Though in the winter, he didn’t see it. There wasn’t enough energy then.
As he hugged his little Lina goodbye, it struck him that time was running out. He had five children and had been dropping them off and picking them up for almost fifteen years without ever thinking that, one day, it would be over. After next year, he would no longer be dropping children off at nursery. He would never drop the children off at nursery again.
Grandkids, maybe. Though hopefully not too soon.
Lina, the little blonde, disappeared, skipping off towards the other children. When he saw her hug a little boy called Rutger, she was no longer daddy’s little girl.
He stood for a moment, watching her. His youngest.
When he stepped out into the hesitant summer morning, he imagined that it would be a good scene for a crime novel. He was a detective, dropping his kids off at nursery. People would recognise themselves in it. Though, obviously, he would be a woman…
No, Arto Söderstedt decided. This wasn’t a crime novel. This was reality.
He wandered along Bondegatan, the sun making a half-hearted attempt to peep through the thick patches of cloud. The street was strangely mottled, an ongoing battle between sun and shade. He came out onto Götgatan, right opposite the tower block which housed the tax authorities. It shimmered in the same strange, mottled, constantly shifting light. Anja would already be inside, checking over tax returns. At the breakfast table, she would give daily reports on the most astounding attempts at tax evasion. So he didn’t need to feel too bad about letting the children spend their summer in day care, the youth centre and summer camps. The married couple shared the tax burden fraternally – or was it sororally?
Down on Götgatan, the newly assigned service Audi was waiting. Without a parking ticket. He had started to learn the complicated parking rules. The accelerator pedal felt well oiled and the clutch elastic. He sat for a moment, pretending to drive. He secretly hoped that no one had seen him cross the line as the Safari Rally’s most brilliant winner of all time.
He turned the ignition and drove towards Kungsholmen. He knew what he would be doing first today. True, he and Viggo would be going to search through Roger Sjöqvist’s and Dan Andersson’s flats in the southern suburbs, but that wasn’t the first thing he was planning on doing.
The first thing Arto Söderstedt would be doing was buying a car. On the Internet.
It was a decision that had matured, if not slowly, then… quickly, in any case. A decision which had matured quickly. He had gained the support of the family using hardly democratic means. Anja, who had been nagging for a car for two years, looked at him sceptically, trying to work out his hidden motives. He revealed nothing, just sat there, poker-faced, spouting altruistic motives like fake playing cards: they could go on trips to Skåne, take day trips to the Kolmården Animal Park, drive around the Bay of Bothnia to Vasa and see whether they had any friends left in Finland.
After all, he couldn’t reveal what the real reason was – that it was fun to drive.
What the enormous family needed was a so-called family car. As he turned off into the garage beneath the police station, he pondered over the term ‘family car’. They were minibuses, but you couldn’t call them that. It sounded unsophisticated. The European Commission for Traffic Safety had recently presented the results of a large safety test on family cars. It was especially welcome in Sweden because the last year had seen a couple of catastrophes where family cars had burst into flames following collisions. Fortunately, the tests revealed that there were safe models.
He came to his office, nodding absent-mindedly in greeting at Viggo Norlander who, once again, looked like something the cat had dragged in. Today, he looked like a ruffled and tattered old great tit. Söderstedt sat down at his computer and launched the browser.
‘We’ve got to go,’ said Norlander sullenly. ‘To Handen first, and then-’
‘The foot,’ said Arto Söderstedt, entering his password.
‘Shut up,’ said Viggo Norlander.
‘So you had Charlotte again last night? Did it go well?’
‘Christ, it’s hard work.’
‘Are you getting cold feet?’
‘No. No, I love it. Really. But it’s hard work. I’m convinced she’s dead three times a night. Sudden infant death syndrome.’
‘What about Astrid?’
‘Thursday night. Astrid meets her friends then.’
‘Sewing circle,’ said Arto Söderstedt while he waited for his password to be approved.
‘What?’
‘They listen deeply to one another. No, it used to be called a sewing circle. Nowadays it’s called a girls’ evening or a girls’ night in. If you’ve woken up on the wrong side of the bed, you could call it a hen house, too. Though you should keep that to yourself. How’s it going with her?’
‘Well, vitality’s the word. Astrid’s born again. She got her baby in the end. She’s bubbling. You say that, right? “Bubbling”?’
‘You can say that. If that’s what you mean.’
‘It’s what I mean. What the hell are you up to? I’ve been waiting quarter of an hour. We’ve got to go.’
‘What do you mean by “bubbling”? It’s only three weeks since she gave birth. No complications?’
‘She tore a bit. Not that it’s slowing her down.’
‘Sexually?’
‘That’s our business, isn’t it?’
‘Exactly,’ said Arto Söderstedt, typing the address for Gula Tidningen’s home page. ‘Your business is the kind of thing you share with your friends.’
‘Shut up,’ said Viggo Norlander.
Söderstedt turned towards him.
‘Come on, Viggo. You’re in your first monogamous relationship in God knows how many decades, and I want to know how it’s going. It’s called a social network. I’m your social network.’
Viggo Norlander’s facial expression changed dramatically. His gloomy, lopsided, inward-backward-sloping mug was replaced by a dreamy smile.
‘Got it,’ said Söderstedt, smiling. ‘That was quick work. Go down to the car, then, I’m coming. This will only take five minutes.’
Norlander disappeared. That’s a robust great tit, Söderstedt thought to himself, glancing over the headlines in front of him on the screen.
Gula Tidningen had, for the past few decades, been Stockholm’s main paper for free advertisements. Maybe also for the stolen goods trade. You could buy anything you wanted second-hand. No questions asked. Cars, for example. Family cars, for example. The paper also had a website. The system wasn’t fully developed yet, but it was more than enough.
He found seven items of interest, above all a Renault Espace and a Toyota Picnic. Terrifying prices, of course, but it was just a case of facing the music. He sent off seven messages showing his interest. That was enough. He returned to the home page.
The headline, THIS WEEK’S ‘I LOVE YOU’, woke his easily aroused interest. Arto Söderstedt loved reading personal ads, declarations of love and intimate messages. He couldn’t really explain why – maybe it was just a perversion of his; maybe these small, concentrated phrases held the longing of our times. In tightly constrained form. A person’s entire complicated emotional life reduced to no more than a few lines, and that meant that the results were normally highly interesting. He thought for a moment about Norlander, seething as he waited down in the garage. But only for a moment. With a voyeur’s overexcited feeling of shame, he glanced through the entries under THIS WEEK’S ‘I LOVE YOU’. Some of them really fuelled the imagination.
‘Stallion Harald. I’m passionate about your rut. Your filly, Edna.’
‘BK is CF. 3 12 13 18 24 28 30. DL.’
‘Stefan. Come back. All is forgiven. Even the freezer incident. I L Y, Rickard.’