Фредрик Бакман - Anxious People

RO:They want you to look in the fridge. That’s all part of the real estate agent’s so-called “homestyling,” everyone knows that. Once I found tacos. They still rank in the top three tacos I’ve ever eaten.

JULES:Hang on, you ate the tacos?

RO:They want you to.

JULES:You ate food you found in some stranger’s fridge? Are you kidding?

RO:What’s wrong with that? It was chicken. Well, I think it was chicken. Everything tastes like chicken when it’s been in the fridge awhile. Apart from turtle. Have I told you about the time I ate turtle?

JULES:What? No! Stop talking now, I’m going to throw up, seriously.

RO:What do you mean, stop talking? You’re the one who keeps saying you want us to know everything about each other!

JULES:Well, I’ve changed my mind. Right now I think we know just the right amount about each other.

RO:Do you think it’s weird to eat tacos at a viewing?

JACK:I’d appreciate it if you didn’t involve me in this.

JULES:He thinks it’s sick.

RO:He didn’t say that! You know what is sick? Jules hides candy and chocolate. What sort of adult does that?

JULES:I hide expensive chocolate, sure, because I’m married to a wormhole.

RO:She’s lying. One time I discovered she’d bought sugar-free chocolate. Sugar-free! And then she hid that as well, as if I wouldn’t even be able to stop myself eating sugar-free chocolate, like some bloody psychopath.

JULES:And then you ate it.

RO:To teach you a lesson. Not because I enjoyed it.

JULES:Okay, I’m ready to answer your questions now!

JACK:Wow. Lucky me.

JULES:Do you want to ask your questions or not?

JACK:Okay. When the perpetrator let you go, and you left the apartment, do you remember who went downstairs with you?

JULES:All the hostages, of course.

JACK:Can you list them, please, in the order you remember them going down the stairs?

JULES:Sure. Me and Ro, Estelle, Lennart, Zara, Anna-Lena, and Roger.

JACK:What about the real estate agent?

JULES:Okay, and the real estate agent.

JACK:The real estate agent must have been with you as well?

JULES:Are we nearly finished here?

RO:I’m hungry.

46

All professions have their technical aspects that outsiders don’t understand, tools and implements and complicated terminology. Perhaps the police force has more than most, its language is constantly changing, older officers lose track of it at the same rate that younger officers invent it. So Jim didn’t know what the damn thing was called, the telephone thingy. He just knew that there was something special about it that meant you could make calls even though there was hardly any signal, and that Jack was delighted that the station had been given one. Jack was perhaps capable of being more delighted by telephone thingies than Jim thought was strictly reasonable, but it was this phone they had sent in to the bank robber at the end of the hostage drama, so it turned out to be fairly useful after all. It was actually Jim who came up with the idea, which he was not a little proud of. Just after the hostages had been released, the negotiator had called the bank robber on that phone in an attempt to negotiate a peaceful surrender. That was when they heard the shot.

Naturally, Jack has explained the technology in the phone to Jim in great detail, so obviously Jim still calls it “that special telephone thingy which gets a bloody signal where there isn’t a bloody signal.” When they were about to send it in to the bank robber, obviously Jack told Jim to make sure the ringtone was set properly. Which of course it wasn’t.

Jack is looking around the apartment.

“Dad, did you make sure the ringtone on that phone was switched on when we sent it in?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes, of course,” Jim replies.

“So… no, then?”

“I might have forgotten that. Maybe.”

Jack rubs his whole face with his palms in frustration.

“Could it have been on vibrate?”

“It could have been, yes.”

Jack reaches out and touches the little table where the phone had been lying when they stormed the apartment. It’s barely standing up on three legs, a definite challenge to gravity. He looks at the place on the floor where they found the pistol. Then he follows something invisible with his gaze and goes over to the green curtain. The bullet is in the wall.

“The perpetrator didn’t shoot himself,” Jack says in a low voice.

Then it dawns on him that the perpetrator wasn’t even in the apartment when the shot was fired.

“I don’t get it,” Jim says behind him, not angrily like some dads would, but proudly, like only a few dads can. Jim likes hearing his son explain the reasoning behind his conclusions, but there’s no satisfaction in Jack’s voice when he does so now. “The phone was on that wobbly table, Dad. The pistol must have been lying next to it. When we called the phone after all the hostages had been released, it started to vibrate, the table shook, and the pistol fell to the floor and fired. We thought the perpetrator shot himself, but he wasn’t even here. He was already gone. The blood… the stage blood or whatever the hell it is… must have been poured out in advance.”

Jim looks at his son for a long time. Then scratches his stubble.

“Do you know something? On the one hand this seems like the smartest crime in the world…”

Jack nods, stroking the large lump on his forehead, and finishes his dad’s thought for him: “… but on the other, it seems to have been carried out by a complete idiot.”

At least one of them is right.

Jack sinks down onto the sofa, and Jim collapses on it as if he’s been pushed. Jack picks up his bag, takes out all the notes from the witness interviews, and spreads them out around him without explaining what he’s doing. He reads through everything one more time. When he puts the last page down, he bites his way methodically along his tongue, because that’s where Jack’s stress lives.

“I’m an idiot,” he says.

“Why?” Jim wonders.

“Bloody hell! Bloody, bloody… I’m an idiot ! How many people were in the apartment, Dad?”

“You mean how many prospective buyers?”

“No, I mean in total, how many people were there in total in the apartment?”

Jim starts waffling, in the hope that it will make him sound like he understands anything of all this: “Let’s see… seven prospective buyers. Or, well… there were really only those two, Ro and Jules, and Roger and Anna-Lena, and Estelle, who wasn’t really interested in buying the apartment…”

“That’s five,” Jack nods impatiently.

“Five, yes. That’s it, yes. And then there’s Zara, we don’t really know why she was there. And then there’s Lennart, who was there because Anna-Lena had hired him. So that makes… one, two, three, four, five…”

“Seven people in total!” Jack nods.

“Plus the perpetrator,” Jim adds.

“Exactly. But also… plus the real estate agent.”

“Plus the real estate agent, yes, so that makes nine, then!” Jim says, immediately cheered by his own mathematical prowess.

“Are you sure, Dad?” Jack sighs.

He looks at his dad for a long time, waiting for him to realize, but gets no response. Absolutely none at all. Just two eyes staring at him the way they did many years ago after they’d watched a film together, and Jack had to explain at the end: “But, Dad, the bald guy was dead , that’s why only the little kid could see him!” And his dad exclaimed: “What? Was he a ghost? No, he couldn’t have been, because we could see him!”