“It’s completely insane,” I said. “First it’s an hour, then all of a sudden it’s twice that. Then it halves again, but before you know it the waiting time’s gone up to three hours.”
She apologized and said that the system was still under development.
“There are still a few teething problems,” she said. “The idea was to develop a more dynamic, customer-centered queuing service. At the moment it takes the length of the current call and adjusts the estimated waiting time from that. But sometimes it can be a little misleading…”
“No kidding,” I said.
“Well,” she said, “what can I do for you?”
I said I’d received an invoice, and that there must be some mistake, and would she mind correcting it? She listened carefully, then explained that everything was in order. There was no mistake, and no, I wasn’t the first person to call. I said I hadn’t ordered anything, or requested any services, but she maintained that the invoice was still correct. When I wondered what this was all about, she sighed and asked if I never read the papers, watched television, or listened to the radio? I had to admit that I didn’t really keep up with the news.
“Well,” she said, and I got the impression that she could have been smiling at the other end of the line. “It’s time to pay up now.”
Small strands of heat clouds were appearing in the sky through the window. It had to be the hottest day of the year so far. It looked like everything out there was quivering. Some children were running about on the pavement below, squirting each other with water pistols. I could hear their delighted cries when they were hit by the sprays of cool water. On the balcony opposite a woman was shaking a rug. The sound of a spluttering moped echoed off the walls of the buildings. It died away, then came back. It sounded like someone was going from one address to the other, looking for something.
“Have you got Beta or Link?” the woman said on the phone.
“What did you say?” I said.
“Which payment system have you signed up with?”
“No idea,” I said. “I don’t think I got one at all.”
“No?” she said.
“No.”
“But you do have a plan?”
“A plan?”
“You’ve got a payment plan, linked to your E.H. account?”
I waited a moment.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“You haven’t registered?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Should I have?”
She didn’t say anything for a while, so I repeated the question.
“Is that something I should have done?”
She cleared her throat.
“Well, let me put it like this: yes.”
I felt a sudden urge to sit down.
“But what…what am I supposed to be paying for?” I said.
“What?” she said.
“Yes?”
“Everything,” she said.
“What do you mean, everything?” I asked.
I was sitting on the floor, with my back against the kitchen wall and my legs pulled up to my chest. The knees of my jeans were starting to look a bit threadbare. It wouldn’t be long before I had a hole there, whether I liked it or not. And even though I realized it probably wasn’t fashionable anymore, I still thought it would look a bit cool.
She hesitated a moment before answering, but even though she was silent, I could hear the weariness in her breathing.
“Where are you calling from?” she asked.
“I’m at home,” I said.
“At home. Okay. Look around you. What can you see?”
I raised my eyes from the floor and looked around the room.
“I see my kitchen,” I said.
“So, what can you see there?”
“Er…the sink. Some dirty dishes…a table.”
“Look out of the window.”
“Okay.”
I stood up and went over to the kitchen window, which was open slightly. I’d left it open all night. Maybe a few days. I couldn’t remember. The heat had more or less erased the boundary between outside and in. The other day I had a bird in the kitchen for what must have been half an hour. I don’t know what sort it was, but it was very pretty. It fluttered to and fro between the kitchen cupboards, then sat on the kitchen table for a while before flying out again.
“What can you see outside?” the woman on the phone asked.
“Buildings,” I said. “And a few trees…”
“What else?”
“More buildings, and the street, a few cars…”
“What else?”
“I can see a blue sky, the sun, a few clouds, people, children playing on the pavement, adults, shops, cafés…People out together…”
“Exactly. Can you smell anything?”
“Er…yes.”
I breathed in the smell of the street. It was sweet and warm with summer scents. Flowers, a shrub of some sort? Some old food? A faint smell of something slightly rotten, and petrol. Typical summer smells. Almost a bit Mediterranean. I could hear the moped again now.
“You can feel something, can’t you?” the woman continued. “You’re feeling feelings, thinking of different things, friends and acquaintances. And I presume you have dreams?”
She was no longer bothering to wait for me to reply.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“Do you dream at night?” she went on.
“Sometimes.”
“Hmm. Do you imagine all that is free?”
I didn’t say anything for a while.
“Well, I suppose I thought…”
“Is that really what you thought?” she said.
I tried to come up with a reply, but my thoughts were going round in circles without formulating themselves into any sort of order. The woman on the phone went on, giving a long explanation of the division of costs, resolutions, single payments, and deduction systems. It sounded almost as if she knew it by heart.
“But how can it amount to so much?” I said, when I could speak again.
“Well,” she said, “being alive costs.”
I said nothing for a while, because I didn’t know what to say.
“But,” I eventually said, “I had no idea it was so expensive…”
I looked at the payment reminder from the collection company. I ran my finger across the ice-cream stain. I felt foolish. Unmasked, somehow. I felt the same way I used to feel back in school many years ago when the teacher would ask questions designed to reveal how wrong your reasoning was. The children were heading off down the street, they were about to disappear round the corner. The sound of the moped was increasingly distant. A man had arrived on a bike and was busy chaining it to a lamppost.
“But I’ve always paid my taxes?” I said.
She laughed. I sank back down onto the floor. Somehow that felt like the most comfortable way to sit right now.
“This isn’t a tax,” she said.
She was silent for a few moments, as if she were expecting me to comment, but I didn’t know what to say so she carried on talking of her own accord.
“Tax. That’s barely enough to cover day-to-day maintenance. Besides, I presume you don’t belong to the group that—”
She stopped again, and I heard her tapping at a keyboard.
“Let’s see, what did you say your date of birth and ID number were?”
I told her, and heard her type in the numbers. She drummed her fingers gently against the phone as she waited.
“Right. Let’s see, you’re…thirty-nine years old. Hmm…and you haven’t made any payments at all?”
“No, I had no idea that—”
She interrupted me midsentence. “Well, obviously it’s going to amount to a fair sum.”
I heard her clicking, as if there were more pages to look through.
“Hmm,” she went on, “that’s a lot of money.”
Several rays of sunlight were falling across the kitchen floor. One of them rea
ched my legs. I stretched my hand carefully back and forth, in and out of the light. Why hadn’t anyone said anything? I wondered, and as if the woman at the authority could hear my thoughts, she went on in a rather strict tone of voice: “I’m so fed up of hearing people say they didn’t know anything. We’ve run several online campaigns over the past year, we’ve had ads in the papers and handed out information leaflets at schools and workplaces. You’ll have to be a bit more observant in the staff room or cafeteria next time.”
“The staff room?”
“Yes, that’s usually where the notices get put up. About things like this.”
“But,” I said, pulling my hand out of the light, “there’s absolutely no way I can pay.”
She was completely quiet for a while.
“No?”
I considered the meager income from my part-time job in the video shop. The little that was left over from my wages, which were paid partly cash in hand, plus a small inheritance that was gradually shrinking, made up the sum total of my savings.
On the other hand, I’d never had any particularly large expenses. My apartment was small and old-fashioned, and the rent was low. I had no one but myself to support, and I didn’t have a lavish lifestyle. A few computer games every now and then, music, a bit of food, hardly any phone bill to speak of, and I got films free from the shop. Sometimes I would pay for a beer or lunch for Roger, but that didn’t happen often these days. I always imagined I was free of extra financial responsibilities of that sort. Other people had careers and acquired houses and families and children. Got married, divorced, started their own businesses and set up limited companies. Employed accountants, bought property, leased cars, borrowed money. I was pretty happy on my own, without a big social circle, or anyone to cause any problems.
“It’s completely impossible,” I said. “At most, I’ve got about forty thousand in the bank.”
“What about your apartment?” she said.
“Rented.”
She said nothing for a moment. Then she said abruptly: “Hold on a moment and I’ll check…”
She put the phone down and I heard her walk away. In the background there was the sound of keyboards being tapped, other people who seemed to be talking on the phone. A couple of telephones ringing. She was gone for some time. Eventually I heard her come back and pick up the phone again.
“Do you own anything of value?”
“Er, no…the television, maybe.”
“Hmm,” she said, “television sets aren’t worth anything these days. Is it big?”
“Thirty-two inches, maybe.”
“Forget it. That’s nothing. No car?”
“No.”
“I see,” she said, and sighed. “You’ll have to pay what you can. Then we’ll start with an inventory of your home and see what that comes up with. That will give us an idea of what level of debt we’re going to end up at…”
“And what happens then?”
“That depends entirely on the amount.”
“In what way?”
“Well, we do have a debt ceiling.”
“What does that mean?”
“That means we can only permit debts up to a certain limit…I mean, in order to maintain continued access…”
“To what?”
“To…everything.”
“Are you going to kill me?”
She laughed. It was evidently a stupid question and I felt rather relieved at her reaction.
“No,” she said, “we aren’t going to kill you. But I’m sure you can appreciate that you can’t carry on enjoying experiences if you don’t have the means to pay for them?”
I held my hand out toward the shaft of light again and felt the heat of the sun. There really was a big difference in temperature, even though it was actually only a matter of a few centimeters. The woman at the other end of the line interrupted my thoughts.
“What on earth have you been thinking? All these years? Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that you should be paying your way?”
“Well, I didn’t actually know that we had to pay. Why—?”
She interrupted me again. She had obviously heard all this before. She knew it wasn’t going to lead anywhere. She’d run out of patience for excuses and explanations. I could hear voices in the background, and got the impression that my time was running out.
“Let me put it like this: Have you ever been in love?”
“Er, yes.”
“When?”
“A few times, I suppose.”
“More than once, then?”
“Yes. I mean, well, once properly.”
She was running on autopilot. Probably already thinking about the next conversation. But she still sounded friendly, in a professional way. “There, you see, you must have experienced some wonderful things.”
I thought about Sunita, whom I had been with for several years back in the nineties. A small wave of memories coursed through my body. A pang of melancholy.
“Yes, I suppose so,” I said.
She was obviously in a hurry to hang up now, there was no mistaking it. As if she had suddenly realized that we had exceeded our allotted time. As if it had struck her that she didn’t have time to make idle conversation with me.
“Well, if there’s nothing else, thank you for calling.”
“Hang on a moment,” I said. “How do I…? What can I do?”
She must have loads of calls waiting.
Maybe she could see the constantly rising number of people in the queue. She probably had a boss who was eager for her to move on. She was talking faster now.
“Have you checked with your bank?”
“No, but…It doesn’t really seem very likely that I…”
“No, I suppose not.”
She sighed audibly, and someone said something in the office where she was sitting.
“Do you know what?” she said. “Take a thorough look at your finances in peace and quiet—people usually manage to come up with something—and then call me again.”
“But,” I said, “the queue to get through is really long…”
“You can have my direct number.”
“Okay.”
I got her number and wrote it on the bottom of the ice-cream tub.
“My name’s Maud,” she said.
We hung up and I sat there for a long time with the phone in my hand. The sun had passed behind a cloud. The warm ray of light across my knees was no longer there.
I could hear ringing in my ears. The sort of sound you get after a concert or a sinus infection. I’m not sure when it started. Maybe it was just that long phone call. It was already as hot as Greece inside the apartment. And I knew it was only going to get hotter when the sun moved completely round to this side of the building later in the afternoon. I wondered if it was best to carry on leaving the windows open, or if I was only letting in more heat. An overwhelming feeling of tiredness washed over me. I hauled myself up onto the sofa, thinking that somewhere at the back of my mind I’d always had an inkling about this. The feeling that life couldn’t really be this simple.
I leaned back, took some deep breaths, and felt a weak breeze just about reach me as I sat there on the sofa. I surrendered to the heavy, numbing tiredness and felt myself slowly drift from consciousness and into a wonderful drowsiness where time and space and thought gradually dissolved. After a while I fell asleep, and only woke up when my phone buzzed.
It was a text from Roger. Call me, it said. But I didn’t feel like calling. Not just then.
I stretched out my legs and lay back on the sofa. The fabric was warm. I felt warm, right down to the roots of my hair. Everything was warm. For a brief moment I got the impression that everything was just a dream, until I caught sight of the ice-cream tub and the number written on the bottom. All of a sudden it felt pretty irresponsible that I’d gone out to buy ice cream when my financial situation was so precarious.
—
I had a bit of a headache when I stood up and wande
red aimlessly round the apartment until I finally ended up in front of my collection of vinyl records. What could they be worth? There were quite a few genuine collector’s items. I had a number of limited-edition Blu-ray films, and then there were my instruments, of course, but no matter how I tried I couldn’t get anywhere close to the amount required. 5,700,150 kronor was more money than I could even imagine.
I toyed with the idea of simply running away. Leaving the country. How many resources would they devote to tracking down someone like me?
I could take the bus to Nynäshamn, then the ferry to Gotland, and hide out there on some pebbly beach. Or get the train to Copenhagen, then hitchhike down to Germany…What then, though? I could get all my money out of the bank, buy a plane ticket to the USA, and stroll about Manhattan drinking milkshakes and eating pastrami sandwiches. In a way, the thought of just taking off like that was quite tempting. But what would I do once I’d actually got there? And the thought of never coming back…No, I was happy here, after all. I had my friends here. All my memories. I liked my apartment, the changing seasons. I liked lying on the sofa…But of course if there was no other option…
I picked up my phone and held it in my hand for a while. If Mum was still alive I would have called her. That would have cheered her up, something as simple as that, even if she’d have been worried about the size of the debt. Maybe she’d have been able to come up with a solution. She usually could. I stood for a while tossing my phone from hand to hand. In the end I rang the only number I could think of.
Maud answered on the second ring. She sounded much calmer now. It felt odd, after the long wait in the queue the previous evening, suddenly to get through to her straightaway this time. It made me feel a bit special.
“What would you do if I just disappeared?” I asked.
“Disappeared?” she said.
“Yes.”
“In principle it doesn’t really matter where you are. This applies to everyone. Top-up payments, or in your case the whole amount, can be made from anywhere. And in whatever currency you choose. You can live wherever you like, as long as you don’t try to avoid your duty to pay.”
The Invoice Page 2