Daniel Åberg - Virus - Stockholm - S1

“We can’t…” one of the officers begins, but stops when the car behind starts beeping its horn again, followed by the other cars behind that. What’s their problem? Iris thinks. Since when did people start beeping at accidents, or indeed at police cars? Isn’t that a crime? We’re thirty metres away, they must be able to see what’s happening?

The male officer walks in the direction of the first car and the driver releases the clutch; the car starts rolling. He then presses on the accelerator and swings violently left, out of Iris’ field of vision, past the bus and into oncoming traffic. In the corner of her eye she sees a red van racing down the hill. It disappears behind the front of the bus, a short but hard sound of brakes and half a second of quiet before the vehicles crash into each other.

It’s a familiar sound, like the one that the recycling machine makes as the aluminum cans crash down on the other side. Iris pictures Sigrid when she was little, her smiling face as Iris used to lift her up so that she could place the cans into the machine at the supermarket and her clapping when the gratifying clang of metal came. The illusion breaks just as the car that tried to escape comes flying back like a projectile, its hood crushed so far in that the airbag looks to be in the backseat, followed the next second by the van and its broken windscreen. Both vehicles come to a sliding, scraping halt just as the van’s right rear wheel slams into the edge of the pavement and it flips onto the cycle lane on the other side. It travels, screeching, a few metres before being caught in the embrace of the metal fence that separates the pedestrians from the traffic on the Bridge.

No ride then, Iris thinks.

“Baba, why have we stopped?”

Dano is looking at his father who is sitting with his little sister Line in his lap. His father’s face is sweaty, dripping through the stubble that has decorated his face these last few days. Dano isn’t used to seeing him like this, his father is always cleanly shaved, it’s been his daily ritual even in these last six months as they have all tried to cling to their dignity as much as possible.

“I don’t know,” his father says and looks out of the carriage window. “We can’t be at the central station yet, I don’t see any… station.”

Dano’s father looks at his mother, who is sitting in the seat beside Dano. She has been trying to rock their youngest Bilal to sleep for the last half an hour, and Dano can see how agitated she is. The movements of the train calm Bilal, but now they are still he is wriggling.

“Here, look after this,” she says and gives Dano the only mobile with data they have left. They were lucky to get seats with a charger nearly the whole way from Malmö, and now his mother’s arm is tangled in the charger cable. Before Dano manages to free her, Bilal spits out his dummy. It lands on the floor and bounces into the aisle. A Swedish man sitting across from them reaches and picks it up.

“Thank you,” his mother says in English and breaks into a quick smile. “Thank you so much.”

Dano opens Google Maps on the Samsung, tracing the crack in the screen with his finger as he waits for it to load and for the GPS to connect. He was the one who dropped it when they were being chased out of the overcrowded minibus that took them from Belgrade to Munich. It smashed onto the ground and slid across the asphalt wet with rain. Dano had been lucky not to be hit. He didn’t look, just ran out into the road. The phone was too valuable to be crushed by an oncoming car.

The map emerges slowly on the screen. It’s on satellite view, but he switches to map. It’s easier to see where they are then.

He zooms out a few times until Stockholm appears in the corner of the screen. He looks at the scale in the corner. Two kilometres for the width of his thumb. He measures. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight thumbs.

“About sixteen kilometres left,” he says.

His father sighs. Line straightens, tries to look out of the window. She pulls herself up, sticks her dark, unruly mop above the edge of the window, but soon loses interest when all she sees is a depot: a messy tangle of train tracks and a no man’s land. A barbed wire fence crosses the view a few hundred metres away, and beyond that, she can make out a collection of grey factories or warehouses. A carbon copy of the view she has seen all too many times in the past six months.

Bilal is swaying in his mother’s arms. He doesn’t want to sleep, not even lie down. He wants to stand and after a fruitless tussle, she lets him do as he wishes. She turns him so that his eyes meet hers and holds him loosely under his arms to balance him. Bilal wobbles, but manages to stand by pressing his legs down against her thighs. He laughs, he loves to stand, loves to see the world by standing on his eight-months-old legs.

There is a crackle in the speakers and an announcement is made, probably in Swedish. It sounds a bit like German, Dano thinks, but he doesn’t recognise many words. He hears no “achtung”, no “schnell”, “nein” or “schweine”, only “Stockholm” followed by a long string of incomprehensible babble. Then the woman in the speakers falls silent, clears her throat and begins in a halting, uncomfortable English: “We have been given a red light because of an accident on a pendel train station ahead. We hope to be able to continue our journey to Stockholm Central Station shortly.”

Dano waits for more, the first announcement was so much longer, but after another crackle there is only silence. Dano looks at his mother.

“What’s a ‘pendel train station’?” he asks. She shrugs her shoulders, tries to smile, to keep the mood light, but Dano can see how tired she is, exhausted from never getting to rest, never relaxing, never thinking of herself, always in motion for Dano, Line and Bilal.

“Commuter train station,” says the man opposite. “That’s what you were wondering, yes? What the conductor meant?”

Dano nods and looks at the man who seems to be in his thirties, maybe a little younger. It’s difficult to tell how old they are, he thinks.

“This train passes a commuter train station a, but there has been an accident there on the platform, so we have to wait for that to be handled before we can go on.”

Dano’s father turns to the man. “Thank you,” he says, and the man nods.

“You’re welcome.”

Dano looks back at the depot again and tries to avoid thinking about how much he needs to pee. The toilets have been closed for the last two hours, they were blocked and no one knows why. He was standing in the queue, only one person in front of him, when a woman came out and the conductor, who had just come past, locked the door from the outside. Said something like, “It doesn’t work,” and Dano thought he heard the word “diapers”. How someone could be so stupid as to try to flush a diaper down the toilet Dano couldn’t understand. The toilet in the front end of the carriage was already closed when they boarded and he didn’t want to go further. He was afraid to let his family out of his sight.

The whir of the fan and the engine vibration fade and die. His father has also noticed and together their gazes track up to the ceiling and the long metal plates filled with small air holes.

“They’re saving on energy now that we’re standing still,” his father says, trying to give Dano an encouraging smile, but he seems to know how bleak the situation really is, sighs and looks out at the tracks. Dano studies the furrows in his father’s face. They have both aged too much these last few years.

After what feels like two hours, but according to the mobile in Dano’s hand is actually only fifty-four minutes, the subdued but increasingly irritated mood of the carriage morphs into anticipation as a man wearing workgear and a yellow reflective vest passes through the carriage. A well-stocked tool belt hangs on his hips and he is carrying a well-thumbed book wrapped in plastic. Dano sees that he is sweating heavily as he passes their seats. The man stops at the end of the carriage, where a number of passengers are gathered around the conductor, and taps her on the shoulder. From Dano’s angle, he can only make out part of the text written in black letters on the back of the man’s vest.