Anxious People: A Novel

by Fredrik Backman

  He told the teenage boy all this, and then of course the teenage boy knew that everything was going to be all right. Because if a man standing on a railing takes the time to tell a stranger how much he loves his children, you know he doesn’t really want to jump.

  And then he jumped.

  11

  Ten years later the young police officer is standing in the corridor outside the interview room. His dad is still in there with the real estate agent. Of course his mom was right: they should never have worked together, he and his dad, there was bound to be trouble. He didn’t listen, because of course he never does. Occasionally when she was tired or she’d had a couple of glasses of wine, enough to make her forget to hide her emotions, his mom looked at her son and said: “There are days when I can’t help thinking you never really came back from that bridge, love. That you’re still trying to save that man on the railing, even though it’s as impossible now as it was back then.” Perhaps that’s true, he doesn’t feel like checking. He still has the same nightmares, ten years on. After Police College, exams, shift after shift, late nights, all his work at the station that’s garnered so much praise from everyone but his dad, even more late nights, so much work that he’s come to hate not working, unsteady walks home at dawn to the piles of bills in the hall and an empty bed, sleeping pills, alcohol. On nights when everything has been completely unbearable he’s gone out running, mile after mile through darkness and cold and silence, his feet drumming against the pavement faster and faster, but never with the intention of getting anywhere, of accomplishing anything. Some men run like hunters, but he ran like their prey. Drained with exhaustion he would finally stagger home, then head off to work and start all over again. Sometimes a few whiskies were enough to get him to sleep, and on good mornings ice-cold showers were enough to wake him up, and in between he did whatever he could to take the edge off the hypersensitivity of his skin, stifle the tears when he felt them in his chest, long before they reached his throat and eyes. But all the while: still those same nightmares. The wind tugging at his jacket, the dull scraping sound as the man’s shoes slid off the railing, the boy’s scream across the water that neither sounded nor felt like it came from him. He barely heard it anyway, the shock was too great, too overwhelming. It still is.

  Today he was the first police officer through the door after the hostages were released and the pistol shot rang out inside the apartment. He was the one who rushed through the living room, over the bloodstained carpet, tore the balcony door open, and stood there staring disconsolately over the railing, because no matter how illogical it might seem to everyone else, his first instinct and greatest fear was: “He’s jumped!” But there was nothing down there, just the reporters and curious locals who were all peering up at him from behind their mobile phones. The bank robber had vanished without a trace, and the policeman was alone up there on the balcony. He could see all the way to the bridge from there. Now he was standing in the corridor of the police station, unable even to make himself wipe the blood from his shoes.

  12

  The air passes through the older policeman’s throat as roughly as a piece of heavy furniture being dragged across an uneven wooden floor. When he’d reached a certain age and weight, he’d noticed himself starting to sound like that, as if older breaths were heavier. He smiles awkwardly at the real estate agent.

  “My colleague, he… He’s my son.”

  “Ah!” the Realtor nods, as if to say that she’s got children, too, or perhaps that she hasn’t got children but that she’d read about them in a manual during her real estate agent’s training. Her favorites are the ones with toys in neutral colors, because they match everything.

  “My wife said it was a bad idea for us to work together,” the policeman admits.

  “I understand,” the Realtor lies.

  “She said I’m overprotective. That I’m one of those penguins that squats on top of a stone because I don’t want to accept that the egg has gone. She said you can’t protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.”

  The Realtor considers pretending to understand, but replies honestly instead.

  “What did she mean by that?”

  The police officer blushes.

  “I never wanted… Look, it’s silly of me to sit here and go on about this to you, but I never wanted my son to join the police. He’s too sensitive. He’s too… good. Do you know what I mean? Ten years ago he ran onto a bridge and tried to talk some sense into a man who was going to jump. He did all he could, all he could! But the man jumped anyway. Can you imagine what that does to a person? My son… he always wants to rescue everyone. After that I thought maybe he’d stop wanting to be a policeman, but the opposite happened. He suddenly wanted it more than ever. Because he wants to save people. Even the bad guys.”

  The real estate agent’s breathing has slowed, her chest is rising and falling almost imperceptibly.

  “You mean the bank robber?”

  The older policeman nods.

  “Yes. There was blood everywhere inside the apartment when we got in. My son says the bank robber’s going to die unless we find him in time.”

  The real estate agent can see how much this means to him from the sadness in his eyes. Then he runs his fingers across the tabletop and adds with forced formality, “I have to remind you that everything you say during this interview is being recorded.”

  “Understood,” the real estate agent assures him.

  “It’s important that you understand that. Everything we say here will be included in the file and can be read by any other police officer,” he insists.

  “Everyone can read. Definitely understood.”

  The older officer carefully unfolds the piece of paper the younger officer left on the table. It’s a drawing, produced by a child who is either extremely talented or completely devoid of talent for their age, depending entirely on what that age is. It appears to show three animals.

  “Do you recognize this? As I said before, we found it in the stairwell.”

  “Sorry,” the real estate agent says, looking genuinely sorry.

  The policeman forces himself to smile.

  “My colleagues reckon it looks like a monkey, a frog, and a horse. I think that one looks more like a giraffe than a horse. I mean, it hasn’t even got a tail! Giraffes don’t have tails, do they? I’m sure it’s a giraffe.”

  The real estate agent takes a deep breath and says what women usually say to men who never seem to think that their lack of knowledge should get in the way of a confident opinion.

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  * * *

  In truth, it wasn’t the man on the bridge that made the teenage boy want to be a policeman. It was the teenage girl who was standing on the same railing a week later that made him want it. The one who didn’t jump.

  13

  The coffee cup is thrown in anger. Right across the two desks, but the unfathomable ways of centrifugal force mean that it retains most of its contents until it shatters against the henceforth cappuccino-colored wall.

  The two policemen stare at each other, one embarrassed, the other concerned. The older policeman’s name is Jim. The younger officer, his son, is Jack. This police station is too small for these two men to be able to avoid each other, so as usual they’ve ended up on either side of their desks, only half hidden behind their respective computer screens, because these days police work consists of one-tenth actual police work, with the rest of the time devoted to making notes about exactly what you did during the course of that police work.

  Jim was born in a generation that regarded computers as magic, Jack in one that has always taken them for granted. When Jim was young, children used to be punished by being sent to their rooms, but these days you have to force children to come out of them. One generation got told off for not being able to sit still, the next gets told off for never moving. So when Jim writes a report he hits every key all the way down very deliberately, then checks the sc
reen at once to make sure it hasn’t tricked him, and only then does he press the next key. Because Jim isn’t the sort of man who lets himself be tricked. Jack, in turn, types the way young men who’ve never lived in a world without the Internet do, he can do it blindfolded, stroking the keys so gently that even a forensics expert wouldn’t be able to prove that he’d touched them.

  The two men drive each other crazy, of course, about the smallest things. When the son is looking for something on the Internet, he calls it “googling,” but when his dad does the same thing he says: “I’ll look that up on Google.” When they disagree about something, the father says: “Well, it must be right, because I read it on Google!” and the son exclaims: “You don’t actually read things on Google, Dad, you search for them there…”

  It isn’t really the fact that his dad doesn’t understand how to use technology that drives his son mad, but the fact that he almost understands. For instance, Jim still doesn’t know how to take a screenshot, so when he wants to take a picture of something on his computer screen, he takes a photograph of the screen with his mobile phone. When he wants to take a picture of something on his mobile, he uses the photocopier. The last really big row between Jim and Jack was when some boss’s boss decided that the town’s police force should become “more accessible on social media” (because in Stockholm the police are evidently massively accessible the whole damn time), and asked them to take pictures of each other in the course of an ordinary day at work. So Jim took a photograph of Jack in the police car. While Jack was driving. With a flash.

  Now they’re seated opposite each other, typing, constantly out of sync with each other. Jim is slow, Jack efficient. Jim tells a story; Jack simply gives a report. Jim deletes and edits and starts again, Jack just types and types as if there were nothing on the planet that could be described in more than one way. In his youth Jim had dreams of becoming a writer. In fact he was still dreaming about that until long into Jack’s childhood. Then he started to dream that Jack might become a writer instead. That’s an impossible thing for sons to grasp, and a source of shame for fathers to have to admit: that we don’t want our children to pursue their own dreams or walk in our footsteps. We want to walk in their footsteps while they pursue our dreams.

  They have pictures of the same woman on their desks. The mother of one of them, the wife of the other. Jim’s desk also has a photograph of a young woman, seven years older than Jack, but they don’t often talk about her, and she only gets in touch when she needs money. At the start of each winter Jim says hopefully: “Maybe your sister will come home for Christmas,” and Jack replies: “Sure, Dad, we’ll see.” The son never tells his dad he’s being naive. It’s an act of love. His dad’s shoulders are weighed down with invisible boulders when he says, late each Christmas Eve: “It’s not her fault, Jack, she’s…,” and Jack always replies: “She’s ill. I know, Dad. Do you want another beer?”

  There are so many things that stand between the older policeman and the younger one now, regardless of how close they live to each other. Because Jack eventually stopped running after his sister—that’s the main difference between the brother and the father.

  When his daughter was a teenager, Jim used to think that children were like kites, so he held on to the string as tightly as he could, but eventually the wind carried her off anyway. She pulled free and flew off into the sky. It’s hard to tell exactly when a person’s substance abuse begins, which is why everyone is lying when they say: “I’ve got it under control.” Drugs are a sort of dusk that grant us the illusion that we’re the ones who decide when the light goes out, but that power never belongs to us. The darkness takes us whenever it likes.

  A few years ago Jim found out that Jack had withdrawn all his savings, which he was planning to use to buy an apartment, and used them to pay for his sister’s treatment in an exclusive private clinic. Jack drove his sister there. She checked herself out two weeks later, too late for him to get his money back. She didn’t get in touch for six months, when she suddenly phoned in the middle of the night as if nothing had happened, and asked if Jack could lend her “a few thousand.” For a plane ticket home, she said. Jack sent the money, she never came. Her dad is still running about on the ground, trying not to lose sight of the kite way up in the sky, that’s the difference between the father and the brother. Next Christmas one of them will say: “She’s…,” and the other will whisper: “I know, Dad,” then get him another beer.

  * * *

  Obviously they find ways to argue about beer, too. Jack is one of those young men who is curious about beers that taste of grapefruit and gingerbread and sweets and all sorts of other crap. Jim wants beer that tastes of beer. Sometimes he calls the complicated version “Stockholm beer,” but not too often, naturally, because then his son gets so angry that Jim has to buy his own damn beer for several weeks. He sometimes thinks it’s impossible to know if children end up completely different despite the fact that they grew up together, or precisely because of that. He glances over the top of the computer screens and watches his son’s fingertips on the keyboard. The little police station in their not especially large town is a fairly quiet place. Not much happens there, they’re not used to hostage dramas, or any sort of drama at all, really. So Jim knows that this is Jack’s big chance to show the bosses what he can do, what sort of police officer he can be. Before the experts from Stockholm show up.

  Jack’s frustration is dragging his eyebrows down and restlessness is blowing a gale inside him. He’s been teetering on the verge of a furious outburst ever since he was the first officer into the apartment. He’s been keeping a lid on it, but after the last interview he marched into the staffroom and exploded: “One of these witnesses knows what happened! Someone knows and is lying to our faces! Don’t they understand that a man could be lying hidden somewhere, bleeding to death right now? How the hell can anyone lie to the police while someone’s dying?”

  Jim didn’t say a word when Jack sat down at his computer after his outburst. But when the coffee cup hit the wall, it wasn’t Jack who threw it. Because even if his son was furious about not being able to save the perpetrator’s life, and hated the fact that a group of damn Stockholmers were about to show up and take the investigation away from him, that came nowhere close to the frustration his father felt at not being able to help him.

  A long silence follows. First they glare at each other, then down at their keyboards. Eventually Jim manages to say: “Sorry. I’ll clean it up. I just… I can understand that this is driving you crazy. I just want you to know that it’s driving me crazy… too.”

  He and Jack have both studied every last inch of the plan of the apartment. There are no hiding places in there, nowhere to go. Jack looks at his dad, then at the remains of the coffee cup behind him, and says quietly: “He must have had help. We’re missing something here.”

  Jim stares at the notes from the interviews with the witnesses.

  “We can only do our best, son.”

  It’s easier to talk about work when you haven’t quite got the words to talk about the other things in life, but obviously those words apply to both things at the same time. Jack has been thinking about the bridge ever since the hostage drama started, because during his best nights he still dreams that the man didn’t jump, that Jack managed to save him. Jim thinks about the same bridge all the time, because during his worst nights he dreams that it was Jack who jumped instead.

  “Either one of the witnesses is lying, or they all are. Someone must know where this man is hiding,” Jack repeats mechanically.

  Jim sneaks a glance at Jack’s two index fingers, tapping the desktop the same way as his mother after a heavy night at the hospital or prison. Too much time has passed for the father to ask his son how he’s doing, too much time for the son to be able to explain. The distance between them is too great now.

  But when Jim slowly gets up from his chair with the full symphony of a middle-aged man’s groans, to wipe the wall and pick up the piec
es of the cup he threw, Jack gets quickly to his feet and walks to the staffroom. He comes back with two more cups. Not that Jack drinks coffee, but he understands that it occasionally means something to his father not to have to drink alone.

  “I shouldn’t have got involved in your interview, son,” Jim says in a low voice.

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Jack replies.

  Neither of them means it. We lie to those we love. They hunch over their keyboards again and type up the final transcripts of all the interviews with the witnesses, reading them through one more time in search of clues.

  * * *

  They’re right, both of them. The witnesses aren’t telling the truth, not all of it. Not all of them.

  14

  Witness Interview

  Date: December 30

  Name of witness: London

  JACK: You’d probably be more comfortable if you sat on the chair instead of the floor.

  LONDON: Have you got something wrong with your eyes or something? You can see that the charging cable for my cell phone won’t reach the chair.

  JACK: And moving the chair is out of the question, obviously.

  LONDON: What?

  JACK: Nothing.

  LONDON: You’ve got really crap reception in here. Like, one bar…

  JACK: I’d like you to switch your phone off now so I can ask my questions.

  LONDON: I’m not stopping you, am I? Ask away. Are you really a cop? You look too young to be a cop.

  JACK: Your name is London, is that correct?

  LONDON: “Correct.” Is that how you talk? You sound like you’re doing role-play with someone who gets turned on by accountants.