Anxious People / Тревожные люди (by Fredrik Backman, 2020) - аудиокнига на английском

This book is dedicated to the voices in my head, the most remarkable of my friends. And to my wife, who lives with us. 1 A bank robbery. A hostage drama. A stairwell full of police officers on their way to storm an apartment. It was easy to get to this point, much easier than you might think. All it took was one single really bad idea. This story is about a lot of things, but mostly about idiots. So it needs saying from the outset that it’s always very easy to declare that other people are idiots, but only if you forget how idiotically difficult being human is. Especially if you have other people you’re trying to be a reasonably good human being for. Because there’s such an unbelievable amount that we’re all supposed to be able to cope with these days. You’re supposed to have a job, and somewhere to live, and a family, and you’re supposed to pay taxes and have clean underwear and remember the password to your damn Wi-Fi. Some of us never manage to get the chaos under control, so our lives simply carry on, the world spinning through space at two million miles an hour while we bounce about on its surface like so many lost socks. Our hearts are bars of soap that we keep losing hold of; the moment we relax, they drift off and fall in love and get broken, all in the wink of an eye. We’re not in control. So we learn to pretend, all the time, about our jobs and our marriages and our children and everything else. We pretend we’re normal, that we’re reasonably well educated, that we understand “amortization levels” and “inflation rates.” That we know how sex works. In truth, we know as much about sex as we do about USB leads, and it always takes us four tries to get those little buggers in. (Wrong way round, wrong way round, wrong way round, there! In!) We pretend to be good parents when all we really do is provide our kids with food and clothing and tell them off when they put chewing gum they find on the ground in their mouths. We tried keeping tropical fish once and they all died. And we really don’t know more about children than tropical fish, so the responsibility frightens the life out of us each morning. We don’t have a plan, we just do our best to get through the day, because there’ll be another one coming along tomorrow. Sometimes it hurts, it really hurts, for no other reason than the fact that our skin doesn’t feel like it’s ours. Sometimes we panic, because the bills need paying and we have to be grown-up and we don’t know how, because it’s so horribly, desperately easy to fail at being grown-up. Because everyone loves someone, and anyone who loves someone has had those desperate nights where we lie awake trying to figure out how we can afford to carry on being human beings. Sometimes that makes us do things that seem ridiculous in hindsight, but which felt like the only way out at the time. One single really bad idea. That’s all it takes. One morning, for instance, a thirty-nine-year-old resident of a not particularly large or noteworthy town left home clutching a pistol, and that was—in hindsight—a really stupid idea. Because this is a story about a hostage drama, but that wasn’t the intention. That is to say, it was the intention that it should be a story, but it wasn’t the intention that it should be about a hostage drama. It was supposed to be about a bank robbery. But everything got a bit messed up, because sometimes that happens with bank robberies. So the thirty-nine-year-old bank robber fled, but with no escape plan, and the thing about escape plans is just like what the bank robber’s mom always said years ago, when the bank robber forgot the ice cubes and slices of lemon in the kitchen and had to run back: “If your head isn’t up to the job, your legs better be!” (It should be noted that when she died, the bank robber’s mom consisted of so much gin and tonic that they didn’t dare cremate her because of the risk of explosion, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have good advice to offer.) So after the bank robbery that wasn’t actually a bank robbery, the police showed up, of course, so the bank robber got scared and ran out, across the street and into the first door that presented itself. It’s probably a bit harsh to label the bank robber an idiot simply because of that, but… well, it certainly wasn’t an act of genius. Because the door led to a stairwell with no other exits, which meant the bank robber’s only option was to run up the stairs. It should be noted that this particular bank robber had the same level of fitness as the average thirty-nine-year-old. Not one of those big-city thirty-nine-year-olds who deal with their midlife crisis by buying ridiculously expensive cycling shorts and swimming caps because they have a black hole in their soul that devours Instagram pictures, more the sort of thirty-nine-year-old whose daily consumption of cheese and carbohydrates was more likely to be classified medically as a cry for help rather than a diet. So by the time the bank robber reached the top floor, all sorts of glands had opened up, causing breathing that sounded like something you usually associate with the sort of secret societies that demand a password through a hatch in the door before they let you in. By this point, any chance of evading the police had dwindled to pretty much nonexistent. But by chance the robber turned and saw that the door to one of the apartments in the building was open, because that particular apartment happened to be up for sale and was full of prospective buyers looking around. So the bank robber stumbled in, panting and sweaty, holding the pistol in the air, and that was how this story ended up becoming a hostage drama. And then things went the way they did: the police surrounded the building, reporters showed up, the story made it onto the television news. The whole thing went on for several hours, until the bank robber had to give up. There was no other choice. So all eight people who had been held hostage, seven prospective buyers and one real estate agent, were released. A couple of minutes later the police stormed the apartment. But by then it was empty. No one knew where the bank robber had gone. That’s really all you need to know at this point. Now the story can begin. 2 Ten years ago a man was standing on a bridge. This story isn’t about that man, so you don’t really need to think about him right now. Well, obviously you can’t help thinking about him, it’s like saying “Don’t think about cookies,” and now you’re thinking about cookies. Don’t think about cookies! All you need to know is that a man was standing on a bridge ten years ago. Up on the railing, high above the water, at the end of his life. Don’t think about that anymore now. Think about something nicer. Think about cookies. 3 It’s the day before New Year’s Eve in a not particularly large town. A police officer and a real estate agent are sitting in an interview room in the police station. The policeman looks barely twenty but is probably older, and the real estate agent looks more than forty but is probably younger. The police officer’s uniform is too small, the real estate agent’s jacket slightly too large. The real estate agent looks like she’d rather be somewhere else, and, after the past fifteen minutes of conversation, the policeman looks like he wishes the real estate agent were somewhere else, too. When the real estate agent smiles nervously and opens her mouth to say something, the policeman breathes in and out in a way that makes it hard to tell if he’s sighing or trying to clear his nose. “Just answer the question,” he pleads. The Realtor nods quickly and blurts out: “How’s tricks?” “I said, just answer the question!” the policeman repeats, with an expression common in grown men who were disappointed by life at some point in their childhood and have never quite managed to stop feeling that way. “You asked me what my real estate agency is called!” the Realtor insists, drumming her fingers on the tabletop in a way that makes the policeman feel like throwing objects with sharp corners at her. “No I didn’t, I asked if the perpetrator who held you hostage together with—” “It’s called House Tricks! Get it? Because when you buy an apartment, you want to buy from someone who knows all the tricks, don’t you? So when I answer the phone, I say: Hello, you’ve reached the House Tricks Real Estate Agency! HOW’S TRICKS?” Obviously the Realtor has just been through a traumatic experience, has been threatened with a pistol and held hostage, and that sort of thing can make anyone babble. The policeman tries to be patient. He presses his thumbs hard against his eyebrows, as if he hopes they’re two buttons and if he keeps them pressed at the same time for ten seconds he’ll be able to restore life to its factory settings. “Okaaay… But now I need to ask you a few questions about the apartment and the perpetrator,” he groans. It has been a difficult day for him, too. The police station is small, resources are tight, but there’s nothing wrong with their competence. He tried to explain that over the phone to some boss’s boss’s boss right after the hostage drama, but naturally it was hopeless. They’re going to send some special investigative team from Stockholm to take charge of the whole case. The boss didn’t place the emphasis on the words “investigative team” when he said that, but on “Stockholm,” as if coming from the capital was itself some sort of superpower. More like a medical condition, the policeman thinks. His thumbs are still pressed to his eyebrows, this is his last chance to show the bosses that he can handle this himself, but how on earth is that going to work if you’ve only got witnesses like this woman? “Okeydokey!” the real estate agent chirrups, as if that were a real Swedish word. The policeman looks down at his notes. “Isn’t this an odd day to have a showing? The day before New Year’s Eve?” The real estate agent shakes her head and grins. “There are no bad days for the HOUSE TRICKS Real Estate Agency!” The policeman takes a deep breath, then several more. “Right. Let’s move on: when you saw the perpetrator, what was your first react—” “Didn’t you say you were going to ask about the apartment first? You said ‘the apartment and the perpetrator,’ so I thought the apartment would be first—” “Okay!” the policeman growls. “Okay!” the real estate agent chirrups. “The apartment, then: Are you familiar with its layout?” “Of course, I’m the real estate agent, after all!” the real estate agent says, but manages to stop herself adding “from the HOUSE TRICKS Real Estate Agency! HOW’S TRICKS?” seeing as the policeman already looks like he wishes the ammunition in his pistol weren’t so easy to trace. “Can you describe it?” The real estate agent lights up. “It’s a dream! We’re talking about a unique opportunity to acquire an exclusive apartment in a quiet area within easy reach of the throbbing heart of the big city. Open plan! Big windows that let in plenty of daylight—!” The policeman cuts her off. “I meant, are there closets, hidden storage spaces, anything of that sort?” “You don’t like open plan apartments? You like walls? There’s nothing wrong with walls!” the real estate agent replies encouragingly, yet with an undertone that suggests that in her experience, people who like walls are the same sort of people who like other types of barriers. “For instance, are there any closets that aren’t—?” “Did I mention the amount of daylight?” “Yes.” “There’s scientific research to prove that daylight makes us feel better! Did you know that?” The policeman looks like he doesn’t really want to be forced to think about this. Some people want to decide for themselves how happy they are. “Can we stick to the point?” “Okeydokey!” “Are there any spaces in the apartment that aren’t marked on the plans?” “It’s also a really good location for children!” “What does that have to do with anything?” “I just wanted to point it out. The location, you know. Really good for children! Actually, well… apart from this whole hostage thing today. But apart from that: a brilliant area for kids! And of course you know that children just love police cars!” The real estate agent cheerily spins her arm in the air and imitates the sound of a siren. “I think that’s the sound of an ice-cream truck,” the police officer says. “But you know what I mean,” the real estate agent persists. “I’m going to have to ask you to just answer the question.” “Sorry. What was the question, again?” “Exactly how big is the apartment?” The real estate agent smiles in bemusement. “Don’t you want to talk about the bank robber? I thought we were going to talk about the robbery?” The policeman clenches his teeth so hard that he looks like he’s trying to breathe through his toenails. “Sure. Okay. Tell me about the perpetrator. What was your first reaction when he—” The real estate agent interrupts eagerly. “The bank robber? Yes! The bank robber ran straight into the apartment in the middle of the viewing, and pointed a pistol at us all! And do you know why?” “No.” “Because it’s open plan! Otherwise the bank robber would never have been able to aim at all of us at the same time!” The policeman massages his eyebrows. “Okay, let’s try this instead: Are there any good hiding places in the apartment?” The Realtor blinks so slowly that it looks like she’s only just learned how to do it. “Hiding places?” The policeman leans his head back and fixes his gaze on the ceiling. His mom always said that policemen are just boys who never bothered to find a new dream. All boys get asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and at some point almost all of them answer “A policeman!” but most of them grow out of that and come up with something better. For a moment he finds himself wishing he’d done that, too, because then his days might have been less complicated, and possibly also his dealings with his family. It’s worth pointing out that his mom has always been proud of him, she was never the one who expressed disapproval at his choice of career. She was a priest, another job that’s more than just a way of earning a living, so she understood. It was his dad who never wanted to see his son in uniform. That disappointment may still be weighing the young police officer down, because he looks exhausted when he focuses his gaze on the Realtor again. “Yes. That’s what I’ve been trying to explain to you: we believe the perpetrator is still in the apartment.” 4 The truth is that when the bank robber gave up, all the hostages—the real estate agent and all the prospective buyers—were released at the same time. One police officer was standing guard in the stairwell outside the apartment when they emerged. They closed the door behind themselves, the latch clicked, and then they walked calmly down the stairs, out into the street, got into the waiting police cars, and were driven away. The policeman in the stairwell waited for his colleagues to come up the stairs. A negotiator phoned the bank robber. Shortly after that the police stormed the apartment, only to discover that it was empty. The door to the balcony was locked, all the windows were closed, and there were no other exits. You didn’t have to be from Stockholm to realize pretty quickly that one of the hostages must have helped the bank robber to escape. Unless the bank robber hadn’t escaped at all. 5 Okay. A man was standing on a bridge. Think about that now. He had written a note and mailed it, he had dropped his children off at school, he had climbed up onto the railing and was standing there looking down. Ten years later an unsuccessful bank robber took eight people hostage at a viewing of an apartment that was for sale. If you stand on that bridge, you can see all the way to the balcony of that apartment. Obviously none of this has anything to do with you. Well, maybe just a little. Because presumably you’re a normal, decent person. What would you have done if you’d seen someone standing on the railing of that bridge? There are no right or wrong things to say at a time like that, are there? You would simply have done whatever it took to stop the man from jumping. You don’t even know him, but it’s an innate instinct, the idea that we can’t just let strangers kill themselves. So you would have tried to talk to him, gain his trust, persuade him not to do it. Because you’ve probably been depressed yourself, you’ve had days when you’ve been in terrible pain in places that don’t show up in X-rays, when you can’t find the words to explain it even to the people who love you. Deep down, in memories that we might prefer to suppress even from ourselves, a lot of us know that the difference between us and that man on the bridge is smaller than we might wish. Most adults have had a number of really bad moments, and of course not even fairly happy people manage to be happy the whole darn time. So you would have tried to save him. Because it’s possible to end your life by mistake, but you have to choose to jump. You have to climb on top of somewhere high and take a step forward. You’re a decent person. You wouldn’t have just watched. 6 The young policeman is feeling his forehead with his fingertips. He has a lump the size of a baby’s fist there. “How did you get that?” the real estate agent asks, looking like she’d really prefer to ask How’s tricks? again. “I got hit on the head,” the policeman grunts, then looks at his notes and says, “Did the perpetrator seem used to handling firearms?” The real estate agent smiles in surprise. “You mean… the pistol?” “Yes. Did he seem nervous, or did it look like he’d handled a pistol plenty of times before?” The policeman hopes his question will reveal whether or not the real estate agent thinks the bank robber might have a military background, for instance. But the real estate agent replies breezily: “Oh, no, I mean, the pistol wasn’t real!” The policeman squints at her, evidently trying to figure out if she’s joking or just being naive. “What makes you say that?” “It was obviously a toy! I thought everyone had realized that.” The policeman studies the real estate agent for a long time. She’s not joking. A hint of sympathy appears in his eyes. “So you were never… frightened?” The real estate agent shakes her head. “No, no, no. I realized we were never in any real danger, you know. That bank robber could never have harmed anyone!” The policeman looks at his notes. He realizes that she hasn’t understood. “Would you like something to drink?” he asks kindly. “No, thank you. You’ve already asked me that.” The policeman decides to fetch her a glass of water anyway. 7 In truth, none of the people who were held hostage knows what happened in between the time they were released and the time the police stormed the apartment. The hostages had already gotten into the cars down in the street and were being driven to the police station as the officers gathered in the stairwell. Then the special negotiator (who had been dispatched from Stockholm by the boss’s boss, seeing as people in Stockholm seem to think they’re the only ones capable of talking on the phone) called the bank robber in the hope that a peaceful resolution could be reached. But the bank robber didn’t answer. Instead a single pistol shot rang out. By the time the police smashed in the door to the apartment it was already too late. When they reached the living room they found themselves trampling through blood. 8 In the staffroom of the police station the young policeman bumps into an older officer. The young man is fetching water, the older man is drinking coffee. Their relationship is complicated, as is often the case between police officers of different generations. At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose. “Morning!” the older man exclaims. “Hi,” the younger man says, slightly dismissively. “I’d offer you some coffee, but I suppose you’re still not a coffee drinker?” the old officer says, as if it were some sort of disability. “No,” the younger man replies, like someone turning down an offer of human flesh. The older and younger men have little in common when it comes to food and drink, or anything else, for that matter, which is a cause of ongoing conflict whenever they’re stuck in the same police car at lunchtime. The older officer’s favorite food is a service station hot dog with instant mashed potatoes, and whenever the staff in the local restaurant try to take his plate away on buffet Fridays, he always snatches it back in horror and exclaims: “Finished? This is a buffet! You’ll know when I’m finished because I’ll be lying curled up under the table!” The younger man’s favorite food, if you were to ask the older officer, is “that made-up stuff, algae and seaweed and raw fish, he thinks he’s some sort of damn hermit crab.” One likes coffee, the other tea. One looks at his watch while they’re working to see if it will soon be lunchtime, the other looks at his watch during lunch to see if he can get back to work soon. The older man thinks the most important thing is for a police officer to do the right thing, the younger thinks it’s more important to do things correctly. “Sure? You can have one of those Frappuccinos or whatever they’re called. I’ve even bought some of that soy milk, not that I want to know what the heck they milked to get hold of it!” the older man says, chuckling loudly, but glancing anxiously toward the younger man at the same time. “Mmm,” the younger man murmurs, not bothering to listen. “Getting on okay with interviewing that damn real estate agent?” the older man asks, in a tone that suggests he’s joking, to cover up the fact that he’s asking out of consideration. “Fine!” the younger man declares, finding it increasingly difficult to conceal his irritation now, and attempting to move toward the door. “And you’re okay?” the older officer asks. “Yes, yes, I’m okay,” the younger man groans. “I just mean after what happened, if you ever need to…” “I’m fine,” the younger man insists. “Sure?” “Sure!” “How’s…?” the older man asks, nodding toward the bump on the younger man’s forehead. “Fine, no problem. I’ve got to go now.” “Okay. Well. Would you like a hand questioning the real estate agent, then?” the older man asks, and tries to smile rather than just stare anxiously at the younger officer’s shoes. “I can manage on my own.” “I’d be happy to help.” “No—thanks!” “Sure?” the older man calls, but gets nothing but a very sure silence in response. When the younger officer has gone, the older man sits alone in the staffroom drinking his coffee. Older men rarely know what to say to younger men to let them know that they care. It’s so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: “I can see you’re hurting.” There are red marks on the floor where the younger man was standing. He still has blood on his shoes, but he hasn’t noticed yet. The older officer wets a cloth and carefully wipes the floor. His fingers are trembling. Maybe the younger man isn’t lying, maybe he really is okay. But the older man definitely isn’t, not yet. 9 The younger officer walks back into the interview room and puts the glass of water down on the table. The real estate agent looks at him, and thinks he looks like a person who’s had his sense of humor amputated. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. “Thanks,” she says hesitantly toward the glass of water she hadn’t asked for. “I need to ask you a few more questions,” the young officer says apologetically, and pulls out a crumpled sheet of paper. It looks like a child’s drawing. The real estate agent nods, but doesn’t have time to open her mouth before the door opens quietly and the older police officer slips into the room. The real estate agent notes that his arms are slightly too long for his body, if he ever spilled his coffee he’d only burn himself below his knees. “Hello! I just thought I’d see if there was anything I could do to help in here…,” the older officer says. The younger officer looks up at the ceiling. “No! Thanks! Like I just told you, I’ve got everything under control.” “Right. Okay. I just wanted to offer my help,” the older man tries. “No, no, for God’s… No! This is incredibly unprofessional! You can’t just march in in the middle of an interview!” the younger man snaps. “Okay, sorry, I just wanted to see how far you’d got,” the older man whispers, embarrassed now, unable to hide his concern. “I was just about to ask about the drawing!” the younger man snarls, as if he’d been caught smelling of cigarette smoke and insisted that he was only holding it for a friend. “Ask who?” the older officer wonders. “The real estate agent!” the younger man exclaims, pointing at her. Sadly this prompts the Realtor to bounce up from her chair at once and thrust her hand out. “I’m the real estate agent! From the HOUSE TRICKS Real Estate Agency!” The Realtor pauses and grins, unbelievably pleased with herself. “Oh, dear God, not again,” the younger police officer mutters as the Realtor takes a deep breath. “So, HOW’S TRICKS?” The older officer looks questioningly at the younger officer. “She’s been carrying on like this the whole time,” the younger man says, pressing his thumbs against his eyebrows. The older police officer squints at the real estate agent. He’s gotten into the habit of doing that when he encounters incomprehensible individuals, and a lifetime of almost constant squinting has given the skin under his eyes something of the quality of soft ice cream. The Realtor, who is evidently of the opinion that no one heard her the first time, offers an unwanted explanation: “Get it? HOUSE TRICKS Real Estate Agency. HOW’S TRICKS? Get it? Because everyone wants a real estate agent who knows the best…” The older officer gets it, he even gives her an appreciative smile, but the younger one aims his forefinger at the Realtor and moves it up and down between her and the chair. “Sit!” he says, in that tone you only use with children, dogs, and real estate agents. The Realtor stops grinning. She sits down clumsily, and looks first at one of the officers, then the other. “Sorry. This is the first time I’ve been interviewed by the police. You’re not… you know… you’re not going to do that good cop, bad cop thing they do in films, are you? One of you isn’t going to go out to get more coffee while the other one assaults me with a phone book and screams ‘WHERE HAVE YOU HIDDEN THE BODY?’ ” The Realtor lets out a nervous laugh. The older police officer smiles but the younger one most definitely doesn’t, so the Realtor goes on, even more nervously: “I mean, I was joking. They don’t print phone books anymore, do they, so what would you do? Assault me with an iPhone?” She starts waving her arms about to illustrate assault by phone, and yelling in what the two officers can only assume is the real estate agent’s imitation of their accents: “Oh, hell, no, I’ve ended up liking my ex on Instagram as well! Delete! Delete!” The younger police officer doesn’t look at all amused, which makes the real estate agent look less amused. In the meantime the older officer leans toward the younger officer’s notes and asks, as if the Realtor weren’t actually in the room: “So what did she say about the drawing?” “I didn’t get that far before you came in and interrupted!” the younger man snaps. “What drawing?” the real estate agent asks. “Well, as I was about to say before I was interrupted: we found this drawing in the stairwell, and we think the perpetrator may have dropped it. We’d like you to—,” the younger officer says, but the older officer interrupts him. “Have you talked to her about the pistol, then?” “Stop interfering!” the younger man hisses. This makes the older officer throw his arms up and mutter: “Okay, okay, sorry I’m here.” “It wasn’t real! The pistol! It was a toy!” the real estate agent says quickly. The older officer looks at her in surprise, then at the younger officer, before whispering in a way that only men of a certain age think is a whisper: “You… you haven’t told her?” “Told me what?” the real estate agent wonders. The younger police officer sighs and folds the drawing, as carefully as if he were actually folding his older colleague’s face. Then he looks up at the Realtor. “Well, I was coming to that… You see, after the perpetrator released you and the other hostages, and we’d brought you here to the station…” The older officer interrupts helpfully: “The perpetrator, the bank robber—he shot himself!” The younger officer clasps his hands tightly together to stop himself from strangling the older man. He says something the real estate agent doesn’t hear: her ears are already full of a monotonous buzzing sound that grows to a roar as shock takes hold of her nervous system. Long afterward she will swear that rain was pattering against the window of the room, even though the interview room had no windows. She stares at the policemen with her jaw hanging open. “So… the pistol… it was…?” she manages to say. “It was a real pistol,” the older officer confirms. “I…,” the Realtor begins, but her mouth is too dry to speak. “Here! Have some water!” the older officer offers, as if he’d just fetched it for her. “Thanks… I… but, if the pistol was real, then we could all… we could all have died,” she whispers, then gulps at the water in a state of retroactive shock. The older officer nods authoritatively, takes the younger man’s notes from him, and starts to make his own additions with a pen. “Perhaps we should start this interview again?” he says helpfully, which prompts the younger officer to take a short break so he can go out into the corridor and bang his head against the wall. When the door slams shut the older man jumps. This business with words is tricky when you’re older and all you want to say to someone younger is: “I can see you’re in pain, and that causes me pain.” The younger officer’s shoes have left reddish brown marks of dried blood on the floor under his chair. The older man looks at them disconsolately. This was precisely why he didn’t want his son to become a policeman. 10 The first person who saw the man on the bridge ten years ago was a teenage boy whose dad wished he would find a new dream. Perhaps the boy could have waited for help, but would you have done that? If your mom was a priest and your dad a policeman, if you’d grown up taking it for granted that you have to help people if you can, and not abandon anyone unless you really have to? So the teenage boy ran out onto the bridge and shouted to the man, and the man stopped. The teenage boy didn’t know what he should do, so he just started… talking. Tried to win the man’s trust. Get him to take two steps back rather than forward. The wind was tugging gently at their jackets, there was rain in the air and you could feel the start of winter on your skin, and the boy tried to find the words to say how much there must be to live for, even if it maybe didn’t feel that way right now. The man on the bridge had two children, he told the teenage boy that. Possibly because the boy reminded him of them. The boy pleaded with him, with panic weighing down each word: “Please, don’t jump!” The man looked at him calmly, almost sympathetically, and replied, “Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.” The teenage boy probably didn’t really understand what he meant. His hands were shaking as he glanced over the side of the bridge and saw death all the way down. The man smiled weakly at him and took half a step back. Just then, that felt like the whole world. Then the man explained that he’d had a pretty good job, he’d set up his own relatively successful business, bought a fairly nice apartment. That he’d invested all his savings in shares in a real estate development company, so that his children could get even better jobs and even nicer apartments, so that they could have the freedom not to have to worry, not have to fall asleep exhausted every night with a pocket calculator in their hands. Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure. They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized that we don’t actually know what we’re doing. So the man did what we all do: he pretended he knew. When his children started to ask why poo was brown, and what happens after you die, and why polar bears don’t eat penguins. Then they got older. Sometimes he managed to forget that for a moment and found himself reaching to hold their hands. They were so embarrassed. Him too. It’s hard to explain to a twelve-year-old that when you were little and I walked too fast, you would run to catch up with me and take hold of my hand, and that those were the best moments of my life. Your fingertips in the palm of my hand. Before you knew how many things I’d failed at. The man pretended—about everything. All the financial experts promised him that shares in the real estate development company were a safe investment, because everyone knows that property values never go down. And then they did just that. There was a financial crisis somewhere in the world and a bank in New York went bankrupt, and far away in a small town in a completely different country lived a man who lost everything. He saw the bridge from his study window when he hung up after the phone call with his lawyer. It was early in the morning, still unusually mild for the time of year, but there was rain in the air. The man drove his children to school as if nothing had happened. Pretending. He whispered in their ears that he loved them, and his heart broke when he saw them roll their eyes and sigh. Then he drove toward the water. Stopped the car where you weren’t allowed to stop. Left the keys in it. Walked out onto the bridge and climbed up onto the railing. He told the teenage boy all this, and then of course the teenage boy knew that everything was going to be all right. Because if a man standing on a railing takes the time to tell a stranger how much he loves his children, you know he doesn’t really want to jump. And then he jumped. 11 Ten years later the young police officer is standing in the corridor outside the interview room. His dad is still in there with the real estate agent. Of course his mom was right: they should never have worked together, he and his dad, there was bound to be trouble. He didn’t listen, because of course he never does. Occasionally when she was tired or she’d had a couple of glasses of wine, enough to make her forget to hide her emotions, his mom looked at her son and said: “There are days when I can’t help thinking you never really came back from that bridge, love. That you’re still trying to save that man on the railing, even though it’s as impossible now as it was back then.” Perhaps that’s true, he doesn’t feel like checking. He still has the same nightmares, ten years on. After Police College, exams, shift after shift, late nights, all his work at the station that’s garnered so much praise from everyone but his dad, even more late nights, so much work that he’s come to hate not working, unsteady walks home at dawn to the piles of bills in the hall and an empty bed, sleeping pills, alcohol. On nights when everything has been completely unbearable he’s gone out running, mile after mile through darkness and cold and silence, his feet drumming against the pavement faster and faster, but never with the intention of getting anywhere, of accomplishing anything. Some men run like hunters, but he ran like their prey. Drained with exhaustion he would finally stagger home, then head off to work and start all over again. Sometimes a few whiskies were enough to get him to sleep, and on good mornings ice-cold showers were enough to wake him up, and in between he did whatever he could to take the edge off the hypersensitivity of his skin, stifle the tears when he felt them in his chest, long before they reached his throat and eyes. But all the while: still those same nightmares. The wind tugging at his jacket, the dull scraping sound as the man’s shoes slid off the railing, the boy’s scream across the water that neither sounded nor felt like it came from him. He barely heard it anyway, the shock was too great, too overwhelming. It still is. Today he was the first police officer through the door after the hostages were released and the pistol shot rang out inside the apartment. He was the one who rushed through the living room, over the bloodstained carpet, tore the balcony door open, and stood there staring disconsolately over the railing, because no matter how illogical it might seem to everyone else, his first instinct and greatest fear was: “He’s jumped!” But there was nothing down there, just the reporters and curious locals who were all peering up at him from behind their mobile phones. The bank robber had vanished without a trace, and the policeman was alone up there on the balcony. He could see all the way to the bridge from there. Now he was standing in the corridor of the police station, unable even to make himself wipe the blood from his shoes. 12 The air passes through the older policeman’s throat as roughly as a piece of heavy furniture being dragged across an uneven wooden floor. When he’d reached a certain age and weight, he’d noticed himself starting to sound like that, as if older breaths were heavier. He smiles awkwardly at the real estate agent. “My colleague, he… He’s my son.” “Ah!” the Realtor nods, as if to say that she’s got children, too, or perhaps that she hasn’t got children but that she’d read about them in a manual during her real estate agent’s training. Her favorites are the ones with toys in neutral colors, because they match everything. “My wife said it was a bad idea for us to work together,” the policeman admits. “I understand,” the Realtor lies. “She said I’m overprotective. That I’m one of those penguins that squats on top of a stone because I don’t want to accept that the egg has gone. She said you can’t protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.” The Realtor considers pretending to understand, but replies honestly instead. “What did she mean by that?” The police officer blushes. “I never wanted… Look, it’s silly of me to sit here and go on about this to you, but I never wanted my son to join the police. He’s too sensitive. He’s too… good. Do you know what I mean? Ten years ago he ran onto a bridge and tried to talk some sense into a man who was going to jump. He did all he could, all he could! But the man jumped anyway. Can you imagine what that does to a person? My son… he always wants to rescue everyone. After that I thought maybe he’d stop wanting to be a policeman, but the opposite happened. He suddenly wanted it more than ever. Because he wants to save people. Even the bad guys.” The real estate agent’s breathing has slowed, her chest is rising and falling almost imperceptibly. “You mean the bank robber?” The older policeman nods. “Yes. There was blood everywhere inside the apartment when we got in. My son says the bank robber’s going to die unless we find him in time.” The real estate agent can see how much this means to him from the sadness in his eyes. Then he runs his fingers across the tabletop and adds with forced formality, “I have to remind you that everything you say during this interview is being recorded.” “Understood,” the real estate agent assures him. “It’s important that you understand that. Everything we say here will be included in the file and can be read by any other police officer,” he insists. “Everyone can read. Definitely understood.” The older officer carefully unfolds the piece of paper the younger officer left on the table. It’s a drawing, produced by a child who is either extremely talented or completely devoid of talent for their age, depending entirely on what that age is. It appears to show three animals. “Do you recognize this? As I said before, we found it in the stairwell.” “Sorry,” the real estate agent says, looking genuinely sorry. The policeman forces himself to smile. “My colleagues reckon it looks like a monkey, a frog, and a horse. I think that one looks more like a giraffe than a horse. I mean, it hasn’t even got a tail! Giraffes don’t have tails, do they? I’m sure it’s a giraffe.” The real estate agent takes a deep breath and says what women usually say to men who never seem to think that their lack of knowledge should get in the way of a confident opinion. “I’m sure you’re right.” In truth, it wasn’t the man on the bridge that made the teenage boy want to be a policeman. It was the teenage girl who was standing on the same railing a week later that made him want it. The one who didn’t jump. 13 The coffee cup is thrown in anger. Right across the two desks, but the unfathomable ways of centrifugal force mean that it retains most of its contents until it shatters against the henceforth cappuccino-colored wall. The two policemen stare at each other, one embarrassed, the other concerned. The older policeman’s name is Jim. The younger officer, his son, is Jack. This police station is too small for these two men to be able to avoid each other, so as usual they’ve ended up on either side of their desks, only half hidden behind their respective computer screens, because these days police work consists of one-tenth actual police work, with the rest of the time devoted to making notes about exactly what you did during the course of that police work. Jim was born in a generation that regarded computers as magic, Jack in one that has always taken them for granted. When Jim was young, children used to be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force children to come out of them. One generation got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told off for never moving. So when Jim writes a report he hits every key all the way down very deliberately, then checks the screen at once to make sure it hasn’t tricked him, and only then does he press the next key. Because Jim isn’t the sort of man who lets himself be tricked. Jack, in turn, types the way young men who’ve never lived in a world without the Internet do, he can do it blindfolded, stroking the keys so gently that even a forensics expert wouldn’t be able to prove that he’d touched them. The two men drive each other crazy, of course, about the smallest things. When the son is looking for something on the Internet, he calls it “googling,” but when his dad does the same thing he says: “I’ll look that up on Google.” When they disagree about something, the father says: “Well, it must be right, because I read it on Google!” and the son exclaims: “You don’t actually read things on Google, Dad, you search for them there…” It isn’t really the fact that his dad doesn’t understand how to use technology that drives his son mad, but the fact that he almost understands. For instance, Jim still doesn’t know how to take a screenshot, so when he wants to take a picture of something on his computer screen, he takes a photograph of the screen with his mobile phone. When he wants to take a picture of something on his mobile, he uses the photocopier. The last really big row between Jim and Jack was when some boss’s boss decided that the town’s police force should become “more accessible on social media” (because in Stockholm the police are evidently massively accessible the whole damn time), and asked them to take pictures of each other in the course of an ordinary day at work. So Jim took a photograph of Jack in the police car. While Jack was driving. With a flash. Now they’re seated opposite each other, typing, constantly out of sync with each other. Jim is slow, Jack efficient. Jim tells a story; Jack simply gives a report. Jim deletes and edits and starts again, Jack just types and types as if there were nothing on the planet that could be described in more than one way. In his youth Jim had dreams of becoming a writer. In fact he was still dreaming about that until long into Jack’s childhood. Then he started to dream that Jack might become a writer instead. That’s an impossible thing for sons to grasp, and a source of shame for fathers to have to admit: that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams. They have pictures of the same woman on their desks. The mother of one of them, the wife of the other. Jim’s desk also has a photograph of a young woman, seven years older than Jack, but they don’t often talk about her, and she only gets in touch when she needs money. At the start of each winter Jim says hopefully: “Maybe your sister will come home for Christmas,” and Jack replies: “Sure, Dad, we’ll see.” The son never tells his dad he’s being naive. It’s an act of love. His dad’s shoulders are weighed down with invisible boulders when he says, late each Christmas Eve: “It’s not her fault, Jack, she’s…,” and Jack always replies: “She’s ill. I know, Dad. Do you want another beer?” There are so many things that stand between the older policeman and the younger one now, regardless of how close they live to each other. Because Jack eventually stopped running after his sister—that’s the main difference between the brother and the father. When his daughter was a teenager, Jim used to think that children were like kites, so he held on to the string as tightly as he could, but eventually the wind carried her off anyway. She pulled free and flew off into the sky. It’s hard to tell exactly when a person’s substance abuse begins, which is why everyone is lying when they say: “I’ve got it under control.” Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we’re the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes. A few years ago Jim found out that Jack had withdrawn all his savings, which he was planning to use to buy an apartment, and used them to pay for his sister’s treatment in an exclusive private clinic. Jack drove his sister there. She checked herself out two weeks later, too late for him to get his money back. She didn’t get in touch for six months, when she suddenly phoned in the middle of the night as if nothing had happened, and asked if Jack could lend her “a few thousand.” For a plane ticket home, she said. Jack sent the money, she never came. Her dad is still running about on the ground, trying not to lose sight of the kite way up in the sky, that’s the difference between the father and the brother. Next Christmas one of them will say: “She’s…,” and the other will whisper: “I know, Dad,” then get him another beer. Obviously they find ways to argue about beer, too. Jack is one of those young men who is curious about beers that taste of grapefruit and gingerbread and sweets and all sorts of other crap. Jim wants beer that tastes of beer. Sometimes he calls the complicated version “Stockholm beer,” but not too often, naturally, because then his son gets so angry that Jim has to buy his own damn beer for several weeks. He sometimes thinks it’s impossible to know if children end up completely different despite the fact that they grew up together, or precisely because of that. He glances over the top of the computer screens and watches his son’s fingertips on the keyboard. The little police station in their not especially large town is a fairly quiet place. Not much happens there, they’re not used to hostage dramas, or any sort of drama at all, really. So Jim knows that this is Jack’s big chance to show the bosses what he can do, what sort of police officer he can be. Before the experts from Stockholm show up. Jack’s frustration is dragging his eyebrows down and restlessness is blowing a gale inside him. He’s been teetering on the verge of a furious outburst ever since he was the first officer into the apartment. He’s been keeping a lid on it, but after the last interview he marched into the staffroom and exploded: “One of these witnesses knows what happened! Someone knows and is lying to our faces! Don’t they understand that a man could be lying hidden somewhere, bleeding to death right now? How the hell can anyone lie to the police while someone’s dying?” Jim didn’t say a word when Jack sat down at his computer after his outburst. But when the coffee cup hit the wall, it wasn’t Jack who threw it. Because even if his son was furious about not being able to save the perpetrator’s life, and hated the fact that a group of damn Stockholmers were about to show up and take the investigation away from him, that came nowhere close to the frustration his father felt at not being able to help him. A long silence follows. First they glare at each other, then down at their keyboards. Eventually Jim manages to say: “Sorry. I’ll clean it up. I just… I can understand that this is driving you crazy. I just want you to know that it’s driving me crazy… too.” He and Jack have both studied every last inch of the plan of the apartment. There are no hiding places in there, nowhere to go. Jack looks at his dad, then at the remains of the coffee cup behind him, and says quietly: “He must have had help. We’re missing something here.” Jim stares at the notes from the interviews with the witnesses. “We can only do our best, son.” It’s easier to talk about work when you haven’t quite got the words to talk about the other things in life, but obviously those words apply to both things at the same time. Jack has been thinking about the bridge ever since the hostage drama started, because during his best nights he still dreams that the man didn’t jump, that Jack managed to save him. Jim thinks about the same bridge all the time, because during his worst nights he dreams that it was Jack who jumped instead. “Either one of the witnesses is lying, or they all are. Someone must know where this man is hiding,” Jack repeats mechanically. Jim sneaks a glance at Jack’s two index fingers, tapping the desktop the same way as his mother after a heavy night at the hospital or prison. Too much time has passed for the father to ask his son how he’s doing, too much time for the son to be able to explain. The distance between them is too great now. But when Jim slowly gets up from his chair with the full symphony of a middle-aged man’s groans, to wipe the wall and pick up the pieces of the cup he threw, Jack gets quickly to his feet and walks to the staffroom. He comes back with two more cups. Not that Jack drinks coffee, but he understands that it occasionally means something to his father not to have to drink alone. “I shouldn’t have got involved in your interview, son,” Jim says in a low voice. “It’s okay, Dad,” Jack replies. Neither of them means it. We lie to those we love. They hunch over their keyboards again and type up the final transcripts of all the interviews with the witnesses, reading them through one more time in search of clues. They’re right, both of them. The witnesses aren’t telling the truth, not all of it. Not all of them. 14 Witness Interview Date: December 30 Name of witness: London JACK: You’d probably be more comfortable if you sat on the chair instead of the floor. LONDON: Have you got something wrong with your eyes or something? You can see that the charging cable for my cell phone won’t reach the chair. JACK: And moving the chair is out of the question, obviously. LONDON: What? JACK: Nothing. LONDON: You’ve got really crap reception in here. Like, one bar… JACK: I’d like you to switch your phone off now so I can ask my questions. LONDON: I’m not stopping you, am I? Ask away. Are you really a cop? You look too young to be a cop. JACK: Your name is London, is that correct? LONDON: “Correct.” Is that how you talk? You sound like you’re doing role-play with someone who gets turned on by accountants. JACK: I’d appreciate it if you could try to take this seriously. Your name is L-o-n-d-o-n? LONDON: Yes! JACK: I have to say, that’s an unusual name. Well, maybe not unusual, but interesting. Where’s it from? LONDON: England. JACK: Yes, I understand that. What I meant was, is there a special reason why you’re called that? LONDON: It’s what my parents decided to call me. Have you been smoking something? JACK: You know what? Let’s forget that and just move on. LONDON: It’s not worth getting upset about, is it? JACK: I’m not upset. LONDON: Right, because you don’t sound at all upset. JACK: Let’s focus on the questions. You work in the bank, is that correct? And you were working at the counter when the perpetrator came in? LONDON: Perpetrator? JACK: The bank robber. LONDON: Yes, that’s “correct.” JACK: You don’t have to do that with your fingers. LONDON: They’re perverted commas. You’re writing this down, right, so I want you to use perverted commas when I do that, so anyone reading your notes will get that I’m being ironic. Otherwise anyone reading this is going to think I’m a complete moron! JACK: They’re called inverted commas. LONDON: Is there an echo in here or something? JACK: I was just telling you what they’re called. LONDON: I was just telling you what they’re called! JACK: That’s not what I sound like. LONDON: That’s not what I sound like! JACK: I’m going to have to ask you to take this more seriously. Can you tell me about the robbery? LONDON: Look, it wasn’t even a robbery. We’re a cashless bank, okay? JACK: Please, just tell me what happened. LONDON: Did you put that my name is London? Or have you just put “witness”? I want you to use my name, in case this ends up online and I get famous. JACK: This isn’t going to end up online. LONDON: Everything ends up online. JACK: I’ll make sure I use your name. LONDON: Sick. JACK: Sorry? LONDON: “Sick.” Don’t you know what “sick” means? It means good, okay? JACK: I know what it means. I just didn’t hear what you said. LONDON: I just didn’t hear what you saaaid… JACK: How old are you? LONDON: How old are you? JACK: I’m asking because you seem quite young to be working in a bank. LONDON: I’m twenty. And I’m, like, only a temp, because no one else wanted to work the day before New Year’s Eve. I’m going to study to be a bartender. JACK: I didn’t know you needed to study to do that. LONDON: It’s tougher than being a cop, anyway. JACK: Of course it is. Can you tell me about the robbery now, please? LONDON: God, could you be any more annoying? Okay, I’ll tell you about the “robbery”… 15 It was a day completely devoid of weather. During some weeks in winter in the central part of Scandinavia the sky doesn’t seem to bother even attempting to impress us, it greets us with the color of newspaper in a puddle, and dawn leaves behind it a fog as if someone has been setting fire to ghosts. It was, in other words, a bad day for an apartment viewing, because no one wants to live anywhere at all in weather like that. On top of that, it was also the day before New Year’s Eve, and what sort of lunatic holds a viewing on a day like that? It was even a bad day for a bank robbery, although, in defense of the weather, that was more the fault of the bank robber. But if we’re being picky, it wasn’t by definition even a bank robbery. Which isn’t to say that the bank robber didn’t fully intend to be a bank robber, because that was very much the intention, it’s just that the bank robber failed to pick a bank that contained any cash. Which probably has to be considered one of the main prerequisites for a bank robbery. But this wasn’t necessarily the bank robber’s fault. It was society’s. Not that society was responsible for the social injustices that led the bank robber onto a path of crime (which society may well in fact be responsible for, but that’s completely irrelevant right now), but because in recent years society has turned into a place where nothing is named according to what it is anymore. There was a time when a bank was a bank. But now there are evidently “cashless” banks, banks without any money, which is surely something of a travesty? It’s hardly surprising that people get confused and society is going to the dogs when it’s full of caffeine-free coffee, gluten-free bread, alcohol-free beer. So the bank robber who failed to be a bank robber stepped into the bank that was barely a bank, and declared the purpose of the visit fairly clearly with the help of the pistol. But behind the counter sat a twenty-year-old, London, deeply immersed in the sort of social media that dismantles a person’s social competence to the extent that when she caught sight of the bank robber she instinctively exclaimed: “Are you some kind of joke, or what?” (The fact that she didn’t phrase her question as “Is this some kind of joke?” but went straight for “Are you a joke?” perhaps says a lot about the younger generation’s lack of respect for older bank robbers.) The bank robber shot her a disappointed-dad look, waved the pistol, and pushed over a note which said: “This is a robbery! Give me 6,500 kronor!” London’s entire face frowned and she snorted: “Six thousand five hundred? You haven’t left off a couple of zeroes? Anyway, this is a cashless bank, and are you really going to try to rob a cashless bank, or what? Are you, like, totally stupid?” Somewhat taken aback, the bank robber coughed and mumbled something inaudible. London threw her arms out and asked: “Is that a real pistol? Like, a really real pistol? Because I saw a television show where a guy wasn’t found guilty of armed robbery because he didn’t use a real pistol!” By this point in the conversation, the bank robber was starting to feel very old, especially since the twenty-year-old on the other side of the conversation gave the impression that she was around fourteen years old. Which of course she wasn’t, but the bank robber was thirty-nine, and had therefore reached an age where there’s suddenly very little difference between fourteen and twenty. That’s what makes a person feel old. “Hello? Are you going to answer me, or what?” London exclaimed impatiently, and obviously it’s easy in hindsight to think that this was a somewhat poorly considered thing to shout at a masked bank robber holding a pistol, but if you knew London you’d have known that this wasn’t because she was stupid. She was just a miserable person. That was because she didn’t have any real friends, not even on social media, and instead spent most of her time getting upset that celebrities she didn’t like hadn’t had their life together ruined, again. Just before the bank robber came in she had been busy refreshing her browser to find out if two famous actors were going to get divorced or not. She hoped they were, because sometimes it’s easier to live with your own anxieties if you know that no one else is happy, either. The bank robber didn’t say anything, though, and had started to feel rather stupid by this point, and was now regretting the whole thing. Robbing a bank had clearly been a breathtakingly stupid idea right from the outset. The bank robber was actually on the point of explaining this to London before apologizing and walking out, and then perhaps everything that happened after that wouldn’t have happened at all, but the bank robber didn’t get a chance seeing as London announced instead: “Look, I’m going to call the cops now!” That was when the bank robber panicked and ran out of the door. 16 Witness Interview (Continued) JACK: Is there anything more specific you could tell me about the perpetrator? LONDON: You mean the bank robber? JACK: Yes. LONDON: So why not just say that instead? JACK: Is there anything more specific you could tell me about the bank robber? LONDON: Like what? JACK: Do you remember anything about his appearance? LONDON: God, that’s such a superficial question! You’ve got a really sick binary view of gender, yeah? JACK: I’m sorry. Can you tell me anything else about “the person”? LONDON: You don’t have to use perverted commas for that. JACK: I’m afraid I’m going to have to say that I do. Can you tell me anything about the bank robber’s appearance? For instance, was the bank robber a short bank robber or a tall bank robber? LONDON: Look, I don’t describe people by their height. That’s really excluding. I mean, I’m short, and I know that can give a lot of tall people a complex. JACK: I’m sorry? LONDON: Tall people have feelings, too, you know. JACK: Okay. Fine. Then I can only apologize again. Let me rephrase the question: Did the bank robber look like the sort of bank robber who might have a complex? LONDON: Why are you rubbing your eyebrows like that? It’s really creepy. JACK: I’m sorry. What was your first impression of the bank robber? LONDON: Okay. My first “impression” was that the “bank robber” seemed to be a complete moron. JACK: I’ll interpret that as suggesting that it’s perfectly okay to have a binary attitude to intelligence. LONDON: What? JACK: Nothing. On what did you base your assumption that the bank robber was a moron? LONDON: I was handed a note saying “Give me six thousand five hundred kronor.” Who the hell would rob a BANK for six and a half thousand? You rob banks to get ten million, something like that. If all you want is six thousand five hundred exactly, there must be some very special reason, mustn’t there? JACK: I have to confess that I hadn’t thought of it like that. LONDON: You should think more, have you ever thought about that? JACK: I’ll do my best. Can I ask you to take a look at this sheet of paper and tell me if you recognize it? LONDON: This? Looks like a kid’s drawing. And what’s it supposed to be anyway? JACK: I think that’s a monkey, and a frog and a horse. LONDON: That’s not a horse. That’s an elk! JACK: Do you think? All my colleagues have guessed either a horse or a giraffe. LONDON: Hang on. I just got a flash in my bud. JACK: No, stay focused now, London—so you think this is an elk? Hello? Put your phone down and answer the question! LONDON: Yes! JACK: Sorry? LONDON: At last! At last! JACK: I don’t understand. LONDON: They are getting divorced! 17 The truth? The truth is that the bank robber was an adult. There’s nothing more revealing about a bank robber’s personality than that. Because the terrible thing about becoming an adult is being forced to realize that absolutely nobody cares about us, we have to deal with everything ourselves now, find out how the whole world works. Work and pay bills, use dental floss and get to meetings on time, stand in line and fill out forms, come to grips with cables and put furniture together, change tires on the car and charge the phone and switch the coffee machine off and not forget to sign the kids up for swimming lessons. We open our eyes in the morning and life is just waiting to tip a fresh avalanche of “Don’t Forget!”s and “Remember!”s over us. We don’t have time to think or breathe, we just wake up and start digging through the heap, because there will be another one dumped on us tomorrow. We look around occasionally, at our place of work or at parents’ meetings or out in the street, and realize with horror that everyone else seems to know exactly what they’re doing. We’re the only ones who have to pretend. Everyone else can afford stuff and has a handle on other stuff and enough energy to deal with even more stuff. And everyone else’s children can swim. But we weren’t ready to become adults. Someone should have stopped us. The truth? The truth is that just as the bank robber ran out into the street, a police officer happened to be walking past. It would later become apparent that no police officers were yet looking for the bank robber, seeing as the alarm hadn’t been raised over the radio, seeing as twenty-year-old London and the staff in the emergency call center took plenty of time to become mutually offended by one another first. (London reported a bank robbery, which led the call operator to ask “Where?” which led London to give them the address of the bank, which led the call operator to ask “Aren’t you a cashless bank? Why would anyone want to rob that?” which led London to say “Exactly,” which led the call operator to ask “Exactly what?” which led London to snap “What do you mean ‘Exactly what’?” which led to the call operator hitting back with “You were the one who started it!” which led London to yell “No, you were the one who…,” after which the conversation quickly deteriorated.) Later it turned out that the police officer the bank robber saw in the street wasn’t actually a police officer but a traffic warden, and if the bank robber hadn’t been so stressed and had been paying attention, that would have been obvious and a different escape strategy might have been possible. Which would have made this a much shorter story. But instead the bank robber rushed through the first available open door, which led to a stairwell, and then there weren’t exactly many options except to go up the stairs. On the top floor one of the apartment doors was wide open, so that’s where the bank robber went, out of breath and sweating, with the traditional bank robber’s ski mask askew so that only one eye could see anything. Only then did the bank robber notice that the hall was full of shoes, and that the apartment was full of people with no shoes on. One of the women in the apartment caught sight of the pistol and started to cry, “Oh, dear Lord, we’re being robbed!” and at the same time the bank robber heard rapid footsteps out in the stairwell and assumed it was a police officer (it wasn’t, it was the postman), so in the absence of other alternatives the bank robber shut the door and aimed the pistol in various different directions at random, initially shouting, “No… ! No, this isn’t a robbery… I just…,” before quickly thinking better of it and panting, “Well, maybe it is a robbery! But you’re not the victims! It’s maybe more like a hostage situation now! And I’m very sorry about that! I’m having quite a complicated day here!” The bank robber undeniably had a point. Not that this is in any way a defense of bank robbers, but they can have bad days at work, too. Hand on heart, which of us hasn’t wanted to pull a gun after talking to a twenty-year-old? A few minutes later, the street in front of the building was crawling with journalists and cameras, and after they came the police arrived. The fact that most of the journalists arrived before the police should in no way be interpreted as evidence of their respective professions’ competence, but in this instance more as proof that the police had more important things to be getting on with, and that the journalists had more time to read social media, and the unpleasant young woman in the bank that wasn’t a bank was evidently able to express herself better on Twitter than over the phone. On social media she announced that she had watched through the large front window of the bank as the robber ran into the building on the other side of the street, whereas the police didn’t receive the call until the postman who had seen the bank robber in the stairwell called his wife, who happened to work in a caf? opposite the police station. She rushed across the road, and only then was the alarm sounded, to the effect that what appeared to be a man armed with what appeared to be a pistol, wearing what appeared to be a ski mask, had rushed into a viewing in one of the apartments and had locked the real estate agent and prospective buyers inside. This was how a bank robber failed to rob a bank but instead managed to spark a hostage drama. Life doesn’t always turn out the way you expect. Just as the bank robber closed the door to the apartment, a piece of paper dislodged from a coat pocket fluttered out into the stairwell. It was a child’s drawing of a monkey, a frog, and an elk. Not a horse, and definitely not a giraffe. That was important. Because even if twenty-year-olds can be wrong about a lot of things in life (and those of us who aren’t twenty can probably agree that most twenty-year-olds are wrong so often that most of them would have just a one in four chance of answering a yes or no question correctly), this particular twenty-year-old was actually right about one thing: normal bank robbers ask for large amounts and round figures. Anyone can go into a bank and yell: “Give me ten million or I’ll shoot!” But if a person walks in armed and nervous and very specifically asks for exactly six thousand five hundred kronor, there’s probably a reason. Or two. 18 The man on the bridge ten years ago and the bank robber who took people hostage at an apartment viewing aren’t connected. They never met each other. The only thing they really have in common is moral hazard. That’s a banking term, of course. Someone had to come up with it to describe the way the financial markets work, because the fact that banks are immoral is so obvious to us that simply calling them “immoral” wasn’t enough. We needed a way to describe the fact that it’s so unlikely that a bank would ever behave morally that it can only be considered a risk for them even to try. The man on the bridge gave his money to a bank so that they could make “secure investments,” because all investments were secure in those days. Then the man used these secure investments as security against loans, and then he took out new loans to pay off the old ones. “Everyone does this,” the bank said, and the man thought: “They’re the ones who should know.” Then one day all of a sudden nothing was secure anymore. It was called a crisis in the financial markets, a bank crash, even though the only ones who crash are people. The banks are still there, the financial markets have no heart that can be broken, but for the man on the bridge, a whole life’s savings had been replaced by a mountain of debt, and no one could explain how that had happened. When the man pointed out that the bank had promised that this was “entirely risk-free,” the bank threw out its arms and said: “Nothing’s entirely risk-free, you should have known what you were getting into, you shouldn’t have given us your money.” So the man went to another bank to borrow money to pay off the debts he now had because the first bank had lost all his savings. He explained to the second bank that he might lose his business otherwise, then his home, and he told them he had two children. The second bank nodded and was very understanding, but a woman who worked there told him: “You’ve suffered what we call moral hazard.” The man didn’t understand, so the woman explained that moral hazard is “when one party in an agreement is protected against the negative consequences of its own actions.” When the man still didn’t understand, the woman sighed and said: “It’s when two idiots are sitting on a creaking tree branch, and the one closest to the trunk is holding the saw.” The man was still blinking uncomprehendingly, so the woman raised her eyebrows and explained: “You’re the idiot furthest away from the trunk. The bank’s going to saw the branch off to save itself. Because the bank hasn’t lost any of its own money here, just yours, because you’re the idiot who let them hold the saw.” Then she calmly gathered together the man’s papers, handed them back to him, and told him that she wasn’t going to authorize a loan. “But it isn’t my fault that they lost all my money!” the man exclaimed. The woman looked at him coolly and declared: “Yes it is. Because you shouldn’t have given them your money.” Ten years later a bank robber walks into an apartment viewing. The bank robber had never had enough money to hear a woman in a bank talk about moral hazard, but the bank robber had a mother who often said that “if you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans,” and sometimes that comes down to the same thing. The bank robber was only seven years old the first time this was said, and that may well be a little early to hear something of that nature, because it pretty much means “life can go all sorts of different ways, but it will probably go wrong.” Even seven-year-olds understand that. They also understand that if their mom says she doesn’t like making plans, and even if she never plans to get drunk, she still ends up getting drunk a little too often for it to be a coincidence. The seven-year-old swore never to start drinking hard liquor and never to become an adult, and managed to keep half that promise. And moral hazard? The seven-year-old learned about that just before Christmas Eve the same year. When Mom kneeled down on the kitchen floor and lurched into a hug that left the seven-year-old’s hair peppered with cigarette ash. In a voice shaken by sobs, the seven-year-old’s mom said: “Please don’t be upset with me, don’t shout at me, it wasn’t actually my fault.” The child didn’t understand exactly what that meant, but slowly began to realize that whatever it was, it might have some connection to the fact that the child had spent the past month selling Christmas editions of magazines every day after school, and had given all the money to Mom so she could buy food for Christmas. The child looked into the mother’s eyes, they were shiny with alcohol and tears, intoxication and self-loathing. She wept as she clung to the child. She whispered: “You shouldn’t have given me the money.” That was the closest the woman ever came to asking her child for forgiveness. The bank robber often thinks about that to this day. Not about how terrible it was, but about how odd it is that you can’t hate your mom. That it still doesn’t feel like it was her fault. They were evicted from their apartment the following February, and the bank robber swore never to become a parent, and, when the bank robber ended up becoming a parent anyway, swore never to become a chaotic parent. The sort who can’t cope with being an adult, the sort who can’t pay bills and has nowhere to live with their kids. And God laughed. The man on the bridge wrote a letter to the woman at the bank who had told him about moral hazard. He wrote down exactly what he wanted her to hear. Then he jumped. The woman at the bank has been carrying that letter in her handbag for ten years. Then she met the bank robber. 19 Jim and Jack were the first police officers to arrive on the scene outside the building. That wasn’t so much an indication of their competence as a sign of the size of the town: there just weren’t that many police officers around, especially not the day before New Year’s Eve. The journalists were already there, of course. Or maybe they were just locals and curious onlookers, it can be hard to tell these days when everyone films, photographs, and documents their whole life as if every individual were their own television channel. They all looked expectantly at Jim and Jack, as if the police ought to know exactly what was going to happen next. They didn’t. People simply didn’t take other people hostage in this town, and people didn’t rob banks here, either, especially now that they’d gone cashless. “What do you think we should do?” Jack wondered. “Me? I don’t know, I really don’t, you’re the one who usually knows,” Jim replied bluntly. Jack looked at him despondently. “I’ve never been involved in a hostage drama.” “Me neither, son. But you went on that course, didn’t you? That listening thing?” “Active listening,” Jack muttered. Sure enough, he’d been on the course, but precisely what use that might be to him now was hard to imagine. “Well, didn’t that teach you how to talk to hostage takers?” Jim said, nodding encouragingly. “Sure, but in order to be able to listen, there has to be someone talking. How are we going to contact the bank robber?” Jack said, because they hadn’t received any kind of message, no ransom demand. Nothing. Besides, he couldn’t help thinking that if that course on active listening was as good as the tutor claimed, then surely Jack ought to have a girlfriend by now. “I don’t know, I really don’t,” Jim admitted. Jack sighed. “You’ve been in the police your whole life, Dad, you must have some experience of this sort of thing?” Naturally, Jim did his best to act like he definitely had experience, seeing as dads like teaching their sons things, because the moment we can no longer do that is when they stop being our responsibility and we become theirs. So the father cleared his throat and turned away as he took out his phone. He stood there for a good while, hoping he wasn’t going to be asked what he was doing. He was, of course. “Dad…,” Jack said over his shoulder. “Mmm,” Jim said. “Are you seriously googling ‘what should you do in a hostage situation’?” “I might be.” Jack groaned and leaned over with his palms on his knees. He was growling silently to himself because he knew what his bosses, and his bosses’ bosses, would say when they called him in the very near future. The worst words Jack knew. “Perhaps we should call Stockholm and ask for help?” Sure, Jack thought, because how would it look if we actually managed to do something for ourselves in this town? He glanced up at the balcony of the apartment where the bank robber was holed up. Swore under his breath. He just needed a starting point, some way of establishing contact. “Dad?” he eventually sighed. “Yes, lad?” “What does it say on Google?” Jim read out loud that you have to start by finding out who the hostage taker is. And what he wants. 20 Okay. A bank robber robs a bank. Think about that for a moment. Obviously, it has nothing to do with you. Just as little as a man jumping off a bridge. Because you’re a normal, decent person, so you would never have robbed a bank. There are simply some things that all normal people understand that you must never under any circumstances do. You mustn’t tell lies, you mustn’t steal, you mustn’t kill, and you mustn’t throw stones at birds. We all agree on that. Except maybe swans, because swans can actually be passive-aggressive little bastards. But apart from swans, you mustn’t throw stones at birds. And you mustn’t tell lies. Unless… well, sometimes you have to, of course, like when your children ask: “Why does it smell like chocolate in here? ARE YOU EATING CHOCOLATE?” But you definitely mustn’t steal or kill, we can agree on that. Well, you mustn’t kill people, anyway. And most of the time you mustn’t even kill swans, even if they are bastards, but you’re allowed to kill animals if they’ve got horns and are standing in the forest. Or if they’re bacon. But you must never kill people. Well, unless they’re Hitler. You’re allowed to kill Hitler, if you’ve got a time machine and an opportunity to do it. Because you must be allowed to kill one person to save several million others and avoid a world war, anyone can understand that. But how many people do you have to save in order to be allowed to kill someone? One million? A hundred and fifty? Two? Just one? None at all? Obviously, you won’t have an exact answer to that, because no one does. Let’s take a much simpler example, then: Are you allowed to steal? No, you mustn’t steal. We agree on that. Except when you steal someone’s heart, because that’s romantic. Or if you steal harmonicas from guys who play the harmonica at parties, because that’s being public spirited. Or if you steal something small because you really have to. That’s probably okay. But does that mean it’s okay to steal something a bit bigger? And who decides how much bigger? If you really have to steal, how much do you have to have to do it in order for it to be reasonable to steal something really serious? For instance, if you feel that you really have to and that no one will get hurt: Is it okay to rob a bank then? No, it probably isn’t really okay, even then. You’re probably right about that. Because you’d never rob a bank, so you haven’t got anything in common with this bank robber. Except fear, possibly. Because maybe you’ve been really frightened at some time, and so was the bank robber. Possibly because the bank robber had small children and had therefore had a lot of practice being afraid. Perhaps you, too, have children, in which case you’ll know that you’re frightened the whole time, frightened of not knowing everything and of not having the energy to do everything and of not coping with everything. In the end we actually get so used to the feeling of failure that every time we don’t disappoint our children it leaves us feeling secretly shocked. It’s possible that some children realize this. So every so often they do tiny, tiny things at the most peculiar times, to buoy us up a little. Just enough to stop us from drowning. So the bank robber left home one morning with that drawing of the frog, the monkey, and the elk tucked away in a pocket without realizing it. The girl who had drawn it put it there. The little girl has an older sister, they ought to fight the way sisters are always said to do, but they hardly ever do that. The younger one is allowed to play in the older sister’s room without the older one yelling at her. The older one gets to keep the things she cares for most without the younger one breaking them on purpose. Their parents used to whisper, “We don’t deserve them,” when the girls were very small. They were right. Now, after the divorce, during the weeks when the girls live with one of their parents, they listen to the news in the car in the morning. Their other parent is in the news today, but they don’t know that yet, they don’t know that one of their parents has become a bank robber. During the weeks when the girls live with their bank robber parent they go on the bus. They love that. All the way they invent little stories about the strangers in the seats at the front. That man there, he could be a fireman, their parent whispers. And she might be an alien, the youngest daughter says. Then it’s the older daughter’s turn, and she says really loudly: “That one could be a wanted man who’s killed someone and has their head in his backpack, who knows?” Then the women in the seats around them shuffle uncomfortably and the daughters giggle so hard that they almost can’t breathe, and their parent has to put on a serious face and pretend that it really isn’t funny at all. They’re almost always late to the bus stop, and as they run across the bridge and the bus stops on the other side, the girls always shriek with laughter: “The elk’s coming! The elk’s coming!” Because their bank robber parent’s legs are very long, out of proportion, and that means you look funny when you run. No one noticed that before the girls appeared, but children notice people’s proportions in a different way from adults, possibly because they always see us from below, and that’s our worst angle. That’s why they make such good bullies, the quick-witted little monsters. They have access to everything that’s most vulnerable in us. Even so, they forgive us, the whole time, for almost everything. And that’s the weirdest thing about being someone’s parent. Not just a bank robber parent, but any parent: that you are loved in spite of everything that you are. Even astonishingly late in life, people seem incapable of considering that their parents might not be super-smart and really funny and immortal. Perhaps there’s a biological reason for that, that up to a certain age a child loves you unconditionally and hopelessly for one single reason: you’re theirs. Which is a pretty smart move on biology’s part, you have to give it that. The bank robber parent never uses the girls’ real names. That’s the sort of thing you never really notice until you belong to someone else, the fact that those of us who give children their names are the least willing to use them. We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone. So the bank robber parent always calls the girls what they used to feel like, kicking in their mother’s belly six and eight years ago. One of them always seemed to be jumping about in there, and the other always seemed to be climbing. One frog. One monkey. And an elk that would do anything for them. Even when it’s completely stupid. Perhaps you have that in common after all. You probably have someone in your life whom you’d do something stupid for. But obviously you would still never rob a bank. Of course not. But perhaps, though, you’ve been in love? Almost everyone has, after all. And love can make you do quite a lot of ridiculous things. Getting married, for instance. Having children, playing happy families, and having a happy marriage. Or you might think that, anyway. Not happy, perhaps, but plausible. A plausible marriage. Because how happy can anyone really be, all the time? How could there be time for that? Mostly we’re just trying to get through the day. You’ve probably had days like that as well. But when you get through enough of them, one morning you look over your shoulder and realize that you’re on your own, the person you were married to turned off somewhere along the way. Maybe you uncover a lie. That’s what happened to the bank robber. An infidelity comes to light, and even if no one’s actually been unfaithful to you, you can probably appreciate that it’s enough to knock a person off balance. Especially if it wasn’t just a fling, but an affair that had been going on for a long time. You haven’t only been cheated on, you’ve also been deceived. It’s possible for someone to be unfaithful to you without really thinking about you at all, but an affair requires planning. Perhaps that’s what hurts most of all, the millions of tiny clues that you didn’t notice. Maybe you’d have been even more crushed if there wasn’t even a good explanation. For instance, maybe you could have understood if it was about loneliness or desire, “You’re always at work and we never have any time for each other.” But if the explanation is “Well, er, if you want me to be really honest, the person I’ve been unfaithful with is your boss,” then it can be harder to get back up again. Because that means that the reason you’ve been working so much overtime is also the same reason why you no longer have a marriage. When you get to work on the Monday after the breakup, your boss says: “Well, er, obviously it’s going to be uncomfortable for everyone involved, so… perhaps it would be easiest if you no longer worked here.” On Friday you were married and had a job, and on Monday you’re homeless and unemployed. What do you do then? Talk to a solicitor? Sue someone? No. Because the bank robber was told: “Don’t make a scene now. Don’t cause chaos. For the children’s sake!” So the bank robber didn’t. Didn’t want to be that sort of parent, so just moved out of the apartment, left work, eyes closed, jaw clenched. For the children’s sake. Perhaps you’d have done the same. Once the frog said she’d heard an adult on the bus say “love hurts,” and the monkey replied that maybe that’s why hearts end up jagged when you try to draw them. How do you explain a divorce to them after that? How do you explain about infidelity? How do you avoid turning them into little cynics? Falling in love is magical, after all, romantic, breathtaking… but falling in love and love are different. Aren’t they? Don’t they have to be? Good grief, no one could cope with being newly infatuated, year after year. When you’re infatuated you can’t think about anything else, you forget about your friends, your work, your lunch. If we were infatuated all the time we’d starve to death. And being in love means being infatuated… from time to time. You have to be sensible. The problem is that everything is relative, happiness is based on expectations, and we have the Internet now. A whole world constantly asking us: “But is your life as perfect as this? Well? How about now? Is it as perfect as this? If it isn’t, change it!” The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit. Not that that really makes much difference, because now we’ve learned that every day needs to be special. Every day. Suddenly you find yourselves living alongside each other, not with each other. One of us can go around for a shocking length of time thinking our marriage is good. Or at least no worse than anyone else’s. Plausible, anyway. Then it turns out that one of us wants more, just getting through the day isn’t enough. One of us worked and went home, worked and went home, worked and went home, trying to be amenable in both places. And then it turns out that the person you were married to and the person you were working for have been extremely amenable to each other the whole time. “Love one another until death do us part,” isn’t that what we said? Isn’t that what we promised each other? Or am I remembering wrong? “Or at least until one of us gets bored.” Maybe that was it? Now the monkey and the frog and one parent and the boss live in the apartment, and the bank robber parent lives somewhere else. Because the apartment was only in the name of the other parent, and the bank robber parent didn’t want to make a fuss. Not cause chaos. But it isn’t exactly easy to get a home in this part of town, or any other part of any other town, really, if you haven’t got a job or any savings. You don’t put your name on the list for public housing when you’re married and have children and a life, because it never occurs to you that you might lose all of it in the course of an afternoon. The worst thing a divorce does to a person isn’t that it makes all the time you devoted to the relationship feel wasted, but that it steals all the plans you had for the future. Buying an apartment is completely out of the question, the bank said, because who’d lend money to someone without money? You only lend money to people who don’t really need to borrow money. So where are you to live, you might ask. “You’ll have to rent,” the bank said. But in order to rent an apartment in this town when you don’t have a job, you have to put down four months’ rent as a deposit. A deposit you get back when you move out, for all the good it’ll do you then. Then a letter arrived from a lawyer. It said that the monkey and frog’s other parent had decided to apply for sole custody of the children because “the current situation, in which their other custodian has neither a home nor a job, is untenable. We really must think of the children.” As if there were anything else a parent with no home and no job ever thinks about. The other parent also sent an email saying: “You need to pick up your things.” Which means of course that you have to pick up the things that the other parent and your old boss, after pinching all the good stuff, have decided are rubbish. They’re packed away in the storeroom in the basement, so what do you do? Maybe you go there late one evening, to avoid the shame of bumping into any of the neighbors, and maybe you realize you’ve got nowhere to take the things. You haven’t got anywhere to live, and it’s starting to get cold outside, so you stay in the storeroom in the basement. In another storeroom, belonging to a neighbor who’s forgotten to lock up, is a box full of blankets. You borrow them to keep yourself warm. For some reason, beneath the blankets is a toy pistol, so you sleep with that in your hand, thinking that if some crazy burglar breaks in during the night, you can scare them away with it. Then you start to cry, because you realize that you’re the crazy burglar. The next morning you put the blankets back but keep the toy pistol, because you don’t know where you’re going to sleep that night, and it might come in useful. This goes on for a week. You might not know exactly how it feels, but perhaps you’ve also had moments when you stare at yourself in the mirror and think: This wasn’t how life was supposed to turn out. That can terrify a person. So one morning you do something desperate. Well, not you, obviously, you’d have done something different, of course. You’d have found out about the law and what your rights were, and you’d have gotten hold of a lawyer and gone to court. Unless perhaps you wouldn’t have done that. Because perhaps you didn’t want to make a fuss in front of your daughters, you didn’t want to be one of those chaotic parents, so maybe you’d have thought: “Somehow, if I get the chance, I’ll find a way to sort this out without upsetting them.” So when a small apartment becomes available fairly close to the apartment where the monkey and the frog live, right by the bridge, a sublet from someone already subletting from someone else subletting, at a cost of six thousand five hundred a month, you think: If I can just manage a month I’ll have time to find a job, then they won’t be able to take the children away from me, as long as I just have somewhere to live. So you empty your bank account and sell everything you own and scrape together enough money for a month, and you lie awake thirty nights in a row, wondering how you’re going to afford another month. And then suddenly you can’t. You’re supposed to go to the authorities in that situation, that’s what you’re supposed to do. But perhaps you stand outside the door and think about your mom and what the air in there was like when you sat on a wooden bench with a numbered ticket between your fingertips, you remember how much a child can lie for their parents’ sake. You can’t force your heart to cross the threshold. The stupidest thing people who have everything think about people who have nothing is that it’s pride that stops a person from asking for help. That’s very rarely the case. Addicts are good at lying, but never as good as their children. It’s their sons and daughters who have to come up with excuses, never too outlandish or incredible, always mundane enough for no one to want to check them. An addict’s child’s homework never gets eaten by the dog, they just forgot their backpack at home. Their mom didn’t miss parents’ evening because she was kidnapped by ninjas, but because she had to work overtime. The child doesn’t remember the name of the place she’s working, it’s only a temporary job. She does her best, Mom does, to support us now that Dad’s gone, you know. You soon learn how to phrase things in such a way as to preclude any follow-up questions. You learn that the women in the welfare office can take you away from her if they find out she managed to set fire to your last apartment when she fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand, or if they find out she stole the Christmas ham from the supermarket. So you lie when the security guard comes, you take the ham off her, and confess: “It was me who took it.” No one calls the police for a child, not when it’s Christmas. So they let you go home with your mom, hungry but not alone. If you had been that sort of child, and then grown up and had children of your own, you would never have subjected them to that. Under no circumstances would they have to learn to become such good liars, you would promise yourself that. So you don’t go to the welfare office, because you’re scared they’ll take the girls away from you. You accept the divorce and don’t put up a fight for your apartment or your job, because you don’t want the girls to have parents who are at war with each other. You try to sort everything out yourself, and eventually you get a stroke of luck: you manage to find a job, against the odds, not the sort you can live comfortably on, but one you can survive on for a while. That’s all you need, a chance. But they tell you your first month’s wages are being withheld, meaning that they won’t pay you for the first month until you’ve worked two months, as if the first month weren’t the time when you can least afford to go without money. You go to the bank and ask for a loan so that you can afford to work for no wages, but the bank tells you that isn’t possible, because it isn’t a permanent job. You could get fired at any time. And then how would they get their money back? Because you haven’t got any, have you?! You try to explain that if you had money, you wouldn’t need a loan, but the bank can’t see the logic in that. So what do you do? You struggle on. Hope that’ll be enough. Then you receive another threatening letter from the lawyer. You don’t know what to do, who to turn to, you just don’t want to start a fight. You run to the bus in the morning, imagine that the girls can’t see how you’re feeling, but they do. You can see in their eyes that they want to sell subscriptions to magazines and give you all the money. When you leave them at school you go into an alleyway and sit down on the edge of the sidewalk and cry because you can’t stop thinking: You shouldn’t have loved me. All your life you’ve promised yourself that you’ll cope with everything. Not be a chaotic person. Not have to beg for help. But Christmas Eve arrives, and you suffer your way through it in lonely despair, because the girls are going to spend New Year’s Day with you. The day before New Year’s Eve you put the latest letter from the lawyer who wants to take them away from you in your pocket, next to the letter from your landlord which says that if you don’t pay the rent today you’re going to be evicted. Right there, right then, it takes next to nothing to knock you off balance. One really bad idea is enough. You find the toy pistol that looks like a real pistol. You make holes in a black woolly hat and pull it down over your face, you go into the bank that wasn’t prepared to lend you any money because you didn’t have any money, you tell yourself that you’re only going to ask for six thousand five hundred kronor for the rent, and that you’ll return it as soon as you get paid. How? a more ordered mind might be asking, but… well… perhaps you haven’t really thought that far ahead? Perhaps you just think you’ll go back, in the same ski mask and with the same pistol, and force them to take the money back? Because all you need is one month. All you need is one single chance to sort everything out. Later it turns out that that damn toy pistol, the one that looked almost real, looked real because it was real. And in a stairwell a drawing of an elk and a frog and a monkey flutters on the breeze, and in an apartment at the top of the building is a rug soaked in blood. This wasn’t how life was supposed to turn out. 21 It wasn’t a bomb. It was a box of Christmas lights that one of the neighbors had strung up on his balcony. He had actually been thinking of leaving them up over New Year’s Day, but then he had a row with his wife, because she thought “there are far too many lights, don’t you think? And why can’t we have ordinary white lights like everyone else? Do we have to have flashing lights, all different colors, so it looks like we’ve opened a brothel?” He had muttered back: “What sort of brothels have you been to, if they have flashing lights?” and then she had raised her eyebrows and suddenly demanded to know “what sort of brothels have you been to, seeing as you know exactly what they look like…?” and the row had ended with him going out onto the balcony and pulling the damn lights down. But he couldn’t be bothered to carry the box down to the storeroom in the basement, so he left them on the landing outside the door to their apartment. Then he and his wife went off to her parents’ to celebrate the New Year and argue about brothels. The box was left outside the door, on the floor below the apartment that ended up being the location for a hostage drama. When the postman at the start of this story came up the stairs and suddenly caught sight of the armed bank robber going into the apartment that was open for viewing, obviously he couldn’t get downstairs fast enough and stumbled over the box, accidentally dislodging the wires from the top of it. It didn’t look like a bomb, it really didn’t, it looked like an overturned box of Christmas lights. From a brothel. But in Jim’s defense perhaps it looked like it could have been a bomb, especially if you’d mostly only heard about bombs but never actually seen one. Or a brothel. Rather like if you’re really frightened of snakes and are sitting on the toilet and feel a slight draft on your backside, and you automatically think, Snake! Obviously that’s neither logical nor plausible, but if phobias were logical and plausible they wouldn’t be called phobias. Jim was considerably more frightened of bombs than he was of Christmas lights, and at times like that your brain and eyes can have a bit of a falling-out. That’s the point here. So, the two police officers had been standing down in the street. Jim had looked for advice on Google, and Jack had phoned the owner of the apartment where the hostages were to find out roughly how many people might be in there. The owner turned out to be a mother with a young family in a different town altogether. She said the apartment had been passed down to her and that she hadn’t been there in person for a very long time. She didn’t have anything to say about the viewing. “The real estate agent’s in charge of all that,” she said. Then Jack called the police station and spoke to the woman at the caf? who was married to the postman who first raised the alarm about the bank robber. Unfortunately Jack didn’t find out very much more, except for the fact that the bank robber was “masked and fairly small. Not really small, but normally small! Maybe more normal than small! But what’s normal?” Jack tried to come up with a plan based on this scant information, but didn’t get very far because his boss called and—when Jack couldn’t immediately present him with a plan—the boss called the boss’s boss, and the boss’s boss’s boss, and all the bosses naturally agreed, predictably enough, that it would probably be best if they called Stockholm at once. All of them apart from Jack, of course, who wanted to deal with something himself for once in his life. He suggested that the bosses should let him and Jim go into the stairwell and up to the apartment to see if they could make contact with the bank robber. The bosses agreed to this, despite their doubts, because Jack was basically the sort of police officer that other police officers trusted. But Jim was standing beside him, and heard as one of the bosses shouted down the line that they should “take it really damn carefully, and make sure there are no explosives or other crap in the stairwell, because it might not be about the hostages, it could be a terrorist incident! Have you seen anyone carrying any suspicious packages? Anyone with a beard?” Jack wasn’t bothered by any of that, because he was young. But Jim was seriously bothered, because he was someone’s father. The elevator was out of order, so he and Jack took the stairs, and on the way up they knocked on all the doors to see if any of the neighbors were still in the building. No one was home, because the day before New Year’s Eve anyone who had to work was at work, and anyone who didn’t have to work had better things to do, and anyone who didn’t must have heard the sirens and seen the reporters and police officers from their balconies and gone outside to see what was going on. (Some of them were actually afraid that there was a snake loose in the building, because there’d recently been rumors on the Internet that a snake had been found in a toilet in a block of apartments in the neighboring town, so that was pretty much the level of probability for hostage dramas in those parts.) When Jack and Jim reached the floor with the box and the wires, Jim started so hard with fear that he hurt his back (here it should be noted that Jim had recently hurt his back in the same place when he happened to sneeze unexpectedly, but still.) He yanked Jack back and hissed: “BOMB!” Jack rolled his eyes the way only sons can and said: “That isn’t a bomb.” “How do you know that?” Jim wondered. “Bombs don’t look like that,” Jack said. “Maybe that’s what whoever made the bomb wants you to think.” “Dad, pull yourself together, that isn’t…” If it had been any other colleague, Jim would probably have let him carry on up the stairs. Maybe that’s why some people think it’s a bad idea for fathers and sons to work together. Because Jim said instead: “No, I’m going to call Stockholm.” Jack never forgave him for that. The bosses and the bosses’ bosses and whoever was above them in the hierarchy who issued orders immediately issued an order that the two officers should go back down to the street and wait for backup. Obviously it wasn’t easy to find backup, even in the big cities, because who the hell robs a bank the day before New Year’s Eve? And who the hell takes people hostage at an apartment viewing? “And who the hell has an apartment viewing the day before…?” as one of the bosses wondered, and they carried on like that for a good while over the radio. Then a specialist negotiator, from Stockholm, called Jack’s phone to say that he was going to be taking charge of the entire operation. He was currently in a car, several hours away, but Jack needed to understand very clearly that he was expected merely to “contain the situation” until the negotiator arrived. The negotiator spoke with an accent that definitely wasn’t from Stockholm, but that didn’t matter, because if you asked Jim and Jack, being a Stockholmer was more a state of mind than a description of geographic origin. “Not all idiots are Stockholmers, but all Stockholmers are idiots,” as people often said at the police station. Which was obviously extremely unfair. Because it’s possible to stop being an idiot, but you can’t stop being a Stockholmer. After talking to the negotiator Jack was even angrier than he’d been the last time he’d had to speak to a customer service representative at his Internet provider. Jim in turn felt the weight of responsibility for the fact that his son wasn’t now going to get the chance to show that he could apprehend the bank robber on his own. All their decisions for the remainder of the day would come to be governed by those feelings. “Sorry, son, I didn’t mean…,” Jim began sheepishly, without knowing how he was going to finish the sentence without admitting that if Jack had been any other man’s son, Jim would most likely have agreed that it wasn’t a bomb. But you don’t take any risks if the son is your own son. “Not now, Dad!” Jack replied sullenly, because he was talking to their boss’s boss on the phone again. “What do you want me to do?” Jim asked, because he needed to be needed. “You can start by trying to get hold of people living in the neighboring apartments, the ones we never reached because of you and your ‘bomb,’ so we know that the rest of the building is empty!” Jack snapped. Jim nodded, crushed. He looked up the phone numbers on Google. First the owner of the apartment on the floor where Jim had seen the bomb. A man replied, said he and his wife were away, and when his wife snapped: “Who’s that?” irritably in the background, the man snapped back: “It’s the brothel!” Jim didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, so he asked instead if there was anyone in their apartment. When the man said there wasn’t, Jim didn’t want to worry him by talking about the bomb, and there was no way the man could possibly have known at that point that if he had just said: “By the way, that box on the landing contains Christmas lights,” then this whole story would have changed instantly, so the man merely asked instead: “Was there anything else?” and Jim said: “No, no, I think that’s everything,” then thanked him and hung up. Then he called the owners of the apartment at the top of the building, the one on the same floor as the apartment where the hostage drama was going on. The owners of that one turned out to be a young couple in their early twenties, they were in the middle of splitting up and had both moved out. “So the apartment’s empty?” Jim asked, relieved. It was, but in two separate conversations Jim still had to listen as two twentysomethings took it for granted that Jim would want to know why they had split up. It turned out that one of them couldn’t live with the fact that the other one had such ugly shoes, and the other was turned off by the fact that the first dribbled when he brushed his teeth, and that both of them would rather have a partner who wasn’t quite so short. One said that the relationship was doomed because the other liked coriander, so Jim said: “And you don’t?” only to receive the reply: “I do, but not as much as her!” The other one said they’d started to hate each other after an argument that, as far as Jim could understand, started when they were unable to find a juicer in a color that reflected them both as individuals but also as a couple. That was when they realized that they couldn’t live together another minute longer, and now they hated each other. It struck Jim that today’s youngsters had far too much choice, that was the whole problem—if all those modern dating apps had existed when Jim’s wife first met him, she would never have ended up becoming his wife. If you’re constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind, Jim thought. How could anyone live with the stress of knowing that while their partner was in the bathroom, they could be swiping right or left and finding their soul mate? A whole generation would end up getting urinary tract infections because they had to keep waiting to pee until the charge on their partner’s phone ran out. But obviously Jim said none of this, merely asked one last time: “So the apartment’s empty?” They each confirmed that it was. All that was left in there was a juicer in the wrong color. The apartment was going to be put up for sale in the new year, with an estate agency whose name one of them couldn’t remember, only that it was “really corny, kind of dad-joke corny!” The other one confirmed this: “Whoever named that estate agency has a worse sense of humor than hairdressers! Did you know there’s one here called ‘The Upper Cut’? I mean, like, what?” Jim hung up then. He thought it was a shame that they’d split up, those two, because they deserved each other. He went over to Jack and tried to tell him about it, but Jack just said: “Not now, Dad! Did you get hold of the neighbors?” Jim nodded. “Is anyone home?” Jack asked. Jim shook his head. “I just wanted to say that…,” he began, but Jack shook his head and resumed his conversation with his boss. “Not now, Dad!” So Jim didn’t say anything more. What then? Well, then everything slid out of control, little by little. The whole hostage drama took several hours, but the negotiator got caught up in traffic and ended up stuck behind the worst multi-vehicle pileup of the year on the motorway (“Bound to be Stockholmers who set out without proper studded tires,” Jim declared confidently), so he never arrived. Jim and Jack were left to deal with the situation themselves, which wasn’t without its complications seeing as it took them a long time before they even managed to establish contact with the bank robber (culminating in Jack getting a large bump on his head, which itself is quite a long story). But eventually they managed to get a phone inside the apartment (which is an even longer story), and once the bank robber had released all the hostages and the negotiator made a call to that phone, that was when the pistol shot was heard from inside the apartment. Several hours later Jack and Jim were still sitting in the police station, interviewing all the witnesses. That didn’t help at all, of course, because at least one of them wasn’t telling the truth. 22 The truth is that the bank robber went to ridiculous lengths not to point the pistol at anyone inside the apartment, to avoid frightening anyone. But the first person the bank robber accidentally happened to aim the pistol at was a woman called Zara. She’s somewhere in her fifties, and beautifully dressed in that way that people who have become financially independent on the back of other people’s financial dependency often are. The funny thing is that when the bank robber rushed in, stumbled, and ended up waving the pistol in such a way that Zara found herself staring straight down the barrel of the gun, she didn’t even look scared. Another woman in the apartment, on the other hand, let out a shriek of panic: “Oh, dear Lord, we’re being robbed!” Which seemed a little odd, because the bank robber had absolutely no intention that this bit should be a robbery. Obviously no one likes being treated in a prejudiced way, and the fact that you just happen to be holding a pistol doesn’t automatically make you a robber, and even if you are, you can still be a bank robber without necessarily wanting to rob individuals. So when another woman cried, “Get your money out, Roger!” to her husband, the bank robber couldn’t help feeling rather insulted. Not unreasonably, really. Then a middle-aged man in a checkered shirt who was standing by the window—Roger, evidently—muttered sullenly: “We haven’t got any cash!” The bank robber was about to protest, but caught sight of the reflection captured in the balcony window. A figure with a masked face armed with a pistol, and the other people in the room. One of them was a very old woman. Another was pregnant. A third looked like she was about to burst into tears. They were all staring at the pistol, eyes wild with fear, no one’s wilder than the eyes staring out through the holes in the ski mask in the reflection. Then the bank robber reached a crushing realization: They’re not the captives here. I am. The only person who didn’t look remotely scared was Zara. That’s when they heard the sound of the first police sirens from down in the street. 23 Witness Interview Date: December 30 Name of witness: Zara JIM: Hello! My name’s Jim! ZARA: Yes, yes, fine. Get on with it. JIM: So, I’m here to record your version of what happened. Tell me about it in your own words. ZARA: Who else’s words would I use? JIM: Well, yes, quite. Just a figure of speech, I suppose. But first I’d like to make you aware that everything you say here is being recorded. And you can have a lawyer present if you’d like one. ZARA: Why would I want one? JIM: I just wanted you to be aware of that. My bosses say that their bosses say it’s important that everything’s done properly. We’re going to be getting a team of special investigators from Stockholm who are going to take over this investigation. My son’s very angry about that, he’s also a police officer, you see. So I just wanted to let you know that bit about having a lawyer present. ZARA: Listen, I’ll pay for a lawyer if I ever threaten anyone with a pistol. Not when I’m the one being threatened. JIM: I understand. I certainly didn’t mean to be impertinent, certainly not. I realize you’ve had a difficult day, obviously I realize that. You just need to answer all my questions as honestly as you can. Would you like coffee? ZARA: Is that what you call it? I saw what came out of that machine out there, and I wouldn’t drink that if you and I were the last people on the planet and you promised me it was poison. JIM: I’m not sure if that’s more of an insult to me or the coffee. ZARA: You said you wanted me to answer your questions honestly. JIM: Yes, I suppose I did, didn’t I? Well, can I start by asking why you were in the apartment? ZARA: What a stupid question. Were you the one standing in the stairwell when we were released? JIM: Yes, that was me. ZARA: So you were the first one into the apartment after we left? And you still managed to lose the bank robber? JIM: I wasn’t actually first in. I waited for Jack, my colleague. You probably met him earlier. He was the first man into the apartment. ZARA: You policemen all look alike, did you know that? JIM: Jack’s my son. Maybe that’s why. ZARA: Jim and Jack? JIM: Yes. Like Jim Beam and Jack Daniel’s. ZARA: Is that supposed to be funny? JIM: No, no. My wife’s never found that funny, either. ZARA: So you’re married, then? Well done you. JIM: Yes, perhaps that isn’t entirely relevant right now. Can you give me a short explanation of why you were at the viewing of the apartment? ZARA: It was an apartment viewing. Is that phrase too hard to understand? JIM: So you were there to look at the apartment? ZARA: You’re about as sharp as a wet box of cornflakes, aren’t you? JIM: Does that mean yes? ZARA: It means what it means. JIM: What I mean is, were you planning to buy the apartment? ZARA: Are you a real estate agent or a policeman? JIM: I just mean that it would be easy to assume that you might be a little too well-off to be interested in that apartment. ZARA: Oh, it would, would it? JIM: Well, what I mean is that my colleagues and I might think that. One of them, anyway. My son, I mean. Based on some of the witness statements, I mean. You seem comfortably-off, that’s what I mean. And at first glance this apartment doesn’t look like the sort of thing that someone like you would want to buy. ZARA: Listen, the problem with the middle class is that you think someone can be too rich to buy things. But that’s not true. You can only be too poor. JIM: Well, perhaps we should move on. By the way, have I spelled your surname right here? ZARA: No. JIM: No? ZARA: But there’s a perfectly logical reason why you think it’s spelled that way. JIM: Oh? ZARA: It’s because of the simple fact that you’re an idiot. JIM: I’m sorry. Can you spell it out for me? ZARA: I-d-i-o-t. JIM: I meant your name? ZARA: We’d be here all night, and some of us actually have important jobs to do, so why don’t I summarize things for you? A lunatic with a gun held me and a group of poor, less well-off people hostage for half a day, you and your colleagues surrounded the building, and the whole thing was on television, but you still managed to lose the bank robber. Right now you could have prioritized being out there trying to find the aforementioned bank robber, but instead you’re sitting here sweating because you’ve never seen a surname with more than three consonants in it before. Your bosses couldn’t make my taxes disappear faster if I’d given them matches. JIM: I understand that you’re upset. ZARA: That’s very clever of you. JIM: I just meant that you’re in shock. I mean, no one expects to be threatened with a pistol when they go to view an apartment, do they? The papers may keep saying that the property market’s tough these days, but taking hostages is probably going a bit far. I mean, it says in the papers one day that it’s a “buyer’s market,” then the next that it’s a “seller’s market,” but in the end surely it’s always just the damn banks’ market? Don’t you think? ZARA: Is that supposed to be a joke? JIM: No, no, it’s supposed to be small talk. I just mean that the way society looks right now, the bank robber would have had considerably fewer police resources looking for him if he’d actually succeeded in robbing that bank than if he, as was actually the case, took all of you hostage. I mean, everyone hates banks. It’s like people say: “Sometimes it’s hard to know who the biggest crooks are, people who rob banks, or the people who run the banks.” ZARA: Do people say that? JIM: Yes. I think so. They do, don’t they? I just mean, I read in the paper yesterday about how much those bank bosses earn. They live in houses the size of palaces worth fifty million while ordinary people can barely manage to make their mortgage payments. ZARA: Can I ask you a question? JIM: Of course. ZARA: Why is it that people like you always think successful people should be punished for their success? JIM: What? ZARA: Do you do some sort of advanced conspiracy role-play at Police College where you’re tricked into thinking that police officers get the same salary as bank bosses, or were you all just not capable of doing a bit of basic mathematics? JIM: Yes, well. I mean, no. ZARA: Or do you just think the world owes you something? JIM: It’s just struck me, I never asked what you do for a living. ZARA: I run a bank. 24 The truth is that Zara, who appears to be a little more than fifty years old, but exactly how much no one has ever dared ask, was never interested in buying the apartment. Not because she couldn’t afford it, of course, she could probably have bought it with the spare change she found between the cushions on the sofa in her own apartment. (Zara regarded coins as disgusting little havens of bacteria which have probably been touched by God knows how many middle-class fingers, and she’d rather have burned her sofa cushions than pick one up, so let’s put it like this: she could definitely have bought that apartment for the cost of her sofa.) So she went to the viewing with her nose already wrinkled, wearing diamond earrings large enough to knock out a medium-sized child, if that turned out to be necessary. But not even that, if you looked at her really closely, could hide the lurching grief inside her. The first thing you have to understand is that Zara has recently been seeing a psychologist, because Zara has the sort of career which, if you do it for long enough, sometimes means you have to seek professional help to get instructions on what you can do with your life beyond having a career. Her first meeting with the psychologist didn’t go terribly well. Zara began by picking up a framed photograph from the desk and asking: “Who’s that?” The psychologist replied: “My mom.” Zara asked: “Do you get on well with her?” The psychologist replied: “She passed away recently.” Zara asked: “And what was your relationship like before that?” The psychologist noted that a more normal response would have been to offer condolences on her death, but tried to maintain a neutral expression and said: “We’re not here to talk about me.” To which Zara replied: “If I’m going to leave my car with a mechanic, first I want to know if her own car is a worthless heap of junk.” The psychologist took a deep breath and said: “I can understand that. So let me just say that my mom and I had a very good relationship. Is that better?” Zara nodded skeptically and asked: “Have any of your patients ever committed suicide?” The psychologist’s chest tightened; she replied: “No.” Zara shrugged her shoulders and added: “As far as you’re aware.” That was a fairly cruel thing to say to a psychologist. The psychologist, however, recovered quickly enough to say: “I only completed my training relatively recently. I haven’t had that many patients, but I do know they are all still alive. Why are you asking these questions?” Zara looked at the only picture on the walls of the psychologist’s office, pursed her lips thoughtfully, and said, with surprising honesty: “I want to know if you can help me.” The psychologist picked up a pen, smiled a practiced smile, and said: “With what?” Zara replied that she was having “trouble sleeping.” She had been prescribed sleeping pills by her doctor, but now her doctor was refusing to prescribe more unless she spoke to a psychologist first. “So here I am,” Zara declared, and tapped her watch, as if she were the one being paid by the hour rather than the reverse. The psychologist asked: “Do you think your trouble sleeping is related to your work? You said in your phone call that you run a bank. That sounds like it could be quite a stressful, high-pressure job.” Zara replied: “Not really.” The psychologist sighed and asked: “What are you hoping to accomplish during our meetings?” Zara countered at once with a question of her own: “Will this be psychiatry or psychology?” The psychologist asked: “What do you think the difference is?” Zara replied: “You need psychology if you think you’re a dolphin. You need psychiatry if you’ve killed all the dolphins.” The psychologist looked uncomfortable. The next time they met she wasn’t wearing her dolphin brooch. During their second session Zara asked, somewhat out of the blue: “How would you explain panic attacks?” The psychologist lit up the way only psychologists can do at that question: “They’re hard to define. But according to most experts, panic attacks are the experience of—” Zara interrupted: “No, I want to know how you would explain them!” The psychologist shuffled uncomfortably on her chair and pondered various different answers. Eventually she said: “I’d say that a panic attack is when psychological pain becomes so strong that it manifests itself physically. The anxiety becomes so acute that the brain can’t… well, in the absence of any better words, I’d say that the brain doesn’t have sufficient bandwidth to process all the information. The firewall collapses, so to speak. And anxiety overwhelms us.” “You’re not very good at your job,” Zara replied drily. “In what sense?” “I already know more about you than you know about me.” “Really?” “Your parents worked with computers. Programmers, probably.” “How… how on earth… how did you know that?” “Has it been hard to deal with the shame of that? The fact that they did jobs that had a tangible application in the real world, whereas you work with…” Zara fell silent abruptly and seemed to be searching for the right words. So the psychologist, somewhat affronted, filled in: “… feelings? I work with feelings.” “I was going to say ‘fripperies.’ But okay, let’s say ‘feelings,’ if that makes you feel better.” “My dad’s a programmer. My mom was a systems analyst. How did you know?” Zara groaned as if she were trying to teach a toaster to read. “Does it matter?” “Yes!” Zara groaned at the toaster again. “When I asked you to explain panic attacks in your own words, not with the definition you learned during your training, you used the words ‘bandwidth,’ ‘process,’ and ‘firewall.’ Words that don’t fit easily into ordinary vocabulary usually come from their parents. If they had a good relationship with them.” The psychologist tried to regain the initiative in the conversation by asking: “Is this why you’re good at your job at the bank? Because you can read people?” Zara stretched her back like a bored cat. “Sweetie, you aren’t that hard to read. People like you are never as complicated as you’d like to be, especially not if you’ve been to university. Your generation don’t want to study a subject, you just want to study yourselves.” The psychologist looked ever so slightly offended. Possibly more than ever so slightly. “We’re here to talk about you, Zara. What are you hoping to get out of this?” “Sleeping pills, like I said before. Ideally some that will go with red wine.” “I can’t prescribe sleeping pills. Only your doctor can do that.” “So what am I doing here, then?” Zara asked. “You’re the best person to answer that,” the psychologist replied. That was the level on which their relationship began. Things went downhill from there. But it’s worth saying at once that it wasn’t at all difficult for the psychologist to make a diagnosis of this new patient: Zara was suffering from loneliness. But instead of saying that (the psychologist hadn’t burdened herself with more than half a decade’s worth of student debt just to learn to say what she thought), the psychologist explained that Zara was exhibiting signs that she was suffering from “nervous exhaustion.” Zara didn’t look up from the newsfeed on her phone when she replied: “Yes, well, I’m exhausted because I can’t sleep, so just get me some pills!” The psychologist didn’t want to do that. Instead she started to ask questions, with the intention of helping Zara to see her own anxieties in a broader context. One of them was: “Are you worried about the survival of the planet?” Zara replied: “Not really.” The psychologist smiled warmly. “Let me put it like this: What do you think the biggest problem with the world is?” Zara nodded quickly, and replied as if the answer were obvious: “Poor people.” The psychologist corrected her in a friendly way: “You mean… poverty.” Zara shrugged. “Sure. If that feels better for you.” When they parted, Zara didn’t shake hands. On her way out she moved a photograph on the psychologist’s bookcase and rearranged three books. Psychologists aren’t supposed to have favorite patients, but if this psychologist had one, it definitely would not have been Zara. It wasn’t until their third session that the psychologist realized how unwell Zara was. It was just after Zara had explained that “democracy as a system is doomed, because idiots will believe anything as long as the story’s good enough.” The psychologist did her best to ignore that, and asked Zara instead about her childhood and work, wondering repeatedly how Zara “feels.” How do you feel when that happens? How does talking about this make you feel? How do you feel when you think about how you feel, does that feel difficult? So in the end Zara did feel something. They had been talking about something else for a long while, and suddenly Zara seemed to be looking deep inside her, and when she spoke she whispered the words, as if her voice were no longer her own. “I’ve got cancer.” The silence in the room was so extreme that you could hear both women’s heartbeats. The fingers falling flat on the notepad, the breathing that grew shallower, lungs filled no more than a third with each breath, terrified of making a noise. “I’m truly very sorry indeed to hear that,” the psychologist eventually said, her voice trembling, and with carefully practiced dignity. “I’m sorry, too. Depressed, actually,” Zara said, and wiped her eyes. “What… what sort of cancer?” the psychologist asked. “Does it matter?” Zara whispered. “No. No, of course not. I’m sorry. That was insensitive of me.” Zara looked out of the window, not really seeing anything, for so long that the light outside seemed to have time to change. From morning to midday. Then she raised her chin slightly and said: “You don’t have to apologize. It’s made-up cancer.” “S… sorry?” “I haven’t got cancer. I was lying. But that’s what I was saying: democracy doesn’t work!” And that was when the psychologist realized what a very unwell person Zara was. “That’s a… an astonishingly insensitive thing to joke about,” she managed to say. Zara raised her eyebrows. “So it would have been better if I had cancer?” “No! What? Absolutely not, but—” “Surely it’s better to joke about it than to actually have cancer? Or would you rather I had cancer?” The psychologist’s neck flushed red with indignation. “But… no! Of course I don’t wish you had cancer!” Zara clasped her hands together in her lap and said in a grave tone, “But that’s how I’m feeling.” The psychologist had trouble sleeping that night. Zara sometimes has that effect on people. The next time Zara visited her office the psychologist had removed the photograph of her mother from her desk, and during that session Zara actually considered telling the truth about the cause of her sleeping problems. She had a letter in her bag that explained everything, and if she had only shown it then, everything that happened after that might have been different. But instead she just sat for a long time staring at the picture on the wall. It was of a woman looking out across an endless sea, toward the horizon. The psychologist moistened her lips and asked gently: “What are you thinking when you look at that picture?” “I’m thinking that if I had to choose just one picture to have on a wall, it wouldn’t be that one.” The psychologist smiled tightly. “I usually ask my patients what they think about the woman in the picture. Who is she? Is she happy? What do you think?” Zara’s shoulders bounced nonchalantly. “I don’t know what happiness is for her.” The psychologist said nothing for a while before admitting: “I’ve never heard that answer before.” Zara snorted. “That’s because you ask the question as if there’s only one type of happiness. But happiness is like money.” The psychologist smiled with the superiority that only someone who thinks of themselves as being a very deep person can. “That sounds superficial.” Zara groaned like a teenager trying to explain anything to anyone who isn’t a teenager. “I didn’t say that money was happiness. I said happiness is like money. A made-up value that represents something we can’t weigh or measure.” The psychologist’s voice wavered, just for a moment. “Well… yes, maybe. But we can measure and evaluate the cost of depression. And we know that it’s very common for people suffering from depression to be afraid of feeling happy. Because even depression can be a sort of secure bubble, it can make you start to think, If I’m not unhappy, if I’m not angry—who am I then?” Zara wrinkled her nose. “Do you believe that?” “Yes.” “That’s because people like you always look at people who are wealthier than you are and say: ‘Yes, they may be richer, but are they happy?’ As if that was the meaning of life for anyone but a complete idiot, just going around being happy all the time.” The psychologist noted something down, then asked, still looking down at her notepad: “What is the meaning, then? In your opinion?” Zara’s reply was the response of a person who’s spent many years thinking about this. Someone who has decided it was more important for her to do an important job than live a happy life. “Having a purpose. A goal. A direction. And do you want to know the truth? The truth is that far more people would rather be rich than happy.” The psychologist smiled again. “Says the bank director to the psychologist.” Zara snorted again. “Remind me again how much you get paid per hour? Can I come here for free if it makes me happy?” The psychologist let out a laugh, an involuntary laugh, on the brink of unprofessional. It surprised her so much that she blushed. She made a feeble attempt to pull herself together, and said: “No. But perhaps I’d let you come here for free if it made me happy.” Then Zara suddenly let out a laugh, not consciously, but as if the sound just slipped out of her. It had been a while since that last happened. They sat in silence for a long while after that, somewhat awkwardly, until Zara finally nodded toward the woman on the wall. “What do you think she’s doing?” The psychologist looked at the picture and blinked slowly. “The same as everyone else. Searching.” “What for?” The psychologist’s shoulders moved up one inch, then down two. “For something to cling on to. Something to fight for. Something to look forward to.” Zara took her eyes from the picture and looked past the psychologist, out of the window. “What if she’s thinking of committing suicide, then?” The psychologist didn’t look away from the picture, just smiled and gave away none of the feelings that were raging inside her. It takes years of training and two parents you love and never want to worry to master that facial expression. “Why do you think that’s what she’s thinking?” “Don’t all intelligent people think about that, some time or other?” At first the psychologist was going to reply with some practiced phrase she had learned during her training, but she was well aware that wouldn’t help. So she replied honestly instead: “Yes. Maybe. What do you think stops us?” Zara leaned forward and moved two pens on the desk so they were lying parallel. Then she said: “Fear of heights.” There isn’t a person on this planet who could have said there and then with any certainty if she was joking or not. The psychologist considered her next question for a long time. “Can I ask, Zara—do you have any hobbies?” “Hobbies?” Zara repeated, but not in an entirely condescending way. The psychologist elaborated: “Yes. Are you involved in any charities, for instance?” Zara shook her head silently. The psychologist thought at first that it was a compliment that she didn’t just fire back with an insult, but the look in Zara’s eyes made her hesitate, as if the question had toppled and broken something inside her. “Are you okay? Did I say something wrong?” the psychologist asked anxiously, but Zara had already looked at the time, stood up, and was now walking to the door. The psychologist, who hadn’t been a psychologist long enough not to be struck by panic at the thought of losing a patient, found herself saying something quite remarkably unprofessional: “Don’t do anything silly, now!” Zara stopped at the door, surprised. “Such as what?” The psychologist didn’t know what to say, so she smiled awkwardly and said: “Well, don’t do anything silly… before you’ve paid my bill.” Zara let out a sudden laugh. The psychologist joined in. It was harder to identify the extent to which that was also unprofessional. While Zara was standing in the elevator, the psychologist sat in her office staring at the woman in the painting, surrounded by sky. Zara was the first person who had ever suggested that the woman might be thinking of ending her life, no one else had looked at it like that. The psychologist herself always felt that the woman was gazing off toward the horizon in a way that can only have two explanations: longing or fear. That was why she had painted the picture, as a reminder to herself. It was the sort of subject psychologists love, because you can look at it for ages without noticing the most obvious thing. The fact that the woman is standing on a bridge. 25 Witness Interview (Continued) JIM: I feel stupid now. ZARA: I don’t suppose that’s a new feeling for you. JIM: If I’d known you ran a bank, obviously I wouldn’t have said that. Well, I mean, I shouldn’t have said it anyway. I’m not really sure what to say now. ZARA: In that case, perhaps I can just leave? JIM: No, hold on. Look, this is all a bit embarrassing. My wife has often told me that I should just keep my mouth shut. I’ll stick to my questions from now on, okay? ZARA: Let’s give it a try. JIM: Can you describe the robber? Anything at all that you can remember about him, anything you think could be helpful to our investigation. ZARA: You already seem to know the most important thing. JIM: And that is? ZARA: You said “him,” so you evidently know he was a man. That explains a lot. JIM: I have a feeling I’m likely to regret asking this, but why? ZARA: You lot can’t even piss without missing the target. So obviously things are going to go wrong if you get hold of a pistol. JIM: Can I interpret that as meaning you don’t remember any details about his appearance? ZARA: If someone’s wearing a mask and pointing a pistol at you, a psychologist would probably compare the trauma to almost being run down by a truck: you’d be unlikely to remember the number on the license plate. JIM: I have to say, that’s a very insightful observation. ZARA: That’s a relief, because what you think really matters to me. Can I go now? JIM: Not yet, I’m afraid. Do you recognize this drawing? ZARA: Is that what it is? It looks like someone’s knocked over a urine sample. JIM: I’ll interpret that as a no to the question of whether or not you recognize the picture. ZARA: Very clever of you. JIM: Where in the apartment were you when the bank robber came in? ZARA: By the balcony door. JIM: And where were you during the rest of the hostage drama? ZARA: What difference does that make? JIM: Quite a lot of difference. ZARA: I can’t imagine why. JIM: Look, you’re not a suspect. Not yet, anyway. ZARA: Sorry? JIM: Well, look. What I’m trying to get you to understand is that you need to try to understand that my colleague is convinced that one of the hostages helped the bank robber to escape. And it seems odd that you were there at all, to put it bluntly. To start with, you had no reason to want to buy the apartment. And you don’t appear to have been frightened when the bank robber aimed his pistol at you. ZARA: So now you suspect that I helped the bank robber to escape? JIM: No. No, not at all. Look, you’re not a suspect at all. Well, not yet, anyway. I mean, you’re not a suspect at all! But my colleague thinks it all seems a bit odd. ZARA: Really? Do you know what I think your colleague seems like? JIM: Can you tell me what happened in the apartment, please? So I can record it? That’s my job here. ZARA: Sure. JIM: Great. How many prospective buyers were there in the apartment? ZARA: Define “prospective buyers.” JIM: I mean: How many people were there who wanted to buy the apartment? ZARA: Five. JIM: Five? ZARA: Two couples. One woman. JIM: Plus you and the real estate agent. So seven hostages in total? ZARA: Five plus two is seven, yes. You’re very smart. JIM: But there were eight hostages? ZARA: You haven’t counted the rabbit. JIM: The rabbit? ZARA: You heard. JIM: What rabbit? ZARA: Do you want me to tell you what happened or not? JIM: Sorry. ZARA: Do you seriously think one of the hostages helped the bank robber to escape? JIM: You don’t think so? ZARA: No. JIM: Why not? ZARA: They were all idiots. JIM: And the bank robber? ZARA: What about the bank robber? JIM: Do you think he shot himself intentionally or by accident? ZARA: What are you talking about? JIM: We heard a pistol shot from the apartment, after you were released. When we got inside the apartment the floor was covered in blood. ZARA: Blood? Where? JIM: On the carpet and floor in the living room. ZARA: Oh. Nowhere else? JIM: No. ZARA: Okay. JIM: Sorry? ZARA: Excuse me? JIM: When you said “okay,” it sounded as if you were about to say something more. ZARA: Definitely not. JIM: Sorry. Well, my colleague is convinced it was there in the living room that he shot himself. That was what I was going to say. ZARA: And you still don’t know who the bank robber is? JIM: No. ZARA: Listen—if you don’t explain soon how on earth you suspect I might be involved in this, you’ll end up wishing I had called my lawyer. JIM: No one suspects you of anything! My colleague would just like to know why you were there in the apartment, if you weren’t there to buy it? ZARA: My psychologist told me I needed a hobby. JIM: Viewing apartments is your hobby? ZARA: People like you are more interesting than you might imagine. JIM: People like me? ZARA: People in your socio-economic bracket. It’s interesting seeing how you live. How you manage to bear it. I went to a few viewings, then a few more, it’s like heroin. Have you tried heroin? You feel disgusted with yourself, but it’s hard to stop. JIM: You’re telling me you’ve become addicted to viewing apartments owned by people who earn far less than you? ZARA: Yes. Like when kids catch baby birds in glass jars. The same slightly forbidden attraction. JIM: You mean insects? People do that with insects. ZARA: Sure. If that makes you feel better. JIM: So you were at this apartment viewing because it’s your hobby? ZARA: Is that a real tattoo on your arm? JIM: Yes. ZARA: Is it supposed to be an anchor? JIM: Yes. ZARA: Did you lose a bet or something? JIM: What do you mean by that? ZARA: Was someone threatening your family? Or did you do it voluntarily? JIM: Voluntarily. ZARA: Why do people like you hate money so much? JIM: I’m not even going to comment on that. I’d just like you to tell me, so that we’ve got it on tape, why the other witnesses say you didn’t seem at all afraid when you saw the bank robber’s pistol. Did you think it wasn’t real? ZARA: I understood perfectly well that it was real. That’s why I wasn’t frightened. I was surprised. JIM: That’s an unusual reaction to a pistol. ZARA: For you, maybe. But I’d been contemplating killing myself for quite a long time, so when I saw the pistol I was surprised. JIM: I don’t know what to say to that. Sorry. You’d been contemplating killing yourself? ZARA: Yes. So I was surprised when I realized that I didn’t want to die. It came as a bit of a shock. JIM: Did you start seeing your psychologist because of those suicidal thoughts? ZARA: No. I needed the psychologist because I was having trouble sleeping. Because I used to lie awake thinking that I could have killed myself if only I had enough sleeping pills. JIM: And it was your psychologist who suggested that you needed a hobby? ZARA: Yes. That was after I told her about my cancer. JIM: Oh. I’m very sorry to hear that. How sad. ZARA: Okay, look… 26 The next time the psychologist and Zara met, Zara said that she had actually found a hobby. She had started to go to “viewings of middle-class apartments.” She said it was exciting because a lot of the apartments looked like the people who lived there did the cleaning themselves. The psychologist tried to explain that this wasn’t quite what she’d had in mind by “getting involved in a charity,” but Zara retorted that at one of the viewings there had been “a man who was thinking of renovating it himself, with his own hands, the same hands he eats with, so don’t try to tell me I’m not doing all I can to fraternize with the most unfortunate members of society!” The psychologist had no idea how to even begin to answer that, but Zara noted her arched eyebrows and hanging jaw and snorted: “Have I upset you now? Christ, it’s impossible not to upset people like you the moment you start to say anything at all.” The psychologist nodded patiently and immediately regretted the question she asked next: “Can you give me an example of when people like me have been upset by you without your meaning it?” Zara shrugged, then told the story of how she had been called “prejudiced” when she interviewed a young man for a job at the bank, just because she had looked at him when he entered the room and exclaimed: “Oh! I would have expected you to apply for a job in the IT department instead, your sort tend to be good with computers!” Zara spent a long time explaining to the psychologist that it was actually a compliment. Does giving someone a compliment mean you’re prejudiced these days, too? The psychologist tried to find a way to talk about it without actually talking about it, so she said: “You seem to get caught up in a lot of disagreements, Zara. One technique I’d recommend is to ask yourself three questions before you flare up. One: Are the actions of the person in question intended to harm you personally? Two: Do you possess all the information about the situation? Three: Do you have anything to gain from a conflict?” Zara tilted her head so far that her neck creaked. She understood all the words, but the way they were put together made as much sense as if they’d been pulled at random from a hat. “Why would I need help to stop getting into conflicts? Conflicts are good. Only weak people believe in harmony, and as a reward they get to float through life with a feeling of moral superiority while the rest of us get on with other things.” “Like what?” the psychologist wondered. “Winning.” “And that’s important?” “You can’t achieve anything if you don’t win, sweetie. No one ends up at the head of a boardroom table by accident.” The psychologist tried to find her way back to her original question, whatever it had been. “And… winners earn a lot of money, which is also important, I assume? What do you do with yours?” “I buy distance from other people.” The psychologist had never heard that response before. “How do you mean?” “Expensive restaurants have bigger gaps between the tables. First class on airplanes has no middle seats. Exclusive hotels have separate entrances for guests staying in suites. The most expensive thing you can buy in the most densely populated places on the planet is distance.” The psychologist leaned back in her chair. It wasn’t hard to find textbook examples of Zara’s personality: she avoided eye contact, didn’t want to shake hands, was—to put it mildly—empathetically challenged, and had perhaps as a result chosen to work with numbers. And she couldn’t help compulsively straightening the photograph on the bookcase every time the psychologist moved it out of position on purpose before each session. It was hard to ask someone like Zara about that sort of thing directly, so the psychologist asked instead: “Why do you like your job?” “Because I’m an analyst. Most people who do the same job as me are economists,” Zara replied immediately. “What’s the difference?” “Economists only approach problems head-on. That’s why economists never predict stock market crashes.” “And you’re saying that analysts do?” “Analysts expect crashes. Economists only earn money when things go well for the bank’s customers, whereas analysts earn money all the time.” “Does that make you feel guilty?” the psychologist asked, mostly to see if Zara thought that word was a feeling or something to do with gold plating. “Is it the croupier’s fault if you lose your money at the casino?” Zara asked. “I’m not sure that’s a fair comparison.” “Why not?” “Because you use words like ‘stock market crash,’ but it’s never the stock market or the banks that crash. Only people do that.” “There’s a very logical explanation for why you think that.” “Really?” “It’s because you think the world owes you something. It doesn’t.” “You still haven’t answered my question. I asked why you like your job. All you’ve done is tell me why you’re good at it.” “Only weak people like their jobs.” “I don’t think that’s true.” “That’s because you like your job.” “You say that as if there’s something wrong with that.” “Are you upset now? People like you really do seem to get upset an awful lot, and do you know why?” “No.” “Because you’re wrong. If you stopped being wrong the whole time you wouldn’t be so upset.” The psychologist looked at the clock on her desk. She still believed that Zara’s biggest problem was her loneliness, but perhaps there’s a difference between loneliness and friendlessness. But instead of saying that, the psychologist murmured in a tone of resignation: “Do you know what… I think this might be a good place for us to stop.” Unconcerned, Zara nodded and stood up. She tucked the chair back under the table very precisely. She was half facing away when she said, “Do you think there are bad people?” It sounded as if she hadn’t really meant to let the words out. The psychologist did her best not to look surprised. She managed to reply: “Are you asking me as a psychologist, or from a purely philosophical perspective?” Zara looked like she was talking to a toaster again. “Did you have a dictionary shoved up your backside as a child, or did you end up like this of your own volition? Just answer the question: Do you think there are bad people?” The psychologist shuffled on her seat so much that she very nearly turned her pants inside out. “I’d probably have to say… yes. I think there are bad people.” “Do you think they know it?” “What do you mean?” Zara’s gaze fell upon the picture of the woman on the bridge. “In my experience there are plenty of people who are real pigs. Emotionally cold, thoughtless people. But even we don’t want to believe that we’re bad.” The psychologist considered her response for a long time before she replied: “Yes. If I’m being honest, I think that almost all of us have a need to tell ourselves that we’re helping to make the world better. Or at least that we’re not making it worse. That we’re on the right side. That even if… I don’t know… that maybe even our very worst actions serve some sort of higher purpose. Because practically everyone distinguishes between good and bad, so if we breach our own moral code, we have to come up with an excuse for ourselves. I think that’s known as neutralizing techniques in criminology. It could be religious or political conviction, or the belief that we had no choice, but we need something to justify our bad deeds. Because I honestly believe that there are very few people who could live with knowing that they are… bad.” Zara said nothing, just clutched her far too large handbag a little too tightly and, for just a fraction of a second, looked like she was about to admit something. Her hand was halfway to the letter. She even allowed herself, very fleetingly, to entertain the possibility of confessing that she had lied about her hobby. She hadn’t only just started going to apartment viewings, she’d been going to them for ten years. It wasn’t a hobby, it was an obsession. But none of the words slipped out. She closed her bag, the door slid shut behind her, and the room fell silent. The psychologist remained seated at her desk, bemused at how bemused she felt. She tried to make some notes for their next encounter, but found herself instead opening her laptop and looking at the details of apartments for sale. She tried to figure out which of them Zara was thinking of looking at next. Which was obviously impossible, but it could have been simple if only Zara had explained that all the apartments she looked at had to have balconies, and that all the balconies had to have a view that stretched all the way to the bridge. In the meantime Zara was standing in the elevator. Halfway down she pressed the emergency stop button so she could cry in peace. The letter in her handbag was still unopened, Zara had never dared read it, because she knew the psychologist was right. Zara was one of the people who deep down wouldn’t be able to live with knowing that about herself. 27 This is a story about a bank robbery, an apartment viewing, and a hostage drama. But even more it’s a story about idiots. But perhaps not only that. Ten years ago a man wrote a letter. He mailed it to a woman at a bank. Then he dropped his kids off at school, whispered in their ears that he loved them, drove off on his own, and parked his car by the water. He climbed onto the railing of a bridge and jumped. The following week, a teenage girl was standing on the same bridge railing. Obviously it doesn’t really make any difference to you who the girl was. She was just one person out of several billion, and most people never become individuals to us. They’re just people. We’re just strangers passing each other, your anxieties briefly brushing against mine as the fibers of our coats touch momentarily on a crowded sidewalk somewhere. We never really know what we do to each other, with each other, for each other. But the teenage girl on the bridge was called Nadia. It was the week after the man had jumped to his death from the railing where she was standing. She knew next to nothing about who he was, but she went to the same school as his children, and everyone was talking about it. That was how she got the idea. No one can really explain, either before or after, what makes a teenager stop wanting to be alive. It just hurts so much at times, being human. Not understanding yourself, not liking the body you’re stuck in. Seeing your eyes in the mirror and wondering whose they are, always with the same question: “What’s wrong with me? Why do I feel like this?” She isn’t traumatized, she isn’t weighed down by any obvious grief. She’s just sad, all the time. An evil little creature that wouldn’t have shown up on any X-rays was living in her chest, rushing through her blood and filling her head with whispers, saying she wasn’t good enough, that she was weak and ugly and would never be anything but broken. You can get it into your head to do some unbelievably stupid things when you run out of tears, when you can’t silence the voices no one else can hear, when you’ve never been in a room where you felt normal. In the end you get exhausted from always tensing the skin around your ribs, never letting your shoulders sink, brushing along walls all your life with white knuckles, always afraid that someone will notice you, because no one’s supposed to do that. All Nadia knew was that she had never felt like someone who had anything in common with anyone else. She had always been entirely alone in every emotion. She sat in a classroom full of her contemporaries, looking like everything was the same as usual, but inside she was standing in a forest screaming until her heart burst. The trees grew until one day the sunlight could no longer break through the foliage, and the darkness in there became impenetrable. So she stood on a bridge looking over the railing to the water far below, and knew it would be like hitting concrete when she landed, she wouldn’t drown, just die on impact. That thought consoled her, because ever since she was very little she’d been scared of drowning. Not death itself, but the moments before it. The panic and powerlessness. A thoughtless adult had told her that a person who’s drowning doesn’t look like they’re drowning. “When you’re drowning you can’t call for help, you can’t wave your arms, you just sink. Your family can be standing on the beach waving cheerfully to you, completely unaware that you’re dying.” Nadia had felt like that all her life. She had lived among them. Had sat at the dinner table with her parents, thinking: Can’t you see? But they didn’t see, and she didn’t say anything. One day she simply didn’t go to school. She tidied her room and made her bed and left home without a coat because she wouldn’t be needing one. She spent all day in town, freezing, wandering around as if she wanted the town to see her one last time, and understand what it had done by failing to hear her silent screams. She didn’t have any real plan, just a consequence. When sunset came she found herself standing on the railing of the bridge. It was so easy. All she had to do was move one foot, then the other. It was that teenage boy called Jack who saw her. He couldn’t explain why he’d gone back to the bridge, evening after evening, for a week. His parents had forbidden it, of course, but he never listened. He snuck out and ran there as if he were hoping to see the man standing there again, so he could turn back the clock and make everything right this time. When he saw the teenage girl on the railing instead, he didn’t know what to shout at her. So he didn’t shout anything. He just rushed over and pulled her down with such force that she hit the back of her head on the tarmac and was knocked unconscious. She woke up in the hospital. Everything had happened so quickly that she had only caught a glimpse of the boy rushing toward her out of the corner of her eye. When the nurses asked what had happened she wasn’t even sure of that herself, but the back of her head was bleeding, so she said she’d climbed up onto the railing to take a photograph of the sunset, then fell backward and hit her head. She was so used to saying what she knew other people wanted to hear, so they wouldn’t worry, that she did it without thinking. The nurses still looked worried, suspicious, but she was a good liar. She’d spent her whole life practicing. So in the end they said: “Climbing up on that railing, what a silly thing to do! It’s sheer luck you didn’t slip off the other side instead!” She nodded, dry-lipped, and said yes. Luck. She could have gone straight back to the bridge from the hospital, but she didn’t. It was impossible to explain why, even to herself, because she would never know for sure what she would have done if that boy hadn’t pulled her down. Would she have taken a step forward or back? So every day after that she tried to understand the difference between herself and the man who had jumped. That drove her to choose a profession, a career, a whole life. She became a psychologist. The people who came to her were the ones who were in so much pain that it felt like they were standing on a railing with one foot over the edge, and she sat in her chair opposite them with eyes that said: I’ve been here before. I know a better way down. Of course sometimes she couldn’t help thinking about the reasons why she had wanted to jump, all the things she thought were missing from her reflection. Her loneliness at the dinner table. But she found ways to cope, to tunnel her way out of herself, to climb down. Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is. Over time she realized that deep down almost everyone asks themselves the same sort of questions: Am I good? Do I make anyone proud? Am I useful to society? Am I good at my job? Generous and considerate? A decent shag? Does anyone want me to be their friend? Have I been a good parent? Am I a good person? People want to be good. Deep down. Kind. The problem of course is that it isn’t always possible to be kind to idiots, because they’re idiots. That’s become a lifelong project for Nadia to grapple with, as it is for all of us. She never met the boy from the bridge again. Sometimes she honestly believes that she made him up. An angel, maybe. Jack never saw Nadia again, either. He never went back to the bridge. But that was the day his plan to become a police officer became unshakable, when he realized that he could be the difference. Ten years later Nadia will move back to the town, after training to become a psychologist. She will acquire a patient named Zara. Zara will go to an apartment viewing and get caught up in a hostage drama. Jack and his dad, Jim, will interview all the witnesses. The apartment where it happened has a balcony, from which you can see all the way to the bridge. That’s why Zara is there. Ten years ago she found a letter on her doormat, written by a man who jumped. His name was written neatly on the back of the envelope, she remembered their meeting, and even though the newspapers never published the name of the person the police found in the water, the town was too small for her not to know. Zara still carries the letter around with her in her handbag, every day. She’s only been down to the bridge once, the week after he climbed onto the railing, she saw a girl climb up onto the same railing, and a boy who rescued her. Zara didn’t even move, she just stood hidden in the darkness, shaking. She was still standing there when the ambulance arrived and took the girl to the hospital. The boy vanished. Zara walked out onto the bridge and found the girl’s wallet and ID card with her name on it. Nadia. Zara has spent ten years following Nadia’s life and education and the start of her career in secret, from a distance, because she’s never dared approach her. She has spent ten years looking at the bridge, also from a distance, from the balconies of apartments that are for sale. For the same reason. Because she’s afraid that if she goes down to the bridge again, maybe someone else will jump, and if she seeks out Nadia and discovers the truth about herself, perhaps it will be Zara who does it. Because Zara is human enough to want to hear what the difference is between that man and Nadia, even though she realizes that she doesn’t really want to know. That she bears the guilt. That she’s the bad person. Maybe everyone says they’d like to know that about themselves, but no one does really. So Zara still hasn’t opened the envelope. The whole thing is a complicated, unlikely story. Perhaps that’s because what we think stories are about often isn’t what they’re about at all. This, for instance, might not actually be the story of a bank robbery, or an apartment viewing, or a hostage drama. Perhaps it isn’t even a story about idiots. Perhaps this is a story about a bridge. 28 The truth? The truth is that that damn real estate agent was a damn poor real estate agent, and the apartment viewing was a disaster right from the start. If the prospective buyers couldn’t agree about anything else, they could at least agree on that, because nothing unites a group of strangers more effectively than the opportunity to come together and sigh at a hopeless case. The advertisement, or whatever you want to call it, was a poorly spelled disaster, with pictures so blurred that the photographer seemed to believe that a “panoramic shot” was something you achieved by throwing your camera across the room. “The HOUSE TRICKS Estate Agency! HOW’S TRICKS?” it said above the date, and who on earth would get it into their head to hold an apartment viewing the day before New Year’s Eve? There were scented candles in the bathroom, and a bowl of limes on the coffee table, a brave effort by someone who seemed to have heard about apartment viewings but had never actually been to one, but the closet was stuffed with clothes, and there was a pair of slippers in the bathroom that looked like they belonged to someone who had spent the past fifty years shuffling around without ever lifting their feet. The bookcase was packed, and not even color-coordinated, and there were even more books piled up on the windowsills and the kitchen table. The fridge was covered with yellowing drawings produced by the owner’s grandchildren. Zara had been to enough viewings by this point to be able to spot an amateur: a viewing should make it look as if no one lives in the apartment, because otherwise only a serial killer would want to move in. A viewing should make it look as if anyone could potentially live there. People don’t want to buy a picture, they want to buy a frame. They can handle books in a bookcase, but not on the kitchen table. Perhaps Zara could have gone up to the real estate agent and pointed that out, if only the real estate agent hadn’t been a human being, and if only Zara hadn’t hated human beings. Especially when they spoke. Instead Zara did a circuit of the apartment, trying to look interested, the way she had seen people who actually wanted to buy apartments look. That was quite a challenge for her, seeing as only someone on drugs who collected fingernail clippings could possibly be interested in living in this particular apartment. So when no one was looking in her direction, Zara went out onto the balcony, stood by the railing, and stared off toward the bridge until she started to shake uncontrollably. The same reaction as always, time after time for the past ten years. The letter she had never opened lay in her handbag. She had learned to cry almost without tears now, for practical reasons. The balcony door was ajar and she could hear voices, not just in her head but from inside the apartment. Two married couples were wandering about, trying to ignore all the rather ugly furniture and instead visualize their own really ugly furniture in its place. The older couple had been married for a long time, but the younger couple seemed to have only gotten married recently. You can always tell by the way people who love each other argue: the longer they’ve been together, the fewer words they need to start a fight. The older couple were called Anna-Lena and Roger. They’d been retired for a few years now, but clearly not long enough for them to have gotten used to it. They were always stressing about something, but without having anything they truly needed to hurry for. Anna-Lena was a woman with strong feelings, and Roger a man with strong opinions, and if you’ve ever wondered who writes all those too detailed, one-out-of-five-star reviews of household gadgets (or theater plays, or tape dispensers, or small glass ornaments) on the Internet, it’s Anna-Lena and Roger. Sometimes, of course, they hadn’t even tried out the gadgets in question, but they weren’t the sort of people to let that stop them from writing a scathing review. If you had to try things out and read things and find out the truth about things, then you’d never have time to have an opinion about anything. Anna-Lena was wearing a top in a color usually only seen on parquet floors, Roger was in jeans and a checkered shirt that had received a sulfurous one-out-of-five-stars review online because it “had shrunk several inches!” not long after Roger’s bathroom scale had received the damning judgment that it was “calibrated wrong!” Anna-Lena tugged at one of the curtains and said: “Green curtains? Who on earth has green curtains? Honestly, the things people do these days. But maybe they’re color-blind. Or Irish.” She didn’t say this to anyone in particular, she had just fallen into the habit of thinking out loud, seeing as that seemed appropriate for a woman who had gotten used to the fact that no one listened to her anyway. Roger was kicking the baseboards and muttering: “This one’s loose,” and didn’t hear a word of what Anna-Lena said. The baseboard may possibly have been loose because Roger had spent ten minutes kicking it, but for a man like Roger a truth is a truth, regardless of its cause. From time to time Anna-Lena whispered to him about what she thought of the other prospective buyers in the apartment. Sadly Anna-Lena was about as good at whispering as she was at thinking quietly, so it was pretty much the sort of shouted whisper that’s the equivalent of a fart in an airplane that you think won’t be noticed if you let it out a little bit at a time. You never manage to be as discreet as you imagine. “That woman on the balcony, Roger, what does she want with this apartment? She’s obviously too rich to want it, so what’s she doing here? And she’s still got her shoes on. Everyone knows you take your shoes off at an apartment viewing!” Roger didn’t answer. Anna-Lena glared at Zara through the balcony window as if Zara were the one who’d farted. Then Anna-Lena leaned even closer to Roger and whispered: “And those women in the hall, they really don’t look like they could afford to live here! Do they?” At this Roger stopped kicking the baseboard, turned toward his wife, and looked her deep in the eye. Then he said four little words that he never said to any other woman on the planet. He said: “For God’s sake, darling.” They never argue anymore, unless perhaps they argue all the time. When you’ve been stuck with each other long enough it can seem like there’s no difference between no longer arguing and no longer caring. “For God’s sake, darling, remember to tell everyone you talk to that this place needs serious renovation! That way they won’t want to put in an offer,” Roger went on. Anna-Lena looked confused: “But that’s good, isn’t it?” Roger sighed. “For God’s sake, darling. Good for us, yes. Because we can do the renovations. But the others—you can tell from miles off that none of them knows a thing about renovation.” Anna-Lena nodded, wrinkled her nose, and sniffed the air demonstratively. “There’s a definite smell of damp, isn’t there? Possibly even mold?” Because Roger had taught her always to ask the real estate agent that question, loudly, so that the other prospective buyers would hear and be worried. Roger closed his eyes in frustration. “For God’s sake, darling, you’re supposed to say that to the Realtor, not me.” Wounded, Anna-Lena nodded, then thought out loud: “I was just practicing.” Zara could hear them from where she was standing looking out over the railing on the balcony. The same swirling panic inside her, the same nausea, the same quivering fingertips every time she saw the bridge. Maybe she was fooling herself by thinking that one day it would feel better, or perhaps worse, so unbearable that she herself went and jumped. She looked down from the balcony but wasn’t sure it was high enough. That’s the only thing someone who definitely wants to live and someone who definitely wants to die have in common: if you’re going to jump off something, you need to be pretty damn sure of the height. Zara just wasn’t sure which of those she was: just because you don’t much like life doesn’t necessarily mean you want the alternative. So she had spent a decade seeking out and attending these apartment viewings, standing on balconies and staring at the bridge, balancing right in the middle of all that was worst inside her. She heard new voices from inside the apartment. It was the other couple, the younger pair, Julia and Ro. One of them was a blonde, the other had black hair, and they were squabbling noisily the way you do when you’re young and think that every feeling fluttering about in all your hormones is completely unique. Julia was the one who was pregnant, and Ro was the one who was irritated. One was dressed in clothes that looked like she’d made them herself out of capes she’d stolen from murdered magicians, the other as if she sold drugs outside a bowling alley. Ro (that was a nickname, of course, but the sort that had stuck to her for so long that even she used it to introduce herself, which was just one of the many reasons Zara found her irritating) was walking around and holding her phone up toward the ceiling, repeating: “There’s, like, no signal at all in here!” while Julia snapped back: “Well, that’s terrible, because then we might actually have to talk to each other if we lived here! Stop trying to change the subject the whole time, we need to make a decision about the birds!” They very rarely agreed about anything, but in Ro’s defense she didn’t always know that. Fairly often when Ro asked Julia “Are you upset?” Julia would reply “NO!” and Ro would shrug, as carefree as a family in an advertisement for cleaning products, which obviously only made Julia even more upset, because it was perfectly obvious that she was upset. But this time even Ro was aware that they were arguing, because they were arguing about the birds. Ro had had birds when she and Julia got together, not as lunch but as pets. “Is she a pirate?” Julia’s mom had asked the first time it was mentioned, but Julia put up with the birds because she was in love and because she couldn’t help wondering how long birds could actually live. A very long time, as it turned out. When Julia eventually realized this and tried to deal with the situation in an adult way by sneaking out of bed one night and letting them out of a window, one of the wretched creatures fell all the way to the street and died. A bird! Julia had to invite some of the neighbors’ children in for a soda the next day when Ro was at work so she could blame one of them when Ro found the cage open. And the other birds? They were still sitting in the cage. What sort of insult to evolution was it that creatures like that managed to stay alive? “I’m not going to have them put down, and I don’t want to talk about it anymore,” Ro said, sounding hurt and looking around the apartment with her hands deep in the pockets of her dress. Her dress had pockets because she appreciated looking nice, but still liked to have somewhere to put her hands. “Okay, okay. So what do you think of the apartment, then? I think we should take it!” Julia said breathlessly, because the elevator was broken and every time Ro said, “We’re pregnant,” to family and friends as if it were a team sport, Julia felt like pouring molten wax in her ears when she was asleep. Not that Julia didn’t love Ro, because she did, so much that it was almost unbearable, but they had looked at more than twenty apartments in the past two weeks and Ro always found something wrong with every single one of them. It was as if she didn’t actually want to move. But Julia woke up every night in their current apartment to play every pregnant woman’s favorite game, “kick or gas?” and then she couldn’t get back to sleep because both Ro and the birds snored, so she was more than ready to move anywhere right now, as long as it had more than one bedroom. “No signal,” Ro repeated morosely. “Who cares? Let’s take it!” Julia persisted. “Well, I’m not sure. I need to check the hobby room,” Ro said. “That’s a walk-in closet,” Julia corrected. “Or a hobby room! I’m just going to get the tape measure!” Ro nodded cheerfully, because one of her most charming and simultaneously most infuriating characteristics was that no matter what they’d just been arguing about, she could be in a wonderful mood in the blink of an eye if she thought about cheese. “You know perfectly well that you’re not going to be allowed to store cheese in my walk-in closet,” Julia declared sternly, seeing as their current apartment had a storeroom in the basement that Julia referred to as the Museum of Abandoned Hobbies. Every third month Ro would become obsessed with something, 1950s dresses or bouillabaisse or antique coffee services or CrossFit or bonsai trees or a podcast about the Second World War, then she would spend three months studying the subject in question with unstinting devotion on Internet forums populated by people who clearly shouldn’t be allowed Wi-Fi in whatever padded cell they were locked up in, and then she would suddenly get fed up and immediately find a new obsession. The only hobby that had remained constant since they got together was that Ro collected shoes, and nothing could sum up a person more clearly than the fact that she owned two hundred pairs of shoes, yet always managed to have the wrong ones on when it was raining or snowing. “No, I don’t know that perfectly well! Because I haven’t measured it yet, so I don’t know if there’d be room for the cheese in there! And my plants also need…,” Ro began, because she had just decided to start growing plants under heat lamps in the hobby room. Which was a walk-in closet. Or a… In the meantime Anna-Lena was running her hand over a cushion cover and thinking about sharks. She’d been thinking about them a lot recently, because in their marriage, she and Roger had come to resemble sharks. That was a source of silent sorrow for Anna-Lena. She kept rubbing the cushion cover and distracted herself by thinking out loud: “Is this from IKEA? Yes, it’s definitely from IKEA. I recognize it. They do a floral version as well. The floral version’s nicer. Honestly, the things people do these days.” You could have woken Anna-Lena in the middle of the night and asked her to recite the IKEA catalog. Not that there’d be any reason to, of course, but you could if you wanted to, that’s the point. Anna-Lena and Roger have been to every IKEA store in the whole country. Roger has many faults and failings, Anna-Lena knows people think that, but Anna-Lena is always reminded that he loves her in IKEA. When you’ve been together for a very long time, it’s the little things that matter. In a long marriage you don’t need words to have a row, but you don’t need words to say “I love you,” either. Once when they were at IKEA, very recently, Roger had suggested when they were having lunch in the cafeteria that they each have a piece of cake. Because he understood that it was an important day for Anna-Lena, and because it was important to her it was important to him as well. Because that’s how he loves her. She went on rubbing the cushion cover that was nicer in the floral pattern and glanced over at the two women in a way Anna-Lena thought was discreet, the pregnant one and her wife. Roger was looking at them as well. He was holding the Realtor’s prospectus with the layout of the apartment in his hand, and grunted: “For God’s sake, darling, look at this! Why do they have to call the small room ‘child’s room’? It could just as well be a perfectly ordinary damn bedroom!” Roger didn’t like it when there were pregnant women at apartment viewings, because couples expecting a baby always bid too much. He didn’t like children’s rooms, either. That’s why Anna-Lena always asks Roger as many questions as she can think of when they walk through the children’s section in IKEA. To help distract him from the incomprehensible grief. Because that’s how she loves him. Ro caught sight of Roger and grinned, as if they weren’t really at war with each other. “Hi! I’m Ro, and that’s my wife, Julia, over there. Can I borrow your tape measure? I forgot mine!” “Absolutely not!” Roger snapped, clutching his tape measure, pocket calculator, and notepad so hard that his eyebrows started to twitch. “Calm down, I only want to—” Ro began. “We all have to take responsibility for our own actions!” Anna-Lena interrupted sharply. Ro looked surprised. Surprise made her nervous. Nervousness made her hungry. There wasn’t much she could eat in the immediate vicinity so she reached for one of the limes in the bowl on the coffee table. Anna-Lena saw this and exclaimed: “Dear me, what on earth are you doing? You can’t eat those! They’re viewing limes!” Ro let go of the lime and stuffed her hands in the pockets of her dress. She went back to her wife, muttering: “No. This apartment isn’t us, hon. It’s nice and all that, but I’m getting bad vibes here. Like we could never be our best selves here, yeah? Remember me saying I’d read about we-energies that month when I was thinking of becoming an interior designer? When I learned that we had to sleep facing east? And then forgot if it was your head or your feet that… well… never mind! I just don’t want this apartment. Can’t we just go?” Zara was standing out on the balcony. She gathered the wreckage of her feelings into an expression of derision and went back into the apartment. Just as she walked in, the pregnant woman let out a yelp. At first it sounded like a roar of guttural rage from an animal that’s just been kicked, but eventually the words became clearer: “No! That’s enough, Ro! I can take the birds and I can take your awful taste in music and I can take a whole load of other crap, but I’m not leaving here until we’ve bought this apartment! Even if I have to give birth to our child right here on this carpet!” The apartment fell completely silent. Everyone was staring at Julia. The only person who wasn’t was Zara, because she was standing just inside the balcony door and staring at the bank robber. One second passed, then two, in which Zara was the only person in the room who had realized what was about to happen. Then Anna-Lena also caught sight of the figure in the ski mask and cried out: “Oh, dear Lord, we’re being robbed!” Everyone’s mouths opened at the same time but no words came out. Fear can numb people at the sight of a pistol, switch off everything except the brain’s most important signals, silence all background noise. Another second passed, then one more, in which all they heard was their own heartbeats. First the heart stops, then it races. First comes the shock of not understanding what’s happening, then comes the shock of realizing precisely what’s happening. The survival instinct and fear of dying start to fight, making space for some surprisingly irrational thoughts in between. It’s not unusual to see a pistol and think: Did I switch the coffee machine off this morning? instead of: What’s going to happen to my children? But even the bank robber was silent, just as scared as all the others. After a while the shock gradually turned to confusion. Anna-Lena sputtered: “You are here to rob us, aren’t you?” The bank robber seemed to be about to protest, but didn’t have time before Anna-Lena started to tug at Roger like he were a green curtain, crying: “Get your money out, Roger!” Roger squinted skeptically at the bank robber and was evidently engaged in a complicated internal struggle, because on the one hand Roger was very cheap, but on the other he wasn’t particularly enamored with the thought of dying in an apartment with this much potential for renovation. So he pulled his wallet from his back pocket, where men like him always keep their wallets except when they’re at the beach, when they keep it in their shoe, but found nothing of use in it. So he turned to the person closest to him, who happened to be Zara, standing over by the balcony door, and asked: “Have you got any cash on you?” Zara looked shocked. It was hard to work out if that was because of the pistol or the question. “Cash? Seriously, do I look like a drug dealer?” The bank robber’s eyes, visible through the repeatedly adjusted holes in the sweaty mask, were darting around the room. Eventually the bank robber shouted: “No… ! No, this isn’t a robbery… I just…,” then corrected that statement in a breathless voice: “Well, maybe it is a robbery! But you’re not the victims! It’s maybe more like a hostage situation now! And I’m very sorry about that! I’m having quite a complicated day here!” That’s how it all began. 29 Witness Interview Date: December 30 Name of witness: Anna-Lena JACK: Hello, my name’s Jack. ANNA-LENA: I don’t want to talk to any more policemen. JACK: I can certainly understand that. I’ve just got a few brief questions. ANNA-LENA: If Roger was here he’d have told you that you’re all idiots, the whole lot of you, for managing to lose a bank robber who was trapped inside an apartment! JACK: That’s why I need to ask my questions. So that we can find the perpetrator. ANNA-LENA: I want to go home. JACK: Believe me, I do understand that, we’re just trying to work out what happened inside the apartment. Can you tell me what happened when the perpetrator first came in with the pistol? ANNA-LENA: That woman, Zara, she had her shoes on. And the other one, Ro, was going to eat one of the limes. You don’t do things like that at apartment viewings! There are unwritten rules! JACK: Sorry? ANNA-LENA: She was going to eat one of the limes. The viewing limes! You can’t eat the viewing limes, because the Realtor’s put them there as decoration, they’re not for eating. I was about to go and find the agent and tell her, to get Ro thrown out, because you just can’t behave like that. But at that very moment that lunatic burst through the door waving a pistol. JACK: I see. And then what happened? ANNA-LENA: You should talk to Roger. He’s got a very good memory. JACK: Roger’s your husband? And you’d gone to look at the apartment together? ANNA-LENA: Yes. Roger said it would be a good investment. Is this table from IKEA? Yes, it is, isn’t it? I recognize it. They do it in ivory as well. That would have gone better with the walls. JACK: I have to confess that I’m not responsible for the way our interview rooms are furnished. ANNA-LENA: Just because it’s an interview room doesn’t mean it can’t look nice, does it? Seeing as you were already in IKEA. That ivory table is right next to this one in the self-service area. But you still picked this one. Well, everyone makes their own choices. JACK: I’ll see if I can raise it with my boss. ANNA-LENA: Well, that’s up to you. JACK: When Roger said the apartment was a “good investment,” did that mean that you wouldn’t be settling there? You’d just buy it and sell it on later? ANNA-LENA: Why are you asking that? JACK: I’m just trying to understand who was in the apartment, and why, so that we can rule out the possibility that any of the hostages was in any way connected to the perpetrator. ANNA-LENA: Connected? JACK: We think someone may have helped him. ANNA-LENA: And you think that could have been me and Roger? JACK: No, no. We just need to ask a few routine questions, that’s all. ANNA-LENA: So you think it was her, that Zara? JACK: I haven’t said that. ANNA-LENA: You said you think someone helped the bank robber. That Zara was dodgy, I could see it the moment I set eyes on her, she was obviously too rich to want that apartment. And I heard that pregnant woman tell her wife that Zara looked like “Cruella de Vil.” I think that’s from a film? It sounds dodgy, anyway. Or do you think it was Estelle who helped the bank robber? She’s almost ninety, you know. Are you going to start accusing ninety-year-olds of helping criminals now? Is that how modern policing works? JACK: I’m not accusing anyone. ANNA-LENA: Roger and I never help anyone else at an apartment viewing, I can promise you that. Roger says that the moment we walk in it’s war and we’re surrounded by enemies. That’s why he always wants me to tell everyone that the apartment needs a lot of work done to it and that the cost of that would be very expensive. As well as the smell of damp. Things like that. Roger’s a very good negotiator. We’ve made some extremely good investments. JACK: So you’ve done this before? Bought an apartment only to flip it? ANNA-LENA: There’s no point in an investment if you don’t sell, Roger says. So we buy, Roger does the renovations, I sort out the decor, then we sell and buy another apartment. JACK: That sounds like an unusual thing for two people who are retired to do. ANNA-LENA: Roger and I like working on projects together. JACK: Are you okay? ANNA-LENA: Yes. JACK: You look like you’re crying. ANNA-LENA: I’ve had a very trying day! JACK: Sorry. That was insensitive of me. ANNA-LENA: I know Roger doesn’t always come across as particularly sensitive, but he is. He likes us to have a project in common because he’s worried we’d run out of things to talk about otherwise. He doesn’t think I’m interesting enough to be with all day unless we’ve got a project. JACK: I’m sure that’s not true. ANNA-LENA: What would you know about that? JACK: I guess I don’t know anything at all. Sorry. I’d like to ask a few questions about the other prospective buyers now. ANNA-LENA: Roger’s more sensitive than he seems. JACK: Okay. Can you tell me anything about the other people at the viewing? ANNA-LENA: They were looking for a home. JACK: Sorry? ANNA-LENA: Roger says there are two types of buyer. Those who are looking for an investment, and those who want a home. The ones who are looking for a home are emotional idiots, they’ll pay anything because they think all their problems will just disappear the moment they move in. JACK: I’m not sure I understand. ANNA-LENA: Roger and I don’t let our feelings get in the way of our investments. But everyone else does. Like those two women at the viewing, the one who was pregnant and the other one. JACK: Julia and Ro? ANNA-LENA: Yes! JACK: You think they were the sort who were “looking for a home”? ANNA-LENA: It was obvious. People like that go to viewings thinking that everything would feel better if only they were living there. That they’d wake up in the mornings and not find it hard to breathe. They wouldn’t have to look in the bathroom mirror with an invisible weight in their chest. They’d argue less. Maybe touch each other’s hands the way they did when they were first married, back when they couldn’t help it. That’s what they think. JACK: You’ll have to excuse me, but it looks like you’re crying again? ANNA-LENA: Don’t tell me what I’m doing! JACK: Okay, okay. But you seem to have put a fair amount of thought into how people behave at apartment viewings, is that fair to say? ANNA-LENA: Roger does most of the thinking. Roger’s very intelligent, you know. You need to know your enemy, he says, and all your enemy wants is to get it over with. They just want to move in and have done with it and never have to move again. Roger isn’t like that. We saw a documentary about sharks once, Roger’s very interested in documentaries, and there’s a particular type of shark that dies if it stops moving. It’s something to do with the way they absorb oxygen, they can’t breathe unless they’re moving the whole time. That’s how our marriage has ended up. JACK: Sorry, I’m afraid I don’t understand. ANNA-LENA: Do you know what the worst thing about being retired is? JACK: No. ANNA-LENA: That you get too much time to think. People need a project, so Roger and I became sharks, and if we didn’t keep moving, our marriage wouldn’t get any oxygen. So we buy and renovate and sell, buy and renovate and sell. I did suggest that we try golf instead, but Roger doesn’t like golf. JACK: Sorry to interrupt, but I wonder if we might be getting a little off the point here? You only have to tell me about the hostage situation. Not about you and your husband. ANNA-LENA: But that’s the problem. JACK: What is? ANNA-LENA: I don’t think he wants to be my husband anymore. JACK: What makes you say that? ANNA-LENA: Do you know how many IKEA stores there are in Sweden? JACK: No. ANNA-LENA: Twenty. Do you know how many Roger and I have been to? JACK: No. ANNA-LENA: All of them. Every single one. We went to the last one fairly recently, and I didn’t think Roger had been keeping count, but when we were in the cafeteria having lunch Roger suddenly said we should each have a piece of cake as well. We never have cake in IKEA. We always have lunch, but never cake. And that was when I knew that he’d been keeping count. I know Roger doesn’t seem romantic, but sometimes he can be the most romantic man on the planet, you know. JACK: That certainly sounds romantic. ANNA-LENA: He can seem hard on the surface, but he doesn’t hate children. JACK: What? ANNA-LENA: Everyone thinks he hates children because he gets so angry when real estate agents put “children’s room” on the plans. But he only gets angry because he says children push the price up like you wouldn’t believe. He doesn’t hate children. He loves children. That’s why I have to distract him when we’re walking through the children’s section in IKEA. JACK: I’m sorry. ANNA-LENA: Why? JACK: Sorry, I took that to mean that you couldn’t have children. And if that’s the case, I’m sorry. ANNA-LENA: We’ve got two children! JACK: I apologize. I misunderstood. ANNA-LENA: Have you got children? JACK: No. ANNA-LENA: Our two are about your age, but they don’t want kids of their own. Our son says he’d rather focus on his career, and our daughter says the world’s already overpopulated. JACK: Oh. ANNA-LENA: Can you imagine what a bad parent you must have been for your children not to want to be parents? JACK: I’ve never thought about that. ANNA-LENA: Roger would have been such a good grandfather, you know. But now he doesn’t even want to be my husband. JACK: I’m sure things will work out between you, no matter what’s happened. ANNA-LENA: You don’t know what’s happened. You don’t know what I’ve done, it was all my fault. But I just wanted to stop, it’s been nothing but one apartment after the other for years now, and in the end I’ve had enough. I’m looking for a home, too. But I had no right to do what I did to Roger. I should never have paid for that darn rabbit.