IDA

LINDE

t

Norrut

åkEr

mAN

för

Att

Dö

titel_norrutakerman140617.indd 2 2014-06-17 16:20

Previous titles by Ida Linde:Maskinflickans testamente, 2006

Om jag glömmer dig blir jag en annan, 2009Räkneboken, 2009 (Autor)En kärleksförklaring, 2011

© 2014 Ida LindeNorstedts, Stockholm

Translated by Susan Beardwww.norstedtsagency.se

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Something in the air testified that spring was on its way. Easy and shameless. The car flashed in the sun on the brow of the hill. A blue Volvo 240 with tinted windows and rust round the hub caps when it came closer. It couldn’t be Jonson. Sara laughed at an image of her colleague turning up in an old car like that instead of the patrol car. Jonson with his reliable Toyota, who picked her up every morning even though it was out of his way. And wasn’t that a pair of fluffy dice hanging at the front, a fir tree air freshener? The faint smell of mould and perfume.

Sara squinted at the forest where the birds’ feet were like fragile twigs in the majestic pines. She had been careless about feeding them during the win-ter and now the sparrows were chattering demen-tedly. The car slowed in the blinding sunlight on the snow. On the bonnet a sticker that read: Let Norrland decide about snowmobiles. She had sold her dad’s. Last year that was. Got a good price for

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it so nothing to be ashamed about. The man who bought it thought he could haggle at first, that Sara knew nothing, but that soon changed. When she came out with the terminology he was practically stammering as he handed over the envelope with the money, the amount they had agreed over the phone. With the envelope in her jacket pocket she set off for the retirement home where Dad was sit-ting in the lounge. The News was on but no-one was listening. She asked about dinner and he replied that pork was pork and after that the usual silence pulsated between them.

She had no plans to tell him about the sale of the snowmobile and how it would help pay for the home for a time, that would only make him hate it even more. But the envelope warmed her inside pocket and she pulled her jacket tighter around her body when he coughed and asked if she was still getting any use out of the Lynx. She said it was like an old war horse and he laughed and said there’s no taking the horse out of the girl, that’s for sure.

The car came to a halt and Sara was grateful for her dark blue uniform. She gripped her baton. Cold and white. The only one she hadn’t used it on yet was Dad, thought about that when the man got out of

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the car, that he looked like someone who would be able to knock her dad down. Then he pushed back his black hair and looked around in curiosity. Unshaven, languid.

”Don’t suppose you’ve got any coffee left?””It’s not a café, this.””No, I just thought, you know, your sort usually

do.””It’s not a police station either.””You’re hard work,” he said, and laughed.”I couldn’t be arsed making any more but there’s

instant.”The man walked straight towards her and she lo-

wered her eyes like an animal, a moose, stock-still, steam coming from the wide nostrils. Only once had someone tried to tame a moose. Farmer Isak af Darelli had done pretty well with a bull moose but given up after failing with a couple of females. He came right up close in the doorway. Sara looked up and for a moment their eyes locked together, but then the man carried on into the kitchen without taking his shoes off, leaving big wet prints after him.

”Do you think we have a cleaner, or what?”He turned round and looked at his footprints but

still didn’t seem to register what she had said. Lit a cigarette, inhaled a few times and flicked ash onto the floor.

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”My name’s Benjamin,” he said, reaching out his hand. ”But call me Ben.”

Sara didn’t go to the effort of telling him her name but snorted instead. She walked into the kit-chen and picked up the cup she had used herself at around six that morning. The coffee jar was stan-ding on the worktop. Ben ran hot water from the tap, groped around in a drawer for a teaspoon and stirred. He slurped his coffee noisily and carried on smoking but this time he dropped the ash into the sink. That irritated her. She got a cigarette for her-self and let the ash fall like grey rain onto the floor. Maybe it was time to stop bothering about it all.

”So this is yours?””Yep.”A dull rumbling out on the road. Ben heard no-

thing and carried on slurping and flicking ash. Soon Jonson would be here and usually Sara was standing outside waiting, he was never allowed inside Väster-botten Farmhouse. Once he had asked her what she did with all the rooms on her own but she told him to mind his own business. Jonson was older than Sara and could have been in the house before. When she was little and he called on Dad for some reason or other. Didn’t like the thought that he might have seen her then. Wearing a skirt, tired. But he had only nodded in reply and never asked again because

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Jonson wasn’t the type to intrude.When Jonson hooted Ben seemed to jump, sud-

denly frail and caught off guard. The man who had marched so confidently into her kitchen was now hopelessly vulnerable in the same house and in her hands.

”Just go in the larder over there.”Jonson hooted again and soon he would be at the

front door, not opening it but knocking. Knocking and waiting. He would try the handle. The door was unlocked. Of course he would come in and look, the way you do when something deviates from the norm.

Inside the larder it was dark. Sara could only smell her way to Ben’s astonishment. He hadn’t turned the light on. They stood pressed together and she felt his leg against her thigh, him drawing closer, his knee soon between her legs.

She heard her name and held her breath.Jonson was inside the house, calling.Before long he would be in the kitchen, smel-

ling the smoke. She put her hand over Ben’s mouth and in turn he leaned his whole body nearer and grabbed her hips. With eyes slowly adjusting to the dark, Sara looked up. Preserved pears and sacks of

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potatoes. Empty shelves with checked lining paper harbouring more dust than food. Once upon a time someone had come in here often, sorting and wri-ting things on jars. Dates and names. Now it was only Sara who occasionally put in a sack of onions or potatoes.

The front door shut. Jonson’s car started, leaving a dead silence behind it. Presumably he would drive to the station to see if she was there already. He would make coffee and wait. It was possible he had taken a quick look in the bedroom, no sign of any struggle, naturally. It was just that unfamiliar blue Volvo.

Ben pulled down her trousers and pushed in his fingers.

She gasped. It didn’t matter now but she bit her lip to stop any words escaping, as if there was still someone out there among all the rooms she had to hide from.

Sara unbuttoned his trousers. Ben had no un-derpants, his genitals were right there. She pressed him up against the wall and there they fucked to the smell of old root vegetables and jam.

”You should come with me,” he said afterwards.”Do you think I can’t handle this?””It would be more fun if you came with me.” Sara

looked around but nothing she saw would be missed

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by her. A photo, maybe, as a memento. She ought to pack something, surely, but she couldn’t think what. Her hands went cold when they reached for things in the house. Nothing was hers anyway. All of it inherited, passed down, looked after.

Once when Dad was still living at home she thought she’d move the sofa in the sitting room so they wouldn’t have to look at the forest all the time. It had been heavy and when it was in place her shoulder hurt so she had to sit down on it im-mediately.

She had sat there and stared out at the road and felt an urgent kind of waiting. Knew how that kind of waiting, the one that rips a whole life to shreds, had taken root in her.

Afraid of the gravity of the moment she had taken off on the horse, galloped hard and fast for a long time. The horse she got in return for promising Dad she’d join the police.

Returning many hours later she noticed he had moved the sofa back. In all honesty Dad was too old and feeble. But Sara hadn’t cared. She knew it was a mistake to invite those kinds of crucial decisions into the house and neither of them mentioned it. It was as if it never happened, perhaps it never had, perhaps it was all just a fantasy inside her head.

”Okay.”

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”Seriously?”Sara didn’t feel she needed to repeat the answer to

his question and merely followed after him, locking the door behind them. That was something she had never done before, lock the door.

The fir trees passed with almost no variation. No cars, light sky. They drove north, there would be more and more snow. They discussed road surfaces, what type was worst, salt on the west coast or sand in Västerbotten. Whether a chip on a windscreen was worse than mist. Whatever you could talk about that was ordinary and safe.

Around lunch time they turned off at a service station to buy things and to fill the tank. Sara got out of the car and filled it for almost six hundred kronor. Then she went in and nodded at the assis-tant. A young lad in his twenties, probably an ice hockey player, maybe his first proper job outside the rink. Big muscles and the beard that that was yet to embed itself in his young face newly shaven nonet-heless. His face broad, hard to grasp. A faint whiff of adolescent aftershave.

Sara chose a large bottle of Coke, readymade sand-wiches and a chocolate wafer bar. There was a shelf of expensive golden cloudberry jam and dried rein-

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deer meat right next to the counter. A photograph of the man who owned the service station. It had to be the hockey player’s dad, same high forehead, pale eyes and a face kind of at one with the landscape it came from. She had never felt like she belonged, more like an old dog, overwintering.

Ben came in and a bell plinged, a tremulous litt-le sound that seemed to be at odds with the entire planet. Sara stared at the stickers on the till. An advertisement for Lynx snowmobiles. Perhaps she thought she would beat Ben to it, that it wouldn’t happen quite so soon, that she would have been able to prepare herself for the sound.

As if she had been the one to fire the shot.But he was the one holding the gun.A jar of cloudberry jam fell from its shelf and

flowed out in a mixture of glass and yellow lum-py blood across the floor. The ice hockey lad didn’t even have time to lift his hands to protect his young face, but fell wide open, exposed. Ben crashed into the magazine stand as he took a step backwards and TV listings, gossip and diets fluttered through the air before they fastened in the sludge on the floor. Then the silence when everything was fastened to the ground by an ear-splitting death.

The little bell over the door plinged again.It was a woman and she looked at Sara and looked

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at Ben. Her hair was dark and stood like a cloud around her head. In her hand she was holding a mo-bile phone which she held out to Sara imploringly:

”I got the wrong phone,” she whispered.In slow motion Sara moved to take it but then

Ben fired again. She dropped to the ground with the sound but it was the woman who screamed. Sara got up and watched as the pool of blood leaking fast out of the woman’s head grew bigger and bigger.

Ben dragged her by her arm, out of the service station. Her legs could no longer support her, she clung to him and he had to push her into the car. Sara tried to sit up, pull herself together. Fastened her seat belt to keep her body upright. Took out her cigarettes but all she could do was shake.

”Give them here,” he said, and lit one. ”Are you scared?”

She didn’t know what to say. Had shot people herself, but not like that, only to disable. It was a question of definition that she and Jonson disagreed about. Who you have the mandate to shoot. Jonson would never shoot anyone. That lad was a promi-sing ice hockey player, that was true, and the wo-man, well, she didn’t know who the woman was. Sara thought about fear as something chilling and white, blinded by reflections of the world, but she felt only emptiness.

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”No, not scared. Tired.””Get some sleep and I’ll drive us out of here.”The pine trees flickered before her eyes like sha-

dows from the past and Sara counted the reflective roadside poles exactly as she had done as a child. When she lost count she tried to count the seconds between them instead.

The road was clean and clear when she woke. Ben asked if she wanted to know anything about him, perhaps he had been waiting for her to wake up. He seemed almost confused that she was actually sit-ting there in her uniform, and he helped her light another cigarette which she smoked through the window.

Sara didn’t want anything.The woman’s blood had congealed on her trouser

leg and was chafing. Sara usually did the driving and she wished he would drive faster. Straight through the pitiless afternoon light and into the darkness and repose of evening.

”Bloody fucking shit!”Benjamin slammed on the breaks and reversed.

On the road lay a broken bundle of grey fur and de-licate bones. The tail was whole but the rest impos-sible to untangle. The blood flowed out to form a red

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little circle around the mangled body of the cat. No other cars. The road silent.

”Shall we get out?””No. Carry on driving.”It was only a cat. As a child Sara had owned one,

black and athletic. It had run away or been eaten by a fox, so Dad had said. That’s nature for you. It was only now that she realised it had probably been run over, living as they did right next to the road. En-ded up as a mangled knot with its beautiful coat all sticky. Muscles no longer any use. The thought was shocking, that Dad had spared her.

So that she wouldn’t drown in her own past she opened her mouth and started telling Ben about the time her dad was giving her a driving lesson. They had been listening to Elvis. She clearly recalled how Sven had been singing along as he sat there beside her. You ain’t nothing but a hound dog. Then out of the blue there was a moose on the bonnet. Huge and trembling. When Sara hit the brakes it slid off and to their astonishment got up and staggered off into the forest. Dad had climbed out of the car to get his rifle from the boot and go and look for it. If it was injured it was just as well to finish it off. But ins-tead he had walked to the front of the car, stood by the bonnet and laid his hands where the great body had just been throbbing. It was as if he didn’t see

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Sara as he reached out his hand and traced the crack in the windscreen with his index finger, and then, the worst bloody part of all, he had started sobbing. Huge tears ran down his grey creases. Sara didn’t know if she should go out and comfort him or if she ought to cry too. But she had stayed where she was while Dad crouched down in front of the car almost like it was him she had run over. She hoped no-one would come along and see him there like that. Hel-pless, pounding.

Afternoon arrived with the dusk which in turn brought the melancholy. Sara couldn’t settle and in-stead looked at the stranger who was looking at the road. He had a sorrowful face with eyebrows a bit like a clown. Large dark green eyes and the corners of his mouth downturned. On his wrist a home-made tattoo that said Saskia. He glanced in her di-rection.

”You okay?””Sure.”She curled up against the window and the forest

was so close to the verge it felt as if she was leaning towards the trees as well. Her eyelids drooped and Dad had sat in silence all the way home. She had to drive interminably slowly due to the crack that divided the windscreen almost in two. To oncoming traffic it might have looked as if they were each dri-

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ving their own car.

Sara woke because the Volvo stood still. Ben was no longer sitting beside her, for a brief second she thought he had driven her home. A house was sil-houetted against the darkness and perhaps they had never even driven anywhere. She started when the door opened. In one hand the cigarette, in the other the rifle.

”Where are we?””A place to sleep.””Who lives here?””We do,” he said, and laughed.As they approached the house a light went on au-

tomatically. Sara drew back but it didn’t seem to trouble Ben, as if the light had been switched on for his sake. Perhaps the whole county had been abandoned, she and Ben the only ones left, the ice hockey player and the woman with the telephone the last people they would see alive. Everyone else had left the cold and darkness behind and moved to Stockholm to do whatever people in Stockholm do. Sara had been there on a class trip in year eleven but there was nothing that interested her, just ugliness everywhere. Imagine if all Västerbotten’s wooden houses were left abandoned for her and Ben to move

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into. When they grew tired of one place they could move to the next. They could live in a chapel with their faces turned towards God. They could live in every single house in a village during the summer, only to say to each other come autumn: In that vil-lage we knew everything about each other.

”Have you been here before?””No,” he said, with his back to her, so she couldn’t

tell if he was speaking the truth or not, not that truth mattered any longer.

She walked into one of the bedrooms, a large dou-ble bed with a throw from Gotland, small curly-hai-red sheep. Clothes were hanging in a wardrobe and she stuck her nose in among them and smelled the fabric conditioner. Someone must have been here recently. Sara took out a shirt and a pair of jeans, wanted rid of her uniform and the smell of sweat. Tugged off the tight-fitting trousers and felt her thighs expand. When Ben walked into the room she unbuttoned the shirt.

”God, you are so sexy.”Then the laughter came. It had been lying there,

smouldering, in her heartbeats all day but now it exploded in her mouth. Sara couldn’t stop and then Ben started laughing too and they laughed until their bodies shook. They rolled around and found it hard to catch their breath. They tried to kiss bet-

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ween the attacks and soon he was inside her and she wanted it never to end.

”Did you come in here before me and shoot who-ever was living here?

”Sweetheart,” he said, hiding in her armpit. ”Now it’s my turn to sleep.”

He fell asleep immediately and she covered his body with the throw and all its sheep. On her own body her breasts shrivelled in the night air that came in through the window. She shrugged off his embrace and slid out of bed. Had already slept in the car, what would Dad say about that, sleeping in the middle of the day?

In the fridge there was milk and cream. On the worktop potatoes and cheese. She started with the potatoes, peeling them one by one. Steadily the gol-den flesh emerged, as if astonished at the world. She cut thin, thin slices. You had to have wine with a po-tato gratin. She searched the kitchen, knowing the bottle would be there somewhere, found it standing in a purple bag in the hall. Opened it straight away and poured a glass. Grated the cheese and spread it in a thick layer over the potatoes. Patted it like an animal.

Laid the table with the same plates from IKEA

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that they had at home. Oddly enough Dad had liked IKEA. He said you had to respect that Kamprad fel-low, and of course it was cheap.

When Ben got up they ate and Sara couldn’t stop talking about Dad. Ben listened. He said it was a bloody shame and reached over the table to hold her hand but let it go before the tenderness became too much. That was more than she had hoped for. People always have their mouths full of words, un-derstanding, trying to put on a plaster and hide the pain under a load of drivel. Or full of their own sto-ries, as if someone else’s experience would be any help.

Dad was Dad.Then Ben told her about his mum who was over-

anxious. Obsessed with catastrophes she watched TV endlessly or else the radio was on. It got worse as availability expanded over the years. BBC, CNN. She cut pictures out of the papers and lay them like a jigsaw puzzle across the kitchen table, stuck them in her red scrapbook, convinced that her children’s deliverance would materialise out of the pattern.

”And all that time she had you right next to her.””Hadn’t thought of that. A walking catastrophe.””With a child’s hands.””Yes, with a child’s hands.””That’s what you are,” she said, and laughed. ”A

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walking catastrophe.””Hello?”A woman called out tentatively from the hall. In-

stantly Ben stood up and a frightened cry was fol-lowed by a nervous laugh. Sara sat as if paralysed in front of her half-eaten potato gratin, had genuinely believed that only she and Ben were left. Realised she was holding her breath. That was the first thing she had learned at the academy, the importance of a constant stream of oxygen to the brain.

Opened her mouth and a sound came out.Or did the sound belong to the other woman and

come from the bedroom.The shot sounded different from the first one.

Sara felt confused, dizzy. Perhaps she had drunk too much. Emptied her glass quickly, and Ben’s too. When she started something she liked to finish it. Noticed the smell of smoke, sat still and counted. At fifty-seven Ben came back into the kitchen:

”We’d better be going now.”His hand was warm and damp. On the way to the

car he slipped and she had to hold him up, felt the weight of his large body in her shoulder, felt what it would have been like to carry him through life. She got into the driver’s seat and without a murmur he crawled into the back and lay down like a dog on the tartan blanket.

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Sara swung out onto the road and wondered if Jonson had gone back to look for her, driven back and forced the lock. If he had dared to drive to Dad and ask if she had said anything, if he had dared to admit he had mislaid their Sara.

She wondered if she had forgotten to switch off the oven, not that it mattered, it might even be a good thing if the whole damn lot burned down. Screaming trees that no-one hears. Recalled Mum’s face from photos. Pictured a straight back walking into the house she and Ben have just left. Mum sit-ting down and eating the remains on Sara’s plate so that nothing will go to waste. After that she clears the table and washes up. The kitchen is in flames but that is of no concern to Mum because she is already dead.

It’s only when Mum puts the dishes away that Sara sees the stump. The tractor driver had been dazzled and rammed into the little brown Audi and it was pointless sewing the arm back on a dead body. Dad had said that late one night when he had been drinking. All they had done was lain the arm close beside her in the coffin. So now Mum was standing there wiping the cheap crockery, holding the plate tight between her chin and her chest, drying it with her right hand. The fire took hold but that didn’t worry Mum in the slightest. Sara was only afraid

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she would drop the plate and start to feel ashamed about her stump, her incompetence, her death.

Västerbotten had not been depopulated but ins-tead filled with settlers who loved the outdoor life and wore windproof jackets and had children with cheeks rosy from the cold. Students who fell in love with the change in the seasons and said that as far as Vitamin D was concerned, what was lost during the winter could be made up for in the summer. They bought snowmobiles. They went on holiday to buy expensive designer clothes. In various hotel bars they reminded each other that there was so-mething about the sky up there, you want to live where you can reach up and touch it.

Sara recognised the car in the rear view mirror.So Jonson had set off to look.That meant the people at the filling station had

already been found.She pulled over.Jonson got out of the car, limping from the wear

and tear in his hip. She had met his wife Maria only once, a beautiful woman with a shyness in her eyes. She was the one who had borne their only son and he had since left home and made a good career at Umeå University. Jonson also had a brother but she had never met him, he was a soldier in Afghanistan. Sara had the rifle in her hand and shot before Jon-

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son came too close.She had always been faster than Jonson who was

oddly trusting. He collapsed onto his knees and so she fired again to make sure and after a prolonged gurgling it went quiet. Only the cars, only the bo-dies. Only the countryside as a witness.

She turned the key in the ignition. Indicated from habit even though there was no-one else around. Fumbled with the radio but couldn’t tune it to any station so stayed with the crackling static.

”You got him first time.”Sara jumped, hadn’t realised he was awake, tur-

ned up the crackling so the whole car felt electrified.”No worries,” said Ben. ”I know where we can

go.”In the flat they drove to there was a mattress and

a table with two stools. No food to cook and no wine to drink. They went to bed immediately with their clothes on and Ben stroked her hair. He pus-hed her fringe from right to left across her forehead and then back again until she started giggling. He giggled too and then burrowed into her armpit.

”What are you, a little squirrel?”It got hot under the blanket and the empty place

in her chest slowly began to fill. With something. Not blood, not air. Something far worse and lighter.

”Why didn’t you shoot me?”

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”You offered me coffee.””It was the uniform, wasn’t it?””Why did you let me in?””It doesn’t matter anymore.”Sara woke without knowing where she was. Slip-

ped between dreaming and waking and found it hard to orientate herself in time. When the door slammed her body jerked involuntarily. Ben had been somewhere and bought coffee in cardboard mugs. He hurried up to her, eager to avoid the lo-neliness.

The coffee was almost cold.He should have woken me, she thought. A little

awkwardly he pulled a croissant out of a bag:”I thought you might like these.”It crunched in her mouth and greasy flakes fell on

her lap. He looked at her tensely so she nodded en-couragingly. This thing with morning and presents made them waver at the edges. Sara broke off small pieces and ate a little at a time, tried dunking but that only left oily rings in the coffee. Picked up her cigarettes and he lit one for her even though she wasn’t shaking that morning.

”Can we stay here?””Not for long.””Couldn’t you pay?””I don’t know, Sara,” and that was the first time

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he had said her name. ”Maybe we ought to go back to your place.”

She thought about the ice hockey player and his brothers. They wouldn’t bother with a trial. They’d form an army of hockey players who cut deep ho-les in the ice, dressed in oversized jerseys with bur-ning birch leaves on the front, clubs that beat in time as they move forwards through the birch trees. The birches are burning and they are pushing Ben in front of them. The flames lick his body leaving black marks on his clothes, and his arms hang char-red from his body. They would be waiting for Sara in the safety of her own home, if the house hadn’t been burned down already, that is.

In the filthy bathroom Sara closed her eyes and thought that someone should have had a word with Dad. Jonson should have had a word with Dad. A few days had passed after all and it wasn’t like her to disappear. The long corridors with the striped wall-paper and white panelling, the doors at the home, whether open or closed, still waited to be opened. For someone to go in and touch all the stillness.

Dad’s closed room.The way he sits in the armchair staring out at the

car park with shining eyes like mirrors of age or

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sorrow. The radio is on to deafen the silence that echoes between his eyes and the cars outside. The same dark brown polyester trousers as always. He shakes his head and rolls up his shirtsleeves to re-veal the birthmarks like different astrological signs.

He says her name quietly to himself.Jonson wonders if it is one of the indications of

senility, whether Sven has forgotten who the name belongs to, but then he looks up and asks:

”Will you run me over, Officer Jonson?””What?””Will you run me over to the house, Officer Jon-

son?”Apart from the fact that she has locked the door,

everything is the same as usual. Only an unwashed cup on the draining board and it unexpectedly che-ers him up to see that she has acquired some bad habits. He walks over to the wedding photograph and takes it down from the wall and gives it to Jon-son. Then he finds some old newspapers and spreads them on the kitchen floor. With his slow hands he tries to light a match and set fire to the house.

”That’s not going to make any difference,” says Jonson, but Dad doesn’t care.

He hopes Sara is lying in one of the beds, or else he knows she is, convinced that Jonson has chosen not to show him the dead Sara so he’ll have enough

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strength to be able to burn her up himself. Can’t bear the thought that someone else would end the girl’s life. He gave her life and it’s his job to end it.

Then they drive back. At the home it’s stewed reindeer with lingonberries. Dad eats it all up and licks the creamy gravy from the knife, something he’s never done before. In his room he places his slippers beside the bed, walks across the vinyl floo-ring in his socks and gets his important papers out of the drawer, placing them in full view on the table. In bed he clasps his hands as usual and falls asleep.

It is to Jonson the home rings next morning when they can’t get hold of Sara. That was why he had set off to search for her, why he caught up with the Volvo. He felt obliged for Sven’s sake because he was a father himself. Even though he had never really comprehended it. Once he had heard his son give a public lecture at the university, walked on the green fitted carpet in the corridors and looked at the pain-tings under their dim lighting. He had sat at the very back and seen his son send a welcoming smile in his direction, but hadn’t had time to smile back, was still trying to rearrange his facial expression. His son had cleared his throat, started the projector and the moment was gone. Jonson hadn’t under-

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stood much of what his son had talked about, could hardly understand that the man standing there was his own flesh and blood. Gesticulating, articulating.

Jonson had told Sara about it the next day in the car and she had answered that it was good he un-derstood that children come into the world to be their own person.

The E4 was ploughed and the approaching warmth tempted a few small birds to sing winter off their chests. They drove for a while with the windows down. Ben had found a radio station with easy liste-ning music, the kind of songs they slow-danced to in secondary school at some stage. Even though she was sitting close to him Sara wanted to be even clo-ser. Sometimes you feel time is pretending because it knows how everything is going to end, and from the offhand way it was throwing spring air and easy feelings around she knew the end was closing in. She drove up to verge and asked if they could shag. He gave a crooked smile:

”You’re insane, you are.””Well, it’ll soon be over anyway.”They fucked with their clothes on and she screa-

med when she came and that made them start laug-hing. When she drove back onto the road and made

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a U-turn she was still wet between her legs. It wasn’t a decision to turn round, she wouldn’t think of it like that, everything was just unfolding the way it should.

Certain places you can never leave.But still it amazed her that the house was still

standing. An odd pile of newspapers on the kitchen floor that looked as if they had burned for a while but then given up. They each lit a cigarette and wai-ted. They were back at the same place where they had been a few days ago, but it probably wouldn’t be more than a few hours before someone came to pick them up. She noticed that the wedding photo and the picture of her parents were missing. Proof that now she was absolutely alone in the world. That made her sink onto one of the chairs. Silent, incapacitated.

And at the table, like any other married couple with nothing to say to each other, it occurred to her that she could be pregnant. She touched her sto-mach cautiously so that Ben wouldn’t see and share the same thought.

When the police arrived Ben went out first with his hands above his head. They knocked him to the ground as soon as he drew close, handcuffed his

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wrists behind his back. Sara, whose body they had trained themselves, they didn’t dare approach in the same brutal way. Trusted that she knew what was expected of her.

And she might have been held hostage, how were they to know.

In prison she felt sick and vomited. When she looked at herself in the mirror she could see daily how her hair was going grey, lines like ruts down her cheeks, all Dad’s grief transferred to her like small furrows. She thought of Dad sometimes but more often of Jonson and Jonson’s family, but most often no thoughts at all, only a thick fog.

She didn’t see Ben until the hearing. It was almost difficult to recognise him, unlike her the confusion had given way to something calm and almost dig-nified. He looked relieved. He mouthed something at her but she didn’t understand what he was say-ing. Made an effort to store every movement of his mouth in her memory so she would be able to spend the time thinking about what he had said.

Perhaps something as simple as wanting her to be with him.

Or a sorry. A song.You ain’t nothing but a hound dog.The ice hockey player’s little brother sat in the

public gallery. He missed his brother so much that

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he was losing his grip, the second before he woke up, the second before the darkness was pumped th-rough the hockey body. They were going to go to Vancouver together. That was why they were taking turns to work in their dad’s filling station and now he couldn’t even bring himself to drive past. Under his big jacket he was wearing a match shirt to ho-nour his brother, the Montreal Canadiens.

When the judge asked Ben why he had killed so many innocent people he was silent. The judge had to repeat the question. Ben leaned in to the microp-hone but spoke mainly to himself:

”Maybe there is evil in this world after all.”