The Final Word (31 page)

‘You killed a boy and got away with it. People don’t forget something like that. Maj-Lis never shopped at Konsum again – did you know that? She and Birger used to drive to the ICA store in Flen, right up until she died, because they couldn’t bear seeing me behind the till. Have you any idea how that made me feel?’

Anger gave way to darkness, swirling round Annika’s head.
Not at all dangerous, just go with it.

‘Mum,’ she said, ‘I’m really sorry about what happened.’

‘Are you?’ Barbro lit another cigarette. ‘You’ve never apologized to me,’ she said.

Annika let the darkness come, embracing her from all
sides, making its way in through her mouth and nostrils. Strangely, she could still talk. ‘Are you really the one I should be apologizing to?’

‘Yes, because you never spoke to Sven’s parents. You never had the decency to do that.’

Annika closed her eyes and let the darkness win. That was true. She hadn’t apologized to Maj-Lis and Birger. She’d never dared to imagine doing so. She had been weak and evasive, taking refuge in shadows and work.

She heard Steven come into the kitchen.

‘Has Diny eaten?’

She opened her eyes. She could still breathe. Steven was standing in the doorway with his daughter on his arm.

‘Sausage and macaroni,’ Barbro said, as she took her glass to the fridge. She filled it from a three-litre wine-box.

Annika stood up. ‘I’ve got to go,’ she said.

‘Yes. Your job’s more important than everything else,’ Barbro said.

Infinite weariness washed over Annika. ‘The newspaper’s being shut down,’ she said. ‘It was made public this morning. I’ll be out of work in a few months’ time.’

Her mother took a slurp from the glass and looked at her, her eyes less harsh now. ‘Life’s catching up with you,’ she said, ‘the way it does with everyone.’

Annika pushed past Steven to escape, get out, away, but by the shoe-rack she stopped and stood there, staring at the letterbox. She put her sandals on, then went back
to the kitchen. She looked at her mother, her sad eyes, tired hands. ‘It doesn’t matter how much I apologize to you,’ she said. ‘I can never make up for what I’ve done to you, but I’m going to try.’

A flicker of uncertainty crossed her mother’s face.

‘I apologize for being born,’ Annika said. ‘I didn’t mean to be.’

Then she left, stumbling over the rag-rug towards the daylight, out of the flat.

Once she was back in the car, she wept.

She could have clenched her teeth and held it in, as she usually did, just switch off and move on, leave it all behind, but she decided not to struggle. She sat in the stuffy car and let the pain come, until it misted the windows and she had no energy left.

What would happen when her mother died? Annika had been mourning her all her life: would her death make any difference? She didn’t know.

There was now lightning down to the south-west, towards Julita. She couldn’t hear any thunder yet, but it would be there soon enough. There was tension in the air, and it needed release.

She started the car, wound down the window, drove to the junction, then turned left.

Slowly she drove towards Tallsjön, the beach she hadn’t visited for over twenty years.

She stopped beside the turning, two wheels on the verge. She switched the engine off and listened to her
heartbeat. Then she looked, eyes wide open, at the place where her father had died.

The tarmac didn’t quite cover the whole of the carriageway, and was ragged and sandy at the edges. There were weeds growing right up to the road, their leaves dark and motionless in the peculiar light. There was nothing to indicate what had happened there. It was just a patch of road, a turning, like thousands of others, yet her pulse was still hammering, like a turbine, right through her body.

They said he didn’t suffer.

Freezing to death was a painless way to die.

He had tried to get into the old inn, Värdshuset – it was still open in those days – but they hadn’t let him in. He was too drunk.

He didn’t actually drink that much. Not before the big cutbacks started, anyway. Hasse Bengtzon was the union representative at the works, the man who had led negotiations with the owners about who should lose their jobs and who should stay. He had fought like a tiger for his co-workers, was interviewed in the papers and on local television about the owners’ heartless policies. They wanted to close the site down and sell the machinery to Vietnam, sucking every last drop out of it at the expense of their own decency.

He had taken off his coat and boots. A man delivering newspapers found him, sitting in a snowdrift with an almost empty vodka bottle in his hand.

Annika didn’t believe there was any such thing as a
painless death. She took a deep breath, let her pain blaze in her chest. Oddly, she didn’t cry. Maybe she had done all her grieving without realizing it.

The lightning was coming closer and she could hear the first rumbles of thunder.

She started the car, put it into reverse, listened to the wheels crunching on the gravel, then drove off towards the railway.

Birger Matsson still lived in the house on Källstigen where Sven and his elder brother, Albin, had grown up: a hundred-year-old wooden house that had been renovated beyond all recognition in the sixties, with big picture windows and cladding. The garden was dominated by a large garage with metal doors, while the house itself was tucked in beside a small hill at the edge of the forest.

Annika parked in front of one of the garage doors and pulled on the handbrake. She didn’t know if Birger was at home, but if he was, he would already have seen her.

Slowly she got out of the car and hung her bag on her shoulder.

She used to walk past here in her tightest jeans, hoping Sven would see her. He did, as it turned out. Annika was still a teenager when they’d got together. And they’d stayed together until his death.

She walked towards the house, feeling as if she was going to her own funeral. Discomfort was gnawing at her hands and stomach, and she was finding it hard to breathe.
At least a four
.

Her index finger shook as she rang the doorbell.

Birger opened the door at once. He had seen her coming. He towered above her, tall and skinny, his shock of white hair like a sail on top of his head. ‘Annika?’ he said. ‘Is that you?’ He sounded bemused, almost perplexed.

‘Sorry to turn up unannounced.’

He scratched his head with one hand, the way she remembered him doing, although in those days his hair was still steely grey. ‘Don’t worry, not a problem,’ he said.

‘I’d like . . . I’d like to talk to you,’ she said.

He took a step back, at something of a loss. ‘Of course. Come in.’

‘Thanks,’ she said.

He turned and went into the living room, his cardigan flapping around his thin frame. A commentator was babbling enthusiastically in German on the television. Annika stepped into the hall, took off her sandals, dropped her bag on to the floor and followed him.

They had bought a new sofa since she was last there. An Ektorp, from Ikea.

Birger sat on one of two new armchairs, reached to get the remote from a side-table and switched the television off, but not before Annika had caught a glimpse of a tennis match. Birger was very keen on sport, active in the indoor hockey club and the orienteering group, and he had passed on his interest to both his sons. Sven had been a star of the hockey team and, the last she’d heard, Albin
was working as the assistant coach of an ice-hockey team in the Swedish Hockey League. Modo, maybe, or was it Frölunda?

A heavy silence settled over the room. Birger sat with the remote in his hand and gazed at her. He seemed to have pulled himself together: the look in his eyes was clear but watchful. ‘Please, have a seat,’ he said.

She sat in the armchair on the other side of the coffee-table. Her mouth felt dry as dust.

‘I don’t know how I managed to subscribe to German Eurosport,’ he said, nodding towards the television. ‘As luck would have it, I studied German at grammar school, because the contract’s for two years.’

She tried to smile.

He put the remote down.

‘I can understand if you’d like me to go,’ Annika said. The roaring in her head was so loud that she almost couldn’t hear herself speak.

The old man stared at her, and she made an effort not to look away, and to confront what she had done.

‘It’s okay, you can stay,’ he said.

She took several deep breaths through her mouth. ‘I’ve come to . . . to talk about what happened,’ she said.

He folded his hands in his lap.

‘To hear how it was for you and . . .’ She could feel tears burning in her eyes.

She had never talked much to Birger when she and Sven were together. Maj-Lis was the one who had organized
the family. Birger was often away at club meetings, or off training in the forest. One year he’d come third in the Swedish national veterans’ tournament. She remembered him as being quiet and difficult to reach.

‘I’ve thought about you a lot over the years,’ Birger said.

She steeled herself. She wasn’t going to duck the issue. Doing that would mean she hadn’t moved on: she would still be stuck, trying to escape the swirling darkness. ‘I never thought about you,’ she said. ‘Almost never, anyway. And as soon as I did, I forced myself to do something else.’

The old man turned to the window. Then he nodded. ‘We thought about contacting you, but we always came up with the excuse that you probably didn’t want us to. It was cowardly of us. We should have asked.’

Annika’s head was howling. She clasped her hands together and forced herself to listen to what he was saying. She went on, ‘I’ve been avoiding lots of things. I stopped off at the turning to Tallsjön on my way here. I haven’t done that since . . . well, since Dad died there.’

‘That was a real tragedy,’ Birger said, ‘what happened to Hasse. We weren’t friends, exactly, but we did work together.’

Annika felt air fill her lungs. Birger had been one of the managers at the works. He’d left school with good grades. He’d stayed at the ironworks until the end, when he’d retired.

‘Hasse was a good worker,’ Birger said, ‘one of the best. It was a shame he never wanted to be a foreman.’

She was taken aback. ‘A foreman? Dad?’

‘Mind you, he was doing a good job for the union, I can’t deny that. He was an excellent negotiator, combative but good at formulating arguments. If the times had been different he would have gone a long way.’

‘Is that true? Was he really offered the chance to be a foreman?’

‘He turned it down, said it wasn’t for him. He was one of the workers, that’s how he saw himself.’

‘But,’ Annika said, ‘could he have stayed on at the works? After the cutbacks?’

‘Of course. We needed good people in charge. But I respected his position, choosing to remain one of the collective. It was an honourable decision.’

Her father could have gone on working, needn’t have taken to drink.

A flash of lightning lit the room, and there was a distant rumble of thunder.

‘So how can I help you, then?’ Birger asked.

Annika tucked her hair nervously behind her ear. ‘I’ve come to apologize,’ she said.

Birger looked down. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘But you don’t have to.’

Calm breaths, in and out,
not dangerous
. ‘I’m so sorry about what happened. I understand how badly I hurt you. I’ve got children of my own, a boy called Kalle. If anyone hurt him I’d never forgive them.’

Birger rubbed his face in a weary gesture of resignation. ‘I don’t think you understand,’ he said. ‘We didn’t attend the trial, but that wasn’t to distance ourselves from you.’

She waited for him to go on.

‘We thought it would seem as if we were condoning what Sven had done if we went to see you sitting in the dock, and we didn’t want that. It felt wrong. We had failed so horribly . . . Maybe
we
should have been the ones sitting there.’ He glanced at her, as if to make sure she was listening. ‘What sort of mistakes must someone have made as a parent if their son turns out to be a monster? It’s difficult to accept. Sven died twice – as the person he had become, and the person I’d thought he was.’ He shook his head. ‘It wasn’t until afterwards that we saw how our actions could be interpreted. That our not going to court was seen in town as a judgement on you, a lack of faith in the legal system, but that wasn’t the case.’

‘You realized
before
. . . what he was like?’ Annika asked.

Birger shook his head. ‘Well, the thought certainly crossed my mind. I mean, I saw the bruises. But I couldn’t believe it. I might have had my suspicions, but I didn’t want to see. And I did nothing. That shame is something I have to live with.’

She had to wipe her nose.

‘Do you know,’ Birger said, ‘why he ended up like that?’

She shook her head.

‘It was only when we read the verdict that we understood the extent of what you’d gone through. Why didn’t you ever say anything?’

A five now, maybe a six.
‘I thought it was all my fault,’ she managed.

‘It wasn’t. Not the way you were treated.’

‘But it was my fault he died.’

‘Maybe not even that.’

‘I didn’t have to hit him so hard.’

‘It was an accident,’ Birger said.

She forced herself to look him in the eye. ‘But what if it wasn’t? What if I wanted him to die?’

‘Wishing someone dead is one thing,’ he said. ‘Most of us do that at some point.’

‘But if I really hit him and hoped he’d never get up again?’

The silence sucked all the oxygen from the room. Birger rubbed his eyes with one hand. She could barely breathe at all now.
A seven, maybe more
.

‘Then you’ll have to live with that,’ he said.

An eight. Hard to breathe.

Out in the hall her mobile rang, the sound bouncing off the walls.

‘Aren’t you going to . . .?’ Birger began.

‘It’ll stop in a moment,’ Annika said.

The silence afterwards made the air feel even thicker.

Birger cleared his throat. ‘I read everything you write,’ he said. ‘You’ve covered some terrible stories.’ He
nodded towards the bookcase. ‘Maj-Lis saved all your articles in a scrapbook – it’s in a drawer somewhere. I did plan to carry on after she died, but that never happened.’