomato sauce with fresh basil, and ate while watching an episode of
Beverly Hills
. Then he fiddled with the Portastudio for a while until it was time to leave. Funkface were putting together a demo, and a couple of the tracks would sound better with a slightly more pop beat. He couldn’t find anything.

The security guard on the gate examined Kalle’s ID closely as if to underline his disapproval of Kalle’s presence, then let him through. There was still a scrap of daylight left in the sky and the buildings didn’t look as unpleasant as on the previous evening. Rather it was as if a great sorrow was held within the walls. Something that had never quite come to pass; something that had been too late a long time ago.

It wasn’t easy to find the way. Signs showing contradictory numbers reinforced the impression that he was in a place that was no more than a maze, a labyrinth leading inwards towards an empty centre. He thought he caught a glimpse of faces at some of the windows.

He gave up trying to remember the route and instead allowed himself to be guided by the strength of the hum of others’ thoughts.
Eventually he turned into the right area and without understanding how, he knew that one of the guards was the same as the previous day. The one with the tree falling into the water. Right now the man was thinking of clouds changing shape.

Kalle stopped and got out of the van. The guards who came towards him were carrying a more up-to-date version of the submachine gun he had used during his military service. They checked his ID, looked closely at his face and ransacked his brain.

The man with the clouds (he was still thinking about clouds while he was talking, and Kalle didn’t understand how he could do it) pointed at the doors and said, ‘You gather up everything in the entrance and pack it away. That’s it. OK?’

Kalle nodded, and they let him pass.

The items to be moved had been placed in a small foyer with a pair of double doors leading further into the building. There were a couple of metal hospital beds, some drip stands and a number of boxes. The lids were not sealed, and Kalle peered inside one of the boxes. He saw a large quantity of one-litre bags containing a clear liquid. He looked at the labels: glucose 10%, sodium chloride 3%. Sugar and salt, as far as he could tell. He set to work.

When he had carried out everything except the drip stands and came back for the last time to fetch them, he stopped for a moment to catch his breath. He had already begun to learn how to control the intrusive alien thoughts. He played the drums. As soon as another voice, another series of images started to take over, he laid a beat over the top of them and played it until they fell silent.

There was a small gap between the double doors leading to the next room. He walked over to it.

To have been here and not—

He put down a beat over his own thought. A bossa nova, gently seductive, which he increased in pitch and volume until it filled his head. Hopefully his own thoughts could no longer be heard. He
widened the gap and looked in.

It looked like a gigantic classroom. Rows of long benches were laid out at regular intervals, and at each bench a number of people sat doing something with metal objects. Next to each person was a drip stand, with two tubes leading down into the person’s arm.

People? But they’re dead—

Quickly Kalle tried to recapture the bossa rhythm, but the impression he had just received was too powerful, and forced its way up to the surface. The people sitting at the benches were dead. Empty eyes or no eyes at all, dried-up flesh, bony fingers moving over the metal objects. Kalle couldn’t see what they were doing, but he had no time to ponder the issue because the door behind him opened and the guard walked in. Kalle backed away from the double doors, and the guard grabbed him by the shoulder.

‘You just couldn’t help yourself, could you?’

Kalle didn’t speak. The guard snorted and waved a hand in the direction of the drip stands. ‘Get those out of here.’

Kalle gathered up the stands with the guard’s eyes burning into his back and his clouds floating through his head. He felt sick, and couldn’t manage to come up with a rhythm to hide the fact. When he had finished loading the van and walked around to the driver’s door, the guard came over to him.

‘Listen. It’s fine. But you’re a part of this now. With all that entails. Just so you know.’

Kalle nodded, knowing nothing about what anything entailed. He just wanted to get out of there. When the guard looked away Kalle got in the van and drove off as quickly as he dared. Somehow he managed to find the basement and unload the stuff. With a lump in his throat caused by either nausea or tears, he drove out of the compound and stopped in the same place where he had met Flora.

His thoughts were his own once more, but he didn’t want them. He’d never seen a dead person before. Now he’d seen hundreds.
Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad had it not been for the intense sorrow and impotence that poured wordlessly, blankly from the dead bodies.

This is hell.

Kalle switched off the engine and lay down across the seats. He tried to fight it, but the darkness was pumping through his body, a paralysis that began in his hands and spread inwards until he was incapable of moving. Everything was darkness, and his body was a part of it.

The memories came back to him. The man who had turned up at school and asked Kalle to accompany him to the headmaster’s office. The head and the school counsellor were sitting there. The counsellor asked Kalle to sit down next to her. Then she took his hand, and Kalle knew he didn’t want to hear what she was going to tell him.

An accident. Your mother has been involved in an accident. On the subway.

It wasn’t until a year later that he found out from Sture what had actually happened. She had simply positioned herself in the middle of the track and waited, staring into the big eyes as they came closer. Kalle could see it in his mind’s eye, all too clearly. He could see the body being hurled backwards a few metres before it ended up underneath the train. His mum. Mush. She must have turned into mush.

Kalle forced some feeling into his fingers, clenched his fists and hit himself on the chest, hard. Hit the black heart, and the pain unlocked the paralysis. He sat up and thumped his thighs, chest, head, drumming pain into his body. He was moving, he was in pain, he had a body. He was alive, and he just kept drumming.

His phone rang. His hands stopped in mid-air and he stared at the phone. Heard the sound, couldn’t work out what it meant, his thoughts were somewhere else. It rang again.

Telephone. Answer.

He picked it up in one aching hand and managed to hit the reply button.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, it’s Flora. Do you remember me?’

Kalle blinked and looked out through the windscreen. Far away he could see the lights shining in the windows of tower blocks, the glow of the city spread across the sky. He opened his mouth to say something, but he didn’t know what it was.

‘Hello? Are you there?’

‘Yes. Hi. Sorry. I was…hi.’

A brief pause. Then Flora asked, ‘Are you upset?’

Kalle inhaled deeply, then let the air out.

‘Yes. But I’m…a bit better now.’

‘Do you want to come over?’

‘To your place?’

‘Yes.’

If a bomb fell on your house and it collapsed. If another bomb fell a couple of minutes later and rebuilt the house. You’d probably end up just standing there for a while, pondering over the incomprehensibility of life. Kalle was fumbling. He felt like a idiot, heard his previous responses replaying in his head, but there was nothing he could do. The words just wouldn’t come to him.

‘If you want to,’ said Flora. ‘If you’ve got time.’

‘Listen, I’m just…’ said Kalle. ‘I’m starting the van now and I’ll be there in five minutes. OK?’

‘OK. Great.’

Kalle put down the phone. He’d said he was going to start the van. He started the van. He set off across the field. He was so used to driving that it was automatic. He headed for the lights in the distance.

When he parked outside Flora’s apartment block he was more or less back in his body. He got out, locked the van, then stood for a
while taking in the facades, the many windows around him.

So many people…

That there should be someone among all these people, that their paths should happen to cross and that now, among all these windows, he would know that…
There. That window. Behind that window, nowhere else.

Kalle ran his hands over his face and shook his head.

Calm down. You’re just making all this up. You’ve met a girl who seems nice, OK. Now you’re going to go up and see her, have a chat. Take it easy.

But he couldn’t help it; the highs and lows of the past half hour were like some reality-enhancing drug. Everything seemed so beautiful: the lights in the windows, all the people with their lives and their hearts pottering about doing little tasks almost reduced him to tears.

He went inside and realised he didn’t know which floor she lived on, or what her surname was. He was just taking out his wallet so that he could find her number and phone her when a door opened on the ground floor and Flora looked out.

‘Hi.’

Kalle waved his wallet. ‘I didn’t know where you lived, I thought I’d just—’

‘I live here.’

‘Yes. Right.’

Flora went back in and Kalle followed her. It was as if everything was happening five seconds in the future, and he couldn’t keep up. Once he was inside the apartment and had taken off his shoes, he said, ‘Listen, you’ll have to forgive me, but I’m completely out of it. I’ve been waiting all day for you to ring me and now you have and I’m just…I’ll pull myself together.’

Flora walked around him and closed the door.

‘What’s happened?’

‘It’s that place. It makes me feel really ill.’

Flora nodded and led the way into the kitchen. The apartment was sparsely furnished; things were there to fulfil a function, not because they had been chosen specially to fit in a particular spot.

In the kitchen there was a table with two chairs of one kind, two of another. A rag rug on the floor and an illuminated Christmas star in the window, even though it was September. Kalle sat down and pointed at the star.

‘Are you early or late?’

Flora laughed and Kalle realised it was the first sensible thing he’d said since she rang.

‘I just wanted a lamp, and it…was there. We haven’t got much money.’

‘We?’

‘A friend and I share the rent. Can I get you anything?’

‘What have you got?’

‘Beer. Tea.’ Flora was staring at him; he probably looked like something the cat had played with for a while then left to its fate. ‘How about a beer?’

Kalle gestured in the direction of the window. ‘I’m in the van.’

‘Well, you could walk home. Or stay.’

Kalle no longer felt as if things were happening five seconds in the future. More like a couple of hours. He looked down at the table, patted it as if he were checking what it was made of.

‘Beer would be good.’