Фредрик Бакман - Anxious People

Anna-Lena looked rather uncomfortable when Roger switched hands, because nothing good ever came of Roger gesturing with both hands within the space of a few minutes, so she stage-whispered: “Might it be better not to be provocative, Roger?”

“For God’s sake, darling, surely we have a right to accurate information?” Roger replied, insulted, then turned to the bank robber once more and repeated: “Is this a robbery or not?”

Anna-Lena stretched to see over his shoulder, and stuck out her thumb and forefinger, then waved them about in illustration while mouthing the words “Bang?” twice, then adding one helpful “Robbery?”

The bank robber took several deep breaths, eyes closed, the way you do when the children are fighting in the back of the car and you’re getting stressed and lose your temper and shout at them rather more loudly than you intended, and they suddenly get so scared that they shut up altogether, and you end up hating yourself. Because you don’t want to be that sort of parent. And the tone you use after that, when you apologize and explain that you love them but that you just have to concentrate on driving for a little while, that was the tone the bank robber used to address everyone in the apartment: “Can you… can I ask you all to just lie down on the floor and be quiet for a little while? So I can just… do some thinking?”

No one lay down. Roger refused point-blank, saying: “Not until we know what’s going on!” Zara didn’t want to, because: “Have you seen the state of the floor? This is why everyday people have pets, because it makes literally no difference to them!” Julia demanded to be exempt, because: “Look, if you sit me in an armchair it’ll take me twenty minutes to get up, so I’m not going to lie down anywhere.”

For the first time the bank robber noticed that Julia was pregnant. Ro leapt in front of her at once, holding her arms up and grinning disarmingly. “Please, don’t mind my wife, she’s just a bit hotheaded, please, don’t shoot! We’ll do exactly what you say!”

“I’m not bloody hothead—,” Julia protested.

“P-i-s-t-o-l!” Ro hissed. She hadn’t looked this scared since the last time she tried to photograph her shoes and accidentally clicked the selfie button instead.

“It doesn’t even look real,” Julia pointed out.

“Great. Let’s take a chance, then. We’re only risking our child’s life, after all,” Ro retorted. At that point the bank robber clearly felt that enough was enough, and pointed at Julia.

“I… I didn’t notice you were pregnant. You can leave. I don’t want to hurt anyone, especially not a baby, I just need to think for a moment.”

When he heard this, Roger was struck by an idea, an idea so brilliant that only Roger could have been struck by it.

“Yes! Go on! Off you go!” he exclaimed. Then he marched over to the bank robber and added seriously: “I mean, you can let them all go, can’t you? You really only need one hostage, don’t you? That would make things a lot easier.”

Roger poked his chest with his thumb repeatedly to indicate who the hostage should be, then added: “Plus the real estate agent. I can stay, with the real estate agent.”

Julia glared suspiciously at him and snapped: “That would suit you, wouldn’t it? So you can make an offer on the apartment after the rest of us have gone!”

“Keep out of this!” Roger demanded.

“Like there’s any chance we’re leaving you alone here with the real estate agent!” Julia snapped.

Affronted, Roger shook all the loose skin on the lower half of his face.

“This apartment isn’t suitable for you anyway! This is going to need someone who’s good at DIY!”

Julia, far too competitive to let that pass, snapped back: “My wife’s pretty damn good at DIY!”

“What?” Ro said in surprise, unaware that there was another wife apart from her.

Anna-Lena thought out loud: “Don’t shout. Think of the baby.”

Roger nodded aggressively: “Exactly! Think of the baby!”

Anna-Lena looked happy because he’d heard her, but Julia’s eyes darkened.

“I’m not going anywhere until I’ve bought this apartment, you miserable old goat.”

Ro tugged at her arm anxiously and hissed: “Why do you always have to argue with everyone?”

Because Ro had seen that look in her eyes before. On their very first date several years ago Julia was standing outside a bar smoking while Ro was inside ordering drinks. Two minutes later a security guard came over to Ro, pointed through the window, and asked: “Are you with her?” Ro nodded, and was immediately thrown out of the bar. Apparently there was a delineated smoking area outside the bar, that was the only place you were allowed to smoke, but Julia had been standing two yards beyond the boundary. When the guard told her to go inside the rectangle, Julia started jumping about on the line, mocking him: “What about here? Am I okay HERE? How about if I hold my cigarette inside while I’m standing outside? What about here? If the cigarette’s outside but I blow the smoke into the rectangle?” When Julia had a bit of alcohol inside her, she tended to have trouble respecting any sort of authority, which might be thought a bad character trait to reveal on a first date, but when Ro was being thrown out, she asked the security guard how he knew she and Julia were there together, and he replied gruffly: “When I told her to leave, she pointed at you through the window and said: ‘That’s my girlfriend, I’m not leaving without her!’ ” That was the first time Ro had ever been anyone’s girlfriend. That was the evening she went from being hopelessly infatuated to irrevocably in love.

Later on, it turned out that Julia’s personality when she was drunk was exactly the same as Julia’s personality when she was pregnant, so the past eight months had been fairly tumultuous—but life is full of surprises.

“Please, Jules?” Ro said tentatively.

Julia hissed back: “If we leave now, this apartment could well be sold by the time we come back! How many apartments have we looked at? Twenty? You’ve found something wrong with every single one, and I can’t bear it! So I’m damn well going to have this one, and no one’s going to come along and say I—”

“P-i-s-t-o-l!” Ro repeated.

“Are you going to be farting a ten-pound monkey out of your uterus any time now, Ro? Well? So shut up!”

“It isn’t fair to play the pregnancy card every time we have an argument, Jules, we’ve talked about that…,” Ro muttered, sticking her hands deep into the pockets of her dress, and then Julia realized that she may have gone a bit too far, because Ro’s hands had only delved that deeply into her pockets when the neighbors’ kids killed one of her birds.

The bank robber let out a quiet cough and said: “Excuse me? I don’t want to interrupt, but…,” then raised the pistol a little higher so that everyone could see it and remember exactly what was going on here.

Julia folded her arms over her chest and repeated, one last time: “I’m not going anywhere.”

Ro let out a sigh so deep you could have found oil at the bottom of it, then nodded firmly: “And I’m not going anywhere without her.”

This would obviously have been a very touching moment if Zara hadn’t spoiled it by snorting at Ro: “No one offered you the chance to leave. You’re not pregnant.”

Ro dug her hands so far into her pockets that she actually punched holes in them, and mumbled: “We’re actually on this journey together.”

Roger, who had been getting more and more frustrated that no one seemed to be focusing on the most important thing here—that Roger hadn’t been given any accurate information—was now pointing at the bank robber with both hands: “So what are you after, then? Well? Is it the apartment you want?”