Watching You(58)

She took a deep breath, it was unavoidable. She opened the door.

Kent and Roy were gone, sure enough. There was no one to check the images from the surveillance cameras. They had taken almost all the technical equipment with them. Which meant there was a tiny sliver of hope for the drastic plan she had come up with.

She grabbed Berger’s abandoned rucksack from one corner and went back out into the corridor, retracing her steps until she reached his cell. She sighed deeply and reached out the hand clutching her security card to the reader.

Then she heard a snorting sound coming from the other side of the door.

As if he were having nightmares.





24




Wednesday 28 October, 00.05

Berger was lying on the hard bunk in the tiny isolation cell, and he wasn’t alone. There was quite a crowd around him. The floodgates had opened, the memories were building up. Everything was hazy, yet so very clear. He could see the details of faces he hadn’t consciously thought about for decades. He saw his nursery teachers’ hairstyles. He saw his great-grandmother’s liver spots. He saw every player in his under-twelve football team. He saw his dad at his carpentry bench and his mum by the stove, as if they had merged with the age-old gender roles he had grown up with. Out of the walls came classmates from every year, relatives who had long since emigrated or died, gangs of friends enveloped in clouds of off-piste snow, colleagues with different ranks of uniform, a bared set of teeth approaching his bicep, a group of girls he had slept with all on the same day in Koh Phangan, and then a dark-haired girl from a bar in Barcelona whose face he couldn’t remember ever having seen. The women in his life kept popping up and sweeping past with impassive faces. Misogyny? Sam Berger? He loved these women, or at least he had at the time. Never misogyny, he thought as he tried to catch their elusive gazes. Then came Freja, their first encounter. Freja Lindstr?m – the party where she suddenly showed up with her stiff business boyfriend, their immediate, obvious connection, the same raucous laughter at life’s peculiarities. Exactly the same sense of humour. Was it the similarities that led to the death of the relationship eleven years later? He felt like asking her as she walked across the floor of the cell – time after time, in an endless loop – and cast a fleeting, frightened glance over her shoulder when she caught sight of him. That was the walk towards security at Arlanda, the very last time he saw her. He was stopped at the barrier, guards were called, Freja shielded the twins with her body and gentle words; he heard their laughter, but they never saw him that last time. And he only caught a glimpse of them, and here in the cell he could just make out their hands in hers at Arlanda. But then the twins grew out of their freed hands and appeared in an accelerating succession of flickering images. The fuck that he knew created them, the quivering heat as he shot his sperm deeper that usual into Freja’s orgasm-rocked body. Sitting in the twin buggy, and only Daddy Sam could tell them apart, even Mummy Freja often said the wrong name, but never Daddy Sam. Swimming with their armbands in the Adriatic Sea; fishing for cod in the sea off Halmstad; testing each other on their homework while they pretended to play a video game; running the children’s race at the Midnight Marathon and waiting for each other the whole way, and crossing the line at exactly the same moment; singing so loudly that the neighbours in Ploggatan eventually filed a formal protest with the housing association; standing in their winter clothes in a ditch one spring, picking coltsfoot; and at Arlanda, as nothing but disjointed hands in their mother’s as she cast a frightened glance over her shoulder at him. And the other women in his life gathered around her, and the looks in their eyes were no longer impassive and elusive, but just as he dared to meet their gaze the women started to inflate like balloons, one after the other, and disappear in separate, soundless explosions. Towards the end Deer appeared, she inflated and disappeared. Then Freja inflated and disappeared.

In the end there was only one woman left.

Sam ran through the tall grass that reached his chest. He was following a blond halo of hair visible just above the grass, a floating halo moving over a green sea. He was panting. In the end he caught up with the halo; the long blond hair settled into place, and William Larsson turned round. Sam had never stopped, would never stop being astonished at his friend’s misshapen face, all its cubistic protruding nodules. They were standing eye to eye now; they exchanged a quick hug, breathless. Then William raced off again. Sam didn’t follow him. He went to the rock instead, the stone was smooth, but he held on. Cleared a circle of the filthy glass.

With a backdrop of rustling aspen leaves, which sounded louder and louder, he met the fifteen-year-old girl’s gaze. Their eyes locked until the little drop of blood ran down her forehead and into her eye, turning it red. And yes, he saw more among the stranded buoys and rusty anchors, among the mooring rings, hawsers and sails. He saw the whole, tirelessly ticking mechanism that he had seen so often, been impressed by, fascinated by. He saw the perfectly coordinated constellation of cogs and pinions and springs, axles and pins, shafts, flywheels and spindles, pendulums, clicks and weights.

But that wasn’t all.

In the middle of the mechanism stood the girl. Wrapped in chains. The powerful clock ticked relentlessly on, slowly, slowly pulling her apart.

Through the decades he met the girl’s gaze. He met Molly Blom’s pleading gaze. And he woke up.

And stared into Molly Blom’s far from pleading gaze.