Anxious People: A Novel

by Fredrik Backman

  You’re a decent person. You wouldn’t have just watched.

  6

  The young policeman is feeling his forehead with his fingertips. He has a lump the size of a baby’s fist there.

  “How did you get that?” the real estate agent asks, looking like she’d really prefer to ask How’s tricks? again.

  “I got hit on the head,” the policeman grunts, then looks at his notes and says, “Did the perpetrator seem used to handling firearms?”

  The real estate agent smiles in surprise.

  “You mean… the pistol?”

  “Yes. Did he seem nervous, or did it look like he’d handled a pistol plenty of times before?”

  The policeman hopes his question will reveal whether or not the real estate agent thinks the bank robber might have a military background, for instance. But the real estate agent replies breezily: “Oh, no, I mean, the pistol wasn’t real!”

  The policeman squints at her, evidently trying to figure out if she’s joking or just being naive.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It was obviously a toy! I thought everyone had realized that.”

  The policeman studies the real estate agent for a long time. She’s not joking. A hint of sympathy appears in his eyes.

  “So you were never… frightened?”

  The real estate agent shakes her head.

  “No, no, no. I realized we were never in any real danger, you know. That bank robber could never have harmed anyone!”

  The policeman looks at his notes. He realizes that she hasn’t understood.

  “Would you like something to drink?” he asks kindly.

  “No, thank you. You’ve already asked me that.”

  * * *

  The policeman decides to fetch her a glass of water anyway.

  7

  In truth, none of the people who were held hostage knows what happened in between the time they were released and the time the police stormed the apartment. The hostages had already gotten into the cars down in the street and were being driven to the police station as the officers gathered in the stairwell. Then the special negotiator (who had been dispatched from Stockholm by the boss’s boss, seeing as people in Stockholm seem to think they’re the only ones capable of talking on the phone) called the bank robber in the hope that a peaceful resolution could be reached. But the bank robber didn’t answer. Instead a single pistol shot rang out. By the time the police smashed in the door to the apartment it was already too late. When they reached the living room they found themselves trampling through blood.

  8

  In the staffroom of the police station the young policeman bumps into an older officer. The young man is fetching water, the older man is drinking coffee. Their relationship is complicated, as is often the case between police officers of different generations. At the end of your career you’re trying to find a point to it all, and at the start of it you’re looking for a purpose.

  “Morning!” the older man exclaims.

  “Hi,” the younger man says, slightly dismissively.

  “I’d offer you some coffee, but I suppose you’re still not a coffee drinker?” the old officer says, as if it were some sort of disability.

  “No,” the younger man replies, like someone turning down an offer of human flesh.

  The older and younger men have little in common when it comes to food and drink, or anything else, for that matter, which is a cause of ongoing conflict whenever they’re stuck in the same police car at lunchtime. The older officer’s favorite food is a service station hot dog with instant mashed potatoes, and whenever the staff in the local restaurant try to take his plate away on buffet Fridays, he always snatches it back in horror and exclaims: “Finished? This is a buffet! You’ll know when I’m finished because I’ll be lying curled up under the table!” The younger man’s favorite food, if you were to ask the older officer, is “that made-up stuff, algae and seaweed and raw fish, he thinks he’s some sort of damn hermit crab.” One likes coffee, the other tea. One looks at his watch while they’re working to see if it will soon be lunchtime, the other looks at his watch during lunch to see if he can get back to work soon. The older man thinks the most important thing is for a police officer to do the right thing, the younger thinks it’s more important to do things correctly.

  “Sure? You can have one of those Frappuccinos or whatever they’re called. I’ve even bought some of that soy milk, not that I want to know what the heck they milked to get hold of it!” the older man says, chuckling loudly, but glancing anxiously toward the younger man at the same time.

  “Mmm,” the younger man murmurs, not bothering to listen.

  “Getting on okay with interviewing that damn real estate agent?” the older man asks, in a tone that suggests he’s joking, to cover up the fact that he’s asking out of consideration.

  “Fine!” the younger man declares, finding it increasingly difficult to conceal his irritation now, and attempting to move toward the door.

  “And you’re okay?” the older officer asks.

  “Yes, yes, I’m okay,” the younger man groans.

  “I just mean after what happened, if you ever need to…”

  “I’m fine,” the younger man insists.

  “Sure?”

  “Sure!”

  “How’s…?” the older man asks, nodding toward the bump on the younger man’s forehead.

  “Fine, no problem. I’ve got to go now.”

  “Okay. Well. Would you like a hand questioning the real estate agent, then?” the older man asks, and tries to smile rather than just stare anxiously at the younger officer’s shoes.

  “I can manage on my own.”

  “I’d be happy to help.”

  “No—thanks!”

  “Sure?” the older man calls, but gets nothing but a very sure silence in response.

  * * *

  When the younger officer has gone, the older man sits alone in the staffroom drinking his coffee. Older men rarely know what to say to younger men to let them know that they care. It’s so hard to find the words when all you really want to say is: “I can see you’re hurting.”

  There are red marks on the floor where the younger man was standing. He still has blood on his shoes, but he hasn’t noticed yet. The older officer wets a cloth and carefully wipes the floor. His fingers are trembling. Maybe the younger man isn’t lying, maybe he really is okay. But the older man definitely isn’t, not yet.

  9

  The younger officer walks back into the interview room and puts the glass of water down on the table. The real estate agent looks at him, and thinks he looks like a person who’s had his sense of humor amputated. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

  “Thanks,” she says hesitantly toward the glass of water she hadn’t asked for.

  “I need to ask you a few more questions,” the young officer says apologetically, and pulls out a crumpled sheet of paper. It looks like a child’s drawing.

  The real estate agent nods, but doesn’t have time to open her mouth before the door opens quietly and the older police officer slips into the room. The real estate agent notes that his arms are slightly too long for his body, if he ever spilled his coffee he’d only burn himself below his knees.

  “Hello! I just thought I’d see if there was anything I could do to help in here…,” the older officer says.

  The younger officer looks up at the ceiling.

  “No! Thanks! Like I just told you, I’ve got everything under control.”

  “Right. Okay. I just wanted to offer my help,” the older man tries.

  “No, no, for God’s… No! This is incredibly unprofessional! You can’t just march in in the middle of an interview!” the younger man snaps.

  “Okay, sorry, I just wanted to see how far you’d got,” the older man whispers, embarrassed now, unable to hide his concern.

  “I was just about to ask about the drawing!” the younger man snarls, as if he’d been caught smelling of cigarette
smoke and insisted that he was only holding it for a friend.

  “Ask who?” the older officer wonders.

  “The real estate agent!” the younger man exclaims, pointing at her.

  Sadly this prompts the Realtor to bounce up from her chair at once and thrust her hand out.

  “I’m the real estate agent! From the HOUSE TRICKS Real Estate Agency!”

  The Realtor pauses and grins, unbelievably pleased with herself.

  “Oh, dear God, not again,” the younger police officer mutters as the Realtor takes a deep breath.

  “So, HOW’S TRICKS?”

  The older officer looks questioningly at the younger officer.

  “She’s been carrying on like this the whole time,” the younger man says, pressing his thumbs against his eyebrows.

  The older police officer squints at the real estate agent. He’s gotten into the habit of doing that when he encounters incomprehensible individuals, and a lifetime of almost constant squinting has given the skin under his eyes something of the quality of soft ice cream. The Realtor, who is evidently of the opinion that no one heard her the first time, offers an unwanted explanation: “Get it? HOUSE TRICKS Real Estate Agency. HOW’S TRICKS? Get it? Because everyone wants a real estate agent who knows the best…”

  The older officer gets it, he even gives her an appreciative smile, but the younger one aims his forefinger at the Realtor and moves it up and down between her and the chair.

  “Sit!” he says, in that tone you only use with children, dogs, and real estate agents.

  The Realtor stops grinning. She sits down clumsily, and looks first at one of the officers, then the other.

  “Sorry. This is the first time I’ve been interviewed by the police. You’re not… you know… you’re not going to do that good cop, bad cop thing they do in films, are you? One of you isn’t going to go out to get more coffee while the other one assaults me with a phone book and screams ‘WHERE HAVE YOU HIDDEN THE BODY?’ ”

  The Realtor lets out a nervous laugh. The older police officer smiles but the younger one most definitely doesn’t, so the Realtor goes on, even more nervously: “I mean, I was joking. They don’t print phone books anymore, do they, so what would you do? Assault me with an iPhone?”

  She starts waving her arms about to illustrate assault by phone, and yelling in what the two officers can only assume is the real estate agent’s imitation of their accents: “Oh, hell, no, I’ve ended up liking my ex on Instagram as well! Delete! Delete!”

  The younger police officer doesn’t look at all amused, which makes the real estate agent look less amused. In the meantime the older officer leans toward the younger officer’s notes and asks, as if the Realtor weren’t actually in the room: “So what did she say about the drawing?”

  “I didn’t get that far before you came in and interrupted!” the younger man snaps.

  “What drawing?” the real estate agent asks.

  “Well, as I was about to say before I was interrupted: we found this drawing in the stairwell, and we think the perpetrator may have dropped it. We’d like you to—,” the younger officer says, but the older officer interrupts him.

  “Have you talked to her about the pistol, then?”

  “Stop interfering!” the younger man hisses.

  This makes the older officer throw his arms up and mutter: “Okay, okay, sorry I’m here.”

  “It wasn’t real! The pistol! It was a toy!” the real estate agent says quickly.

  The older officer looks at her in surprise, then at the younger officer, before whispering in a way that only men of a certain age think is a whisper: “You… you haven’t told her?”

  “Told me what?” the real estate agent wonders.

  The younger police officer sighs and folds the drawing, as carefully as if he were actually folding his older colleague’s face. Then he looks up at the Realtor.

  “Well, I was coming to that… You see, after the perpetrator released you and the other hostages, and we’d brought you here to the station…”

  The older officer interrupts helpfully: “The perpetrator, the bank robber—he shot himself!”

  The younger officer clasps his hands tightly together to stop himself from strangling the older man. He says something the real estate agent doesn’t hear: her ears are already full of a monotonous buzzing sound that grows to a roar as shock takes hold of her nervous system. Long afterward she will swear that rain was pattering against the window of the room, even though the interview room had no windows. She stares at the policemen with her jaw hanging open.

  “So… the pistol… it was…?” she manages to say.

  “It was a real pistol,” the older officer confirms.

  “I…,” the Realtor begins, but her mouth is too dry to speak.

  “Here! Have some water!” the older officer offers, as if he’d just fetched it for her.

  “Thanks… I… but, if the pistol was real, then we could all… we could all have died,” she whispers, then gulps at the water in a state of retroactive shock. The older officer nods authoritatively, takes the younger man’s notes from him, and starts to make his own additions with a pen.

  “Perhaps we should start this interview again?” he says helpfully, which prompts the younger officer to take a short break so he can go out into the corridor and bang his head against the wall.

  * * *

  When the door slams shut the older man jumps. This business with words is tricky when you’re older and all you want to say to someone younger is: “I can see you’re in pain, and that causes me pain.” The younger officer’s shoes have left reddish brown marks of dried blood on the floor under his chair. The older man looks at them disconsolately. This was precisely why he didn’t want his son to become a policeman.

  10

  The first person who saw the man on the bridge ten years ago was a teenage boy whose dad wished he would find a new dream. Perhaps the boy could have waited for help, but would you have done that? If your mom was a priest and your dad a policeman, if you’d grown up taking it for granted that you have to help people if you can, and not abandon anyone unless you really have to?

  So the teenage boy ran out onto the bridge and shouted to the man, and the man stopped. The teenage boy didn’t know what he should do, so he just started… talking. Tried to win the man’s trust. Get him to take two steps back rather than forward. The wind was tugging gently at their jackets, there was rain in the air and you could feel the start of winter on your skin, and the boy tried to find the words to say how much there must be to live for, even if it maybe didn’t feel that way right now.

  The man on the bridge had two children, he told the teenage boy that. Possibly because the boy reminded him of them. The boy pleaded with him, with panic weighing down each word: “Please, don’t jump!”

  The man looked at him calmly, almost sympathetically, and replied, “Do you know what the worst thing about being a parent is? That you’re always judged by your worst moments. You can do a million things right, but if you do one single thing wrong you’re forever that parent who was checking his phone in the park when your child was hit in the head by a swing. We don’t take our eyes off them for days at a time, but then you read just one text message and it’s as if all your best moments never happened. No one goes to see a psychologist to talk about all the times they weren’t hit in the head by a swing as a child. Parents are defined by their mistakes.”

  The teenage boy probably didn’t really understand what he meant. His hands were shaking as he glanced over the side of the bridge and saw death all the way down. The man smiled weakly at him and took half a step back. Just then, that felt like the whole world.

  Then the man explained that he’d had a pretty good job, he’d set up his own relatively successful business, bought a fairly nice apartment. That he’d invested all his savings in shares in a real estate development company, so that his children could get even better jobs and even nicer apartments, so that they could have the freed
om not to have to worry, not have to fall asleep exhausted every night with a pocket calculator in their hands. Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders. Shoulders for your children to sit on when they’re little so they can see the world, then stand on when they get older so they can reach the clouds, and sometimes lean against whenever they stumble and feel unsure. They trust us, which is a crushing responsibility, because they haven’t yet realized that we don’t actually know what we’re doing. So the man did what we all do: he pretended he knew. When his children started to ask why poo was brown, and what happens after you die, and why polar bears don’t eat penguins. Then they got older. Sometimes he managed to forget that for a moment and found himself reaching to hold their hands. They were so embarrassed. Him too. It’s hard to explain to a twelve-year-old that when you were little and I walked too fast, you would run to catch up with me and take hold of my hand, and that those were the best moments of my life. Your fingertips in the palm of my hand. Before you knew how many things I’d failed at.

  The man pretended—about everything. All the financial experts promised him that shares in the real estate development company were a safe investment, because everyone knows that property values never go down. And then they did just that.

  There was a financial crisis somewhere in the world and a bank in New York went bankrupt, and far away in a small town in a completely different country lived a man who lost everything. He saw the bridge from his study window when he hung up after the phone call with his lawyer. It was early in the morning, still unusually mild for the time of year, but there was rain in the air. The man drove his children to school as if nothing had happened. Pretending. He whispered in their ears that he loved them, and his heart broke when he saw them roll their eyes and sigh. Then he drove toward the water. Stopped the car where you weren’t allowed to stop. Left the keys in it. Walked out onto the bridge and climbed up onto the railing.