Anxious People: A Novel

by Fredrik Backman

  Jack shakes his head firmly.

  “No, Dad. Stay here.”

  He stops himself from saying: You’ve caused enough problems. Then he walks out onto the steps at the front of the building and tells the waiting reporters everything they need to know. That Jack himself has been responsible for the whole of the police response, and that they have lost the perpetrator. That no one knows where he is now.

  Some of the journalists start shouting accusing questions about “police incompetence,” others merely smirk as they take notes, ready to slaughter Jack in articles and blog posts a few hours from now. The shame and failure are Jack’s alone, he carries them on his own, so that no one else gets blamed. Inside the station, his dad sits with his face in his hands.

  * * *

  The detectives from Stockholm arrive early the next morning, New Year’s Eve. They read through all the witness statements, talk to Jack and Jim, check all the evidence. And then the Stockholmers snort, in voices more self-important than adverts for dishwashing liquid, that they really don’t have the resources to do more than that. No one was hurt during the hostage drama, nothing was stolen in the robbery, so there aren’t really any victims here. The Stockholmers need to focus their resources where they’re really needed. Besides, it’s New Year’s Eve, and who wants to celebrate in a town as small as this?

  * * *

  They’re going to be in a hurry to get home, and Jack and Jim will watch them drive off. The journalists will already have disappeared by then, on their way to the next big story. There’s always another celebrity who might be on the point of getting divorced.

  “You’re a good police officer, son,” Jim will say, looking down at the ground. He’ll want to add but an even better person, but won’t be able to bring himself to say it.

  “You’re not always such a damn good police officer, Dad,” Jack will grin up at the clouds. He’ll want to add but I’ve learned everything else from you, but the words won’t quite come out.

  * * *

  They’ll go home. Watch television. Have a beer together.

  * * *

  That’s enough.

  68

  On the steps at the back of the police station Estelle hugs each of them in turn. (Except Zara, of course, who blocks her with her handbag and jumps out of the way when she tries.)

  “I have to say, if you have to be held hostage, then there’s no better company to be in than all of you.” Estelle smiles at them all. Even Zara.

  “Would you like to come and have coffee with us?” Julia asks.

  “No, no, I need to get home,” Estelle smiles, then she suddenly becomes serious and turns to the real estate agent: “I really am very sorry I changed my mind and didn’t let you sell the apartment after all. But it’s… home.”

  The real estate agent shrugs.

  “I think that’s rather lovely, actually. People always think real estate agents just want to sell, sell, sell, but there’s something… I don’t quite know how to say it…”

  Lennart fills in with the words she can’t find: “There’s something romantic about the thought of all the apartments that aren’t for sale.”

  The real estate agent nods. Estelle takes several deep, happy breaths. She’s going to be neighbors with Julia and Ro, in the apartment on the other side of the landing, and she and Julia will be able to swap books in the elevator. The first one Estelle is going to give her is by her favorite poet. She’ll fold down the corner of one page, underline some of the finest words she knows.

  Nothing must happen to you

  No, what am I saying

  Everything must happen to you

  And it must be wonderful

  Julia will give Estelle a completely different type of literature in exchange. A guidebook about Stockholm.

  * * *

  Ro will lose her dad, she’ll visit him every week, he’s still on Earth but already belongs to Heaven. Ro’s mom will find the strength to cope with the loss because another man will show her that life goes on. Julia will give birth to him with her hand clasped so tightly around Ro’s fingers that the nurses have to give both mothers painkillers, one before the birth, the other after.

  Ro will sleep beside him, perfectly still, on white sheets, without feeling afraid. Because she would have crossed mountains for his sake, would have done anything. Robbed banks, if necessary. They’re going to be good parents, Ro and Julia. Good enough, anyway.

  Julia will still hide candies, and Ro will be allowed to keep her birds. The monkey and the frog will love them, visit them every day, and even when Julia offers them lots of money, they won’t leave the cage open. Julia and Ro will argue, then make up, and all you have to do is make sure you’re better at the latter than the former. So they will shout loudly and laugh even louder, and when they make up, the walls will shake and Estelle will feel embarrassed in her closet. Their love will continue to be a flower shop.

  * * *

  Outside the police station Zara skips quickly down the steps to the street, afraid that someone else might try to hug her. Lennart hurries after her.

  “Would you like to share a taxi?” he asks, as if that weren’t the very definition of anarchy.

  Zara looks like she’s never shared a taxi in her life, or anything else for a very long time. But after a long pause she mutters, “If we do, you can sit in the front. And we’re not going in a car with lots of crap dangling from the rearview mirror. That’s an evolutionary dead end.”

  * * *

  Anna-Lena is still sitting on the steps. Roger sits down beside her with an effort, just close enough that they’re almost touching. Anna-Lena stretches out her fingers toward his. She wants to say sorry. So does he. It’s a harder word than you might think, when you’ve been climbing trees for so long.

  She looks up at the sky, dark now, December is merciless. But she knows that IKEA is still open. A light out there, somewhere.

  “We could go and look at that countertop you were talking about,” she whispers.

  She crumbles when he shakes his head. Roger says nothing for a long time. He keeps changing his mind.

  “I thought perhaps we could do something else,” he eventually mumbles.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The cinema. Maybe. If you’d like that.”

  It’s a good thing Anna-Lena is already sitting down, because otherwise she would have had to.

  * * *

  They go and see something made up. Because people need stories, too, sometimes. In the darkness of the auditorium they hold hands. For Anna-Lena it feels like coming home, and for Roger, like being good enough.

  * * *

  Estelle hurries back to her apartment. On the way she calls her daughter and tells her not to worry, either about the hostage drama or the fact that her mom lives alone in that large apartment. Because she doesn’t anymore. Estelle will have to give up smoking, because the young woman who’s going to be renting a room in the apartment won’t even let her smoke in the closet.

  If we’re being pedantic, the young woman actually rents the whole apartment from Estelle’s daughter, and then Estelle rents a room from her for the same amount: six thousand five hundred. On the door of the fridge hangs a crumpled drawing of a monkey and a frog and an elk. Estelle stole it from the interview room when Jim was getting coffee. Each morning, every other week, the monkey and the frog will eat breakfast with their mom in Estelle’s kitchen. For many years, on the last night of the year, they will watch fireworks together from the window. Then, eventually, a night will come which will be Estelle’s last night without Knut, and everyone else’s last night with Estelle.

  At her funeral Ro will suggest an inscription for her headstone: “Here lies Estelle. She certainly liked her wine!” Julia will kick Ro on the shin, but not hard. Their son will hold each of them by the hand as they walk away. Julia keeps the old woman’s books for the rest of her life, the wine bottles, too. When the monkey and the frog grow into teenagers, they smoke in secret in the
closet.

  Somewhere, in some sort of Heaven, Estelle will be listening to music with one man and talking about literature with another. She’s earned that.

  * * *

  Oh, yes. In the basement storage area of an apartment block not far from there, where a mother of two little girls who became a bank robber once slept, alone and frightened, there’s still a box of blankets there the day after the hostage drama. Somewhere else entirely a bank doesn’t get robbed the day after New Year, because the person who hid their pistol down there under the blankets turns the whole storage area upside down, shouting and swearing because it’s gone. Because what sort of callous bastard would steal a person’s pistol?

  * * *

  Idiots.

  69

  The windowsill outside the office is weighed down by snow. The psychologist is talking to her dad on the phone. “Darling Nadia, my little bird,” he says in the language of his homeland, because “bird” is a more beautiful word there. “I love you, too, Dad,” Nadia says patiently. He never used to talk to her like that, but late in life even computer programmers become poets. Nadia assures him over and over that she’ll drive carefully when she sets off to visit him the following day, but he’d still prefer to come and fetch her. Dads are dads and daughters are daughters, and not even psychologists can quite come to terms with that.

  Nadia hangs up. There’s a knock on the door, like when someone who doesn’t want to touch the door taps on it with the end of an umbrella. Zara is standing outside. She’s holding a letter in her hand.

  “Hello? Sorry, I thought… have we got an appointment booked for now?” Nadia wonders, fumbling first for her diary, then for her mobile to see what time it is.

  “No, I just…,” Zara replies quietly. A gentle tremble of the metal spokes of the umbrella gives her away. Nadia spots it.

  “Come in, come in,” she says anxiously.

  The skin under Zara’s eyes is full of tiny cracks, worn down by everything it’s had to hold back, finally on the brink of bursting. She looks at the picture of the woman on the bridge for several minutes before she asks Nadia: “Do you like your job?”

  “Yes,” Nadia nods, unsettled.

  “Are you happy?”

  Nadia wants to reach out and touch her, but refrains.

  “Yes, I’m happy, Zara. Not all the time, but I’ve learned that you don’t have to be happy all the time. But I’m happy… enough. Is that what you came here to ask?”

  Zara looks past her.

  “You asked me once why I like my job, and I said it was because I was good at it. But I unexpectedly found myself with some time to think recently, and I think I liked my job because I believed in it.”

  “How do you mean?” the psychologist asks, in her professional voice, despite the fact that she feels like saying, unprofessionally, that she’s really pleased to see Zara. That she’s been thinking about her a lot. And has been worrying about what she might do.

  Zara reaches out her hand, as close to the picture as possible without actually touching the woman.

  “I believe in the place of banks in society. I believe in order. I’ve never had any objection to the fact that our customers and the media and politicians all hate us, that’s our purpose. Banks need to be the ballast in the system. They make it slow, bureaucratic, difficult to maneuver. To stop the world lurching about too much. People need bureaucracy, to give them time to think before they do something stupid.”

  She falls silent. The psychologist sits down quietly on her chair.

  “Forgive me for speculating, Zara, but… it sounds like something’s changed. In you.”

  Zara looks her straight in the eye then, for the first time.

  “The housing market is going to crash again. Maybe not tomorrow, but it’s going to crash again. We know that. Yet we still lend money. When people lose everything, we tell them it was their responsibility, that those are the rules of the game, that it was their own fault they were so greedy. But of course that isn’t true. Most people aren’t greedy, most people are just… like you said when we were talking about the picture: they’re just looking for something to cling on to. Something to fight for. They want somewhere to live, somewhere to raise their children, live their lives.”

  “Has anything happened to you since we last met?” the psychologist asks.

  Zara gives her a troubled smile. Because how do you answer that? So instead she answers a question that’s never been asked: “Everything’s become lighter, easier, Nadia. The banks aren’t ballast anymore. One hundred years ago practically everyone who worked in a bank understood how the bank made money. Now there are at most three people in each bank who really understand where it all comes from.”

  “And you’re questioning your place there now, because you no longer think you understand?” the psychologist guesses.

  Zara’s chin moves sadly from side to side.

  “No. I’ve handed in my notice. Because I realized that I was one of the three.”

  “What are you going to do from now on?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The psychologist finally has something important to say. Something she didn’t learn at college but knows that everyone needs to hear, every so often.

  “Not knowing is a good place to start.”

  * * *

  Zara doesn’t say anything more. She massages her hands, counts windows. The desk is narrow, the two women probably wouldn’t have felt comfortable sitting so close to each other if it hadn’t been there between them. Sometimes we don’t need distance, just barriers. Zara’s movements are wary, Nadia’s cautious. Only after a long time has passed does the psychologist venture to speak again.

  “Do you remember asking me, one of the first times we met, if I could explain what panic attacks were? I don’t think I ever gave you a good answer.”

  “Have you got a better one now?” Zara asks.

  The psychologist shakes her head. Zara can’t help smiling. Then Nadia says, as herself, in her own words rather than those of her psychology training or anyone else: “But you know what, Zara? I’ve learned that it helps to talk about it. Unfortunately I think most people would still get more sympathy from their colleagues and bosses at work if they show up looking rough one morning and say ‘I’m hungover’ than if they say ‘I’m suffering from anxiety.’ But I think we pass people in the street every day who feel the same as you and I, many of them just don’t know what it is. Men and women going around for months having trouble breathing and seeing doctor after doctor because they think there’s something wrong with their lungs. All because it’s so damn difficult to admit that something else is… broken. That it’s an ache in our soul, invisible lead weights in our blood, an indescribable pressure in our chest. Our brains are lying to us, telling us we’re going to die. But there’s nothing wrong with our lungs, Zara. We’re not going to die, you and I.”

  The words drift around between them, dancing invisibly on their retinas before the silence takes them. We’re not going to die. We’re not going to die. We’re not going to die, you and I.

  “Yet!” Zara eventually points out, and the psychologist bursts out laughing.

  “Do you know what, Zara? Maybe you could get a new job writing mottos for fortune cookies?” She smiles.

  “The only note a cake eater needs to find is ‘this is why you’re fat’…,” Zara replies. Then she laughs, too, but the quivering tip of her nose gives her away. Her gaze darts first through the window, then it sneaks back to glance at Nadia’s hands, then her neck, then her chin, never quite up to her eyes, but almost. The silence that follows is the longest they’ve shared. Zara closes her eyes, presses her lips together, and the skin beneath her eyes finally gives way. Her terror forms itself into fragile drops and sets off toward the edge of the desk.

  Very slowly she lets the envelope slip out of her hand. The psychologist picks it up hesitantly. Zara wants to whisper that it was because of the letter that she came here, that very first time,
when exactly ten years had passed since the man jumped. That she needs someone to read out loud what he wrote to her, and then, when her chest has caught fire, stop her from jumping herself.

  She wants to whisper the whole thing, about the bridge and about Nadia, and how Zara watched as the boy came running over and saved her. And how she has spent every single day since then thinking about the difference between people. But all she manages to say is: “Nadia… you… I…”

  * * *

  Nadia feels like embracing the older woman on the other side of the desk, hugging her, but she doesn’t dare. So instead, while Zara keeps her eyes closed, the psychologist gently slips her little finger beneath the back of the envelope and opens it. She pulls out a ten-year-old handwritten note. Four words.

  70

  The bridge is covered with ice, sparkling beneath the last few valiant stars as dawn heaves its way over the horizon. The town is breathing deeply around it, still asleep, swaddled in eiderdowns and dreams and tiny feet belonging to hearts our own can’t beat without.

  Zara is standing by the railing. She leans forward, looks over the edge. It almost looks, just for a single, solitary moment, as if she’s going to jump. But if anyone had seen her, had known the whole of her story and everything that had happened in the past few days… well, then of course it would have been obvious that she wasn’t going to do that. No one goes through all this just to end a story that way. She isn’t the sort who jumps.