The Family Clause Read online

  They step out of the lift, pausing to stroke Yeltsin, the building cat, and then roll on up the hill, down the streets, past the small square with the bird-bath fountain, the health centre, the café, the three hairdressers, the foot clinic and the old people’s home. The one-year-old rubs his eyes. The four-year-old runs ahead. Please wear double shoe covers, says the sign in the cloakroom. But the father generally just uses one on each shoe; it feels wasteful to use two, particularly if it isn’t raining outside. He holds the one-year-old in his arms, says hello to the parents he always says hello to but never chats with. The four-year-old runs off to her classroom, arriving just before Leffe appears with the breakfast trolley. Today’s drop-off is a good one. The four-year-old climbs up onto a chair between two friends and waves goodbye. The father asks the playschool staff how they are. He says hello to the cleaner. He stands outside the glass doors and peeps out from around the corner in that funny kind of way that makes the four-year-old laugh. He does it once. Twice. Three times. By the fourth, the daughter is bored. Even though the father pulls a new face every time. The father heads back to the cloakroom. All he wants is for his daughter to look at him and think that he is funny. For her friends to think he’s a good father. And her friends’ parents. And the playschool staff. And the cleaner. He struggles out of the shoe covers and, as he makes his way over to the buggy with a half-sleeping one-year-old in his arms, thinks about how insane it is that he can’t even drop off his daughter at playschool without feeling the urge to perform, how this is yet another sign that he is broken, that he doesn’t work like everyone else, that he must have gone through something that explains why he struggles to do things that ordinary people manage with zero effort.

  The one-year-old falls asleep in the buggy. The father walks down to the water and watches the ducks. Retired couples walk arm in arm. Mothers on maternity leave sit on sunny benches and eat apples, one foot on the back wheel of their buggies. Two dogs are playing down on the quay. The grass is white with a thin layer of frost. The gravel on the footpath is solid, the way it always is when the temperature approaches zero. A son who is a father suddenly feels content. Daughter at playschool. Son sleeping. He did it. Yet another completely ordinary morning. The kind that all other parents can manage without any trouble, but which he has to struggle his way through. But today, it worked. And tomorrow it will, too.

  He feels ready to call his father. He pulls out his phone. He dials his father’s Swedish number. No answer. He sends a message. He puts his phone away. He calls again. He walks back and forth down by the water, he scans through the list of things he needs to do before the four-year-old’s fifth birthday party, he tries to watch the ducks, the pensioners, the mothers on maternity leave, but all he can think about is his father, the father who isn’t answering his phone and who may not even be alive. He tries to calm down. He calms down. He goes to a café and leaves his sleeping son in the buggy outside. He isn’t worried about anything happening. He trusts the universe. Still, just to be on the safe side he locks the buggy to one of the tables. It’s the kind of thing all parents do. It isn’t remotely strange that you might want to be slightly more cautious when you’re responsible for a one-year-old. He comes out with a takeaway cup. The sun is shining. He heads back down to the water. On the other side, he can see the crack in the rock. You can walk straight into it, look up at the sky and see the clouds with a new clarity, framed by the edges of the rock. To the left are Alfred Nobel’s old blasting bunkers. This was where they tested dynamite, at a safe distance from the general public. He reads from the information board that they produced 16,000 kilograms of nitro-glycerine here, but that after several deadly explosions in 1868 and 1874, production was moved to the south side of the bay and protective barriers were built. He knows he will forget that the holes in the barriers resemble a warp-toothed face and that the rust on the board makes the English translation difficult to read. What he will remember are the numbers, the years, the exact amount of nitro-glycerine. He walks on along the gravel. The buggy rolls silently onto the wooden jetty. He comes to a halt at the very end. He breathes. He tries to take in what he is seeing: the water, the sky, the wind, the islands, the horizon, the boats, the waves, the birds. Someone else probably could have described it. He can’t describe it, but he can stand there and feel like a part of it. Then he pulls out his phone and calls his father. Still no answer.

  * * *

  A sister who doesn’t know the staff at the pharmacy still wants to wait outside. Why can’t we go in together? asks the man who seems to think he is her boyfriend. Because I want to stay here, she says, staying put where she is. Why, though? he asks. Because, she says. Seriously, how old are you? he asks, heading inside. But he says it with that light-heartedness in his voice and the constant smile on his lips that could make even an insult sound like a compliment. How old is she? Too old to be with him, in any case, and too old to be doing something she doesn’t want to do. Never again. She already let herself be duped into that once, when she was too young to understand the consequences.

  She moves over to the bus stop. She phones her father. No answer. Through the shop window, she watches her boyfriend enter the pharmacy. Him and his bloody posture. Not even someone who has just won an Olympic gold is that relaxed. The woman behind the counter says hello, but he is busy reading the signs above the shelves. He’s squinting. He reaches the dental care shelf first, then asks his way over to the shelf of condoms, morning-after pills and pregnancy tests. He reads through the contents of two identical boxes. Then he takes both over to the till and pays.

  You’re officially socially inept, she says when he returns with the two boxes in a small green bag. What’s wrong now? he asks. Didn’t you hear her say hello to you? Who? he asks. The woman behind the counter. I saw her speak to you when you first went in, but you just walked straight past. You saw that from here? he asks. Which of us is the socially inept one? He smiles and hands her the bag. They go back to her flat. She takes the lift. He takes the stairs. As usual.

  When they went on their first walk together, she had tried to make it clear that, no matter how good the sex was, no matter how nice it was to hang out and watch TV shows and wake up next to one another, she wasn’t looking for anything serious. Can we agree on that? she said. That this isn’t anything more than an adult relationship where we satisfy each other’s needs? But it was quite difficult to have a serious conversation with someone who was constantly on the lookout for new sticks to snap in two. He found stones that he tried to hit with other stones. Hello, are you listening to me? she asked. Yeah, he said, pointing out an unusually large anthill. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? she asked. Absolutely, he said. I feel the same way. Hey, what’s that? He pointed to an orange traffic cone that had been dumped in the middle of the wood. I hate it when people do this kind of thing, he said, grabbing the cone and carrying it back to the car park.

  She tried again a few weeks later. She said she wasn’t in love with him. Barely even infatuated. She said they may well have spent practically every night together since they met, but she didn’t have time for a boyfriend, she didn’t want to get tied down, she had her career to think about, and valued her freedom above all else. She had deadlines to meet and clients to butter up and bosses to impress and friends to see. Friends who were more like her, who weren’t seven years younger and who liked things other than relaxing, chilling, taking it easy, working out and watching endlessly long Russian silent films. Come on, this is Yevgeni Bauer’s last film, he said, pointing to the computer screen on which the plot was moving so slowly that it was hard to tell whether he had hit pause. She explained that they really weren’t together. He turned to look at her with his big brown eyes. You love me, he said. I really don’t, she said. You do, you just haven’t realised it yet, he said, and for once he didn’t smile.

  They had been hanging out for a month or so when she invited him to after-work drinks organised by her company. They took
the bus from Slussen and the sun was shining in through the window, making his tattoos glow. As they passed the Viking Line ferry terminal, she told him she had a son. He opened his mouth and held it like that for several seconds. You’ve got a kid? he said. Why didn’t you say anything? You never asked, she said. That kind of thing normally comes up, he said. I’m not normal, she said. You should’ve realised that by now. What’s his name? She looked out of the window. Forced herself to say her son’s name. As she said those two syllables, he was a newborn in her arms, he was asleep with his nose buried in her neck, he was reaching out for her when she went to pick him up from playschool, he was losing his footing at handball practice and limping off the court with an overdramatic look on his face, he was coming home from school with a gaping backpack, asking whether it was okay if he ate at a friend’s house. Nice name, said the man who wasn’t her boyfriend. We need to get off now, she said, standing up.

  On the slope down to the boules court, she dropped his hand. She hugged her perfumed colleagues and kissed her scarf-wearing boss on the cheek, introducing the man who wasn’t her boyfriend as a friend. The company had paid for cocktails, nibbles and boules. It was an experiment. It shouldn’t have worked, but somehow it did. He didn’t know any names, but he still managed to organise a boules tournament. He charmed her boss by saying that he was so good at boules that he should use his scarf as a blindfold. When he went to the toilet, two of her colleagues, one male and one female, sneaked over and asked, independent of one another, whether he was single. Afraid not, she said, though she didn’t quite know why. The sun set, the dust from the boules court settled, and he spent ten minutes talking about why Resnais was overrated with an intern who had apparently also studied film. The bridge into town opened at regular intervals, letting boats with high masts pass. A thundering bassline vibrated over from the other side of the canal. We’re on the wrong side, he whispered, nodding at the teenagers with plastic bags, walking towards the music with their phones as compasses.

  They had been together but not together, more hanging out, for six months when she finally explained why her son no longer lived with her. It had all started when he turned twelve. Though, no, it had actually started back when he was still in her belly. She had met her ex-husband when she was nineteen and he was thirty-five. They got married a year later. To begin with, he was perfectly nice. Possibly a bit jealous. If she had been to a party, he would want to check her phone. Sometimes he turned up outside her lectures at university, to kiss her and be introduced to the boys she was doing group work with. Whenever she went for coffee with a friend, she might leave the café with seventeen missed calls. But she had taken all that as a sign that he was just worried about losing her. He was so in love that he became clingy. Then she got pregnant. He got it into his head that she was deliberately eating things that would harm the baby in her belly. He went through the rubbish in their kitchen to check that she hadn’t eaten sushi. He sniffed the glasses in the kitchen to make sure she wasn’t drinking on the sly. Once, he took her keys and locked her inside the flat they shared. On another occasion, he broke a window in the laundry room and threatened to cut himself if she didn’t promise to call off the hen party in Copenhagen she had planned for a friend. Sometimes she counted the weeks and wondered whether she shouldn’t get rid of the baby. But it was impossible. She couldn’t. There was a life growing inside her, and she was convinced that the baby would give her husband the sense of security he lacked. Then the baby stopped growing. As though it could feel that the world wasn’t safe enough. Her ex-husband accused her, she accused him. When the baby was finally born, strong and healthy, it was only six months before they divorced. That was followed by legal proceedings, custody disputes, social services investigations, meetings with lawyers. Both sought sole custody; she was worried her son would fare badly if he lived with his father, he was convinced the child had been beaten in her care. And that was all lies? asked the man who seemed to think they were together. She turned to him and wondered whether he was serious. Do you really think I could hurt my own child? she asked. I’ve got a temper. I can get angry. I can put my foot down. But I’ve never, and I mean never, hit my son. Never ever ever ever. Except my ex-husband made our son believe that I’d hit him when he was younger. He manipulated him into creating false memories, and when my son turned twelve he decided he wanted to move in with his father. We’ll find our way back to one another. I know we will. I’m completely sure of it. The boyfriend hugged her with those arms that made the world feel safe again, he breathed from the roots of her hair and healed her. I can have a word with your ex if you want, he said. I don’t think that would end well, she said.

  My dad used to beat me at least once a week, he said. Sometimes I’d done something to deserve it, but sometimes it felt more like he was using me to channel some kind of dark energy. Like I was his workout. He would come into my room with a plastic clog in one hand and look for a reason to teach me a lesson. If he saw a test where I hadn’t scored higher than a pass, there’d be a row. If he found dust on top of the lampshade, he’d box my ears. If he discovered I’d scratched my new football boots at practice, he’d give me a couple of smacks. Do you have much contact now? she asked. Last time I saw him was in 2009, during the Christmas rush at Heron City. I was there with a few friends; we’d been to the cinema and their kids wanted to try out this orange simulator thing by the entrance. We were waiting in the queue by the lifts when I saw Dad come out of the sports shop on the other side of the fountain. Hold my jacket, I said to my friend, who had no idea what was going on. I went over to Dad and confronted him about all the crap he’d subjected us to over the years, all the humiliation, the beatings, the kickings, the harsh words. And do you know what he said? She shook her head. That we didn’t deserve his attention. That my siblings, mum and I should be grateful he ever wasted his time even trying to bring us up. I swear. I can’t really remember what happened next. But my friends said he hardly had time to raise his guard before I got three or four really good punches in, he fell against a shop window, dropped his little bag, apparently I grabbed it and handed it to him before I picked him up and carried him over to the fountain. My friends said I was holding him like this, above my head, wrestling-style, like I was ready to throw him in, or at least bring him down onto my knee so he’d break his back, but then I guess I realised that the fountain wasn’t very deep. I put him down, gave him a hard kick on the arse and told him to clear off. Then I went back to the queue and asked for my jacket. My friends said he seemed really shocked that I was stronger than him. That was the last time I saw him. Are you crazy? she asked. You hit your own father? He hit us, he said. I just fought back.