Anxious People(58)

JULES: See what I have to put up with? She was obsessed with vanities and commodes for three months last year because she was going to be a cabinetmaker. Just before she was going to be a yoga instructor, and just after she was going to be a hedge fund manager.

RO: Why do you always have to exaggerate? I was never going to be a hedge fund manager.

JULES: What were you going to be, then?

RO: A day trader.

JULES: What’s the difference?

RO: I didn’t get around to learning that. That was around the time I started to get interested in cheese.

JACK: I’d like us to go back to my question.

RO: You look stressed. It’s not good to bite your tongue like that.

JACK: I’d be less stressed if you just answered the question.

JULES: We sat on the sofa and ate pizza. That’s the answer to your question.

JACK: Thank you! And who was in the apartment at that time?

JULES: The two of us. Estelle. Zara. Lennart. Anna-Lena and Roger. The bank robber.

JACK: And the real estate agent?

JULES: Of course.

JACK: And where was the real estate agent?

JULES: Just then?

JACK: Yes.

JULES: Am I your GPS or something?

JACK: I just want you to verify that everyone else was sitting around the table eating pizza.

JULES: I suppose so.

JACK: You suppose so?

JULES: What’s your problem? I’m pregnant and there were people with guns, I had a lot of things to think about, I’m not some preschool teacher counting knapsacks on a bus.

RO: Is this a candy?

JACK: It’s an eraser.

JULES: Stop eating everything!

RO: I was only asking!

JULES: You know she opens the fridge in every apartment we look at? Do you think that’s acceptable behavior?

JACK: I really don’t care.

RO: They want you to look in the fridge. That’s all part of the real estate agent’s so-called “homestyling,” everyone knows that. Once I found tacos. They still rank in the top three tacos I’ve ever eaten.

JULES: Hang on, you ate the tacos?

RO: They want you to.

JULES: You ate food you found in some stranger’s fridge? Are you kidding?

RO: What’s wrong with that? It was chicken. Well, I think it was chicken. Everything tastes like chicken when it’s been in the fridge awhile. Apart from turtle. Have I told you about the time I ate turtle?

JULES: What? No! Stop talking now, I’m going to throw up, seriously.

RO: What do you mean, stop talking? You’re the one who keeps saying you want us to know everything about each other!

JULES: Well, I’ve changed my mind. Right now I think we know just the right amount about each other.

RO: Do you think it’s weird to eat tacos at a viewing?

JACK: I’d appreciate it if you didn’t involve me in this.

JULES: He thinks it’s sick.

RO: He didn’t say that! You know what is sick? Jules hides candy and chocolate. What sort of adult does that?

JULES: I hide expensive chocolate, sure, because I’m married to a wormhole.

RO: She’s lying. One time I discovered she’d bought sugar-free chocolate. Sugar-free! And then she hid that as well, as if I wouldn’t even be able to stop myself eating sugar-free chocolate, like some bloody psychopath.

JULES: And then you ate it.

RO: To teach you a lesson. Not because I enjoyed it.

JULES: Okay, I’m ready to answer your questions now!

JACK: Wow. Lucky me.

JULES: Do you want to ask your questions or not?

JACK: Okay. When the perpetrator let you go, and you left the apartment, do you remember who went downstairs with you?

JULES: All the hostages, of course.

JACK: Can you list them, please, in the order you remember them going down the stairs?

JULES: Sure. Me and Ro, Estelle, Lennart, Zara, Anna-Lena, and Roger.

JACK: What about the real estate agent?

JULES: Okay, and the real estate agent.

JACK: The real estate agent must have been with you as well?

JULES: Are we nearly finished here?

RO: I’m hungry.





46


All professions have their technical aspects that outsiders don’t understand, tools and implements and complicated terminology. Perhaps the police force has more than most, its language is constantly changing, older officers lose track of it at the same rate that younger officers invent it. So Jim didn’t know what the damn thing was called, the telephone thingy. He just knew that there was something special about it that meant you could make calls even though there was hardly any signal, and that Jack was delighted that the station had been given one. Jack was perhaps capable of being more delighted by telephone thingies than Jim thought was strictly reasonable, but it was this phone they had sent in to the bank robber at the end of the hostage drama, so it turned out to be fairly useful after all. It was actually Jim who came up with the idea, which he was not a little proud of. Just after the hostages had been released, the negotiator had called the bank robber on that phone in an attempt to negotiate a peaceful surrender. That was when they heard the shot.

Naturally, Jack has explained the technology in the phone to Jim in great detail, so obviously Jim still calls it “that special telephone thingy which gets a bloody signal where there isn’t a bloody signal.” When they were about to send it in to the bank robber, obviously Jack told Jim to make sure the ringtone was set properly. Which of course it wasn’t.