Anxious People: A Novel

by Fredrik Backman

  “I’m going up the stairs,” Jack replied.

  “Isn’t there an elevator?”

  “I don’t like elevators.”

  The negotiator sounded like he was hitting his head with his phone.

  “So you’re prepared to go into a building containing a bomb and an armed bank robber, but you’re scared of elevators?”

  Jack hissed back: “I’m not scared of elevators! I’m scared of snakes and cancer. I just don’t like elevators!”

  The negotiator sounded like he was grinning.

  “Can’t you call in reinforcements?”

  “All the staff we have at our disposal are here, the whole lot. They’re maintaining the cordon and evacuating the surrounding buildings. I’ve called in backup, but they’re both waiting for their wives.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That they’ve been drinking. Their wives will have to drive them here.”

  “Drinking? At this time of day? The day before New Year’s Eve?” the negotiator wondered.

  “I don’t know how you do it in Stockholm, but here we take New Year’s seriously,” Jack replied.

  The negotiator laughed.

  “Stockholmers don’t take anything seriously, you know that. At least, nothing important.”

  Jack grinned. He hesitated briefly as he went up a few more steps before asking the question he had been wanting to ask for a while.

  “Have you been involved in a hostage drama before?”

  The negotiator hesitated before replying.

  “Yes. Yes, I have.”

  “How did it end?”

  “He let the hostages go and came out after we’d spent four hours talking.”

  Jack nodded tersely and stopped at the next-to-last floor. He peered out of the landing window through a small pair of binoculars. He could see the wires on the floor of the landing opposite, they were hanging out of a box that someone had written something on with a marker. He wasn’t absolutely certain, but from where he was standing it looked very much like the letters C-H-R-I-S-T-M-A-S.

  “It isn’t a bomb,” he said into his phone.

  “What do you think it is, then?”

  “Looks like outdoor Christmas lights.”

  “Well, then.”

  Jack carried on up to the top floor—if the bank robber hadn’t closed the blinds, he might be able to see into the apartment.

  “How did you get him out?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “The hostage taker. Last time.”

  “Oh. All the usual, I suppose, a combination of what you get taught. Don’t use negatives, avoid can’t and won’t. Try to find something you’ve got in common. Find out what his motivation is.”

  “Was that really how you got him out?”

  “No, of course not. I was joking.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously. We talked for four hours and then he suddenly fell silent. And of course that’s the first thing we get taught…”

  “To keep him occupied? Not to let the line go quiet?”

  “Exactly. I didn’t know what to do, so I took a chance and asked if he wanted to hear a funny story. He said nothing for a minute or so, then he said: ‘Well? Are you going to tell me or not?’ So I told him the one about the two Irish guys in a boat, if you know that one?”

  “No,” Jack said.

  “Okay, two Irish brothers are out at sea fishing. A storm blows up, and they lose both oars, they’re convinced they’re going to drown. Then suddenly one of the brothers spots something in the water, and manages to grab hold of a bottle. They pull the cork out and POOF! A genie appears. He grants them one wish, anything they want. So the two brothers look around at the stormy sea, they’re stuck out there with no oars, several miles from shore, and the first brother is thinking about what to ask for when the second brother cheerfully blurts out: “I wish the whole sea was Guinness!” The genie stares at him like he’s an idiot, then says, okay, sure, let’s go for that. And POOF! The sea turns into Guinness. The genie vanishes. The first brother stares at the second brother and snaps: “You bloody idiot! We had one single wish and you wished the sea was Guinness! Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” The second brother shakes his head in shame. The first brother throws his arms out and says…”

  The negotiator left a dramatic pause, but didn’t have time to deliver the punch line before Jack cut in from the other end of the line.

  “Now we have to piss in the boat!”

  The negotiator let out an affronted snort so loud that the phone shook.

  “So you had heard it after all?”

  “My mom liked funny stories. Is that really what got the hostage taker to give up?”

  The line was quiet a little too long.

  “Maybe he was worried I was going to tell him another one.”

  The negotiator sounded like he wanted to laugh as he was saying this, but didn’t quite succeed. Jack couldn’t help noticing. He had reached the top floor now, and looked out of the window at the balcony on the other side of the street. He stopped in surprise.

  “What the…? That’s weird.”

  “What?”

  “I can see the balcony of the apartment where the hostages are being held. There’s a woman standing on it.”

  “A woman?”

  “Yes. Wearing headphones.”

  “Headphones?”

  “Yes.”

  “What sort of headphones?”

  “How many different types are there? What difference does that make?”

  The negotiator sighed.

  “Okay. Stupid question. How old is she, then?”

  “Fifties. Older, maybe.”

  “Older than fifty, or older than in her fifties?”

  “For God’s… I don’t know! A woman. A perfectly ordinary woman.”

  “Okay, okay, calm down. Does she look scared?”

  “She looks… bored. She definitely doesn’t look like she’s in any danger, anyway.”

  “That sounds like an odd hostage situation.”

  “Exactly. And that definitely isn’t a bomb in the stairwell. And he tried to rob a cashless bank. I said from the start, we’re not dealing with a professional here.”

  The negotiator considered this for a few moments.

  “Yes, you might well be right.”

  He was trying to sound confident, but Jack could hear his doubt. The two men shared a long silence before Jack said, “Tell me the truth. What happened in that last hostage drama you were involved in?”

  The negotiator sighed.

  “The man released the hostages. But he shot himself before we managed to get in.”

  * * *

  Those words would follow Jack throughout the day, right next to his skin.

  * * *

  He had started to walk back down the stairs by the time the negotiator cleared his throat.

  “Okay, Jack, can I ask you a question? Why did you turn down that job in Stockholm?”

  Jack considered lying, but couldn’t summon up the energy.

  “How do you know about that?”

  “I talked to one of the bosses before I set off. Asked her who was on the scene locally. She said I should talk to Jack, because he’s bloody good. She said she’d offered you a job several times, but that you keep turning it down.”

  “I’ve got a job.”

  “Not like the one she’s offering.”

  Jack snorted defensively.

  “Oh, all you Stockholmers think the world revolves around your bloody city.”

  The negotiator laughed.

  “Listen, I grew up in a village where you had to drive forty minutes if you wanted to buy milk. Back there we used to think your town was metropolitan. To us, you were the Stockholmers.”

  “Everyone is someone else’s Stockholmer, I guess.”

  “So what’s your problem, then? Are you worried you wouldn’t be able to cope with the job if you took it?”

  Jack rubbed
his hands on his pants.

  “Are you my psychologist or something?”

  “Sounds like you could do with one.”

  “Can’t we just focus on the job in hand?”

  The negotiator hesitated and took a deep breath before asking: “Does your dad know you’ve been offered another job?”

  Jack was about to swear, but the negotiator never got to hear what, because at that moment Jack looked out of the window in the stairwell and saw that his dad was no longer waiting in the street like he’d been told.

  “What the hell?!” Jack exclaimed. Then he ended the call and ran.

  53

  Zara had just stepped out onto the balcony when Jack saw her. That was just after she had told the bank robber out in the hall not to do anything silly, and she needed fresh air, more than ever. If all you saw was the rear view of Zara heading toward the balcony, you’d probably think she was impatient. You needed to see her face to understand that she was feeling fragile. She had surprised herself back there, had lost control, felt things. For anyone else that might perhaps merely have been vaguely uncomfortable, like when you discover you’re starting to share the same taste in music as your parents, or biting into something you think is chocolate but turns out to be liver pâté, but for Zara it unleashed a feeling of complete panic. Was she starting to develop a sense of empathy?

  She rubbed her hands carefully with sanitizer, counted the windows of the building on the other side of the street over and over again, tried to take deep breaths. She had been in the apartment too long, these people had shrunk her customary distance, and she wasn’t used to that. Out on the balcony she pressed herself up against the wall of the building so no one down in the street could see her over the railing. She clamped the headphones over her ears and turned the volume up until the shrieking noise of the music drowned out the shrieking noise inside her head. Until the bass was thudding harder than her heart.

  And just there, perhaps she found it. A truce with herself.

  * * *

  She could see winter making itself comfortable across the town. She liked the silence of this time of year, but had never appreciated its smugness. When the snow arrives autumn has already done all the work, taking care of all the leaves and carefully sweeping summer away from people’s memories. All winter had to do was roll in with a bit of freezing weather and take all the credit, like a man who’s spent twenty minutes next to a barbecue but has never served a full meal in his life.

  She didn’t hear the balcony door open, but she felt a furry ear on her hair as Lennart stepped out and stood beside her. He tapped gently on one of the earphones.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “Do you smoke?” Lennart asked, because even though he hadn’t managed to remove the rabbit’s head, there was a small hole in the snout that he was fairly certain he’d be able to smoke through.

  “Certainly not!” Zara said, putting the headphone back over her ear.

  Lennart was surprised, even if that wasn’t visible through the unchanging ambivalence of the rabbit’s head. Zara looked like someone who smoked, not because she liked it so much as to make the air worse for other people. The rabbit tapped on the headphone again and she removed it with the utmost reluctance.

  “What are you doing out on the balcony, then?” he wondered.

  Zara took a long, hard look at him, starting from his white socks, via his bare legs and his nonelasticated underpants, to his bare torso, where the chest hair had started to go gray.

  “Do you really think you’re in any position to question other people’s life choices?” she asked, but didn’t sound anywhere near as annoyed as she had hoped, which was annoying.

  He scratched his big, lifeless rabbit’s ears and replied: “I don’t smoke, either, not really. Just at parties. And when I’m being held hostage!”

  He laughed, she didn’t. He fell silent. She put the headphone back on her ear, but of course he tapped on it again immediately.

  “Can I stand out here with you for a while? I’m worried Roger might hit me again if I go back in there.”

  Zara didn’t answer, just put the headphone back in place, and the rabbit tapped on it at once.

  “Are you here on safari, then?”

  She glared at him in surprise.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Just an observation. There’s always someone like you at every apartment viewing. Someone who doesn’t want the apartment, but is just curious. On safari. Test-driving a lifestyle. You get to recognize that sort of thing in my job.”

  The look in Zara’s eyes was poisonous, but her mouth remained closed. Being seen through isn’t pleasant, you tend to pull your clothes a little tighter when it happens, especially if you’re usually the one who sees through other people. Her instinct was to say something cruel to put a bit of distance between them, but instead she found herself asking: “Aren’t you cold?”

  He shook his head and she had to duck to avoid one of his ears. Then he patted his furry face and chuckled: “Nope. They say seventy percent of your body heat gets lost through your head, so seeing as I’m stuck in here, I suppose I’m only losing thirty percent right now.”

  That isn’t the sort of thing a man dressed in tight underwear usually boasts about in freezing temperatures, Zara noted. She put the headphones back on again, hoping that would be enough to get rid of him, but even before he tapped on the headphone again she had already guessed that his next sentence was going to start with the word “I.”

  “I’m really an actor. This business of disrupting apartment viewings is only a sideline.”

  “How interesting,” Zara said in a tone that only the child of a telesales operative would interpret as an invitation to go on talking.

  “Times are tough for people in the cultural sector,” the rabbit nodded.

  Zara pulled the headphones down around her neck in resignation and snorted.

  “So that’s your excuse for exploiting the fact that times are tough for people selling apartments, too? How come you people in the ‘cultural sector’ never think capitalism is any good except when you’re the ones profiting from it?”

  It just slipped out, she didn’t really know why. Between his ears she caught a glimpse of the bridge. The ears wavered thoughtfully in the December wind.

  “Sorry, but you don’t strike me as the sort of person who feels sorry for people trying to sell apartments,” he said.

  Zara snorted again, more angrily.

  “I don’t care about sellers or buyers. But I do care about the fact that you don’t seem to appreciate that your ‘sideline’ is manipulating the economic system!”

  The rabbit’s head was stuck in a rictus grin while Lennart was thinking hard inside it. Then he said what Zara considered to be the stupidest thing that could ever come out of anyone’s mouth, rabbit or human: “What have I got to do with the economic system?”

  Zara massaged her hands. Counted the windows.

  “The market is supposed to be self-regulating, but people like you spoil the balance between supply and demand,” she said wearily.

  Of course the rabbit responded at once by saying the most predictable thing possible: “That’s not true. If I wasn’t doing this, someone else would. I’m not breaking the law. An apartment is the largest investment most people make, and they want the best price, so I’m just offering a service that—”

  “Apartments aren’t supposed to be investments,” Zara replied gloomily.

  “What are they supposed to be, then?”

  “Homes.”

  “Are you some sort of communist?” the rabbit chuckled.

  Zara felt like punching him on the nose for that, but instead she pointed between his ears and said: “When the financial crisis hit ten years ago, a man jumped off that bridge because of a property market crash on the other side of the world. Innocent people lost their jobs and the guilty were given bonuses. You know why?”

  “Now you’re exaggerat—”

 
; “Because people like you don’t care about the balance in the system.”

  Lennart chuckled superciliously inside the rabbit’s head. He still hadn’t realized who he’d embarked on a discussion with.

  “You need to calm down, the financial crisis was the banks’ fault, I don’t make the—”

  “The rules? Is that what you were about to say? You don’t make the rules, you just play the game?” Zara interrupted wearily, seeing as she’d rather drink nitroglycerin and go on a trampoline than have to listen to yet another man lecturing her about financial responsibilities.

  “Yes! Well, no! But…”

  Zara had spent enough of her life in committee rooms with the target market for cuff links to be able to predict the rest of this guy’s monologue, so she decided to save her time and his larynx: “Let me guess where you’re going with this: you don’t care about the seller of this apartment, you don’t care about Roger and Anna-Lena, either, you only care about yourself. But you’re going to try to defend yourself by saying that it isn’t possible to cheat the housing market, because the market doesn’t really exist, it’s a construct. Just numbers on a computer screen. So you don’t have any responsibility, do you?”

  “No…,” Lennart began, but didn’t even manage to take a breath before Zara stormed on.

  “Then you’ll dredge up some pop-psychological nonsense about money not having any value because that’s also a construct. And then we get to the history lesson, where clever old you gets to teach silly, ignorant me about economic theory and how the stock market came about. Maybe you feel like telling me about Hanoi 1902, when the city tried to fight a plague of rats by offering the inhabitants a reward for every rat they killed and whose tail they handed over to the police. And what did that lead to? People started breeding rats! Do you have any idea how many men have told me that story to illustrate how selfish and untrustworthy ordinary people are? Do you know how many men like you every single woman on the planet meets every day, who think that every thought that pops into your tiny little male brains is a lovely present you can give us?”