Юхан Теорин - The Asylum

When he reaches the cloakroom he closes the door behind him and checks to make sure it’s locked. Then he turns off all the lights except for the nightlight in the hallway, and goes to bed. He shuts his eyes in the darkness and lets out a long breath.

But it is difficult to get to sleep. Impossible. Now it’s dark it seems to Jan that the pre-school is full of sounds. Clicking, tiptoeing, whispering... Someone is lying there in the hospital just yearning, someone who wants him to come.

Alice Rami.

Jan closes his eyes, but she is gazing at him, her eyes glowing. Come here, Jan. I want to look at you .

He’s not aware that he has fallen asleep until the alarm clock starts buzzing beside him. The display shows 06.15. It is still dark outside, but it is morning. He sees bare walls around him and realizes that he is in the little staffroom at the Dell.

Almost time to wake Leo, Matilda and Mira.

His first night shift is over, but there are many more to come, and as he gets out of bed he suddenly gets an idea about how he can go down into the basement at night without worrying about the children.

Baby monitors.

It was Wednesday afternoon, and time for the outing from the nursery. When Jan and Sigrid set off with seventeen children, the time was twenty-five past one. That meant there were at least four hours left until sunset, which left a good safety margin. The group would be back by four at the latest.

The temperature outdoors was eleven degrees today, cloudy but with no wind. As they gathered outside the gate Jan noted that Sigrid had nine children from Brown Bear with her. Little William was one of the group; he was wearing a warm, dark-blue jacket with white reflective stripes, and a bright-yellow woolly hat.

Jan had brought eight children from Lynx. The whole group was made up of nine boys and eight girls, and it was quite difficult to count them when they were all together; as usual the children got excited as soon as they left the playground, and once they moved off the path and in among the trees they became even noisier. They kept on surging back and forth between the trees, screaming and jumping and leaping on top of one another. It felt as if they might just race off in all directions at any moment.

The children should have been walking in a crocodile, holding hands, but Sigrid was busy tapping away on her mobile phone, and didn’t seem to notice how unruly the group was. Jan could see that she had received a text message with lots of exclamation marks, from a friend perhaps.

He made no real attempt to impose any order on the children. He simply shouted, ‘Come along, everyone!’ and increased his pace.

The children kept up with him, and in less than quarter of an hour they had climbed the slope and were deep in the forest. The fir trees were more tightly packed here, and the path was narrowing.

‘Do you know where we are, Jan?’ Sigrid had switched off her phone and seemed to be looking around for the first time.

‘Of course.’ He smiled at her. ‘I know my way around here pretty well. If we carry on we’ll come to a clearing soon, and we can stop for our snack.’

And he was quite right; the fir trees gave way to a large, circular glade. Once they were back in the light, the children calmed down.

Their picnic consisted of cinnamon buns and strawberry juice. The children were quite tired by this stage, and it was comparatively easy to get them to sit down and eat together. But once the food was gone they all got a fresh burst of energy, racing around in the undergrowth, pushing and shoving and shouting at one another.

Jan looked at his watch: twenty past three. He caught Sigrid’s eye and felt his heart pounding faster as he asked her, seemingly in all innocence, ‘Shall we play for a little while longer before we head back?’

Sigrid was still full of life. ‘Absolutely!’

‘Well, why don’t we split up?’ suggested Jan. ‘You play with the girls and I’ll take the boys.’

She nodded, and Jan raised his voice and shouted to the boys, ‘Playtime!’

He gathered them around him — William Halevi and the other eight.

‘Quick march!’ Like a sergeant in the marines he took command and marched the boys along the path, deeper into the forest.

They are small, made of white plastic, and they look just like cheap walkie-talkies. Electronic baby monitors. There are lots of different kinds, but the one Jan has chosen is called Angelguards. Guardian angels .

‘This model is actually our top seller,’ says the assistant. ‘It’s incredibly reliable, the nine-volt battery lasts for several weeks, and it transmits using a completely different frequency from mobile phones and radios. And it has an integral nightlight, which can also be used as a torch.’

‘Excellent,’ says Jan.

He is standing in a shop full of things for children: clothes, books and buggies. They sell every imaginable kind of protection and barrier and lock and alarm for little ones — ergonomic spoons and bibs that light up and little tubes to suck the snot out of a baby’s nose — but Jan is interested in only one thing: the baby monitors.

‘What’s the range?’

‘At least three hundred metres, in any conditions.’

‘Does it work through metal and concrete as well?’

‘Absolutely... Walls are no problem.’

Jan buys the Angelguards. The young sales assistant probably thinks he is yet another anxious father, because he winks at him and says, ‘These angels are set to transmit one way only, so you can hear the child, but the child can’t hear you.’

‘Brilliant,’ says Jan.

‘Is it a boy or a girl?’

‘Oh, both... and they’re different ages,’ Jan answers quickly. ‘I’ve got three.’

‘And they’re restless sleepers?’

‘No, no, things are usually pretty quiet, but, I mean, you want to make sure they’re safe, don’t you?’

‘Of course.’ The assistant places the Angels in a bag. ‘That will be three hundred and forty-nine kronor, please.’

In the evening Jan cycles up to the Dell with the Angels in his rucksack. He wonders whether to show them to Marie-Louise — perhaps demonstrating them with the same enthusiasm as the shop assistant — but she would probably dislike them just as much as a couple of TV screens. So when he arrives at exactly half past nine he says nothing; he simply puts his rucksack in his locker and takes over from Marie-Louise.

Matilda, Leo and Mira are fast asleep tonight too, and Marie-Louise doesn’t stay as long this time. Perhaps she is beginning to trust Jan.

‘Did you feel tired today?’ she asks.

‘A bit drowsy.’

‘But you slept well here last night?’

‘Absolutely. So did the children.’

Marie-Louise goes off to catch her bus at quarter to ten, and Jan locks the door behind her.

The door leading to the basement is also locked, he notices.

Now he is alone again, alone with the children.

A light is showing in exactly the same four windows up on the top floor of St Patricia’s as yesterday; he is certain it’s a corridor up there with lights that are left on all night, just like the nightlight at the pre-school.

He stops gazing up at the hospital; he has a lot to do tonight. He tidies up the boots in the cloakroom, he listens to the sports programme on the radio (keeping the volume very low, so as not to wake the children), then he has a sandwich and a cup of tea in the kitchen for his supper.

But all the time he is thinking about today’s major purchase: the Angels.

Shortly after eleven o’clock he takes them out of his rucksack and opens the door to the children’s bedroom, which is in darkness. The children lie motionless beneath their small duvets, and Jan moves silently into the room. He stands still in the darkness for a minute or so, listening to the faint sound of their breathing. A reassuring sound.