Фредрик Бакман - Anxious People

She banged on the closet door.

“What is it?” Julia yelled.

“We’re ordering pizza!” Ro cried.

“I want a Hawaiian without pineapple and without ham, but with banana and peanuts instead, and tell them not to cook it for too long!”

Ro took such a deep breath that her back creaked. She leaned closer to the door.

“Can’t you have a pizza from the menu just for once, darling? A nice, normal pizza? Why do I always have to call and give them a set of instructions like I’m trying to help a blind person land a plane?”

“And extra cheese if it’s good cheese! Ask if they have good cheese!”

“Why can’t you just have something off the menu like a normal person?”

It wasn’t entirely clear if Julia had failed to hear what Ro said, or if she was ignoring her, because she yelled back from inside the closet: “And olives! Not green ones, though!”

“That isn’t a Hawaiian,” Ro muttered very quietly to herself.

“Of course it is!”

Roger did his best to note all that down. Then the closet door opened and Julia peered out, then said out of the blue in a friendly voice:

“Anna-Lena says she’ll have the same as you, Roger.”

Roger nodded slowly, looking down at his pad. He had to go out into the kitchen so that no one saw him write a new note, because the first one was impossible to write on when it was wet. When he got back to the living room the rabbit raised his hand timidly.

“I’d like a—” the voice said from inside the head.

“Capricciosa!” Roger interrupted, blinking away the tears and giving the rabbit a look that said this wasn’t the time to be vegetarian or any other crap like that, so the rabbit just nodded and mumbled: “I can take the ham off, no problem, that’s fine.”

Then Roger looked around for something heavy enough to attach the note to, and eventually found a round object that seemed just the right density. That was how the police came to hear someone shout from the balcony again, and when Jack looked up, a lime hit him on the forehead.

From that distance, that makes one hell of a bump.

44

Jack only manages to slither halfway into the space above the closet. Then Jim has to climb the ladder and pull on both his feet as hard as he can, as if his son were a rat who had crawled into a soda bottle to drink the contents and had become too fat to squeeze out again. When Jack finally comes loose, the two of them fall to the floor, Jim with a crash and Jack with a thud. They lie there sprawled on the closet floor, surrounded by women’s underwear from the last century and with the rabbit’s head rolling around, sending the dust balls fleeing in fear of their lives. Jack embarks upon another verbal demonstration of his knowledge of farmyard anatomy, before getting to his feet and saying: “Well, there’s a very narrow old ventilation duct up there, but it’s sealed at the far end. Cigarette smoke might blow out, but there’s no way anyone could get through there. Not a chance.”

Jim looks unhappy, mostly because Jack looks so unhappy. The father remains standing in the closet for a while after his son storms out, to give him time to walk a few circuits of the living room and get the swearing out of his system. When Jim eventually walks out he finds Jack standing in front of the open fireplace, thinking.

“Do you think the bank robber could have got out this way?” Jim wonders.

“Do you think he’s Santa Claus or something?” Jack answers, with unnecessary cruelty that he regrets at once. But there’s ash at the bottom of the grate, and it’s still warm—there’s been a fire here fairly recently. When Jack carefully pokes about with his flashlight, he fishes out the remains of a ski mask. He holds it up to the light. Looks at the blood on the floor and the furniture around him, trying to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

In the meantime Jim wanders about apparently at random, and finds himself in the kitchen, where he opens the fridge (which perhaps indicates that it wasn’t entirely random after all). There’s leftover pizza in there, on a china plate, carefully covered with clingwrap. Who would do that, in the middle of a hostage drama? Jim shuts the fridge and returns to the living room. Jack is still standing by the fireplace holding the partially burned ski mask in his hand, his shoulders slumped in resignation.

“No, I can’t see how he got out of the apartment, Dad. I’ve tried looking at it from every possible and impossible angle, but I still don’t understand how the hell…”

Jack suddenly looks so sad that his dad immediately tries to cheer him up by asking questions.

“What about the blood? How can the bank robber have lost this much blood and still—?” Jim begins, but is interrupted by a voice from the hall. It’s the police officer who’s been standing guard.

“Er, that isn’t the bank robber’s blood,” he blurts out cheerfully, picking something from his teeth.

“What?” Jack asks.

“Schusssschfnurschulle,” the officer says, with almost his entire hand stuck in his mouth, as if the blood were nowhere near as important as the souvenir from his lunch that had gotten stuck in there. The hand reemerges with a piece of cashew nut, and the newly liberated mouth laughs and looks remarkably happy.

“Sorry?” Jim says, with rapidly dwindling patience.

The cheerful police officer points at the dried blood on the floor.

“I said: that’s stage blood. Look at the way it’s drying, real blood doesn’t look like that,” he says, holding the piece of cashew nut as if he’s unsure whether to throw it away or frame it as a memory of this great personal achievement.

“How do you know that?” Jim asks him.

“I’m a bit of a magician in my spare time. Well, to be more accurate, I’m a bit of a policeman in my spare time!”

His expectation that Jim and Jack are going to laugh at that turns out to be an optimistic prognosis, so he coughs rather forlornly and adds: “I do a few shows, stuff like that. Old people’s homes and so on. Sometimes I pretend to cut myself, and then I use stage blood. I’m quite good, actually. If you’ve got a pack of cards on you, I can…”

Jack, who has never looked like he just happened to “have a pack of cards on him” at any time in his life, points at the blood.

“So you’re quite sure this isn’t real blood?”

The police officer nods confidently.

Jack and Jim look thoughtfully at each other. Then they each switch their flashlights on, even though the ceiling lights are already on, and start to go through the apartment, inch by inch. Around and around and around. Staring at everything but still seeing nothing. There’s a bowl of limes next to the pizza boxes on the table. All the glasses are neatly placed on coasters. There’s a marker on the floor to indicate where the police found the bank robber’s pistol. Right beside it is a small table with a small lamp on it.

“Dad? The phone we sent in for the perpetrator, where did we find it when we came in?” Jack suddenly asks.

“It was there, on that little table,” Jim says.

“That explains it,” Jack sighs.

“Explains what?”

“We’ve been thinking about this wrong all along.”

45

Witness Interview

Date: December 30

Name of witness: “Jules” and “Ro”

JACK:Because you’re witnesses to such a serious offense as this, I really must insist on being able to speak to you separately rather than both at the same time.

JULES:Why?

JACK:Because that’s just the way it is.

JULES:Sorry, but has your body been taken over by a demon that sounds like my mother? What do you mean, “just the way it is”?