The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules Read online

  ‘The staff don’t get the same food as us,’ Martha agreed. ‘The food that we can smell is just for the new owners of Diamond House, who have their office and kitchen on the upper floor.’

  ‘Then we ought to install an elevator which can transport their food down to us,’ remarked Oscar ‘Brains’ Krupp, who was the solution-finder of the group and was one year older than Christina. Brains was an inventor and used to have his own workshop in Sundbyberg. He also loved good food, which was apparent in his plump and cuddly figure. He considered exercise to be a recreation for people with nothing better to do.

  ‘Do you remember the brochure we got when we first came here?’ asked Martha. ‘Good food from the restaurant, it said. And they also boasted of daily walks, visits from artistes, chiropody and somebody to do our hair. With the new owners, nothing works any more. It is about time we made a stand.’

  ‘Rebellion at the retirement home!’ said Christina in her most melodramatic voice, waving her hand vigorously so that the nail file ended up on the floor.

  ‘Yes, that’s right, a little mutiny,’ Martha agreed.

  ‘A mutiny? We’d have to be at sea first,’ snorted Rake in a disbelieving manner.

  ‘But perhaps the new owners have some financial difficulties? It’ll get better eventually, wait and see,’ said Anna-Greta, straightening her glasses, which dated from the early fifties. She had worked in a bank all her life and understood that entrepreneurs must make a profit.

  ‘Get better? Like hell it will,’ muttered Rake. ‘Those bastards have already raised the charges several times and we haven’t seen any improvements.’

  ‘Don’t be so negative,’ said Anna-Greta, straightening her glasses again. They were old and worn out and were always slipping down her nose. She never changed spectacles and instead just updated her lenses because she thought her frames were timeless.

  ‘What do you mean, negative? We must demand improvements. Across the board, but starting with the food!’ Martha said. ‘Now listen, the owners must have something nice to eat in the kitchen upstairs. So when the rest of the staff have gone home, I thought we could …’

  Enthusiasm spread round the table as Martha talked on. Before long, five pairs of eyes were glowing just as brightly as the water on a lake shore on a sunny summer’s day. They all glanced up, looked at each other and made a thumbs-up sign.

  When her friends had left her room, Martha put the cloudberry liqueur back into the depths of her wardrobe and hummed happily to herself. Her dream about the bank robbery seemed to have given her new energy. Nothing is impossible, she thought. But in order to succeed with a change, you must put forward alternatives. And that was what she was going to do now. Then her friends would think that they had made their decisions all by themselves.

  Two

  After everyone had stepped out of the elevator and stood outside the Diamond House office, Martha held up her hand and hushed the others. She had inspected the contents of the key cupboard and had chosen one with a triangular bow, the sort that locksmiths can’t copy. She put the key in the lock, gave it a turn and the door opened.

  ‘Just as I thought. The master key. Excellent, in we go, but remember to be quiet.’

  ‘Look who’s talking,’ muttered Rake, who thought that Martha always talked too much.

  ‘But what if someone discovers us?’ Christina said, worried.

  ‘They won’t, we’ll be as quiet as mice,’ Anna-Greta said loudly. Like all those who are hard of hearing she spoke in a resounding voice without realizing it.

  The walkers squeaked out of time as the five of them slowly and cautiously entered the room. It smelt of office and furniture polish, and there were folders arranged in a meticulous order on the desk.

  ‘Hmm, the kitchen must be through that set of doors,’ Martha said, pointing across to the other side of the room.

  As they entered the next room, Martha took the lead and closed the curtains.

  ‘Now we can turn the lights on!’

  The lights flickered into action and before them appeared a sizeable room with a fridge, freezer and large fitted cupboards on the wall. In the middle was an island on wheels, and beside the window a dining table with six chairs.

  ‘A proper kitchen,’ declared Brains as he stroked the fridge door.

  ‘There will certainly be some good food in here,’ Martha declared as she opened the fridge door. The shelves were filled with chicken and fillet steak, a leg of lamb and several different types of cheese. The drawers below contained lettuces, tomatoes, beetroot and fruit.

  The door to the freezer took some effort to open. ‘Elk steaks and lobster. Goodness me!’ Martha exclaimed, holding the door open for everyone to see. ‘Everything except a Christmas cake! They must have lots of parties up here.’

  For a long while they all stared at the contents without uttering a word. Brains rubbed a hand over his cropped hair, Rake put his hand over his heart and sighed, Christina gasped and Anna-Greta grumbled: ‘This must have cost a pretty penny!’

  ‘Nobody will notice if we help ourselves to a little bit,’ said Martha.

  ‘But surely we can’t steal their food?’ Christina queried.

  ‘We’re not stealing. Whose money do you think bought this food? We are simply taking what we have paid for. Here you are, take this.’

  Martha held out a leftover piece of cooked chicken and Rake—who always felt peckish in the evenings—was the first to bite.

  ‘And we need rice, spices and flour so that we can make a sauce,’ said Brains, who had now woken up. He wasn’t just an inventor but a good cook too. Since his ex-wife had only made food that was inedible, he had been forced to learn to cook. Then, in time, he had realized that not only was she incompetent in the kitchen but she also saw life itself as one great problem, and so he had divorced her. Still to this day, he had nightmares about her standing beside his bed brandishing a rolling pin in her hand whilst complaining. But she had given him a son, and for that he was grateful.

  ‘We must have good wine for the sauce too.’ Brains looked around and caught sight of a wine rack on the wall. ‘Well, I never, look at those bottles …’

  ‘We can’t take those. We’d be found out if we did,’ said Martha. ‘If nobody notices that we have been here, we can come back a few more times.’

  ‘Pah. Food without wine is like a car without wheels,’ announced Brains. He went up to the wine rack and pulled out two bottles of the finest wine. Seeing Martha’s face, he put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. ‘We’ll open the wine bottles, drink up the wine and pour beetroot juice into the bottles instead,’ he said.

  Martha gave Brains an admiring glance. He always had a solution for everything. He was an eternal optimist who thought that problems were there to be solved. He reminded her of her parents. When she and her sister had dressed up in their parents’ clothes and made a dreadful mess everywhere, her father and mother had, of course, told them that they had been naughty, but then had laughed at the whole thing. Better to have a messy home and happy children then a perfect yard and unhappy children, they thought. Their guiding motto in life was: ‘Everything will sort itself out.’ And Martha agreed. It always did.

  The chopping boards, frying pans and saucepans were soon in place and they all got involved in cooking the meal. Martha put a fresh chicken in the oven, Brains made a delicious sauce, Rake prepared a tasty salad and Christina tried her best to be of use. She had gone to a domestic science school when she was young, but since then she had had help in the kitchen all her life, and so she had forgotten everything she had ever learned. The only task she really felt safe doing was slicing a cucumber.

  Anna-Greta took charge of setting the table and saw to the rice.

  ‘She’s good at doing what you tell her,’ Martha whispered, nodding towards Anna-Greta. ‘But she is so slow and always has to count everything.’

  ‘As long as she doesn’t start counting the grains of rice, that’s OK,’ said Brains.

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nbsp; Soon a delicious aroma spread through the kitchen. Rake went around serving wine and looked very much the part in his blue blazer with a crisp cravat around his neck. He had combed his hair and smelled of a nice aftershave. Christina noticed that he had dressed smartly and she in turn discreetly pulled out her powder and lipstick. When nobody was looking, she added some colour to her lips and powdered her nose lightly.

  Talk and laughter mingled with the clatter of plates and pans. Admittedly, it did take rather a long time before the food was ready, but what did that matter when everyone was drinking good wine and having a lovely time? Finally, they settled around the table as happy and enthusiastic as youngsters.

  ‘Another glass?’

  Rake poured out more wine and it was just like the old days when he had been a waiter on cruise ships in the Mediterranean. He was a bit slower now, but he held himself with the same dignity. Between mouthfuls they toasted one another and sang aloud from their choir repertoire, and when Brains found an old bottle of champagne, that did the rounds too. Christina raised her glass and knocked back her wine.

  ‘Wicked,’ she said—an expression she had picked up from her grandchildren. She liked to try and keep up with the times.

  Christina put her glass down and looked about her: ‘Now, dear friends, we must dance!’

  ‘You can do that,’ said Brains, putting his hands on his stomach.

  ‘Dance, yes, absolutely,’ said Rake, getting up, but he was so unsteady on his legs that Christina had to dance on her own.

  ‘“It is better to dare to cast the dice, than to fade away with a withering flame,”’ she recited with her arms out wide. Although Christina had never achieved her dream of becoming a librarian, she had always maintained her interest in literature. And what she didn’t know of the Swedish classics wasn’t worth knowing.

  ‘Here she goes reciting the old favourites again. As long as she doesn’t recite the Odyssey too,’ muttered Martha.

  ‘Or goes on and on about Gösta Berling’s Saga …’ Brains added.

  ‘“It is more beautiful to hear a string that snaps, than never to draw a bow,”’ Christina continued.

  ‘We could have that as our motto!’ Martha suggested.

  ‘What, a string that snaps?’ Rake interrupted her. ‘No, the motto should be “It’s better to be in the bed that broke than always to sleep alone.”’

  Christina, blushing, came to a halt mid-step.

  ‘Rake! Must you always be so coarse? Behave yourself!’ said Anna-Greta, pouting.

  ‘Well, we’ve drawn our bow now, haven’t we?’ said Christina. ‘From now on, we must come up here at least once a week.’ She fetched her glass and raised it.

  ‘Cheers! Here’s to the next time!’

  They all toasted each other and they kept going until their eyelids got heavier and heavier and they started slurring their words. Martha reverted to her old southern dialect, something she only did when she was really tired. It was a warning sign, and she saw the danger.

  ‘Now, dear friends, we must wash the dishes and tidy the kitchen before we go downstairs,’ she said.

  ‘You’re welcome to start on the dishes,’ Rake replied, as he filled up Martha’s glass.

  ‘No, we must tidy up and put everything back in the cupboards so that nobody will see that we’ve been here,’ she insisted, and pushed the glass away.

  ‘If you’re tired, you can rest on my arm,’ said Brains as he gave her a friendly pat on the cheek.

  And so it came about that Martha leaned her head against his arm and fell asleep.

  The next morning, when Ingmar Mattson, the director of Diamond House, came to work, he heard strange sounds from inside his private rooms. The heavy humming noise sounded like a group of bears had just escaped from the zoo. He looked around the office and saw nothing untoward, but he noticed that the kitchen door was open.

  ‘What in heaven’s name …’ he muttered, before bumping into a walker and falling onto the floor. Swearing, he got back on his feet and looked with amazement at the scene before him. The extractor fan was on, and five of the old people from the retirement home were seated around the table, fast asleep. There were dirty dishes and empty wine glasses on the table, and the fridge door was wide open. Director Mattson looked at the mess. The clients in the retirement home evidently had more freedom than he had been aware of. He must ask Nurse Barbara to deal with the matter.

  Three

  A car alarm was going off down the street, and somewhere far away a fan was whirring. Martha blinked and then opened her eyes properly. A ray of sunshine seeped in through the window and her eyes slowly grew accustomed to the faint light. The windows were dirty and needed to be cleaned, and the same could be said about the floral-patterned curtains that she had hung up herself to brighten up the room. Evidently, nobody cared about keeping things clean nowadays, and she certainly couldn’t manage such chores herself anymore. Martha yawned widely, but her thoughts were all confused and she couldn’t really think straight. Oh dear, oh dear, how slow and tired she was feeling. Ever since the party it had felt as if she had small clouds of chewing gum clogging up the inside of her head. Of course, the wine and all the pills she took every day didn’t mix very well. But what fun they had had! If only they had had time to tidy up and return to their rooms … Yes, if only they hadn’t fallen asleep …

  Martha sat on the edge of her bed and manoeuvred her feet into her slippers. Oh, it had been so embarrassing, and Director Mattson had shouted at them in such an irascible manner. She glanced at the bedside table. There lay the corkscrew that Brains had given her ‘for future parties’, as he had put it. But, sadly, there’d be no more. After the party, Nurse Barbara had locked them all in their rooms and now they could only leave the residents’ floor if a member of staff accompanied them. And on top of that, they had been given small red pills ‘to calm them down’. How boring life had become!

  And talking of pills—why did old people always have to have so many pills? They almost seemed to receive more pills than food. Perhaps that’s what had made them so dull? They always used to play cards and had gone into each other’s rooms after 8 p.m. But since Diamond House had taken over, things like that didn’t happen any more. Nowadays they hardly did anything at all, and if they got the chance to play a hand of cards, they either fell asleep or forgot what they were doing. Christina, who loved her literary classics, didn’t even have the energy to thumb through magazines, and Anna-Greta, who had liked to listen to horn concertos and some of the Swedish popular folk singers, now just stared at her record player and couldn’t muster the energy to get any of her records down from the shelf. Brains hadn’t made any inventions for ages, and Rake didn’t look after his plants properly. Most of the time they just watched TV and nobody did anything special. Something was wrong, really horribly wrong.

  Martha got up, supported herself on her walker and went into the bathroom. While she washed her face, brushed her teeth and went about her morning routine, she mulled everything over. Hadn’t she been the one who had intended to protest and make a revolution? But now here she was, doing nothing again. She stared into the mirror and noticed how worn out she looked. Her face was pale and her white hair stood on end. Sighing loudly, she stretched out, reaching for her hairbrush, but in so doing happened to knock the bottle of red pills onto the floor. They scattered across the bathroom floor and lay there like angry red dots by her feet. She didn’t feel like picking them up. Martha snorted and just swept them all down the floor drain with her foot.

  She got rid of some of the other pills too, and after a few days, already felt much chirpier. She started knitting again and, having always loved crime thrillers, went back to working her way through the stack of ghastly murders on her bedside table. And her revolutionary zeal had returned.

  When Brains heard the knocks, he knew it must be Martha. Three distinct knocks on the door right next to the handle and then silence. That was definitely her. He dragged himself up from the sofa and
pulled his sweater down over his round belly. He hadn’t had a visit from Martha for quite some time, and he had wondered if she was OK. Every day he had intended to go and see her in the evening, but instead he always fell asleep in front of the TV. He looked around for an empty cardboard box and quickly tidied away the pile of drawings, chisels and screws from the coffee table into the box before hastily pushing it under his bed. Two blue shirts and some socks with holes in them he hid behind the sofa cushions, and he brushed the breadcrumbs scattered across his side table onto the floor. Having done that, he turned off the TV and went to open the door.

  ‘Ah, it is you, come in!’

  ‘Brains, we must have a talk,’ Martha said, striding into his room purposefully.

  He nodded and put the kettle on. In the cupboard he found two printed circuit cards, a hammer and some cables before he reached the instant coffee. There were two coffee cups behind the coffee jar. When the water had boiled, he filled the cups and added some coffee granules.

  ‘I haven’t got any biscuits, I’m afraid, but—’

  ‘That will do just fine,’ said Martha, accepting the cup of coffee and sitting down on the sofa. ‘You know something, this might sound crazy, but I think they are drugging us. We get too many pills. That is why we have been so lethargic.’

  ‘Really? Do you mean—’ He discreetly pushed a gutted Grundig radio under the armchair and hoped she hadn’t noticed it.

  ‘Well, we can’t allow it to go on!’ he said.

  ‘Exactly! We should have acted when we said we were going to protest.’

  He took her hand and patted it lightly.

  ‘But, my dear, it still isn’t too late.’

  Martha’s eyes sparkled and her face lit up.