Anxious People: A Novel

by Fredrik Backman

  “You should buy this apartment for your wife. There’s nothing wrong with it. It could do with a bit of minor renovation, but there’s no damp or mold. The kitchen and bathroom are in excellent condition, and the finances of the housing association are in good shape. There are a few loose baseboards, but that won’t take long to put right,” he said.

  “I don’t know how to fix baseboards,” Ro whispered.

  Roger was silent for a long, long time before—without looking at her—he said three of the hardest words an older man can say to a younger woman:

  “You’ll manage it.”

  39

  Jim is getting coffee from the police station staffroom, but doesn’t have time to drink it because Jack comes rushing in from his interview with Roger, yelling: “We have to get back to the apartment! I know where he’s hiding! In the wall!”

  Jim doesn’t honestly know what on earth that’s supposed to mean, but he obeys. They leave the station, get in the car, and drive back to the crime scene with high hopes that everything is going to fall into place the moment they walk in, that they’ll have missed something obvious that will give them all the answers long before the Stockholmers arrive and try to grab the glory for everything.

  They’re partly right, of course. They have missed something obvious.

  * * *

  There’s a young police officer posted in the lobby to stop journalists and random outsiders from going inside and snooping about. Jack and Jim know him, because the town is too small for them not to, and if people sometimes make jokes about some young police officers not being “the sharpest knife in the drawer,” this young man isn’t even in the drawer. He barely notices when Jim and Jack pass him, and they look at each other in annoyance.

  “I wouldn’t let that one guard a crime scene if it was up to me,” Jack mutters.

  “I wouldn’t let that one guard my beer while I went to the toilet,” Jim mutters back, without making it quite clear which he thought was more serious. But it’s the day before New Year’s Eve, and they’re too short-staffed to have the luxury of choice.

  They split up to search. First Jack uses his knuckles, then his pocket torch to knock on all the walls. Jim tries to look as though he, too, has some good thoughts and ideas, so he lifts the sofa to see if anyone just happens to be hiding underneath it. Then Jim runs out of good thoughts and ideas. There are some pizza boxes on the coffee table, so Jim lifts the lid of one of them to see if there’s anything left. Jack’s nostrils flare to twice their normal size when he sees this.

  “Dad, please tell me you weren’t thinking of eating any of that if there’s some left? It’s been sitting there all day!”

  His dad closes the lid indignantly.

  “Pizza doesn’t go bad.”

  “If you’re a goat living in a garbage dump, maybe,” Jack mutters, then goes back to carefully knocking, knocking, knocking at various heights on all the walls, first hopefully, then with increasing desperation, palms feeling across the wallpaper like the very first moments after you accidentally drop a key in a lake. His confident facade starts to crack slightly as an entire day’s suppressed dissatisfactions finally slip out of him.

  “No, dammit. I was wrong. There’s no way he’s here.”

  He’s standing in front of the part of the wall behind which the gap Roger mentioned ought to be. But there’s no way into it. If the bank robber is in there, someone must have dismantled part of the wall, then sealed him in, and the wall is far too neatly plastered and painted for that. And there wasn’t anywhere near enough time, either. Jack utters a series of expletives combining certain sexual terms with various farmyard animals. His back creaks as he leans against the wall. Jim sees a sense of failure settle on his son’s face, shrinking the distance between his ears and shoulders, so Jim summons up all of his sympathy as a father and tries to encourage him by saying: “What about the closet?”

  “Too small,” Jack says curtly.

  “Only on the plan. According to that Estelle, it’s actually an entire walk-in closet…”

  “What?”

  “That’s what she said. Didn’t I mention that in my notes from the interview?”

  “Why haven’t you said anything?” Jack blurts out, already on his way.

  “I didn’t know it was important,” Jim says defensively.

  When Jack sticks his head in the closet to look for a light switch, he hits his forehead on a coat hanger, in exactly the same place where he already has the large bump. It hurts so badly that he lashes out at the hanger with his fist. So now his fist hurts as well. But Jim was right. Behind all the old coats and older suits and boxes full of even older things blocking the front, the closet really is far larger than it appeared on the plan.

  40

  There was a knock on the closet door.

  Knock, knock, knock.

  “Come in!” Anna-Lena called out hopefully, then fell apart when she saw it wasn’t Roger.

  “Can I come in?” Julia asked gently.

  “What for?” Anna-Lena said with her face turned away, since she considered crying a more private activity than going to the toilet.

  Julia shrugged.

  “I’m tired of everyone out there. You seem to feel the same. So maybe we have something in common.”

  Anna-Lena had to admit to herself that it had been a long time since she’d had anything in common with anyone apart from Roger, and that it sounded rather nice. So she nodded tentatively from her stool, half hidden by a rail full of old-fashioned men’s suits.

  “Sorry I’m crying. I know I’m the one who’s in the wrong here.”

  Julia looked around for somewhere to sit, and decided to pull out a stepladder from the back of the closet and sit on the lowest step of that. Then she said: “When I got pregnant, the first thing my mom said to me was ‘Now you’ll have to learn to cry in the cupboard, Jules, because children get frightened if you cry in front of them.’ ”

  Anna-Lena wiped her tears and stuck her head out from beneath the suits: “That was the first thing your mom said?”

  “I was a difficult child, so her sense of humor is rather unusual,” Julia smiled.

  Anna-Lena joined in with a weak smile. She nodded warmly toward Julia’s stomach.

  “Are you doing okay? I mean, you and… the little one?”

  “Oh, yes, thanks. I’m peeing thirty-five times a day, I hate socks, and I’m starting to think that terrorists who make bomb threats against public transport are all pregnant women who hate the way people smell on buses. Because people really do smell disgusting. Would you believe that an old guy sitting next to me the other day was eating salami? Salami! On the bus! But thanks, the little one and I are doing fine.”

  “It’s terrible being held hostage when you’re pregnant, I mean,” Anna-Lena said gently.

  “Oh, it’s probably just as bad for you. I’ve just got more to carry.”

  “Are you very scared of the bank robber?”

  Julia shook her head slowly.

  “No, I’m not, actually. I don’t even think that pistol’s real, if I’m being honest.”

  “Nor me,” Anna-Lena nodded, even though she didn’t really have any idea.

  “The police will probably be here any minute, if we just stay calm,” Julia promised.

  “I hope so,” Anna-Lena nodded.

  “The bank robber actually seems more scared than us.”

  “Yes, you’re probably right about that.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “I… I don’t really know. I’ve hurt Roger badly.”

  “Oh, something tells me you’ve put up with far worse from him over the years, so I doubt you’re even yet.”

  “You don’t know Roger. He’s more sensitive than people think. He’s just a bit wedded to his principles.”

  “Sensitive and principled, you hear that a lot,” Julia nodded, thinking that it was a good description of all the old men who’ve started wars throughout human history.

&n
bsp; “Once a young man with a black beard asked if he could have Roger’s parking space in a car park, and Roger waited twenty minutes before he moved the car. Out of principle!”

  “Charming,” Julia said.

  “You don’t know him,” Anna-Lena repeated with a blank look on her face.

  “With all due respect, Anna-Lena—if Roger was as sensitive as you say, he’d be the one crying in the closet now.”

  “He is sensitive… inside. I just can’t understand how… when he saw Lennart, he immediately assumed we were… having an affair. How could he think something like that of me?”

  Julia was trying to find a comfortable way to sit on the stepladder, and caught a glimpse of her own reflection in the metal. It wasn’t flattering.

  “If Roger thought you were being unfaithful, then he’s the one with the problem, not you.”

  Anna-Lena was pressing her hands hard against her thighs to stop her fingers shaking. She stopped blinking.

  “You don’t know Roger.”

  “I knew enough men like him.”

  Anna-Lena’s chin moved slowly from side to side.

  “He waited twenty minutes before he moved the car out of principle. Because on the news that morning there was a man, a politician, who said we ought to stop helping immigrants. That they just come here thinking they can get everything for free, and that a society can’t work like that. He swore a lot, and said they’re all the same, people like that. And Roger had voted for the party that man belonged to, you see. Roger has very firm ideas about the economy and fuel taxes and things like that, he doesn’t like it when Stockholmers turn up and decide how everyone outside Stockholm should live. And he can be very sensitive. Sometimes he expresses himself a bit harshly, I’ll admit that, but he has his principles. No one can say he hasn’t got principles. And that particular day, after he’d heard that politician say that, we were in a shopping mall, it was just before Christmas so the car park was completely full when we got back to the car. Long, long queues. And that young man with the black beard, he saw us walking back to our car and wound his window down and asked if we were leaving, and if he could have our space if we were.”

  By now Julia was ready to get up and turn the walk-in closet into a walk-out closet.

  “Do you know what, Anna-Lena? I don’t think I want to hear the rest of that story…”

  Anna-Lena nodded understandingly, this certainly wasn’t the first time someone had said that about her stories. But she was so used to thinking out loud now that she finished it anyway.

  “There were so many cars there that it took the young man twenty minutes to get to the part of the garage where we were parked. Roger refused to move the car until he got there. He had two little children in the back of the car, I hadn’t noticed, but Roger had. When we drove away I told Roger I was proud of him, and he replied that it didn’t mean he’d changed his mind about the economy or fuel taxes or Stockholmers. But then he said that he realized that in that young man’s eyes, Roger must look just like that politician on television, they were the same age, had the same color hair, the same dialect, and everything. And Roger didn’t want the man with the beard to think that meant they were all exactly the same.”

  Anna-Lena wiped her nose with the sleeve of one of the suit jackets, and wished it had been Roger’s.

  * * *

  It’s worth pointing out that Julia was trying to stand up while this anecdote was being related, a maneuver that took a fair amount of time, so it took just as long for her to slump back into a seated position again. Only then did she open her mouth, and at first the only sound that emerged was a breathless cough, before she burst out laughing.

  “That’s simultaneously the sweetest and most ridiculous thing I’ve heard in a very long time, Anna-Lena.”

  The tip of the other woman’s nose moved up and down in embarrassment.

  “We argue a lot about politics, Roger and I, we have very different opinions, but you can always… I think you can understand someone without necessarily agreeing with them, if you see what I mean? And I know people sometimes think Roger’s a bit of an idiot, but he isn’t always an idiot in the way people assume.”

  Julia admitted: “Ro and I also vote for different parties.”

  She thought of adding that Ro was a deluded hippie when it came to politics, and that you don’t always discover that sort of thing until a couple of months into a relationship, but decided against it. Because it was actually perfectly possible to love each other despite that.

  Anna-Lena wiped her whole face on the jacket sleeve.

  “I should never have gone behind Roger’s back! He was very good at his job, he should have been one of the bosses, but he never got the chance. And now he gets so upset when he doesn’t… win. I want him to feel like a winner. So I called that ‘No Boundaries Lennart,’ and to start with I told myself it would only be the one time… but it gets easier every time you do it. You tell yourself that… well, of course, you’re young, so it’s hard to believe, but… the lie gets easier each time. I told myself I was doing it for Roger’s sake, but of course it was for my own sake. I’ve decorated so many apartments to make them look just like a home is supposed to look, so that someone can come to the viewing and think ‘Oh, this is where I want to live!’ I just wish that I could be that person one day. Settling somewhere again. Roger and I haven’t lived anywhere properly for such a long time. We’ve just been… passing through.”

  “How long have you been together?”

  “Since I was nineteen.”

  Julia thought about the question for a long time before finally asking: “How do you do it?”

  Anna-Lena replied without thinking at all: “You love each other until you can’t live without each other. And even if you stop loving each other for a little while, you can’t… you can’t live without each other.”

  Julia says nothing for several minutes. Her own mom lived on her own, but Ro’s parents had been married for forty years. No matter how much Julia loved Ro, that thought occasionally horrified her. Forty years. How can you love someone that long? Gesturing vaguely toward the walls of the closet, she smiled to Anna-Lena: “My wife drives me crazy. She wants to make wine and store cheese in here.”

  Anna-Lena poked her tear-streaked face out between two pairs of suit pants made of the same fabric, and replied as if she were revealing an embarrassing secret: “Sometimes Roger drives me crazy, too. He uses our hairdryer to… well, you can guess… he sticks it under his towel. That’s not how you’re supposed to use a hairdryer… not there. That makes me want to scream!”

  Julia shuddered.

  “Urgh! Ro does exactly the same thing. It’s so disgusting it makes me feel sick.”

  Anna-Lena bit her lip.

  “I have to admit that I’d never thought of that. That you might have problems like that. I always assumed it would be easier if you lived with a… woman.”

  Julia burst out laughing.

  “You don’t fall in love with a gender, Anna-Lena. You fall in love with an idiot.”

  Anna-Lena started laughing as well, much louder than she usually did. Then they looked at each other. Anna-Lena was twice Julia’s age, but they had a lot in common just then. Both married to idiots who didn’t know the difference between different types of hair. Anna-Lena looked at Julia’s stomach and smiled.

  “When’s it due?”

  “Any time now! Do you hear that, you little alien?” Julia replied, half to Anna-Lena and half to her little alien.

  Anna-Lena didn’t seem to understand the reference, but she closed her eyes and said: “We have a son and a daughter. They’re your age. But they don’t want kids of their own. Roger’s taken it badly. You might not think it if you meet him like this, if you don’t really know him, but he’d be a good grandfather if he got the chance.”

  “There’s still plenty of time for that, isn’t there?” Julia wondered, mostly because if those children were the same age as her, she didn’t want to be old
enough to be an old mom.

  Anna-Lena shook her head sadly.

  “No, they’ve made up their minds. And of course that’s their choice, that’s… that’s how it is these days. My daughter says the world is already overpopulated, and she’s worried about climate change. I don’t know why ordinary anxieties aren’t enough. Does anyone really need something new to worry about?”

  “Is that why she doesn’t want kids?”

  “Yes, that’s what she says. Unless I’ve misunderstood. I probably have. But maybe it would be good for the environment if there weren’t quite so many people, I don’t know. I just wish Roger could feel important again.”

  Julia didn’t seem to follow the logic.

  “Grandchildren would make him feel important?”

  Anna-Lena smiled weakly.

  “Have you ever held a three-year-old by the hand on the way home from preschool?”

  “No.”

  “You’re never more important than you are then.”

  * * *

  They sit there with nothing more to say, shivering slightly in the draft. Neither of them thinks to wonder where it’s coming from.

  41

  Estelle was moving silently through the hall, her old body was now so light that she would have been an excellent hunter if only she didn’t talk so much. She looked indulgently at the bank robber, Ro, and Roger in turn on the bench, and when none of them noticed her, she cleared her throat apologetically and asked: “Can I ask if anyone’s hungry? There’s food in the freezer, I could throw something together. That’s to say, I’m sure there’s food. In the kitchen. People usually have food in the kitchen.”

  Estelle knew no better way of saying that she cared about people than to ask if they were hungry. The bank robber gave her a sad but appreciative smile.

  “Some food would be great, thanks, but I don’t want to be any trouble.”

  Ro, on the other hand, nodded enthusiastically, for no other reason than that she was so hungry she could eat a lime with the rind still on. “Maybe we could order pizza?”