“I often get anxious about nothing special,” I said.
“Oh?”
“And I don’t know why. I get hurt easily, and I’m very sensitive about everything, without any particular reason. In the spring, for instance, when you’d expect to be happy and cheerful. I often feel a bit depressed then.”
I could hear her drinking more coffee as I talked.
“You realize that’s all part of the experience, don’t you?” she said eventually.
“Sorry?”
“And that it’s the whole experience that you’re paying for?”
I pulled my fork across the plate, knocking the knife off. It clattered against the porcelain. She went on: “Think about it like this: when you go to the cinema—one day you might see a comedy, the next a tearjerker. The experience isn’t any the less valid as a result. It all gives E.H. points, you see. You know as well as I do that pain isn’t a universally negative emotion, don’t you?”
I said nothing.
“We wouldn’t want to eat nothing but sweet things…just as little as we’d want to avoid all adversity. In fact, there has to be a degree of adversity for us to appreciate our blessings. I mean, think about the mix of ingredients in really good food dishes. Like that song Lasse Berghagen sings about Stockholm, ‘A mixture of sweet and salt’…”
I pushed the plate across the table. Raised my hand and massaged my forehead. She went on: “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it now. Your case has already been assessed.”
“Is this a punishment?” I said suddenly. “Because I haven’t mourned my parents enough?”
“What?” she said, sounding genuinely surprised. “What makes you say that?”
I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose between my fingers. I could feel myself getting a headache.
“Well, maybe it hasn’t had time to sink in properly yet. I’ve just been carrying on as normal. Is that insensitive of me? I mean…maybe I haven’t been as upset as I should have been…My sister did a lot of crying and screaming, then got all quiet and depressed and all that, but I…”
“Don’t be daft,” she said gently. “This is nothing personal. Your score is entirely experience-based.”
“Can I appeal against it?” I said.
“Of course. But that can take a long time, and it doesn’t alter things as they stand right now. You see, this is more than a national issue. It’s a question of the division of resources. Obviously each country pays a large portion of its total with a collective national amount. But then the bill has to be divided. Between everyone. I’m sure you can understand that. Floods, famine, starvation…If you compare that with—what did you say?—feeling a bit miserable in the spring?”
“Mmm,” I said. I didn’t feel like thinking about it anymore for the moment.
—
After agreeing that I would start by paying what little I had in the bank, we hung up and I realized that I was still very hungry. It occurred to me that I hadn’t eaten anything all day apart from that slice of pizza. I went and made a cheese sandwich. I poured myself a glass of full-fat milk and downed it in one. As soon as I’d finished the first sandwich I immediately made myself another one. I felt insatiable. It was a wonderful feeling to be able to surrender to hunger, instantly, without restraint. The taste of the cheese, bread and milk married to form a wonderful union. Just then I couldn’t think of anything nicer.
I sat back down at the kitchen table and realized that all was lost. There was no way to change the situation. I simply had to accept the facts. So what was likely to happen?
As I had already been told, they couldn’t kill me. She’d said as much. Through the open window I could hear the birds’ evening song. People laughing and talking to each other. Friendly voices. It was approaching the time of day when the whole city relaxed. The sound of voices and footsteps outside kept growing. People going to the pub, sitting at sidewalk bars. This whole situation no longer felt so important. In a way, the feeling of acceptance that was spreading through me was actually pretty good, relaxing. I made up my mind to drink the rest of the carton of milk. It tasted good, almost all the way to the end.
It was late in the evening, but I still called. I’d remained seated at the kitchen table pretty much the whole time, listening to the city outside. I had watched darkness slowly settle over the rooftops as the sounds changed. A couple were arguing. I could hear fragments of what they were saying, but not enough to understand what it was about. A woman laughed loudly, for a long time. A dog barked, and a group of young men sang some football chant. Every so often a gust of cooler air would push its way into the warm kitchen, caressing my face and arms. I sat where I sat, and there was no reason to go anywhere else. Life was just so good, somehow. It was perfectly natural that it should be expensive.
—
I dialed the number but there was no answer, and it struck me that even Maud must need a break, maybe to go to the bathroom or get something to eat. Maybe she too was sitting listening to the sounds of the city? Maybe they had a roof terrace? Maybe she was sitting up there smoking a cigarette or drinking a cup of coffee in the balmy summer night? I hung up, waited half an hour, then called again.
“Yes?” Maud said, and sighed. I could clearly hear the irritation in her voice. She knew it was me. She probably had one of those screens where she could see what number was calling. This can’t have been what she expected when she gave me her direct number.
“Well, I’m sitting here in the kitchen, experiencing happiness,” I said pointedly.
“How nice for you,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “I can’t help wondering what’s going to happen with that?”
She didn’t reply immediately.
“How do you mean?” she said.
“I mean, right now I feel really good, and that, along with all the coming experiences—I don’t really like to admit it, but…Well, it’s going to happen again. This year, maybe next…What’s to say that I won’t owe five million all over again in a year’s time?”
Through the window I could see a drooping potted plant that my neighbor had left out on the balcony when he went away for the summer. Maybe he thought it would survive on nothing but rainwater, but it was unlikely to last much longer in this sort of heat.
Maud let out a deep sigh. She was tired of me now.
“You really don’t get it, do you?” she said.
I got no further than a drawn-out vowel, it might have been an “e,” and was just about to reply that maybe I didn’t get it when she went on regardless: “This is a one-off amount. That’s the whole point of it. This is when it’s happening.”
“What is?” I said. She sighed again.
“Surely you can’t have missed…This is when we’re going to regulate…implement the big adjustment. It was made perfectly clear in all the information leaflets. If you have a look through your in-box…I think I may even have mentioned it myself—”
“But,” I interrupted, “it could end up being incredibly unfair. Let’s say I’m one of the people paying the most now, but then I go and get some disease tomorrow that might torment me for ten, twenty years.”
“Of course,” Maud said. “But the money has to be paid now. And the past is the only thing we know anything about, isn’t it? The future’s…well, we’ve got no idea, have we…? Neither you nor I can know if we’ll still be standing here tomorrow.”
We were both silent for a while as we thought about that. I watched a fly struggling against the windowpane, constantly bouncing off it. In the end I said: “I’m sitting down. Aren’t you?”
I thought I could almost detect a smile.
“No, I’m not, actually,” she said. “I’m standing.”
“Have you got one of those adjustable…?”
“Precisely. After all, I have to spend a lot of hours on the phone.”
I suddenly felt rather sorry for her. It must be an incredibly wearying task, sitting there day after day, dealing with all sorts of a
gitated people and explaining something that you hadn’t come up with yourself. In this sort of heat. Didn’t she ever long to be outside? It was actually pretty fantastic that she was prepared to give me so much of her time. How many people could there be in the queue at that moment, waiting to get through? Perhaps she did like me a bit after all?
“What are you wearing?” I said.
It just came out. I hadn’t planned to say it. It was as if my brain had gone soft in the heat. As if the whole atmosphere had changed just because it was night. Everything felt a bit unreal. I regretted saying it before I’d even finished the sentence.
“Sorry?” she said, as if she genuinely hadn’t heard.
“Nothing,” I said quickly. “Sorry. It was nothing.”
“Okay,” she said, sounding distant again. As if she didn’t quite know how to behave when the conversation strayed outside the usual boundaries.
I could feel myself blushing, and it struck me how little it took for me to become keen on a woman. It really didn’t take much at all. As long as she wasn’t directly off-putting. Often all she had to do was be kind and pleasant. Or not even that. The unpleasant sort could also arouse my curiosity. Most of the time it was enough for a woman to show any sort of interest in me. But not even that was a necessity. I appreciated lack of interest as well. In fact, I was even attracted by it. I realized that I didn’t actually need anything at all to get my attention. It would probably be easy to trick me into anything at all, as long as it was done with a bit of imagination. I basically thought the best of people, and assumed that most people wished me well. And no matter what the reason, it did feel rather intimate, talking to someone at this time of day. Almost a bit exclusive. What sort of working hours could they have? In fact, wasn’t it extremely peculiar that you could call pretty much anytime and still talk directly to this woman?
I stood up and started looking for the invoice. What sort of official body was W.R.D., anyway? What did it stand for? It sounded made-up. Did it really exist? Didn’t the font that the payment demand was printed in look a bit odd? There was actually something rather amateurish about the whole form.
I tried to remember what she’d said. And the more I thought about it, the more it sounded like a classic scam. A young woman with a seductive voice tells a man he owes a load of money, and has to pay it into a particular account. How many films had I seen on that theme? And wasn’t there something a bit suspicious about the fact that she was devoting so much time to me? When did she look after the others? And where was she, anyway? Was she even in the same country as me? It was naïve of me not to have thought about all those gangs that operated through numerous ingenious connections and encryption systems and were almost impossible to trace. And this was exactly how they operated. What had I actually heard? Office noises. That could be anything. Maybe even a recording?
I walked about trying to find the invoice, holding the phone to my ear, but with neither Maud nor I saying anything for a long while. Why was she suddenly not speaking? Had she guessed that I suspected something? Maybe I ought to call Roger or my sister and check with one of them? After all, no one I knew had said anything about this. And there was something a bit odd about those people discussing it out in the city, wasn’t there? Something not quite right, in an indefinable way. That mother and son talking as if they were reciting a script. And the way she was looking in my direction the whole time. Or the woman in the lift, jangling her necklaces and talking about her invoice and loan a bit too explicitly for it to feel natural…Obviously they’d been told to get close to me and say those things within earshot.
I closed my eyes and tried to think. It would be ridiculously foolish to pay a load of money into an account without checking things out more closely. The more I thought about it, the more incredible it seemed that I would never have heard anything about this before that invoice popped through my letterbox. Maybe they specifically targeted single people with a shaky grasp of what was going on in the world, and got them to believe a load of lies?
—
When I failed to find the sheet of paper and neither of us had said anything for almost a minute, I went and stood by the window. A shiver of belated insight ran through my body. That was my first reaction, I thought. That was the first thing I thought: fake invoice. I tried to remember how much information I had given away, apart from my address, date of birth, and ID number.
In the end, I said straight out: “How do I know you’re not trying to trick me?”
She remained silent. I went on without waiting for her to answer.
“Maybe this is all just a trap? It’s the sort of thing you hear about, after all. Have you seen The Spanish Prisoner by David Mamet? That conspiracy film, where everything turns out to have been fake? Or that other one, what’s it called? The Game, with Michael Douglas. How do I know you’re not trying to deceive me and are going to vanish with all my money?”
She didn’t say anything. I thought it felt like a nervous silence. The silence of someone who had been found out. What can anyone say, once everything has been uncovered and revealed?
I couldn’t deny that it was incredibly well done. Grandiose, really. Putting together such an advanced plan, appealing to the victim’s guilty conscience like that, and making it sound almost plausible. In a way it actually felt a bit unkind to have to put a stop to it. I mean, I’d started to enjoy those conversations. I’d have been happy to carry on talking to her each evening. She was drinking coffee again now. Rustling papers, or tidying something in the office.
“Well,” she said eventually, “naturally you’re entitled to book a meeting and come up and talk to one of our advisors, if you’d rather do it that way.”
W.R.D.’s Swedish headquarters consisted of a number of adjoining buildings made of speckled gray granite. An apparently endless flow of people moved to and fro across the shiny stone floor of the main entrance. A large black sign bearing the words “World Resources Distribution” in gold hung above a row of no fewer than six lifts. Along one wall water trickled down smooth, polished granite in a steady, even stream. The large, south-facing glass wall let in plenty of light, and there were big square pots containing what might have been fig trees at the foot of it. There may have been gentle music playing in there, unless it was just the well-judged design itself that was contributing to the harmonious soundscape. Between the third and fourth lifts was a map of the entire complex, with a large “you are here” arrow to indicate where I was.
—
The advisors were on the eleventh floor, and their reception area had glass doors facing all directions, making it impossible to ignore the view. Straight ahead, opposite the lift, a woman was sitting at a desk looking through some papers and answering the phone. She asked me to take a seat. I sat down in one of the armchairs grouped to one side of her. To my left was an empty conference room, and to the right the sort of open-plan office I imagined Maud worked in. I amused myself by trying to work out which one she might be. There were a dozen or so people in there, and most of them were indeed standing at height-adjustable desks. My attention was taken by a woman with long hair in a brownish-beige dress. She looked calm even though you could see she was talking very quickly. It was surprisingly quiet out where I was sitting, considering the level of activity behind the glass doors. Only one door had frosted glass, and through it came a man with combed-over hair. He introduced himself as Georg and asked me to go with him to one of the meeting rooms.
Georg was wearing a suit with no tie and looked like he was the same age as me, possibly a few years older. He had thinning dark brown hair with a hint of red in it, and I wondered if he dyed it. He sat down opposite me and put a thick folder on the table.
“Well,” he said, looking at me. “You wanted a meeting in person?”
“Er, yes,” I said. “I’ve got a few questions.”
He nodded and smiled.
“Hmm,” he said. “What sort of questions?”
I held out my hands.
“How it can come to so much, for instance?”
He nodded again. He was clearly used to questions of this sort.
“Let’s see now,” he said, opening the folder. “You’ve been talking to…”
“Maud,” I said.
He glanced up at me, then looked back down at the folder. He adjusted a long strand of hair that had fallen across his forehead, and ran his finger along the bottom of one page.
“Maud…Maud Andersson—yes, that’s right. One moment.”
He went out to the young woman in reception, then came back in. He sat down and leafed through the file, apparently not bothered by my presence. He had a large pile of documents from the local council, the regional council, schools, the address register, betting companies, and so on. There was a humming sound from the ceiling, from the air conditioning or some sort of ventilation system. I noticed that there were small surveillance cameras in each corner. Simple, flat lenses, big enough to make you realize that it was no secret that every nook and cranny of the room was covered. We were probably being watched the whole time by someone sitting somewhere else. Maybe they were listening in as well.
Through the glass walls, I eventually saw a tall, thin woman in a navy blue jacket and skirt walking between the tables. She had full lips, fair hair cut to the nape of her neck, but longer at the front to form a little arc round her cheeks. She went out into the reception area, then came over toward us, tapped on the glass, and pushed the door open when Georg indicated that she could come in.
“Hello,” she said to me, holding out her hand.
I stood up and was about to utter the phrase I’d thought out in advance: that she looked just like she sounded on the phone, when I realized that she didn’t sound the same at all. I looked at the eyes and hair, and those lips that seemed too full to be entirely natural. And while I was thinking that she didn’t look at all like I’d imagined, she introduced herself with a long, complicated surname that I didn’t quite catch. It sounded like the name of a bank to me. Or a firm of solicitors. I can’t remember what it was, neither her first nor last name. Neither of them was Maud, anyway.
The Invoice Page 4