Camilla Lackberg - The Gilded Cage

That was when my life really started. The past clung to my ankles like a dead weight. Weighing me down, spoiling things, holding me back. But every cell of my body was alive with curiosity. It was me against the world. Far from home, in a city I had dreamed about my whole life. I hadn’t merely wanted to get away. I had been desperate to come here . Slowly I made Stockholm my city. It gave me hope that I might be able to heal and forget.

In early July my landlady, a retired teacher, went off to visit her grandchildren in Norrland.

‘No visitors,’ she said sternly before she left.

‘No visitors,’ I repeated obediently.

That evening I put my make-up on and drank her gin and whisky. Cherry liqueur and Amarula. It tasted disgusting, but that didn’t matter, I wanted to feel that rush, the rush that promised the bliss of forgetting and spread through my body like a warm glow.

When I had drunk enough to feel brave, I put on a cotton dress and walked to Stureplan. After a bit of hesitation, I sat down at a pavement bar that looked nice. Famous faces I had only ever seen on television walked past. Laughing, intoxicated by both alcohol and the summer.

At midnight I got in the queue outside a nightclub on the other side of the street. The atmosphere was impatient and I wasn’t sure if they’d let me in. I tried to imitate the others, act like them. It was only later that I realized they must have been tourists too. As lost as I was, but with courage painted on.

I heard laughter behind me. Two guys the same age as me walked past the queue and went up to the bouncers. A nod and a handshake. Everyone was staring at them with jealousy and fascination. Hours of preparation and giggling over glasses of rosé, only to end up shivering behind a rope. When it could all be so simple. If only we had been someone.

Unlike me, these two guys were people who got noticed, they were respected, they belonged. They were Someone. There and then I decided the same thing was going to apply to me.

At that moment one of the guys turned and looked curiously at the crowd. Our eyes met.

I turned away and felt in my bag for a cigarette. I didn’t want to look stupid, didn’t want to look like what I was – a girl from the country on her first trip to a nightclub in the big city, giddy with stolen gin and Amarula. The next thing I knew, he was standing in front of me. His hair was shaved, his eyes blue, kind. His ears stuck out slightly. He was wearing a beige shirt and dark jeans.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Matilda,’ I replied.

The name I hated. The name that belonged to another life, another person. Someone who was no longer me. Someone I had left behind when I got on the train to Stockholm.

‘I’m Viktor. Are you here on your own?’

I didn’t answer.

‘Go up and stand next to the bouncer,’ he said.

‘I’m not on the list,’ I mumbled.

‘Nor am I.’

A sparkling smile. I pushed my way out of the queue, the object of envious, longing stares from girls in too few clothes and boys with too much hair gel.

‘She’s with me.’

The meat-mountain by the door removed the rope and said: ‘Welcome.’

In the crowd Viktor took my hand, leading me deeper into the darkness. Other people’s shadows, flickering lights, all different colours, throbbing bass, entwined bodies dancing. We stopped at the end of a long bar and Viktor said hello to the bartender.

‘What would you like to drink?’ he asked.

With the cloying taste of sickly liqueur still in my mouth, I said: ‘Beer.’

‘Good, I like girls who drink beer. Class.’

‘Class?’

‘Yeah. Good. Solid.’

He handed me a Heineken. Raised the bottle in a toast. I smiled at him and drank some.

‘So, what dreams have you got for your life, Matilda?’

‘To be someone,’ I replied. Without pausing to think.

‘You’re already someone, aren’t you?’

‘Someone else.’

‘I can’t see that there’s much wrong with you.’

Viktor took a few sideways dance-steps, swaying in time to the music.

‘So what are your dreams?’ I asked.

‘Me? I just want to make music.’

‘Are you a musician?’ I had to lean closer and raise my voice for him to hear me.

‘DJ. But I’m not working tonight. I’m playing tomorrow, I’ll be up there then.’

I followed his finger. On a small stage over by the wall, behind a record-player, stood the guy Viktor had arrived with, grooving to the music. A little while later he came over to us, and introduced himself as Axel. He seemed nice, unthreatening.

‘Good to meet you, Matilda,’ he said, holding out his hand.

I couldn’t help thinking how different they were from the guys back home. Polished. Well-spoken. Axel got a drink, then disappeared. Viktor and I drank another toast. My beer was almost finished.

‘We’re warming up beforehand with a few friends tomorrow, if you fancy coming along?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, looking at him thoughtfully. ‘Why did you want me to come in with you?’

I drank the last of my beer demonstratively, hoping he’d order more. He did. One for me, one for him. Then he answered my question. His blue eyes glinted in the dim light.

‘Because you’re pretty. And you looked lonely. Are you regretting it?’

‘No, not at all.’

He fished a packet of Marlboros from his back pocket and offered me one. I had nothing against taking it, mine would last longer that way. There wasn’t much left from the fifteen thousand I’d got from the sale of the house once the mortgage and everything else had been paid off.

Our hands touched as he lit my cigarette. His hand was warm and tanned. I missed his touch the moment it was gone.

‘You’ve got sad eyes. Did you know that?’ he said, sucking hard on his cigarette.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There seems to be some sort of sadness in you. I find that attractive. I’m suspicious of people who go round thinking life’s a barrel of laughs the whole time. Life is fun. But not all the time. People who are always happy bore me. We’re not supposed to be happy all the time, because then the world would stop.’

One of the bouncers was staring pointedly at Viktor, and he shrugged and stubbed his cigarette out after a few quick puffs. I did the same. But I didn’t answer. I had a feeling he was making fun of me.

Suddenly my head started to spin from all the drink. I decided to get a souvenir, leaned forward, put my hand on the back of his head and pulled his face towards mine. A gesture that must have made me seem far more confident than I was. Our lips met. He tasted of beer and Marlboro, and he was a good kisser. Gentle but intense.

‘Shall we go back to mine?’ he asked.

Jack was sitting at the kitchen table in his dark-blue dressing-gown reading Dagens Industri . He didn’t even look up when Faye came into the kitchen, but she was used to that when he was feeling stressed. And considering all the responsibilities of his work and all the hours he spent in the office, he deserved to be left in peace in the morning at the weekend.

The four-hundred square-metre apartment, the result of knocking four smaller flats into one, felt claustrophobic when Jack needed to be left alone. Faye still didn’t know how to behave on days like that.

In the car on the way home from Lidingö, where Julienne had gone to play with a friend from preschool, she had been looking forward to spending the morning with Jack. Just the two of them. Curl up in bed, watch a television programme that they would both declare stupid and vulgar. Jack would tell her about his week. They’d go for a walk on Djurgården, hand in hand.

Talk, the way they used to.

She cleared away the remains of her and Julienne’s breakfast. The cornflakes had gone soggy in the soured milk. She hated the texture of wet cereal and the sour smell, and swallowed the instinct to gag as she wiped them off with a cloth.