Savage Spring (3 page)

Tove. Janne. My ex-husband.

I have to tell them. Will Tove be upset? Malin had stared at the Ikea clock in the kitchen, and saw her ever-healthier thin face reflected in the window, her blonde bob framing her prominent cheekbones, and wondered about her appointment with the hairdresser later that week.

‘Malin, she’s dead. Do you understand?’

‘Have you got anyone with you?’

‘Malin.’

‘Who can you get to be with you?’

‘Hasse and Kajsa Ekvall are on their way. They can drive me home.’

‘I’ll book a flight. I can be there tomorrow.’

‘Don’t, Malin, don’t do that. I can take care of this.’

And she heard it again, the relief in her father’s voice. It seemed to contain a promise that she would be able to regain something, that she would one day be able to turn around, look herself in the mirror, and maybe know her own innermost secret.

The mourners at the funeral are sitting slumped in the pews of the chapel.

The closest family on the first row.

Mum’s body brought here by plane from Tenerife.

Malin has stopped behind the coffin and can see Dad crying, a soundless, gentle crying. Tove, wearing a beautiful black dress with little white flowers on it, mostly just looks bored. They decided beforehand that Malin would step up to the coffin first, and that Tove would go after her grandfather.

A white rose in Tove’s hand, she chose it herself. And Malin feels a pang of guilt as she looks at her sixteen-year-old daughter. Guilt at having so often been such a bad mother, putting her job and then the drink ahead of her child.

Janne is sitting next to Tove, in a badly fitting blue suit he must have bought specially for the occasion from Dressman. In the seats behind them there are perhaps ten people, all dressed in dark clothes. Couples of Dad’s age. She recognises a few of them from Sturefors, people her parents used to socialise with when she was little.

No brothers or sisters. She doesn’t have any.

No other family either.

The coffin is simple, no ornamentation, and arranged around it are a number of wreaths from Tenerife. Malin doesn’t recognise the names on the wreaths, and it occurs to her that she will never be able to put faces to the names, and that she really doesn’t care.

She closes her eyes.

Her mum is there again, but she’s only an image, nothing to do with humanity or flesh and blood and feelings. Malin opens her eyes, tries to squeeze out a tear for Dad’s sake, but no matter how hard she tries nothing comes out.

The priest, a woman in her fifties, smiles gently from her chair over by one of the windows. She has just given the standard speech about what a fine person Mum was, and about her talent for interior decorating and golf.

And secrets, Malin felt like adding. She had a talent for secrets, and above all maintaining a façade and making herself seem important, special, as if nothing, and least of all me, was ever good enough for her.

While the priest was talking Malin got the feeling that it was all too late now, that something had been lost, that there had still been some sort of chance for her and her mum to sit down at a table and talk to each other like grown-ups.

She could have asked the question, straight out: ‘Mum, why haven’t you ever cared about me? About Tove?’

Or, even more pertinently: ‘Have you ever loved me, Mum? Loved us?’

She puts the rose on the coffin.

Then Malin moves her lips. Whispers to her mother inside the white coffin: ‘Did you ever love me, Mum? God knows, I loved you. Didn’t I?’

Five hundred and forty-two days.

That’s how long Malin has been sober. How long she and Janne have managed to get along, how long she has managed to withstand her body and soul’s howl for alcohol, how desperately fucking long she has managed to keep her boredom locked away.

Her colleagues in the Linköping Police, with Zacharias ‘Zeke’ Martinsson and Superintendent Sven Sjöman in the vanguard, were worried that she might suffer a relapse when they heard about her mother, about her sudden heart attack, and that Margaretha Fors was being brought home for the funeral, and that Åke Fors would probably be selling his flat in Tenerife and moving back home again.

Losing your mother is hard on everyone, her colleagues reasoned, but for a sober alcoholic an event of that sort could mean that frames of reference collapse, a bottle is opened and leads at the very least to helpless intoxication, and possibly something much worse.

But Malin had told them not to worry when they asked how she was.

She was more than capable of coping with the grief, if she actually felt any at all.

Practical matters gave her something to do, it turned out, and kept her wretched restlessness as bay: talking to Dad over the phone, managing the funeral directors, cleaning up her parents’ flat before Dad got back, talking to the priest . . . Things to do, things to organise.

When she told Tove that Grandma was dead, over the phone an hour after she got the call herself, Tove was as indifferent as only a teenager could be. She too had reacted in a practical way, asking if they would be going to Tenerife. Then Malin had heard the fear in her voice.

‘You haven’t got anything to drink in the flat, have you, Mum?’

‘Water and Coca-Cola, Tove.’

‘It’s not a joke.’

‘I promise I’m not going to drink, Tove.’

‘You promise? You need to do more than promise.’

‘I promise,’ Malin had replied, realising that her mother’s death was an opportunity for her to win back some of the trust she had lost.

She had felt ashamed.

In her work she got job satisfaction from extreme violence and murder, from other people’s misfortunes. She knew that, and had accepted it. But someone who instinctively wonders how to gain any sort of advantage from their own mother’s death, what sort of person is that?

Then the longing for tequila returned.

The longing or the thundering power of alcohol. For the senselessness of intoxication. The longing could come at any time, always without warning. She had tried to find a logic in its attacks, a structure, so that she could avoid situations that made her feel thirsty, but she hadn’t managed to find any logic in it.

A sickness. A parasite. An unpredictable virus that strikes as it pleases, on a whim. Learning to live with it, like an invisible handicap.

But just then, after her phone conversations with her dad and Tove, the pull had been stronger than ever. So she did what she sometimes did. She exposed herself to pain, and stuck the fingers of one hand into the bubbling, freshly mashed vegetables, feeling them sting and burn, but aware that it wasn’t hot enough to harm her skin.

Tove’s face is close to Malin’s as they sit in the chapel. Her skin is completely smooth, free from the blemishes and spots that almost all other sixteen-year-old girls have. Tove toys with the rose, and mother and daughter exchange a quick glance, not quite sure what to say with their eyes.

Up at the front lies Grandma, Mum, in her coffin. They can see Grandad, Dad, in his black suit, walking up to the coffin. They see him turn around, hesitate, take a deep breath, sob, then whisper something and lay a red rose on the coffin before he comes back to his seat.

Malin and Tove look at each other, wondering what to do with this moment.

And then Tove sets off towards the coffin, and without trying to force out any tears she lays her rose on top of it.

Tove doesn’t whisper anything, doesn’t say anything, just comes back to her seat, and Malin looks towards her father, then Tove once more, and wishes she could read their minds, but instead she sees Janne approach the coffin with ritualistic movements, as if everything that happens on this spring day in the Chapel of the Resurrection is a piece of theatre that must be played out to its end.

Please, just let this be over, Tove thinks, and closes her eyes. She doesn’t want to watch all the old people she doesn’t know go up to the coffin one by one and whisper things that can’t be heard.

‘Adieu,’ one of them says audibly, and Tove jerks, opens her eyes, and from the corner of her eye she can tell that Grandad is crying, she feels sorry for him, she’s always liked him, but Grandma? She never knew Grandma, and if you never knew someone, you can’t grieve when they’re gone. Even Mum doesn’t seem particularly upset, although Tove can tell she’s trying.

Feigning emotions.

Everyone she knows seems to do that.

She thinks about the letter she’s expecting. She hasn’t told anyone, she daren’t say anything to Mum. It was wrong and immoral of her to forge her signature on the form.

But it might work.

And then she’d be happy, wouldn’t she?

No.

That wasn’t certain. It was very far from certain.

Mum might well freak out totally.

And Tove can’t help smiling when she thinks about the letter that might be on its way, but she can’t smile here. Even if there isn’t an absolute requirement that people should cry here, you definitely shouldn’t smile.

A hymn fills the chapel. The sound of the organ tries to force the stale air aside, trying to imbue the daylight with the natural warmth it lacks.

The last time Malin was here was when a murder victim was being buried, a lonely fat man whom the world seemed to have abandoned from the start.

She walks behind her dad towards the exit, sees him nod to people lining the aisle.

Malin nods.

She imagines that must be what you’re supposed to do.

Then the chapel door is opened and, suddenly backlit, her dad becomes a strange black outline, and around him seem to float two little girls with angels’ wings.

Their faces are white and full of fear.

Their fear is so strong that Malin feels like rushing over, pulling the girls down out of the air and holding them close to her.

She blinks.

Now only her dad is there, once her eyes have adjusted to the light. Only Dad, and the smell of distilled fear.

3

Malin and Mum, over the years

When did I lose you, Mum?

That time you disappeared? Because you did go away when I was little, didn’t you, and where were you then?

On planet Look-after-number-one. And I would go to you, and I was allowed to sit on your lap, but never for more than five minutes, then you would have to do something else, I was too heavy, too hot, too in the way. How can a mother think that her own daughter is in the way?

So I turned away.

I would run to Dad. He was the one who came to my athletics competitions, who gave me lifts to football matches, who made sure I got my hair cut. That was all true, wasn’t it?

You turned me towards Dad, didn’t you? You did, didn’t you?

I remember sitting in my room out in Sturefors, waiting for you to come to me, Mum. Waiting for you to say something nice, rub my back with your hand.

But you never came.

Instead I would lie in bed and stare up at the white ceiling, unable to sleep.

One night when there was a storm I went to your bed and crept in beside you. I was five years old.

You turned on the lamp on the bedside table.

Dad was sleeping next to you.

You looked at me.

Lie down next to me, you said. Are you scared of the thunder?

Then you turned out the light and I could feel your warm body against mine under your nightgown, the way it carried me off to sleep as if your whole being were a vessel of bubbling warmth.

When I woke up the next morning you were already gone. I found you in the kitchen.

Sleepy, with bags under your eyes.

‘I haven’t slept a wink,’ you said. ‘And it’s all your fault, Malin.’

I never felt the warmth of your body under your nightgown again.

You hardly ever got angry, Mum.

It was as if you didn’t really exist, even though you were there in those rooms out in the villa. You decided how I should dress, or wanted to decide, at any rate, trying to make me more girly, because that’s what girls were supposed to be like. I hated the skirts you tried to make me wear. The dresses.

And I tried to rein myself in. You tried to get me to feel small in the world, to know my place.

You’re not that intelligent, Malin.

Make sure you find someone with money.

Maybe you should be a nursery teacher. That might suit you. But try your best.

Make sure you find someone with a good name.

Becoming part of my own failure, my inability to accept what I had, what I had created for myself.

You hated reality, Mum.

Did you hate me? Because I was a reminder of your own reality?

The words, said in your grudging voice when I came home with my school report.

Have you been flirting with the teachers?

And when Tove arrived. You cursed me for my clumsiness, how could I get pregnant, just like that? So young? You said that I, we, weren’t welcome, that you’d die of embarrassment in front of all your acquaintances because I couldn’t keep my legs together.

Tove.

You never looked at her. You never held her in your arms. You’d made up your mind that she was a disgrace, simply because she didn’t suit your plans, or fit in with the image of the perfect life that you were trying to create.

But no one cared about that picture, Mum.

I cared about you.

I wanted your love. But because I didn’t get it when I was little, maybe I didn’t really want it once I was grown up, and you didn’t want to give it to me either.

Was there ever any love?

What were you scared of, Mum? God knows, I could have done with your support when I was studying at Police Academy and was on my own with Tove.

Dad used to come to Stockholm sometimes.

But you refused.

Women shouldn’t be police officers.

The distance grew over the years. The lack of love became greater than the love, eradicating it, and in the end I had to ignore you, Mum.

I miss the mum I never had, but I can’t mourn the mother I did have.

Does that make me a bad person?

4

An acrid, burned smell in the air, presumably from the construction blast earlier, cutting through the air and seeming to trouble the spring sun.