Broken Mirrors (ARC)

by C S Duffy

  I hadn't mentioned the moving out bit. It was so temporary it wasn't worth the hassle of trying to explain.

  'Yeah, he's — you know.'

  'I know, love. He will be himself again in time. When your grandad passed I couldn't ever imagine smiling again, but you do.'

  'It's not just that's he's grieving Liv,' I reminded her. 'Its everything with Mia as well, plus worrying about Krister. It's complicated.'

  'Grief is grief, my love. And life goes on no matter what it throws at you.'

  'I suppose.'

  'Just being there is the main thing. I know you wish there was a magic wand you could wave to make everything all better for him, but there's not. I bet you're helping him more than you realise.'

  It wasn't quite as simple as that. Johan wouldn't be in the pain he was were it not for me. That was the inescapable truth that had burrowed its way between us.

  If I’d never met Johan, if I’d left him as a holiday fling, a lovely little memory of a few precious weeks in Thailand to keep me company during my dreary commute through London, Liv would probably still be alive. That wasn't guilt, it was just how it was.

  'I'm starting a new job, actually,' I blurted.

  'Oh yes? On one of the papers over there?'

  'I can hardly write in Swedish, can I?' My voice came out a bit sharper than I'd intended.

  'I know, I just thought maybe —'

  'Remember my friend Maddie, the Australian? Well, some friend of a friend of hers runs a nursery school and they are desperate for assistant teachers. The school runs half in English to give the kids a head start with their second language, so they're keen on an English speaker. It'll be fun.'

  'A nursery school teacher?' Mum said dubiously. 'Do you know anything about children?'

  'It won't be forever or anything, just to get me on my feet a bit. Nice to have some regular money coming in and all that.'

  It wasn't just the money. The idea of a bit of normality, routine, security, was so tempting I'd nearly bit Lena's hand off when she suggested it. A book deal wouldn't give me that, I'd reminded myself. Having somewhere to go every day, yawning on the bus in rush hour traffic, counting down the days til the weekend, that was the ticket. Eight hours a day during which I couldn't think about Johan or Mia or Liv. Maybe even getting to know a few of the teachers, getting together for the odd drink after work.

  When you only know about five people in an entire country, the fact that one of them tried to murder you puts a serious dent into your social life. I was pretty confident I could sing a few rounds of The Wheels on the Bus for that. I could absolutely do it. It would all be fine.

  5

  This morning I woke up and I thought she was there. For just a few seconds, when I was in that hazy half-state between waking and sleep, I was so sure I felt her warmth next to me. I could hear her breathing softly in the darkness.

  She was always such a silent sleeper. Not that I had many other women to compare her to, but when I’d shared a bedroom with my brothers, or with friends on camping trips, the air had been filled with snores and grunts and farts all night long. The first time I shared a bed with her, I had almost woken her in the night to check she was still alive.

  The next morning I had told her that. I joked that I’d been tempted to find a little mirror to stick under her nose to make sure she was still breathing. She burst out laughing and said if she had woken up to a reflection of her own face at the end of her nose she would have had nightmares for the rest of her life.

  She always had such a sense of humour. Biting, sometimes. She could be viciously funny about our friends, her colleagues, even my family, when she got going. I would always start out a little bit disapproving, insist that the person’s heart was in the right place and that we shouldn’t judge. Seconds later I would be giggling helplessly alongside her. She got me every time.

  When I was a kid, I used to think that having a girlfriend was all about following rules, getting yelled for doing anything you wanted to do, like watching football or going out with your friends. ‘Never get attached to a woman,’ my dad would tell me, shaking his head wearily as his current girlfriend berated him for something or other.

  He never took his own advice. By the time I was eleven or twelve I had given up bothering to learn any of their names. Dad would bring them home to meet us and my brother would ask if we should call her 'mother' just for the fun of watching them squirm, but I never did. I felt sorry for them, this endless procession of females who were all under the impression that their lives would be improved by spending time with my old man.

  Our mother never had anyone else after him. I wondered about that sometimes, but when I asked her she just laughed and said that her friends and us boys were all she needed.

  Being with her was nothing like I thought it would be. It was amazing. She never nagged me or gave me orders or stopped me from doing anything I wanted to. Most of the time we did the things she enjoyed, but that was just because we were so similar that I was happy to do them too. We had so much in common, and I didn’t really want to spend my time with anyone else.

  At least, that’s how it was in the beginning, but all couples have their rocky times, don’t they? Once, during one of our fights, one of the neighbours knocked on the door to ask if we were okay, and when he was gone we laughed and laughed. The idea that we didn't love each other desperately was nuts. We decided he was a moron and we laughed so much we forgot what we were arguing about. She was so sweet and loving that night that I almost wanted to thank the neighbour the next time I saw him.

  And now I don’t know what to do with myself any more. There is so much time, so many hours in the day. I’m sure I remember being busy from the moment I woke until I fell in to bed at night. I would go for a morning run, shower quickly then head to work and talk to people all day long, then dinner with her. There was no time to think, to remember, to question everything I knew or thought I knew.

  The only thing that fills me is memories. My life as it was then. Sometimes I think that maybe this is okay. That if living in the past in my head makes me happy, then what's the problem? As long as I still function, pay bills, talk to people, sleep, eat, exercise, then what happens inside my head is no one’s business.

  Maybe I was never busy and I've just forgotten. Everything is so foggy these days, I can't quite tell what's a memory and what was only ever my imagination. Maybe none of it was ever real. Maybe she never even existed.

  6

  The screaming. The screaming drilled into my bones and haunted my dreams. Even when it stopped for a moment I could still hear the echo ringing in my ears, reverberating through my skull.

  How long until his parents came back?

  'His name means thunder bear,' his dad had said ruefully that morning, as he tried to peel the red-faced, roaring child from around his knees. Tor-Björn had a mop of wild ginger curls and wore purple leggings and a jumper with a truck outlined in glitter. The dad, Casey, was American and a bit chattier than I could be arsed with. 'We didn't realise he'd take the name as a suggestion. My mom had some native on her side of the family, so I guess I should have realised. I guess we'll never lose him on a dark night.'

  'Fab, so we'll see you in about an hour and a half?'

  The Swedish schooling-in process meant that a parent spent the first couple of mornings at school with the kid, then left them for an hour or so, then a full morning, and so on. The past couple of days trying to bond with a wild two year old while making awkward conversation with Casey, who was the type that once you made eye contact with him he wasn't letting go until he told you his life story, had been bordering on excruciating. I'm sure Casey was lovely and all, but I probably hadn't needed to know how loved he'd been in high school.

  He had recognised me from the little flurry of media that there had been about Mia and unfortunately appeared to be a bit of a true crime geek and wanted to know all about it. It wasn't my favourite subject at the best of times, and I was decidedly even less k
een to discuss it whilst trying to engage a toddler in building blocks. Plus, I hadn't exactly mentioned my little side gig of catching serial killers whilst applying to work with small children, and my boss Sandra had overheard and pulled me to one side. That was an awkward conversation that let's just say hadn't exactly endeared me to Casey.

  All that said, come back Casey, all is forgiven. It was mid morning and Tor-Björn's screams had been ringing in my ears since approximately the beginning of time. If it carried on much longer, I was likely to join him.

  Sandra had given me a registration pack filled with information I was supposed to use to make him feel familiar and secure during this transition into nursery school. He always slept with a stuffed frog called Koack, his favourite song was apparently Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac and he loved something called pyttipanna.

  I'd tried ribbeting like a frog, I'd tried singing as much as I could remember of Go Your Own Way. I didn't know what pyttipanna was. He was apparently happiest at mormor and morfar's summer cottage on some unpronounceable island, but I had no idea how to incorporate that particular detail at the present time.

  Tor-Björn was flung on a red bean bag by the reading corner, yelling his head off. I was sitting cross-legged in front of him, awkwardly muttering 'there, there' every once in a while. Sandra, the senior teacher on our team, had the other kids gathered at the other end of the classroom, singing songs over the din. Every once in a while she would glance over to check on Tor-Björn and me. I'd wave to convey I was more than ready to admit defeat, and she'd give me a thumbs up and announce the next song.

  Sandra was in her sixties and had been working at the school for almost forty years. 'When I started work we still told little boys they shouldn't cry,' she'd smiled as she showed me around on my first day. 'The newspapers like to make a lot of controversy about gender neutrality, but all we do is let children be themselves. If a little girl wants to play with dollies and glitter that is absolutely fine, and if a little boy wants to play with dollies and glitter that is also fine. The children let us know what they like to do.'

  Her hair was wound in a long grey plait around her head like a milkmaid and she wore a brightly coloured, flowy caftan over leggings and rubber clogs. I was almost certain that I hadn't seen her repeat a caftan yet and I strangely envied her seemingly endless supply of wafty dress-things though not nearly as much as I envied her unflappable manner with the kids. She was like a flowy, Swedish, Mary Poppins, and I was like the hapless dad in a laundry detergent advert. In my first week I'd managed to put two nappies on back to front, leading to one fairly spectacular accident Sandra cheerily dubbed the 'festival of poo,' and clunked heads with a gigantic two year old so hard that I saw stars for the rest of the day.

  'Look, look!' I shouted in desperation. 'What's this?'

  Tor-Björn stopped crying and looked up with interest. I scrabbled for the first thing that came to hand, which was a wooden building block. Excellent.

  'Woooo,' I screeched in mild hysteria. 'I'm a building block and I'm flying! That's crazy! How can a block fly?'

  I made the building block fly around Tor-Björn's head, zooming in to bop his nose now and then. For one glorious instant I thought I saw a flicker of a smile before his face crumped and the howls returned.

  'Please, kiddo,' I muttered, feeling flutters of actual terror, 'I'll do anything. What do you want? Money? I will literally pay you to stop crying.'

  This had little effect, which wasn't overly surprising given that he wasn't yet two and money meant nothing to him.

  A bad thought occurred to me then. A forbidden thought.

  I could give him his dummy.

  Sandra had a strict dummies-are-for-naptimes-only policy. 'Keeping the spread of colds and other diseases to a minimum is difficult enough without them trading pacifiers all day, and they will,' she had explained. 'Plus a little incentive to lure them into the nap room comes in very useful.'

  All good and sensible reasons. I quite agreed.

  But Sandra was trusting me to handle the situation. It just so happened that my way of handling the situation involved handing over the magic plug of silence. I was taking an executive decision to comfort a child. More importantly, Sandra was all the way over at the other side of the classroom. She'd never even see.

  'Hey kid,' I hissed, like a drug dealer outside a high school in a cautionary TV movie. 'Nappan?'

  At the magic word he looked up and we met one another's eyes in a silent agreement of collusion, although not silent, because one of us was roaring in anguish and the other one was also, albeit on the inside. I could see Tor-Björn's lime green dummy in its shiny new case on the shelf. I glanced over at Sandra but she was busy getting the kids to be trees on a windy day. The coast was clear.

  Quick as a flash I darted to the shelf, grabbed the contraband and the silence was instant and blessed. Tor-Björn stared at me with placid eyes as I leaned on the bean bag next to him and started to read a story. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Sandra's triumphant wave of congratulations and I hardly felt guilty at all.

  That evening, some sort of tinned concoction that appeared to be the Swedish answer to spaghetti hoops burbled away in my little pot. I leaned against my kitchen counter, my knees nearly touching the fridge opposite, scrolling idly through my phone. Some photos popped up from a female journalists' night out in London, a semi-regular get-together I had started a few years ago.

  I was pleased it was carrying on without me. I had created something that lasted, that was something to be proud of. I was glad they looked as though they'd had a good time. It would be absurd of me to feel left out. But as I looked at the pictures of my old life, my friends making faces for the camera, miming glugging a full wine bottle, the inevitable theft of a traffic cone on the way to the night bus, a wave of something I didn't care to identify washed over me.

  The life I'd left behind peered out at me from my phone. They would have spent the day badgering defence barristers coming out the Old Bailey, phone-bashing to track down elusive witnesses, triumphantly filing copy at the last second. After I'd been ticked off for the dummy incident, I'd taken another little boy, newly potty trained, to the toilet, forgotten to remind him to point down and he'd peed in my face.

  I was on a brilliant adventure, obviously. I lived in Sweden, how cool was that? I had been completely prepared for some bumps along the way to settling in, it would have been ridiculous to have imagined otherwise. Obviously, I hadn't anticipated one of those bumps being a serial killer, but it was what it was.

  The smell of burning finally pierced my consciousness and I discovered that I had managed to burn synthetic pasta shapes in fake tomato sauce. Only I could ruin food that wasn't even bloody real food. With an exasperated sigh I dumped the whole lot in the bin, yanked on eighty-seven thousand layers and headed to the pizza place around the corner.

  'Inte parmesan. Nej parmesan,' I pleaded pathetically, and the pizza guy stared at me as though I had two heads. I have nothing against parmesan as a general rule, it's just that for whatever reason they pile so much on pizzas here it's all you can taste. It's fair to say that the pizza experience in Sweden an acquired taste. They come with something called pizza salad, which is sort of like a pickled coleslaw. It isn't bad but it doesn't remotely go with pizza. Further, I'm frankly embarrassed to admit that I live in a country where people consider banana an acceptable pizza topping. It is an abomination and one of these days I will confront the people of Sweden about it. Just as soon as I can speak more than a pitiable few words of their language.

  I knew the word for 'without.' I'd looked it up after a particularly tragic incident in which I'd ended up screeching 'parmesan - NO' while making fairly undignified expressions of disgust. Aldrig parmesan? No, that wasn't it.

  I'd lived in Sweden for almost eight months. I wouldn't expect to be effortlessly fluent by now exactly, but I was pretty horrified by just how crap I had turned out to be at remembering even the most basic phrases. I'd had all sor
ts of grand plans for watching TV and listening to the radio in Swedish every evening so as to immerse myself and intensify all the studying I fondly imagined I would do. Most nights, however, I was so drained by the time I got home that I'd collapse on my air bed craving the familiarity of mindless British soaps and comedy I wouldn't be caught dead watching at home.

  Still, tomorrow was another day. I'd set my alarm early, I promised myself, and study a whole chapter of my Swedish vocabulary book before work. Starting with the bloody word for 'without.'

  'Fem minuter,' said the pizza guy, which even I could gather meant 'five minutes.'

  I sat on one of the little stools by the window. The window was steamed up, cutting us off from the world beyond. A group of twenty-something friends came in and loudly debated their pizza orders. A few of them wore the green, white and yellow scarves of Johan's football team — that explained why he hadn't texted me this evening, then. There must be a game on, he'd be watching with Krister. I can't bear football. I wouldn't have been interested even if he had invited me.

  I pulled out my phone so that I didn't look too much like the Little Matchgirl staring enviously at a group of friends mucking about. I could message someone from home, I thought, opening my text app. One of the girls from the journalists' night out, surely there would be some gossip.

  A news alert flashed up. They had identified the murder victim found at Mariatorget. Anna Essen.

  It had nothing to do with me, I told myself firmly. I had done enough damage. I wasn't a journalist at the present time. I was a nursery school classroom assistant. Primarily a pee-soaked dummy enabler, but still. I should open up my Swedish language app and get in a bit of studying while I waited for my pizza.