‘But Anna’s working on it. Do you remember Anna? From the police academy?’
‘The hormosexual?’
She’d always pronounced it like that. The more Sara told her off, the more she exaggerated her pronunciation.
‘My friend. Who is gay, yes. She called and told me – because I know the family. So I went there.’
‘Who was it who shot him?’
‘We don’t know. That was why I wanted to ask you.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘No, but do you remember if he had any enemies? Did he quarrel with anyone? Was he ever threatened?’
‘No.’
‘Nothing else? No crazy stalker?’
‘Stork?’
‘Stalker. An admirer with an obsession.’
‘Lots of admirers. Do you think one of them might have shot him?’
‘Don’t know. Perhaps not . . . Mum . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘He liked the DDR. East Germany.’
Sara could almost hear Jane’s mood switching gears.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The idiot.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘That he was an idiot! Praising a dictatorship! If he’d lived there, he would have spat at it!’
‘Didn’t you ever tell him what it had been like for you in Poland?’
‘Yes. But then he said that socialism wasn’t finished yet. I should have been patient. “You think I should have stayed?” I asked him, and he said that if I had, “I would have understood better.” Pfft . . . Patience. Idiot! Patience until when? Until they killed me?’
During her childhood, Sara had often wondered why Jane didn’t love Stellan and Agneta as much as she and everyone else did. Sara had often accused her mother of being envious of them – because they had everything and she had nothing.
It obviously wasn’t that simple, but mother and daughter had had very different perspectives on the Broman family. Perhaps Jane had been jealous that Sara always wanted to spend time with them, that she never stopped talking about them. The antagonism had grown after the move from Bromma to Vällingby, which for Sara had been an involuntary move.
But nowadays she thought she’d been sufficiently clear about her opinion of the move, even if it still stung.
From a privileged paradise to a concrete hellhole with intrigue and hormone-addled idiots. Just as she began her sensitive teenage years.
Had Jane moved so that she could have her daughter to herself? Or did she just want her own place? Her own flat, instead of living at the mercy of someone else? She had never wanted to explain – presumably because there was no explanation. Once Jane had moved, she’d remained faithful to Vällingby throughout the years.
‘Could he have been a spy?’
Sara knew she really ought not to disseminate investigative details like this, but on the other hand, Anna and her colleagues hadn’t taken to the spy theory – so she was technically not disclosing anything.
‘Spy?’ said Jane. ‘On what? Spying on young girls? No, he just liked being admired.’
‘But might he have given away information? Perhaps without realising he was being exploited?’
‘Maybe. If you flattered him, he was easy to exploit.’
‘Tell me more,’ said Sara, smiling.
‘About what?’
‘How you flattered and exploited him.’
‘Idiot,’ said Jane, before hanging up.
Sara didn’t know any other sixty-year-old mothers who called their adult daughters idiots, but Jane was unique. She always had been.
When she was in the shower a little later, she heard the front door slam and since no one shouted ‘hello’, she realised it was Ebba who had come home.
‘Can you cook dinner?’ Sara called out towards her daughter’s room as she towelled off. ‘I think we’ve got macaroni and sausages.’
‘No time!’ Ebba called out in reply. ‘I’m going to a party!’
A party on a Monday?
That was high school graduation season for you. Parties every night for weeks. Everyone competing to throw the best one and to go to as many as possible. And the easiest way to get invited to other people’s parties was to have your own to invite them to. If you didn’t go to any at all, then you were a nobody.
Ebba would be allowed a party – Martin had agreed to that, despite Sara being unsure. It would cost a fortune, and there were so many parties anyway. Was it really sensible to contribute to the frenzy? But now things were the way they were. Ebba had got what she wanted. The party had been planned for months and there were only three days left, but instead of getting everything ready, Ebba was out at other people’s parties and revelling long into the night. She couldn’t miss out on anything.
Macaroni and sausages. Was that too easy-going? Sara had never been especially ambitious when it came to food for the kids, and she had a guilty conscience about the fact that she almost always served meat in some form. Just like everyone else, she’d seen the videos of animal transporters, chicken farms and slaughterhouses. The awful treatment of the animals reminded her of what she’d seen of human trafficking, but it went even further in terms of the grimness of what was inflicted on other living, intelligent beings. Humans’ indifference towards others’ suffering made Sara feel sick. She was ashamed that when it came to animals she was helping to keep the system going, just like the men buying sex whom she encountered through her job, who kept human trafficking going by demanding sex. Sara didn’t want to contribute to making the world a worse place. She was going to turn vegetarian – and she was going to make the kids do it, too. Soon.
Ebba got into the shower after Sara. The flat had another shower room intended for the kids, but Ebba preferred the bigger bathroom when she was going out. There was better light by the mirror, according to her. And Mum’s makeup, Sara thought to herself.
The front door slammed again and Olle came in. Sara filled a saucepan with water and put it on the hob.
‘You’re at home?’
She knew her son’s comment wasn’t meant with ill will, unlike Jane’s. He was just surprised. Sara’s many evening and night shifts meant she was rarely at home at dinner time. Perhaps Olle was even happy that his mother was at home right now, but fourteen-year-olds didn’t show that kind of emotion.
Just as the macaroni was ready, Ebba rushed past on the way to her bedroom, wrapped up in a towel.
While she was eating, Sara took out Ebba’s peaked graduation cap and read what people had written on the lining.
‘Ebba, you’re the best!’
‘Ebba 4-ever!’
‘Life starts now’
‘Who run the world? Girls!’
Decidedly traditional, Sara thought to herself as she reviewed her daughter’s classmates’ wisdom for life.
Life was certainly pretty strange.
Ebba was at the threshold of her life, Jane was looking back at hers and Sara was in the middle. She was in the phase where there was never time to stop and think. When you were young, you thought about how life would work out, when you were old you thought about how it had worked out, and in the long period in between you lived without thinking about it. What did she want from her life? Sara asked herself. She shrugged in reply.
She picked up Ebba’s mobile, but put it back down again when Olle came and sat down at the table. He was completely engrossed in his own screen and Sara could probably have pulled up the floorboards without him noticing – but better safe than sorry. She’d recently pretended she needed to borrow Ebba’s mobile to make an important call on the pretext that her own had run out of charge, and once it had been unlocked she’d gone into the settings and added her own fingerprint. Since then, she’d been checking Ebba’s mobile at regular intervals while her daughter slept or was in the shower.
Ebba would have hated it if she’d found out, but there was so much that could happen to young girls these days. Sara had no intention of being so clueless that she let her own dau
ghter run around town without keeping an eye on her. However, she’d carefully avoided pictures and messages of a more private nature.
Now Ebba wanted the new model with facial recognition, which Sara was opposing without explaining why. She knew that her daughter would get one from Martin if she asked him, so Sara had told her husband that it was very important to her that they didn’t give the kids any more gadgets without discussing it with each other first. One fine day, Ebba would probably get a mobile that Sara couldn’t get into – but she wanted to keep an eye on her daughter for a little longer. At least until all the high school graduation partying died down.
Sara took a sip from the Red Bull can Ebba had put down.
Laced.
Pretty heavily, too.
But Sara had no desire to lecture her daughter during the week of her graduation.
She had enough to deal with.
The whole graduation season was hell for Sara. Separation anxiety, feelings of guilt and the fear of being overprotective were all jostling for prime position. Ebba had forbidden her from planning anything to do with leaving school and receptions and student parties, since her mother was working so much and wouldn’t have time to make a good job of it. Instead, Martin got the assignment – which meant completely different resources were at her disposal. Of course they had to impress their guests – why else have a party? Sara had secretly looked at the spreadsheet and seen five-figure totals. Martin had denied that it would cost very much, but Sara didn’t trust him. And Martin had never understood that it didn’t matter what he kept secret from Sara – it was that he kept secrets at all. Lies about unimportant trivialities taxed the trust between them – the tie that was supposed to hold them together.
In the living room were the small place cards for the table settings – the only part of the festivities that Sara was allowed to have an opinion about. She sighed without her son hearing.
Poor Ebba. Poor Olle.
Sara had really thought she would be a much better mother – fun, resourceful, always happy. Not like her own – tired, stressed, irritable. Angry at everything, or just silent. A martyr, as Sara had once described her during her teens. She’d had her ears boxed for that. It was the only time Jane had hit her. Sara had never struck either of her children, but she’d been absent – and probably too demanding. She often wondered whether Ebba’s constant irritation at her was a result of how Sara had been as a mother, or whether it was just ordinary teenage behaviour. She would have loved to be her daughter’s best friend. Was it too late for that? She hoped it wasn’t. Perhaps it would be easier to be close friends once Ebba got older.
Sara sat down in front of the giant television and went to SVT’s catch-up service. She searched for ‘Stellan Broman’ in the archive section and found multiple programmes – she selected an episode of Tivoli.
Laughter and applause from the very beginning, the signature tune followed by a beaming Uncle Stellan welcoming the audience with his arms outspread. Taking all of Sweden into his embrace.
‘I’m off!’ she heard from the hall.
Sara turned off the television and went to say a few parting words, but she came to a halt when she saw Ebba.
Her nineteen-year-old daughter, her firstborn little baby, was in the hall in just a corset, hot pants, suspenders and black leather boots with stiletto heels. Her lips were flame red and her eyes charcoal black. Her graduation cap was on her head.
‘What are you doing?’ said Sara, aghast.
‘Going to a party,’ said Ebba. ‘The theme’s pimps and hoes.’
‘Are you out of your mind?’
‘What is it now?’ said Ebba, her tone one of exhaustion.
‘“Pimps and hoes”?’
‘Yes?’
‘“Hoes”?’
‘For fun.’
‘You’re dressed like victims of assault – like the poor Romanian girls who’ve been trafficked – for a party?’
‘Mum! Stop it. It’s just for fun.’
‘Tell that to the girls I meet at work. Raped ten times a day, assaulted, degraded, kidnapped from their home countries. And you think it’s fun?’
‘It’s not for real, Mum. No one thinks there’s anything glamorous about pimps and hoes – we’re just using it as a cliché. Like a Cowboys and Indians theme. We know the native Americans were almost eradicated in the biggest genocide of history. But that’s not what it’s about!’
‘What is it about, then?’
‘That we’re graduating from high school. You only do that once in life.’
‘It’s exactly stuff like this that makes people look the other way when they see human trafficking. The myth about the happy hooker.’
‘I hear what you’re saying. When I get older and wiser, perhaps I’ll even agree with you and think I was an idiot for going to a pimps and hoes party. But right now I’m nineteen, and I want to have fun with my friends. If they’re dressing like this then I will, too. OK?’
‘No, it’s not OK. Not one bit.’
‘You’ll have to carry on shouting when I get home.’
Ebba took her coat off the rack.
‘It’ll be too hot,’ Sara managed to say before she was interrupted.
‘You think I should go out like this?’ said Ebba, holding out her arms.
Sara had no answer to that.
‘You don’t need to have opinions all the time,’ said her daughter. ‘I’m moving out soon – then you won’t be able to have any opinions about what I do. Perhaps you should start getting used to it?’
It was presumably just that which Sara couldn’t make peace with – not sharing her life with her children any longer.
Ebba turned around and left, but just as the door closed Sara managed one more admonition.
‘One at the latest, OK?’
What was she supposed to have done?
Forbidden Ebba from going?
Unlike many other mothers, she could have kept her daughter there by force, but that wasn’t an option in practice. Apart from the fact that she didn’t believe in using force on her children, Sara was held back by the realisation that it would have led to a further deterioration in her relationship with her daughter. She remembered how angry she’d been at her own mother when she moved away from home, and how rarely she’d got in touch as a result. And she didn’t want Ebba to do that – to avoid her.
At the same time, her daughter and her friends constituted a large part of the reason prostitution was able to continue – the romanticising of this slave trade. Of course, Ebba hadn’t invented pimps and hoes parties, and presumably she hadn’t been the one who’d picked the theme. And no one else at the party would have listened if Ebba had protested. But they were helping to cement the structures.
For a second, Sara pictured her daughter in a flat-based brothel in some anonymous apartment block. A sweaty, much older man on her, and dozens of others waiting. She was on the verge of throwing up at the thought. She would need to speak to the parents of the girls who’d organised tonight’s party. But she knew it wouldn’t help one bit.
There was something titillating about pimps and hoes – something a little sexy about it nowadays. Films like Pretty Woman had laid the foundations for that – transforming the prostitute from an anonymous and despised person into a desirable object who was satisfied with her existence. Even a millionaire played by Richard Gere could fall in love with a whore and marry her – so surely there was nothing wrong with buying sex? You were really doing the girls a favour.
Would it have been better if Sara hadn’t worked so many nights? If she’d done the school run more often, and been able to pass on her values in ways other than agitated lectures when it was really too late, when they’d already done something that Sara thought was stupid?
When the children were little, she had been obliged to work to support the family, given that Martin was busy with his shows and productions, which usually ran at a loss. But she’d tried to ensure she spent all her time with the
kids when she wasn’t at work. And when they’d got older, Sara had assumed they could get by on their own and that they wanted to be left to themselves more. But perhaps she’d been wrong.
And that was when Sara became annoyed at herself.
Typical that she would take responsibility. That it was the woman who sought out the fault in herself.
Martin had also worked a lot of evenings – if visiting pubs to mix with artists and agents could be described as work. Especially since he’d got the company going, which had been in parallel with Ebba’s teens. Perhaps the absent father was a more significant explanation for the flirtation with the whore stereotype than the absent mother?
Sara understood that Martin needed to go out with his clients and potential business partners, and she knew that his industry was heavily based on entertainment. Opportunities for work and socialising were both to be found in the pub for many of his artists. If he wanted to have a good relationship with them, he needed to be out often. Evenings and weekends and days off. There was nothing unusual about it.
But it wasn’t always fun.
It wasn’t always easy when Sara worked the way she did, and her husband was often away on her few evenings off.
But she tried to be happy for his sake.
In his younger years, Martin had performed at school graduation parties and had set up his own cabarets. He’d dreamed of a life as an entertainer. When he didn’t get any work as an actor or artist, he’d started doing his own productions – and after a couple he’d realised he was pretty good at it. So he’d started a company and soon enough ‘Dunder & Brak Scenproduktion’ had become the biggest agency for artists and producers of stage shows in Sweden.
After a decade or so, just when Martin had almost had enough, he’d received an offer he couldn’t decline: to sell his life’s work to Go Live – an international giant in management and stage production – for a daft amount of money. This was on the condition that he remained and ran the company for at least ten years. And, as the boss and with high profitability targets set by the new owners, he often ended up working late.
To Sara’s irritation, Martin had spent most of the money he received for the company on buying the huge flat in the old town. And he’d carried on going to work as usual, doing the job he’d been getting sick of. The job where pub visits with guest artists and local musicians and actors was the norm. The job where most of his colleagues were young women aged eighteen to thirty.
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