Anxious People(34)
“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?