Фредрик Бакман - Anxious People

The bank robber parent never uses the girls’ real names. That’s the sort of thing you never really notice until you belong to someone else, the fact that those of us who give children their names are the least willing to use them. We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone. So the bank robber parent always calls the girls what they used to feel like, kicking in their mother’s belly six and eight years ago. One of them always seemed to be jumping about in there, and the other always seemed to be climbing. One frog. One monkey. And an elk that would do anything for them. Even when it’s completely stupid. Perhaps you have that in common after all. You probably have someone in your life whom you’d do something stupid for.

But obviously you would still never rob a bank. Of course not.

But perhaps, though, you’ve been in love? Almost everyone has, after all. And love can make you do quite a lot of ridiculous things. Getting married, for instance. Having children, playing happy families, and having a happy marriage. Or you might think that, anyway. Not happy, perhaps, but plausible. A plausible marriage. Because how happy can anyone really be, all the time? How could there be time for that? Mostly we’re just trying to get through the day. You’ve probably had days like that as well. But when you get through enough of them, one morning you look over your shoulder and realize that you’re on your own, the person you were married to turned off somewhere along the way. Maybe you uncover a lie. That’s what happened to the bank robber. An infidelity comes to light, and even if no one’s actually been unfaithful to you, you can probably appreciate that it’s enough to knock a person off balance.

Especially if it wasn’t just a fling, but an affair that had been going on for a long time. You haven’t only been cheated on, you’ve also been deceived. It’s possible for someone to be unfaithful to you without really thinking about you at all, but an affair requires planning. Perhaps that’s what hurts most of all, the millions of tiny clues that you didn’t notice. Maybe you’d have been even more crushed if there wasn’t even a good explanation. For instance, maybe you could have understood if it was about loneliness or desire, “You’re always at work and we never have any time for each other.” But if the explanation is “Well, er, if you want me to be really honest, the person I’ve been unfaithful with is your boss,” then it can be harder to get back up again. Because that means that the reason you’ve been working so much overtime is also the same reason why you no longer have a marriage. When you get to work on the Monday after the breakup, your boss says: “Well, er, obviously it’s going to be uncomfortable for everyone involved, so… perhaps it would be easiest if you no longer worked here.” On Friday you were married and had a job, and on Monday you’re homeless and unemployed. What do you do then? Talk to a solicitor? Sue someone?

No.

Because the bank robber was told: “Don’t make a scene now. Don’t cause chaos. For the children’s sake!” So the bank robber didn’t. Didn’t want to be that sort of parent, so just moved out of the apartment, left work, eyes closed, jaw clenched. For the children’s sake. Perhaps you’d have done the same. Once the frog said she’d heard an adult on the bus say “love hurts,” and the monkey replied that maybe that’s why hearts end up jagged when you try to draw them. How do you explain a divorce to them after that? How do you explain about infidelity? How do you avoid turning them into little cynics? Falling in love is magical, after all, romantic, breathtaking… but falling in love and love are different. Aren’t they? Don’t they have to be? Good grief, no one could cope with being newly infatuated, year after year. When you’re infatuated you can’t think about anything else, you forget about your friends, your work, your lunch. If we were infatuated all the time we’d starve to death. And being in love means being infatuated… from time to time. You have to be sensible. The problem is that everything is relative, happiness is based on expectations, and we have the Internet now. A whole world constantly asking us: “But is your life as perfect as this? Well? How about now? Is it as perfect as this ? If it isn’t, change it!”

The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit. Not that that really makes much difference, because now we’ve learned that every day needs to be special. Every day.

Suddenly you find yourselves living alongside each other, not with each other. One of us can go around for a shocking length of time thinking our marriage is good. Or at least no worse than anyone else’s. Plausible, anyway. Then it turns out that one of us wants more, just getting through the day isn’t enough. One of us worked and went home, worked and went home, worked and went home, trying to be amenable in both places. And then it turns out that the person you were married to and the person you were working for have been extremely amenable to each other the whole time.

“Love one another until death do us part,” isn’t that what we said? Isn’t that what we promised each other? Or am I remembering wrong? “Or at least until one of us gets bored.” Maybe that was it?

Now the monkey and the frog and one parent and the boss live in the apartment, and the bank robber parent lives somewhere else. Because the apartment was only in the name of the other parent, and the bank robber parent didn’t want to make a fuss. Not cause chaos. But it isn’t exactly easy to get a home in this part of town, or any other part of any other town, really, if you haven’t got a job or any savings. You don’t put your name on the list for public housing when you’re married and have children and a life, because it never occurs to you that you might lose all of it in the course of an afternoon. The worst thing a divorce does to a person isn’t that it makes all the time you devoted to the relationship feel wasted, but that it steals all the plans you had for the future.

Buying an apartment is completely out of the question, the bank said, because who’d lend money to someone without money? You only lend money to people who don’t really need to borrow money. So where are you to live, you might ask. “You’ll have to rent,” the bank said. But in order to rent an apartment in this town when you don’t have a job, you have to put down four months’ rent as a deposit. A deposit you get back when you move out, for all the good it’ll do you then.

Then a letter arrived from a lawyer. It said that the monkey and frog’s other parent had decided to apply for sole custody of the children because “the current situation, in which their other custodian has neither a home nor a job, is untenable. We really must think of the children.” As if there were anything else a parent with no home and no job ever thinks about.

The other parent also sent an email saying: “You need to pick up your things.” Which means of course that you have to pick up the things that the other parent and your old boss, after pinching all the good stuff, have decided are rubbish. They’re packed away in the storeroom in the basement, so what do you do? Maybe you go there late one evening, to avoid the shame of bumping into any of the neighbors, and maybe you realize you’ve got nowhere to take the things. You haven’t got anywhere to live, and it’s starting to get cold outside, so you stay in the storeroom in the basement.