‘No, I doubt that,’ Linda said. ‘After all, she’s just been checked over by a doctor.’
Vanja screamed and screamed. The whole of her little face was in convulsion.
‘What shall we do?’ Linda said in desperation.
‘Hold her for a while and we’ll see,’ I said.
The second couple, the ones after us, came out with their baby in a car seat. They studiously avoided looking at us as they passed.
‘We can’t stand here,’ I said. ‘Let’s go. Come on. She’ll just have to scream.’
‘Have you rung for a taxi?’
‘No.’
‘Then do it!’
She looked down at Vanja, whom she was hugging, not that it helped, there wasn’t much reassurance in the contact between Vanja’s romper suit and Linda’s Puffa jacket. I took out my mobile and tapped in the taxi number, holding the car seat in my other hand, and walked towards the stairs at the end of the corridor.
‘Hang on,’ Linda said. ‘I just have to put on her hat.’
She screamed all the time we waited for the taxi. Fortunately it arrived a few minutes later. I opened the rear door, put the seat in and tried to secure it with the seat belt, which I had managed an hour earlier without a problem, but now it appeared to be absolutely impossible. I tried attaching it in every conceivable way, through, over and under the bloody seat, and none worked. All with Vanja screaming and Linda looking daggers at me. In the end the driver got out to help me. At first I refused to move, I could damn well manage this on my own, thank you, but after another minute’s fumbling I had to concede defeat and let him, a moustachioed Iraqi-looking man, fasten it at a stroke.
All the way through snowy glistening Stockholm she screamed. Only when we were through the door, at home and she was lying undressed on the bed with Linda did she stop.
We were both drenched in sweat.
‘That was a bit of an ordeal!’ Linda said as she got up from Vanja, asleep on the bed.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There’s some life in her anyway.’
Later that day I heard Linda telling her mother about the medical check-up. Not a word about all the screaming or the panic we had felt, no, what she told her was that Vanja smiled when she was on the table being examined. How happy and proud Linda was! Vanja had smiled, she was in perfect health, and the low sunlight outside, seemingly elevated by the snow-covered surfaces, made everything in the room soft and shiny, even Vanja, as she lay naked on the blanket kicking her legs.
What had happened afterwards was passed over in silence.
Now, waiting in the wind for the ferry, close to a year later, the whole scene appeared bizarre. How was it possible to be so ignorant? But that was how it had been, I could still remember how I felt inside then, how fragile everything had been, also the happiness that was radiated everywhere. Nothing in my life had prepared me for having a baby, I had barely seen one before, and the same was true for Linda, she had not had a single baby near her during her adult life. Everything was new, everything had to be learned on the hoof, also the mistakes that were bound to be made. Quite soon I began to regard various elements of childcare as challenges, as though I were participating in a kind of competition the point of which was to tackle as much as possible at once, and I had continued doing this when Vanja became my responsibility during the day, until there were no new elements left, the little field was conquered, and all that remained was routine.
The engine on the ferry was thrown into reverse as it slowly glided the last metres towards the quay. The ticket collector opened the gate and we, apparently the only passengers, pushed the buggy on board. Bubbles of grey-green water rose to the surface around the propellers. Linda took her wallet from the inside pocket of her blue jacket and paid. I held the railing and looked back towards the town. The white projection which was the Royal Dramatic Theatre, the ridge of hills that separated Birger Jarlsgatan from Sveavägen, where our flat was. The vast mass of building that filled almost all the space in the countryside. How a different perspective, which knew nothing of the purpose of houses and roads, but which considered them as forms and mass, the way pigeons must see the town they fly over and land on, saw the town, how this view in one fell swoop made everything alien. An enormous labyrinth of passages and cavities, some under an open sky, others enclosed, others again under the ground, in narrow tunnels through which trains raced like larvae.
Well over a million people lived their lives there.
‘Mummy said she could look after Vanja on Mondays if you wanted. Then you’d have the day to yourself.’
‘I’d like that of course,’ I said.
‘No of course about it,’ she said.
Mentally, I rolled my eyes.
‘But then we can sleep there,’ she went on. ‘And then come back together early in the morning. If you want, that is. And mummy can bring Vanja in the afternoon.’
‘Sounds like a good plan,’ I said.
When the ferry moored on the other side we walked up the street beside the fair, which in the summer months was always full of people, queuing in front of the ticket windows or hot dog stands, eating in one of the fast food restaurants across the way or just walking. The tarmac was littered with tickets and brochures, ice cream wrappers and hot dog paper, serviettes and drinking straws, Coke cups and juice cartons and everything else people enjoying their leisure tended to drop. Now the street ahead was quiet, empty and clean. Not a soul to be seen anywhere, not in the restaurants on one side, nor in the fair on the other. On a little hill at the other end was Circus, the concert venue. I had been to the restaurant there once with Anders, we had been on the lookout for somewhere showing the Premier League. They had the match we wanted to see on the TV at the back. There was only one other person inside. The light was dim, the walls dark, yet he was wearing sunglasses. It was Tommy Körberg. All the newspapers had his face plastered over the front pages that day, he had been caught drink-driving, you could hardly walk a metre in Stockholm without seeing his face. Now he was hiding in here. The flagrant stares must have been as unpleasant for him as the carefully averted eyes, he left a short time after we entered, even though neither of us had glanced in his direction once.
Compared with what he appeared to be going through, my worst attacks of post-alcoholic angst paled into insignificance.
My mobile rang in my pocket. I took it and looked at the display. Yngve.
‘Hi?’ I said.
‘Hi,’ he answered. ‘How’s it going?’
‘Fine. How about you?’
‘Yep, fine.’
‘Good. Yngve, we’re about to go into a café. Can I ring you later? This afternoon some time? Or was there something in particular?’
‘No, nothing. We can talk later.’
‘Bye.’
‘Bye.’
I put the mobile back in my pocket.
‘That was Yngve,’ I said.
‘Is he all right?’ Linda asked.
I shrugged.
‘I don’t know. But I’ll call him afterwards.’
Two weeks after he turned forty Yngve left Kari and moved into a house on his own. It had all happened very suddenly. Only when he had been here last time had he told me about his plans. Yngve seldom talked about personal matters, he kept almost everything to himself — unless I asked him direct questions, that is. But that didn’t always happen. Besides, I didn’t need him to confide in me to know that he had been living a life he didn’t want. So when he told me it was over, I was happy on his behalf. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help thinking about dad, who had left my mother just a few weeks before he turned forty. The age coincidence, which in this case was down to a week, was neither a family nor a genetic matter and the midlife crisis was not a myth: it had begun to hit people around me, and it hit them hard. Some went almost crazy in their despair. For what? For more life. At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realised it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. Unless you took one last gamble.