Aida’s silence was due to her having seen things that no human being, least of all a young child, should ever be exposed to, and consequently she never said anything about her past life. It was as if she was slowly liberating herself from the remains of horrific experiences, and might now be in a position slowly to start on a journey towards a life worth living.
And so Agnes Klarström now ran her little foster home caring for these three girls, with financial support from various local councils. Lots of people were begging her to open her doors to more girls skulking around in the outer reaches of society. But she refused: in order to provide the help and feeling of security necessary to make a real impact, she needed to keep her activities on a small scale. The girls in her care often ran away, but they nearly always came back again. They stayed with her for a long time, and when they finally left her for good, they always had a new life in store for them. She never took in more than three girls at a time.
‘I could have a thousand girls if I wanted,’ she said. ‘A thousand abandoned, wild girls who hate being alone and the feeling of not being welcome wherever they go. My girls realise that without money all you receive is contempt. So they disfigure themselves, they stab people they’ve never met before — but deep down they are screaming in pain from a wound they don’t understand.’
‘How come you got involved in all this?’
She pointed at the arm I had amputated.
‘I used to be a swimmer, as you might recall. There must have been something about that in my records. I wasn’t just a hopeful, I really could have become a champion. Won medals. I can say, without bitterness, that my strong point was not my legs, but the strength I had in my arms.’
A young man with a ponytail marched into the room.
‘I’ve told you before that you must knock first,’ she shouted. ‘Out you go! Try again!’
The young man gave a start, went out, knocked and came in.
‘Half right. You must wait until I tell you to come in. What do you want?’
‘Aida’s upset. She’s threatening everybody. Mainly me. She says she’s going to strangle Sima.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe she’s just miserable.’
‘She’ll have to learn to cope with that. Leave her alone.’
‘She wants to speak to you.’
‘Tell her I’m coming.’
‘She wants you to come now.’
‘I’ll be there in a minute.’
The young man left the room.
‘He’s not up to it,’ she said with a smile. ‘I think he needs somebody snapping at his heels all the time. But he doesn’t mind my criticising him. After all, I can always blame everything on my arm. He’s come to me thanks to some unemployment benefit scheme or other. His dream is to be in one of those television reality programmes where the participants get to screw each other in front of the cameras. If he can’t manage that, then he hopes to become a presenter. But simply helping my girls seems to be beyond him. I don’t think Mats Karlsson is going to make much of a career for himself in the media.’
‘You sound cynical.’
‘Not at all. I love my girls, I even love Mats Karlsson. But I’m not doing him a favour by encouraging his flawed dreams, or letting him think that he’s making a positive contribution here. I’m giving him an opportunity to see himself for what he is, and perhaps carve out a meaningful life. Maybe I’m wrong in underestimating him. One day he might have his long hair cut off, and try to make something of his life.’
She stood up, escorted me out into a lounge and said she would be back shortly. The rock music coming from somewhere upstairs was still excessively loud.
Melted snow was dripping from the roof outside the windows, songbirds were flitting around like hastily formed shadows.
I gave a start. Sima had entered the room behind my back, without a sound. This time she wasn’t holding a sword. She sat down on a sofa and tucked her legs underneath herself. But she was on guard the whole time.
‘Why were you watching me through your binoculars?’
‘You weren’t the one I was looking at.’
‘But I saw you. Paedophile!’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I know your type! I know what you’re like.’
‘I came here to meet Agnes.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s something between us.’
‘You fancy her, do you?’
I was shocked, and blushed.
‘I think it’s time to conclude this conversation.’
‘What conversation? Answer my question!’
‘There’s nothing to answer.’
Sima looked away, and seemed to have tired of trying to talk to me. I felt offended. The accusation that I was a paedophile was beyond anything I could ever have imagined. I looked furtively at her. She was intent on chewing her fingernails. Her hair seemed to be a mixture of red and black, and was tousled, as if she had combed it while in a temper. Behind that hard exterior, I thought I could discern a very small girl in clothes much too big and black for her.
Agnes came into the room. Sima immediately withdrew. The lion-tamer had arrived, and the beast had slunk away, I thought. She sat down on the same chair that Sima had occupied, and tucked her legs underneath her, as if she were imitating her foster-daughter.
‘Aida is a little girl, and words have suddenly started pouring out of her,’ she said.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing at all. She’s just been reminded of who she is. A big, hopeless nothing, as she puts it. A loser among lots of other losers. If somebody started a Loser Party in Sweden, there’d be no shortage of members to contribute lots of experience. I’m nearly thirty-three years old. What about you?’
‘Twice that.’
‘Sixty-six. That’s old. Thirty-three isn’t much at all. But it’s enough to realise that there has never been so much tension in this land of ours as there is today. But nobody seems to have noticed. At least, none of the people you might think ought to have their fingers on the pulse. There’s an invisible network of walls in Sweden, and it’s getting worse by the day — dividing people up, increasing the distance between them. Superficially, the opposite might seem to be the case. Get on a tube train in Stockholm and go to the suburbs. It’s not very far in terms of miles, but nevertheless, the distance is enormous. It’s rubbish to talk about entering another world. It’s the same world. But every station on the way out from the city centre is another wall. When you eventually get to the outskirts, it’s up to you if you choose to see the truth of the matter or not.’
‘And what is the truth?’
‘That what you think is the periphery is in fact the centre, and it’s slowly recreating Sweden. The country is slowly rotating, and outer and inner, near and far, centre and outskirts are changing. My girls exist in a no-man’s-land in which they can see neither backwards nor forwards. Nobody wants them, they are superfluous, rejected. It’s no wonder that every morning when they wake up, the only thing they can be sure about is their own worthlessness, staring them in the face. So they don’t want to wake up! They don’t want to get out of bed! They’ve had bitterness drilled into them since they were five, six years old.’
‘Is it really as bad as that?’
‘It’s worse.’
‘I live on an island. There aren’t any suburbs there, just little skerries and rocks. And there certainly aren’t any screwed-up girls who come running at you wielding a samurai sword.’