Inertia, p.1
Inertia, page 1
Contents
Prologue: Manfred
Part I: The Escape
Chapter 1: Samuel
Chapter 2: Pernilla
Chapter 3: Manfred
Chapter 4: Samuel
Chapter 5: Manfred
Chapter 6: Pernilla
Chapter 7: Manfred
Chapter 8: Samuel
Chapter 9: Pernilla
Chapter 10: Manfred
Chapter 11: Samuel
Chapter 12: Pernilla
Chapter 13: Manfred
Part II: The Storm
Chapter 14: Samuel
Chapter 15: Pernilla
Chapter 16: Manfred
Chapter 17: Samuel
Chapter 18: Pernilla
Chapter 19: Manfred
Chapter 20: Samuel
Chapter 21: Pernilla
Chapter 22: Manfred
Part III: Descent
Chapter 23: Samuel
Chapter 24: Pernilla
Chapter 25: Manfred
Chapter 26: Samuel
Chapter 27: Pernilla
Chapter 28: Samuel
Chapter 29: Manfred
Chapter 30: Pernilla
Chapter 31: Samuel
Chapter 32: Manfred
Chapter 33: Samuel
Chapter 34: Pernilla
Chapter 35: Manfred
Chapter 36: Pernilla
Chapter 37: Manfred
Chapter 38: Pernilla
Chapter 39: Manfred
Part IV: In the Belly of the Whale
Chapter 40: Samuel
Chapter 41: Pernilla
Chapter 42: Manfred
Chapter 43: Samuel
Part V: In the Valley of the Shadow of Death
Chapter 44: Manfred
Chapter 45: Samuel
Chapter 46: Manfred
Chapter 47: Pernilla
Chapter 48: Samuel
Chapter 49: Manfred
Chapter 50: Samuel
Chapter 51: Pernilla
Chapter 52: Manfred
Chapter 53: Pernilla
Chapter 54: Manfred
Chapter 55: Rachel
Part VI: Atonement
Chapter 56: Manfred
Chapter 57: Pernilla
Chapter 58: Manfred
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
Prologue
Manfred
W
e were an ordinary family. It was a morning like any other.
The kind you don’t expect to remember. One of the many insignificant days you assign no particular weight to, because you think you know that it won’t make much difference to your life. Just another day to deal with, to live through. To cope with and handle, like a form to be filled out and mailed before five o’clock.
Afsaneh got up first to give Nadja a bottle.
I heard her steps: light, tentative almost, as she snuck down the hall into the kitchen. As if she was tiptoeing across thin ice. Then the clatter, the rush of water from the tap and the slight bang as she placed the saucepan on the stove. Finally the rhythmic scratch of metal against metal as she whipped the formula into the water.
From my place in the bed – still warm from Afsaneh’s body – I could hear Nadja whining and coughing from the nursery next door.
The sounds of a very ordinary family: of a woman, my young wife, perhaps too young – there were those who thought so anyway – and of my daughter. And the silence left by my three older children who’d moved out and my ex-wife who left here one spring morning not too different from this one, with a suitcase so heavy she never would have been able to carry it if she hadn’t been so pissed off.
But I didn’t think of any of that at the time, not as I lay there, drowsy from last night’s dreams, in the warmth of the bed. It is only in hindsight that these small events take on weight and become significant.
It’s only afterwards that all the trivialities of a life grow, develop teeth and chase you through the night.
It was just another morning like so many others. In addition, it was Nadja’s third cold in as many weeks and both Afsaneh and I were tired of waking up in the night and soothing our beloved, but defiant, two-year-old.
We joked that Nadja became a baby again when she had a cold. And Afsaneh used to say that I had no one but myself to blame for deciding to start over again with another child and all the rest of it at over fifty.
Afsaneh cracked the door to the bedroom.
She carried Nadja on her hip and as she gently bent her knees and lifted Nadja to get a better grip, her robe slipped open baring one of her breasts, those beautiful breasts that had become mine against all odds.
She asked if I could stay home with the baby today, and I explained I had to go in to the station for a bit.
The station was police headquarters on Kungsholmen in Stockholm. The place I’ve worked for more than twenty years, the equivalent of my job, the salt mines. The place where I investigate murders and other serious crimes. Where I dealt with the very worst sides of humanity, the repulsive variants of human behaviour that the rest of the population needn’t concern themselves with.
How could I think it was so important?
Let them kill each other, I think. Let them rape and beat each other. Let the drugs flood in and the suburbs burn like fireworks in the night. Just leave me out of all that bullshit.
I remember Afsaneh frowning when I said I had to work. She reminded me that it was Ascension Day, a bank holiday, and asked what I had to do that was so important. Then she patiently explained she’d promised to meet with one of her doctoral students, which she’d already mentioned to me twice during dinner last night.
We went on like that for a while.
We squabbled about who would stay home, as if that were important at all. We squabbled in that unreflecting, tiresome way I imagine most families do on perfectly ordinary mornings in a safe and prosperous country like Sweden.
After Afsaneh had gone off to meet her doctoral student, and Nadja was lying next to me in our wide bed, pressing her little runny nose against my cheek, it felt pretty good after all. Why did I need to go to the station today? The dead could wait until tomorrow, and most of my colleagues were off anyway.
I don’t remember precisely, but I think I probably spent the morning tidying up the apartment. My knee was aching so badly, so I took a couple of Naproxen. Maybe I snuck in a couple of cigarettes under the extractor fan too. Nadja watched TV, and I had to turn up the volume to offset the noise from the roadworks outside on Karlavägen.
My elder daughter, Alba, called from Paris and asked to borrow money. I explained calmly but firmly that she would have to talk to her mother, because she’d already got an extra 3,000 from me this month. Besides, her siblings, Alexander and Stella, hadn’t received anything at all. And it’s important to be fair, right?
Fair, what a strange concept, in retrospect.
Eventually Nadja tired of the TV. She screamed and screamed, and I carried her around the apartment in a futile attempt to calm her down. Her little body was scalding hot, and I gave her Tylenol, even though Afsaneh didn’t like it when I did that – another thing we often squabbled about. Afsaneh didn’t think young children should take any medication unless they were dying.
Maybe Nadja was soothed by the Tylenol, maybe it was the sandwich I made for her that did the trick. Or maybe it was the roadworks outside the window that finally managed to distract her.
I lifted her up onto the windowsill in the living room, and she stood there for a long time seemingly fascinated by the digger that slowly ate its way into the road three floors below, while she licked butter off her sandwich and snot from her upper lip with her pointed little tongue. We talked about diggers and cars and trucks and motorcycles for a while. About all kinds of vehicles.
Nadja liked anything that had an engine and made a noise – Afsaneh and I had noticed that early on.
It must have been at that point Afsaneh called from the café.
I put a loudly protesting Nadja onto the floor and went out into the hall to talk undisturbed – the noise from the roadworks made the whole apartment vibrate.
Afsaneh asked how Nadja was feeling, and I said that she seemed fine, that she’d eaten a sandwich and it must not be that serious if she was eating and drinking.
Of course, I didn’t mention the Tylenol.
As soon as we hung up, I immediately sensed that something was wrong. It was as if the air had thickened, as if it was pressing against me, a tactile warning of approaching danger. A moment later I realised that I was actually reacting to the absence of something.
It was quiet.
The construction workers had apparently taken a break, and the only thing I heard was my own breath.
I went out into the living room to look for Nadja, but the room was as empty as her bottle, which lay on the floor in the middle of a pool of juice, and the pile of toys she’d dragged out in the morning.
Maybe it was then that my concern awoke, that primitive instinct we all possess, the drive to protect our children from any harm.
Then I was blinded by a ray of sunshine, a sharp streak of light that shouldn’t be there for the simple reason that the living-room windows were in the shade.
I turned towards the light, squinted and looked into the kitchen.
The window stood open, and the sun reflected off the glass.
Suddenly everything became clear to me: Afsaneh had cleaned the kitchen windows yesterday. She must have forgotten
The moment I formulated the question to myself, I knew why: the digger, the goddamn digger.
I ran towards the open window.
I ran because it was the only thing I could do. I ran because you have to, because you have no choice. You cannot let your child fall, die. If there is one thing in life you cannot do it is that.
Everything else you can get away with.
Outside, the sun’s rays played in the sheer green of the trees and below the construction workers stood still, looking up at me with blank eyes. A couple of them ran towards our building with outstretched arms.
Nadja was hanging off the windowsill and the strange thing was that she was completely silent, just as I’ve heard that children who are drowning are.
Her little fingers clung on, and I threw myself at her because that’s what you do. You throw yourself at your child, you go through fire and water.
You do everything you can and then a little more.
And I grabbed hold of her, I reached forward and felt her greasy little fingers slowly slide out of my hand. Slipped out of my grip like a bar of soap.
She fell.
My child fell to the street, and I couldn’t stop it.
All I’d needed to do was to get there one second earlier, if I could just have got one step nearer while time seemed to stand still and the roar of the silence echoed in my ears.
In another life, in a parallel existence, I might have been able to save her.
But my child fell.
She fell from the third floor onto the street, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it.
We were just a normal family.
It was a morning just like so many others, but afterwards nothing was ever the same.
P A R T I
The Escape
Arise, go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it; for their wickedness has come up before me. But Jonah arose up to flee to Tarshish from the presence of the LORD.
Jonah 1: 2–3
Samuel
I
t took me exactly ten days to fuck up my life.
I’m staring out of the window.
From my room I can see a car park and beyond that the outlines of Långbro Hospital – a former mental institution that has been converted into luxury apartments.
At the moment dark clouds are gathered above the buildings. The pale green foliage contrasts against the violet clouds. The grass grows lush around the car park, but it is still fucking freezing, even though it’s June 11th.
I can hear my mum cleaning up in the kitchen.
She is so annoying. By annoying I don’t just mean that she’s always nagging me to do things – find a job, go to the unemployment office, load the dishwasher, unload the dishwasher and on and on for fucking ever – but that she worries so much. And that worry eats at me, makes my whole body itch, like tiny ants crawling under my skin.
It’s like she can’t get it through her head that I’m an adult now.
I turned eighteen a month ago, but still she hovers around me like some kind of mother hen, demanding to know every step I take.
As if I were her goddamn cause in life.
It drives me crazy.
I think she’d feel a lot better too if she didn’t keep on like that. If she let go, just a little bit. She’s always talking about how much she’s sacrificed for me – so why not get her own life now that she has the chance?
Alexandra, my girlfriend, or maybe the girl-I-sleep-with, says her mother is the same way, but that’s a lie. Sirpa never follows Alexandra into the city, doesn’t phone-stalk her friends or rummage through her pockets in search of weed or condoms.
Speaking of condoms: shouldn’t Mum be happy if she finds condoms? Isn’t that what all parents want: for their children to use protection? Because I assume that’s her biggest fear, that I’ll knock someone up and end up just like her.
A single parent.
Or a singular parent, as they like to say at Mum’s church to make every welfare recipient feel included.
Mum and I live in a three-storey apartment building on Ellen Key’s Street in Fruängen, a totally unremarkable suburb in southern Stockholm. It takes exactly nineteen minutes by train to get to the central station, and surely you can spare nineteen minutes of your life.
Right?
Nineteen minutes to the city and nineteen minutes home, that’s thirty-eight minutes a day. If you make that trip every day, it’s 13,870 minutes a year, or 230 hours, or just about ten days.
Ten days of your life wasted: it’s not so insignificant after all.
A lot can happen in ten days, as you know.
The point is that it’s important to make some calculations before drawing hasty conclusions, like nineteen minutes on the train not mattering.
Maths was the only thing I was ever really good at in school. Maybe Swedish too, when I was younger. Because I liked to read books. But I gave that up; you don’t want to be seen on the train with a book in your hands.
Maths was different though. I never had to make an effort. I could see the numbers in my head and knew the answer long before the others had even reached for their calculators. And though I almost never went to lessons, my maths teacher still gave me an A for my final year of high school.
I guess he wanted to encourage me, but I dropped out of school anyway. I didn’t really see the point in going.
A movement at the corner of my eye catches my attention. In the cage on the floor, the blackbird chick – almost not a chick anymore – leaps up. He roots around a little with his beak among the seed debris on the floor, pauses mid-movement, cocks his head to the side to look at me with yellow-rimmed button eyes.
The common blackbird, Turdus merula.
Well, there is actually one thing I’m good at besides maths, and that’s identifying birds. I was absolutely fucking obsessed with birds when I was little, but I don’t mess with that anymore.
It’s way too geeky.
But when I found the blackbird in the skip, I just had to save it.
I look at the bird again. See its shiny black feathers and the bright yellow beak pecking at the floor.
I feed him seeds and small pieces of tallow. I’ve even taught him to eat out of my hand, like some kind of well-trained pet.
I hold my phone between my thumb and index finger. Check Snapchat.
Liam’s posted a video of an exploding beer can. It looks almost like someone is shooting it, maybe with his air gun. Alexandra’s sent me a picture of herself in bed. Even though her blanket is pulled up to her nose, I can see in her eyes that she’s smiling. Small, hot pink hearts pulsate around her, a filter she added to the picture.
I open WhatsApp: nothing from Igor yet.
In fact I hope I never hear from him again. But unfortunately I fucked up, and now I’m going to have to pay the price.
Ten days.
That’s how long it took to get caught in Igor’s sticky net. As long as it takes to go back and forth to the city by train every day for a year.
But if I’m completely honest, it started much earlier. Mum always says that I lack good judgement and can’t focus for longer than it takes to drink a glass of milk. She’s never said it outright, but it’s clear that she thinks I got it from my dad. Since I’ve never met him, I can’t really say otherwise.
Mum, on the other hand, obviously has no such problems.
At least not when it comes to stalking me. She never loses her focus, never gives up.
She’s like a fucking bloodhound.
The school psychologist sent me to the youth mental health services, and they sent me to a specialist. Some shrink bitch with sweaty hands, large silver jewellery, teeth so brown it looked like she’d been chewing shit.
I never liked her.
Especially not when she started going on about neuropsychiatric impairment. She said that even if I didn’t qualify for a diagnosis, I struggled with attention and impulse control. I stopped listening at that very moment. Mum did too, because she didn’t want to admit that there was anything wrong with me besides a bit of bad judgement.
A few months later, I read in a tabloid about a celebrity who said it felt good to finally have a diagnosis; that it explained so much. As if he wanted to be mental, as if the diagnosis was a nice leather jacket or a beautiful tattoo that he liked to show off.
How did I end up mixed up in this shit anyway?
Liam and I used to shoplift in the city. At first it was mostly just for fun. We pinched small things, like perfume or clothing. But we soon realised that if we took electronics – small hard drives, headphones, portable speakers – we could sell the stuff. Liam bought a booster bag – a backpack lined with several layers of aluminium foil – from Janne at the gym, and then all we had to do was duck the surveillance cameras, pull shit off the shelves, throw it into in the bag, get out of there, get back on the train and nineteen minutes later get off at Fruängen.
