The Circle (Hammer) Read online

  Anna-Karin looks at Grandpa as he gazes out of the window. He can sit there for hours. She often wonders what he’s looking for.

  Grandpa was seventy-seven last spring, but it’s only over the past year that he’s really started to look old. Anna-Karin doesn’t want to think of what will happen when he’s gone.

  Vanessa lays her towel on the lawn in front of Jonte’s house. It has a washed-out pattern of yellow and brown flowers and doesn’t seem completely clean. Who cares? She just wants to lie down and forget everything. Without getting grass stains on her clothes.

  She glances up at the red two-storey house, which also looks washed-out – the paint is sun-bleached and flaking. She hears a bass line throbbing inside. It’s making the windowpanes rattle. Through the living-room window, she sees the gigantic TV and the silhouettes of Wille, Jonte and Lucky against the explosions on the screen.

  She lies down, pulls her shirt up to her bra and lets the sun warm her stomach.

  Wille had been in a bad mood when he’d picked her up from the school. ‘I’m not a bloody taxi,’ he’d mumbled.

  ‘Well, go fuck yourself then!’ she’d shouted, and had thrown open the door while the car was moving.

  Wille had jammed on the brakes and the car behind them had come close to crashing into them.

  Vanessa had stared at him, fear pulsating through her.

  ‘Shut the door,’ he had said, in a low voice, and she had done so immediately.

  ‘Fucking old man.’

  That had hurt, she could tell. Wille is twenty-one and she knows he finds the age difference between them embarrassing.

  When they had got together she had just turned fifteen. By then she had already heard a lot about Wille. Vanessa recognised something of herself in him. He wanted more – to feel more, experience more. She had thought that life with him would be an adventure.

  And now she’s lying here while he’s playing video games with his slacker friends.

  But he’s still the best-looking guy she knows. And he kisses her in that firm way she likes.

  Vanessa angrily swats at a fly that refuses to understand it’s unwelcome on her face. The sun is warm, but she can detect the first hint of autumn chill. Big clouds have started to gather on the horizon.

  ‘Nessa?’ Wille calls.

  She raises a hand and waves.

  ‘Vanessa?’ Wille says again.

  ‘Yeees!’ she shouts back. ‘What do you want?’

  No answer. She sits up on her towel. Wille is standing at the open window, staring at her.

  No. He’s staring right through me. It’s happening again. ‘Wille!’ she shouts, panic-stricken.

  No reaction. Wille cranes his neck and scans the lawn. ‘Where the hell are you?’

  ‘I’m here!’ Vanessa shrieks, waving her arms.

  But he can’t see or hear her. She grabs her towel and waves it. He doesn’t react, so she tosses it aside in frustration.

  Wille almost falls over. He’s still not looking at her but at the towel on the lawn. ‘What the … What the fuck?’ he gasps.

  ‘What is it?’ Jonte asks, as he comes up to the window. Lucky tries to squeeze between them.

  ‘That towel,’ Wille says. ‘It just appeared out of nowhere. I swear! It wasn’t there before.’

  Jonte and Lucky stare at him. Then they stare at the towel and back again. They burst out laughing.

  ‘Chill, Wille. You’re tripping!’ Lucky bellows.

  Jonte says something and closes the window with a bang.

  Vanessa stands in the sunshine for a moment. She sees her own hands clearly in front of her. Her tanned legs. But something’s missing. Something doesn’t feel right.

  She almost starts crying when she realises what it is.

  She’s not casting a shadow on the lawn.

  The sweet-smelling smoke hits her as she sneaks into the house. Wille is sitting in an armchair, staring at the TV and smoking a joint. He’s lit from behind by the sun – his blond hair looks like a halo. Vanessa’s heart somer saults. Sometimes she’s taken by surprise when she looks at him.

  She wants to go up and touch him but she’s too scared to try. She has to keep hidden the strange thing that’s happening to her. At least until she knows what it is.

  ‘Vanessa?’ Jonte asks.

  She whirls round. Jonte scans the room but sees nothing. His eyes are unusually alert and focused beneath the dark blue woollen hat he’s pulled down over his eyebrows.

  ‘You’ve got the Noaidi, dude,’ Lucky mumbles pointedly.

  ‘There’s somebody’s here, he says. ‘I’m fucking sure.’ Lucky is lying half upright on the couch gripping the PlayStation handset. His fat belly is poking out beneath his T-shirt, which reads Pride of Engelsfors. Lucky, whose real name is Lukas, was in Vanessa’s class in year nine, but he never made it to year eleven. Instead he spends his days as Jonte’s errand boy, going out for beer, ordering pizza and helping with the plantation in the basement.

  ‘Did you hear about the priest’s kid?’ Lucky says, frantically punching away at the handset.

  Vanessa sees how Jonte tenses, just slightly. Wille slowly releases the smoke he’s been holding in his lungs. ‘What?’ he asks.

  ‘Elias Malmgren. The priest’s son. He killed himself. At school. They found him today.’

  ‘Are you sure it was him?’ Wille asks. He tries to sound blasé, but Vanessa hears the unease in his voice.

  Of course, she thinks. They knew each other. Elias used to come here to score weed. But that was ages ago, like the Christmas holidays in year nine.

  ‘Positive,’ Lucky says.

  ‘Shit,’ Jonte says. ‘He was here yesterday, buying weed.’

  ‘You think he had a bad trip or something?’ Lucky asks.

  ‘A bad trip?’

  Jonte and Wille burst out laughing. Lucky smiles in his ingratiating way that makes Vanessa’s skin crawl.

  ‘He tried a few times before,’ Jonte says. ‘Probably wanted to be completely out of his skull when he did it.’

  But he’s feeling guilty, Vanessa can tell. She wonders why. Jonte doesn’t usually care about anyone except himself.

  ‘He was, like, a total loser,’ Lucky says. ‘Cutting his arms and shit. I thought only chicks did that kind of thing.’

  ‘Shut up,’ Jonte says suddenly.

  Both Wille and Lucky tense and stare at him.

  ‘There’s someone in the house,’ he whispers.

  The others glance around. Vanessa holds her breath.

  ‘Maybe it’s Elias’s ghost, come to haunt us,’ Lucky says, and gets a smack on the back of the head from Wille’s open hand.

  Vanessa feels the hairs on her arms stand up. Suddenly it’s as if the air billows around her, like a gust of wind. Jonte stares straight at her.

  ‘Where the hell did you spring from?’

  Wille looks round and laughs nervously. ‘You shouldn’t sneak up on us like that, Nessa. You’re going to give your uncle Jonte a heart attack.’

  Lucky laughs as well, for a bit too long. Vanessa does her best to smile indulgently.

  She goes and sits on Wille’s lap. She needs to feel his arms around her. Needs to feel that she’s here. He nuzzles her neck. She presses herself hard against him.

  Outside it starts to rain.

  6

  RAIN IS PATTERING against the kitchen window. Minoo likes the sound, the feeling it gives her of being cocooned inside a secure house. Billie Holiday’s voice is filtering through the speakers in the living room. The low-hanging kitchen lamp casts a warm glow over her parents’ tired, anxious faces.

  ‘How are you feeling, darling?’ her father asks.

  That’s the third time he’s asked since he came home. ‘Okay,’ she answers briefly.

  More than anything, she just feels incredibly tired and drained. She’s talked to her mother for a few hours, but she doesn’t know how she’s ‘feeling’. All she knows is that she’s too exhausted to think.

&
nbsp; ‘Are you going to write about it?’ she asks.

  Her father scratches the bridge of his nose, making his glasses bob up and down. ‘We’ve discussed it. If the poor boy had killed himself at home, of course we wouldn’t. But as it happened at school … The whole town already knows about it.’

  Her mother shakes her head. ‘You’ll be criticised for writing about it.’

  ‘We’ll be criticised if we don’t.’

  Minoo’s father is the editor of a local newspaper. It only comes out a few times a week and mostly offers up exciting headlines like ‘New Traffic Circle Inaugurated on Gnejsgatan’. Three-quarters of the town’s house holds subscribe to the Engelsfors Herald. Everyone knows who Minoo’s father is.

  ‘Cissi has written an article,’ he continues. ‘I had to cut half of it, of course, get rid of all the gory details. You know what she’s like. But suicide is a sensitive topic, no matter how we tone it down.’

  Minoo stares at her plate. She has barely touched her food and the meat sauce suddenly looks repulsive. ‘Are the police sure it was suicide?’ she asks.

  ‘There’s no doubt about it,’ her father answers. ‘But –and this stays between us, all right? Not a word about this to anyone at school?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Minoo sighs. She has never given him reason to doubt her ability to keep quiet. Minoo learned early on that most people collect information so that they can pass it on, but that the only way to get your hands on really interesting information is to be trustworthy.

  ‘Elias died yesterday some time after four thirty. He had just been to see the principal. He’d been missing school and the principal wanted to “nip it in the bud”, as she put it. They spoke for half an hour.’

  It suddenly dawns on Minoo what Linnéa had meant when she accused the principal. What had happened at that meeting? ‘What did the principal have to say?’ she asks.

  ‘She’s shocked, of course.’

  ‘And she saw nothing to suggest he was suicidal?’ her mother asks.

  ‘Of course that’s the question that’ll be asked. Why didn’t she?’

  ‘Poor woman. She’s barely been there a year and this happens.’

  ‘Naturally the school’s responsibility is going to be aired. Especially since the way he did it seems to have been intended as a kind of message to the school itself.’

  ‘Erik,’ her mother says, ‘maybe you don’t want to remind Minoo of …’

  ‘That wasn’t my intention, for God’s sake,’ her father hisses.

  ‘Can’t we talk about something else?’ Minoo asks.

  Her parents stare at her anxiously and exchange looks.

  ‘I can’t bear to listen to any more about Elias,’ she mumbles.

  ‘I understand,’ her mother says calmly.

  While they finish their meal, they talk about cutbacks at the paper. Occasionally Minoo makes a comment. Yet she doesn’t remember a word of the conversation once dinner’s over.

  Anna-Karin’s mother lights a cigarette while she’s still chewing her last mouthful, always eager to fill her lungs with nicotine and tar. The food is something she wants to get out of the way so she can have that delicious after-dinner smoke. Anna-Karin gave up complaining about it a long time ago. Her mother feels that cigarettes are the only luxury she allows herself, and that’s why she intends to ‘damn well smoke without feeling guilty about it’.

  Rain is pelting the window. Puddles are forming in the garden in front of the house.

  The potato salad and smoked pork loin swells in Anna-Karin’s mouth. It doesn’t feel like there’s room for anything in her stomach except stress. She tried to study for a while before dinner, but found herself reading the same paragraph over and over again.

  She’s afraid she won’t be able to handle the natural sciences course. If she wants to become a vet, she’ll need top grades. She can’t fall behind so early in her first term of year eleven.

  ‘I had a phone call,’ Grandpa says, all of a sudden, and looks at Anna-Karin, ‘from Åke. His son works as a para medic. Åke was wondering how you were. If you knew the boy.’

  ‘What’s this?’ Mama asks, between puffs.

  They stare at her. Might as well get it over with.

  ‘A boy died at school today. Elias. He killed himself.’

  Mama takes a long drag from her cigarette, then shrouds the table in ultraviolet smoke with a single exhalation. ‘And you’re only telling me now?’

  Anna-Karin looks at Grandpa helplessly.

  ‘It wasn’t Helena’s son Elias, was it?’ Mama continues.

  ‘Helena who?’

  ‘The priest! What was Elias’s last name?’

  It’s easy to forget that Mama once had another life. It’s only when she starts talking about old friends and acquaintances that Anna-Karin remembers.

  ‘Malmgren,’ answers Anna-Karin.

  ‘Good Lord, it is him.’ Mama puts out her cigarette and immediately lights another one. She looks elated. She’s always like that when there’s a tragedy or an accident. It’s the only time she ever stops wallowing in her own misery. ‘Poor Helena,’ she says. ‘Isn’t that typical? She works as a spiritual guide to others, but I suppose you can still be blind to what’s going on in your own home. How did he do it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But he did it at school?’

  Mama is excited now. For once she’s alert and bursting with energy. She leans towards Anna-Karin as if they were two friends gossiping over coffee.

  ‘Who found him?’

  ‘Two girls. One of them is in my class. Minoo.’

  ‘The newspaper man’s daughter,’ Mama says.

  Grandpa has been sitting there without saying a word. Now he reaches across the table and pats Anna-Karin’s hand. ‘Was this Elias a friend of yours?’

  ‘No. I just knew who he was.’

  ‘When you’re young you think the world revolves around you and that every little setback is a catastrophe,’ Mama says. ‘You don’t understand how good you’ve got it. All the responsibility you’re spared.’

  ‘Young people don’t have it easy these days,’ Grandpa remonstrates.

  ‘No? They expect to have everything done for them.’ Mama snorts.

  Anna-Karin has trouble swallowing again. Her anger is stuck, like a lump, in her throat. She puts down her knife and fork.

  ‘With his whole life ahead of him,’ Mama continues. ‘I can’t understand it.’

  But I can! Anna-Karin wants to scream.

  She’s thought so many times how easy it would be to end it all. The first occasion was when she was eight and had told her teacher about her living hell. He tried to talk to the kids who were bullying her, but they responded by stripping her down to her T-shirt and pants and leaving her in the playground in the middle of winter. ‘Next time we’ll kill you, farm girl,’ said Erik Forslund. When her mother came and picked her up, Anna-Karin said that they had been playing. If Mama had probed a little, she would have told her the truth. But instead she had scolded her for making her drive all the way to school to pick her up.

  Yes, Anna-Karin knows how it feels to want to die. For eight years she’d thought about it almost every day, then put it out of her mind. Because Grandpa’s here. And the animals. And the holidays when she doesn’t have to go into town. And sometimes, when she dares to think that far ahead, the dream of another life takes form – a life in which she’s a vet and can buy a farm of her own, in the middle of the forest, far away from Engelsfors.

  ‘There’s probably a lot we don’t know about how the boy was doing,’ Grandpa says to Mama, in his diplomatic manner.

  ‘It can’t have been easy, of course, with those parents.’ Mama nods, misunderstanding Grandpa as usual.

  Sometimes Anna-Karin doesn’t know which of them annoys her most: Grandpa, who won’t judge anybody, or Mama, who judges everyone except herself.

  ‘I mean, Helena’s always worked a lot, and Krister –don’t get me started on him. Th
e great government boss – I don’t suppose he has time for anything so mundane as his family. Oh, yes, things aren’t always as perfect as they appear.’

  Mama relishes the misfortune of successful people and makes no attempt to hide it.

  ‘Of course, I don’t want to say that it’s somehow the parents’ fault, but you can’t help wondering. When children enter this world, they’re like blank pages. It’s we adults who fill them. And when your father left us, I said to myself, “Anna-Karin shouldn’t have to …”’

  Mama continues to talk, but Anna-Karin can’t bear to listen any more. You’re fucking evil, she wants to scream. You don’t know anything about Elias’s family, you don’t even know anything about your own family, and still you sit there judging them. You don’t have the right to say anything.

  JUST SHUT UP!

  Anna-Karin’s heart is pounding in her chest. Suddenly she notices the silence.

  Mama has stubbed out her cigarette. The butt lies in a crumbled V-shape on the edge of her plate, but is still smouldering. She’s staring at Anna-Karin, wide-eyed. She clears her throat and tries to say something, but all that comes out is a hiss.

  Anna-Karin glances at Grandpa. He looks concerned.

  ‘Are you all right, Mia? Is there something stuck in your throat?’ he asks.

  Mama reaches for her glass of water and gulps. She hawks loudly, but still can’t speak.

  ‘Mama?’ Anna-Karin says.

  ‘I’ve lost my voice,’ she mimes.

  She gets up and shuffles out of the kitchen holding her cigarettes. Soon afterwards the TV comes on in the living room.

  Grandpa and Anna-Karin stare at each other. Anna-Karin starts to giggle uncontrollably.

  ‘It’s nothing to laugh at,’ Grandpa reproaches her, and she goes quiet.