Anxious People(44)
Everyone fell silent, no one more so than Roger. He was staring at Anna-Lena, she was staring at the rabbit and crying, her fingers fluttering about her hips as she evaded Roger’s surprised stare. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen her husband surprised, that’s really not supposed to happen when you’ve been married so long. You’re supposed to have just one thing in your life, one single person you can count on to the extent that you end up taking her for granted. And at this precise moment, Anna-Lena knew all that was ruined for Roger. She whispered in despair: “Don’t hurt him. It’s Lennart.”
“Do you know this person?” Roger spluttered.
Anna-Lena nodded sadly.
“Yes, but it’s not what you think, Roger!”
“Is he… is he…?” Roger struggled, before finally managing to utter the impossible words: “… another prospective buyer?”
Anna-Lena couldn’t bring herself to answer, so Roger spun around and lurched toward the bathroom door with such force that both Julia and Ro (Zara, helpfully, merely jumped out of the way) were obliged to hold him back with all their strength so that he couldn’t get a stranglehold on the rabbit.
“Why is my wife crying? Who are you? Are you a prospective buyer? Answer me this instant!” Roger bellowed.
He didn’t get an immediate answer, and that upset Anna-Lena as well. Roger had always been an important, respected man at work, and even his bosses had listened to him there. Retirement wasn’t something that Roger entered into voluntarily, it was something that had suddenly afflicted him. The first few months he would drive past the office, sometimes several times a day, because he was hoping to see some sign that the people inside couldn’t cope without him. He never saw one. He wasn’t at all difficult to replace, so he went home and the business carried on existing. That realization was a great burden to Roger, and made him slower.
“Answer me!” he demanded of the rabbit, but the rabbit was busy trying to take its rabbit head off. It had evidently got stuck. Beads of sweat bounced from hair to hair on his bare back, like a singularly unappealing pinball game, and his underpants were now also sitting slightly crookedly.
The bank robber stood mutely alongside and looked on, and Zara clearly felt it was time for a bit more feedback, so she gave the bank robber a shove.
“Aren’t you going to do something?”
“Like what?” the bank robber wondered.
“Take charge! What sort of hostage taker are you?” Zara demanded.
“I’m not a hostage taker, I’m a bank robber,” the bank robber whimpered.
“That turned out to be a great choice, didn’t it?”
“Please, just stop pushing me.”
“Oh, just shoot the rabbit so we can get things sorted out. So you earn a bit of respect. You only have to shoot it in the leg.”
“No, don’t shoot!” the rabbit screamed.
“Stop giving me orders,” the bank robber said.
“He could be a policeman,” Zara suggested.
“I still don’t want to…”
“Give me the pistol, then.”
“No!”
Unconcerned, Zara turned to the rabbit. “Who are you? Are you a cop, or what? Answer, or we’ll shoot.”
“I’m the one doing the shooting here! Well, I’m not, actually!” the bank robber protested.
Zara patted the bank robber condescendingly on the arm.
“Hmm. Of course you are. Of course you are.”
The bank robber stamped the floor in frustration.
“No one’s listening to me! You’re the worst hostages ever!”
“Please, don’t shoot, my head’s stuck,” Lennart cried from inside the rabbit’s head, then went on: “Anna-Lena can explain everything, we’re… I’m… I’m with her.”
* * *
Suddenly there wasn’t enough air for Roger. He turned to Anna-Lena again, so slowly that she couldn’t remember him turning to her like that since one day in the early 1990s when he realized she’d used the wrong VHS tape to record an episode of a soap opera and accidentally recorded over an important documentary about antelopes. Roger couldn’t find any words for her betrayal, either then or now. They had always been people of simple words. Anna-Lena may have hoped that would improve when they had children, but the reverse had happened. Parenthood can lead to a sequence of years when the children’s feelings suck all the oxygen out of a family, and that can be so emotionally intense that some adults go for years without having an opportunity to tell anyone about their own feelings, and if you don’t get a chance for long enough, sometimes you simply forget how to do it.
Roger’s love for Anna-Lena was visible in other ways. Little things, like checking the screws and hinges of the little mirrored door on her cabinet in the bathroom every day, so it would always open and close with the least possible resistance. At the time of day when Anna-Lena opened the cabinet she really wasn’t ready for any difficulties, Roger knew that. Anna-Lena had become interested in interior design late in life, but she had read in a book that every designer needed an “anchor” in each new scheme. Something solid and definite that everything else can build upon, spreading out from it in ever-increasing circles. For Anna-Lena, that anchor was her bathroom cabinet. Roger understood that, because he appreciated the value of immovable objects, such as load-bearing walls. You can’t make them adapt to you, you simply have to adapt to them. So Roger always unscrewed the bathroom cabinet last of all whenever they moved out of an apartment, and installed it first when they arrived at the new one. That was how he loved her. But now she was standing there, full of surprises, and confessing: “This is Lennart, and he and I… well, we’re… we have a… you weren’t ever supposed to find out, darling!”