Anxious People(18)

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.



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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.