The Circle (Hammer)

by Elfgren, Sara B. ,Strandberg, Mats

For a moment Minoo thinks Robin’s going to hit her. It’s obvious he’s dying to wipe the smile off her face with his fist. Instead he grabs Linnéa’s bag and dumps the contents on the floor. Makeup, cigarettes, mobile, pens, schoolbooks and Linnéa’s black notepad scatter everywhere.

  Linnéa tries to throw herself over her things, but Erik holds her fast while Robin kicks them around. He stamps on her mobile so the screen cracks.

  ‘Let her go,’ Minoo says.

  Robin picks up the black notepad and flips through it. Minoo glimpses densely written pages, red, blue, green and black ink. Drawings and patterns.

  ‘What’s this?’ Robin asks. ‘Your diary?’

  Linnéa tries to break free of Erik’s grasp, and when she doesn’t succeed, she throws her head back in a failed attempt to headbutt him. That pisses Robin off even more.

  ‘Now let’s see …’ he begins.

  Minoo goes up to Robin and tries to snatch the book, but he laughs and easily holds her at a distance with one outstretched arm while he flips through it with his other hand and starts to read: ‘All the others were sitting with their eyes twinkling, like perfect little children on Christmas Eve and AL was Santa Claus. I can’t take it much longer. M is the worst, always so fucking eager to be the best in the class. She gives me a headache.’

  Minoo has no doubt who ‘M’ is. It stings, but the most important thing is to get hold of that book before it exposes them all. She makes another lunge at Robin and manages to touch it. A page is almost ripped out under her outstretched fingers, but Robin shoves her away.

  ‘Doesn’t it say anything about how she fucks for heroin?’ Erik asks.

  ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute …’ Robin says, and continues flipping through the notebook.

  Linnéa twists, jerks and pulls at Erik’s arms in a wild attempt to dislodge him. He just laughs and holds her closer.

  ‘You like this, don’t you?’ he pants in her ear.

  ‘Let go of me,’ Linnéa barks.

  Robin carries on flipping. ‘“I’ve got to tell the others,”’ he reads. ‘“Everything’s so fucking complicated.”’

  He looks at Linnéa and smirks mockingly. ‘Oh, I think I’m gonna cry soon,’ he says, and returns to the book. ‘“I should have said something from the beginning. Now it would just ruin everything. They’d hate me if they knew.”’

  Linnéa lets out a loud, maniacal scream. It echoes down the corridor. Everything comes to an abrupt stop. That’s enough. Linnéa kicks Robin between his legs with her steel-toed boot. Hard connects with soft. Robin howls and drops to all fours. The book falls out of his hand and slides across the floor.

  Minoo bends down and catches it.

  ‘FuckingcuntI’mgonnakillyou,’ Erik hisses, as if it were one word, and twists Linnéa’s arm behind her back.

  Minoo has never been in a fight, not even as a child. She has no brothers or sisters to fight with, and at nursery she was always a good girl. Now she wriggles out of her backpack.

  It’s heavy. Full of books.

  Linnéa cries out when Erik twists her arm even harder. Minoo shuts off her brain and lets her instincts take over.

  She swings her bag in a wide arc. It hits Erik’s head so hard that he stumbles backwards into the lockers.

  Linnéa breaks free of him. She throws herself to the ground and gathers up her things. Her jar of face powder breaks, sending up a cloud of white dust.

  ‘The book!’ she shouts to Minoo.

  The adrenalin starts pumping through Minoo’s body when she sees Erik climbing to his feet behind Linnéa. She almost doesn’t register what Linnéa says.

  Linnéa gets to her feet with her bag in her hand. She grabs the book from Minoo and runs.

  Minoo is running, too, but Linnéa is a lot faster and has soon disappeared through the front doors. Minoo dashes down the steps to the cafeteria.

  ‘Fucking dykes!’ Erik shouts, somewhere down the corridor behind her.

  Vanessa is sitting in Wille’s car looking at the Lingonberry Nursery playground with its monkey bars and snow-covered sandpit. Five lumpy snowmen are standing to attention in front of the familiar building.

  Vanessa looks at the clock on the dashboard. She should have just enough time. As long as Nicke or her mother hasn’t decided to pick him up early today …

  ‘I’m so nervous,’ she says.

  Wille leans across the seat and kisses her cheek. ‘Should I wait for you?’

  ‘No, it’s okay.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. It’ll only stress me out knowing you’re sitting out here.’

  That’s only half the truth. The other half is that she wants to be alone afterwards.

  ‘Okay. I’m going to Jonte’s place,’ he says. ‘I’ll see you tonight.’

  Vanessa swallows a comment about there being a thousand things Wille ought to do instead of going to Jonte’s place. But she’s sick of hearing her nagging voice.

  She feels like an adult in the worst way whenever she’s with Wille, these days. She’s never sighed so much in her whole life as she has since they started living together. It’s as if she’s turned into her mother.

  Wille still hasn’t mentioned the email she sent him the day before yesterday, with links to the few job listings on the homepage of the Engelsfors employment office. She can understand that it wouldn’t be much fun to work at the saw mill, or clean offices overnight at the town hall, but it would be temporary. As soon as she’s left school they can do whatever they want. Together.

  She climbs out of the car, and he waves to her through the windscreen after she’s slammed the door. She loves him. But she doesn’t know if that’s enough any more.

  ‘Vanessa! We haven’t seen you for ages! Are you picking up Melvin today?’

  Amira had been working there when Vanessa was at nursery, and she was Vanessa’s favourite teacher. She still wears the same suspender-skirts now as she did then, and every time Vanessa sees her she gets flashbacks of story time and rosehip soup, and of when Amira caught her and Kevin in the Wendy house.

  ‘I’m just here to say hi to him,’ Vanessa says. ‘Is it okay if I give him a present? Maybe you have rules or something …’

  Amira looks at the bag she’s holding. Vanessa wonders if Amira knows she isn’t living at home now.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘We can make an exception for you. But do it away from the other kids so they don’t see. There’ll be such a fuss otherwise.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Vanessa says.

  ‘Go on into the lunch room and I’ll bring him to you.’

  The low table where the children eat has been cleared. The dark blue roller blinds decorated with circus animals in bright colours are pulled down halfway, and the room is gloomy. It smells of plastic and cleaning liquid. Everything has been adapted for little kids, and it’s hard for her to imagine she herself was once that small.

  ‘Come on, Melvin. Vanessa’s in here,’ she hears Amira say and turns around.

  Melvin is standing in the doorway looking at her guardedly. He’s wearing a blue-striped shirt, jeans with an elastic waistband, and slipper socks. His hair is longer and curly at the temples. Vanessa puts down her bag and manages to refrain from crying out, ‘Gosh, you’ve grown!’ like some elderly relative. ‘Happy birthday!’ she says instead, goes down on her knees and holds out her arms.

  Melvin looks at her. Then he hides his face against Amira’s leg.

  It’s as if someone’s giving her a Chinese burn on her heart. Because that’s what Melvin does with people he doesn’t know. Vanessa lowers her arms.

  ‘Are you shy, Melvin?’ Amira says in her sweet voice.

  ‘We haven’t seen each other for a bit. I don’t know if he …’ Her voice chokes. She’s on the verge of tears. She can’t let it happen. She can’t start sobbing on her little brother’s birthday and traumatise him for life.

  You already have, a voice says inside her. Just by walking out of the door and disappearing. Of course he
doesn’t trust you. Maybe he doesn’t even remember you.

  She draws a deep breath and tries to swallow the lump in her throat. ‘I brought you a present,’ she says, and pulls a package out of the plastic bag. She sets it down on the floor between them. ‘A birthday present,’ she says.

  Melvin looks at her a little sceptically. Then he takes a few cautious steps. Stops. ‘Two,’ he says, and holds out his hand with two fingers raised.

  ‘Yes, you’re two years old today,’ Vanessa says, and blinks away a few tears. ‘What a clever boy you are.’

  Melvin flashes a little smile. She nudges the package closer to him. Slowly he touches the paper with his chubby fingers. He rips and tears at it a little haphazardly while Vanessa secretly unfastens the tape.

  Eventually he pulls out a soft toy penguin with big eyes. As soon as Vanessa had seen it she’d known she had to get it for Melvin. Now she’s suddenly uncertain about her choice.

  ‘Wow, what a nice penguin!’ Amira says.

  Melvin holds it in front of him. If Melvin hates her present, Vanessa thinks, she’ll lie down on the floor and bawl her eyes out until Amira comes over and picks her up.

  ‘Do you like your penguin?’ Vanessa asks.

  ‘Pingu,’ Melvin says, and shakes it ecstatically.

  She is pathetically happy and close to crying again.

  ‘Can I have a hug now?’ she asks.

  She can’t hold back any longer. She so wants to take him in her arms, feel his warm little body against hers.

  Melvin looks terrified. ‘No,’ he says. Then he takes the penguin by its wing and toddles out of the room.

  Amira is full of sympathy. ‘He’s just a bit shy because he hasn’t seen you lately,’ Amira says.

  Of course her mother couldn’t have kept quiet. And Nicke had probably described it as Jannike’s pain-in-the-arse daughter going off the rails and moving in with the town drug dealer. Vanessa wants to explain everything to Amira, win her over, but she has to leave before she starts sobbing for real.

  She says goodbye and hurries out into the street.

  The nursery is at the top of a hill from which she can see virtually all of Engelsfors. That disgusting little shithole full of people who think they live in the most important place on earth. God, how she hates them. God, how she wants to get away.

  Now, when she’s free to cry, it’s as if her tears have evaporated.

  There’s nowhere she wants to go. Not to Wille and Sirpa’s house. Not to her mother and Nicke’s. She doesn’t feel at home anywhere.

  Minoo is standing outside the library trying to look relaxed when the bell rings after the last lesson. She looks at the door to Gustaf’s classroom. It remains closed. Maybe Ove Post has let a dissection run on again.

  The principal is coming towards her. She walks straight up to Minoo. ‘What are you doing here?’ she asks, as if there’s something suspicious about her standing outside the library. She glances at Gustaf’s classroom.

  ‘Waiting for a friend.’

  The principal eyes her lingeringly. Then she nods and walks off.

  Finally Gustaf’s classmates are filing out into the corridor. Nervously Minoo switches on her mobile and hopes she appears to be writing an important text message.

  She doesn’t see Gustaf until he’s next to her.

  ‘Hi,’ he says.

  ‘Hi! I was waiting for you,’ she says, in as normal a tone as she can muster.

  Gustaf looks happy. ‘You were?’

  Minoo tries to focus on the bridge of his nose between his eyebrows so that he’ll think she’s looking him in the eyes, like a normal human being with nothing to hide. ‘I thought maybe we could do something this weekend,’ she says, hoping he won’t interpret this as a invitation to go out on a date with him. Her ears are so hot that they might shrivel, like two sun-dried tomatoes.

  ‘I’d love to! What do you want to do?’ he asks.

  ‘Just hang out. We’ve got relatives visiting,’ she lies, ‘so maybe we could be at your place.’ Yeah, that had sounded totally spontaneous.

  ‘Okay. I’ve got football practice, but you could come over around four.’

  ‘Are you going to be alone?’ She hears immediately how that sounded and the tomato colour spreads across her entire face. ‘I just mean if we want to be undisturbed … to talk about Rebecka or something. Not that we have to talk about her. But you know …’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Minoo says.

  Gustaf lunges forward and gives her a hug. She has to stop herself recoiling. She remembers how he pulled her to him in the darkness by the viaduct. This feels completely different.

  ‘I’m so happy you want to meet up,’ he says, and lets her go. ‘I thought you were avoiding me.’

  Minoo focuses on the bridge of his nose again. ‘Not at all!’ she says. ‘Why would I do that?’

  49

  THE ROUGH WALLS of the waiting room are a depressing mint green. Someone has painted a waist-high border of happy ducks pecking at the ground. Somehow they make the atmosphere a thousand times worse.

  Anna-Karin is sitting on the sofa staring vacantly ahead. Outside the room, hospital staff are running to and fro. A few are talking far too loudly to each other, as if this is any old job, not one where people are ill and dying. Alarm signals buzz and beep.

  Anna-Karin looks at the ducks again. They’re smiling at each other with their blunt bills, apparently moving along in time with a gay little melody. She realises why she finds them so awful: no one wants to be in this room. You’re only here if your worst nightmares have come true. But someone had thought that the ducks’ perkiness would rub off on whoever was sitting here.

  A male nurse with tribal tattoos down both arms pops into the room and asks Anna-Karin to come with him. They’ve finished today’s tests on Grandpa.

  Anna-Karin feels as if everyone is looking at her askance as she follows him down the corridor. There goes that girl who hasn’t even been once to see her poor grandfather. She ought to be ashamed of herself.

  The nurse stands outside Grandpa’s room and gestures for Anna-Karin to go inside.

  She looks at the open door. More than anything she’d like to bolt down the long corridor and escape into the fresh air, away from the smell of hospital and sick bodies. Away from Grandpa.

  Grandpa.

  She walks past the nurse. Washes her hands thoroughly at the little sink inside the door, then rubs them with alcohol from the pump bottle attached to the wall.

  The room is ghostly in the dim afternoon light. An old man lies in the nearest bed, with fingers as crooked as claws. His eyes are squeezed shut and his toothless mouth gasps air. Anna-Karin’s insides go cold before she realises that he isn’t Grandpa. She hurries past him.

  A light-grey curtain is drawn halfway around the other bed.

  At first she sees only his legs delineated beneath the light blue hospital blanket. When she’s closer she can see his arms resting outside the blanket. Needles attached to long tubes have been inserted into the back of his hands and secured there with papery tape. Another tube feeds out from beneath the blanket. Anna-Karin follows it with her eyes to a bag of pee hanging from the bed near the floor.

  She takes a few more steps and there is Grandpa’s face. It’s almost transparent in the pale light from the window. Yet another tube feeds into his nose. An IV stand has been placed next to the bed. A beeping sound comes from a machine with wires that disappear under the collar of his nightshirt. He’s like a machine into which fluids are pumped in and out.

  Anna-Karin takes her last steps to the edge of his bed. ‘Grandpa,’ she says.

  He turns towards her. His features have sort of collapsed. The skin looks smoother. It’s Grandpa lying there, yet not. All the qualities she identifies with him, the strength, the alertness, the vitality and intelligence, are all missing.

  She wants to hug him, but doesn’t dare. She’s afraid of hurting him. Afraid he won’t want
her hug.

  ‘Grandpa … It’s me. Anna-Karin.’

  Grandpa looks at her silently. It’s impossible to tell whether or not he recognises her.

  Only now does she realise she’s crying for the first time since primary school. ‘I’m sorry. It’s all my fault,’ she whispers, and sniffles. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Grandpa blinks a few times. He seems to be trying to focus. Her mother had said he was so heavily medicated he was completely out of it.

  ‘They told me it was dangerous,’ she continues, ‘but I never thought it could be dangerous for anyone but myself. Least of all you. But I’ve stopped now.’

  She takes his hand, careful not to disturb the needles.

  ‘I should never have started in the first place. I should have listened to the others. I know that now, but it’s too late. I’ve ruined everything. Grandpa, you’ve got to get better. Please. Please.’

  Grandpa blinks again. He opens his mouth and manages to say a few words. She can barely make them out, but he’s speaking Finnish. She’s heard the language now and then throughout her childhood, but never learned it.

  ‘Can you say it in Swedish, Grandpa?’

  ‘They said on the radio that war was coming,’ Grandpa says slowly. ‘Everyone has to choose which side they’re on.’

  ‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ Anna-Karin says. ‘You mustn’t worry, just get better.’

  Grandpa shuts his eyes and nods weakly. ‘My father said, “If we don’t do something now, we’ll have to live with the shame for the rest of our lives.”’

  Anna-Karin strokes his head as he drifts off to sleep. His hair is thin and silky. His forehead is cool, almost cold.

  ‘He’s your grandfather, isn’t he?’ a nurse says, as she enters the room.

  Anna-Karin nods and wipes away her tears with the back of her hand.

  ‘I know he looks awful …’ The nurse explains what all the wires, pumps and needles are for. Anna-Karin feels a little better when she understands what they’re doing for him. These people have a plan for how they’re going to keep him alive, make him better.

  ‘He’s improving,’ the nurse says. ‘It may not look like it, but he is.’