Mons Kallentoft - Autumn Killing

‘Bloody hell, Malin, you’re not well, can’t you see?’

She had waved her glass of tequila and Coke at him.

‘At least I’m not so retarded that I fuck up the Christmas ham.’

Tove had been sitting a few metres away from them at the kitchen table, her hands on the red cotton tablecloth, beside a new homemade decorative skewer for the ham and the red plates they’d bought from Ahlens for the occasion.

Janne had fallen silent.

Malin had felt like carrying on shouting at him, but ended up just looking at Tove instead.

Her wide open blue eyes seemed to be asking just one simple question of the mulled-wine-scented room:

Is this what loving someone means?

In that case, don’t ever let me love anyone.

Malin can see the sky getting brighter above the edge of the town.

Not much traffic.

She wonders if she’s got any dry clothes to change into in the flat, but knows she hasn’t. Maybe something in a box in the attic, but the rest of her clothes are at Janne’s.

A black car drives past her, she can’t see what make it is through the fog, but the driver’s in a hurry, driving almost twice as fast as she is.

It’s raining again, and newly fallen orange and yellow leaves are drifting in front of the windscreen, dancing before her like fireflies from the devil’s own fire, a hearth that whispers and conjures forth evil from city and countryside alike: Come out, come out, mischief and malice, come out from your cold, flooded holes, and show us what your loveless world looks like.

Janne’s pathetic excuses echo inside her head and in the sounds she hears.

No more Christmases like that one. She has promised herself that much.

‘I have to go.’

They had talked about it again on Christmas Day, Malin had a hangover and hadn’t felt like fighting, she was just quietly furious and sad that everything was turning out the way it always used to.

‘They need me there. I couldn’t live with myself if I turned it down. They need my experience to set up the latrines in the refugee camp; if that doesn’t happen thousands of people will die like flies. Have you ever seen a child die of cholera, Malin? Have you?’

She had felt like punching him when he said that.

They had made love one last time the night before he left.

Hard and without any warmth, and she had a sense of Daniel Hogfeldt’s hard body above her, the journalist she had carried on having sex with sometimes, and she had scratched Janne’s back, biting his chest and feeling the metallic taste of his blood, and he hadn’t objected; he seemed to enjoy being tormented by her rage.

There was steel in her that night. Hard, rigid steel.

Janne had come home a month later, and she had been immersed in her work on the Maria Murvall case, spending the weekends interviewing the officers in Motala who had dealt with the investigation.

Tove was living her own life alongside theirs. Somehow this was how things had turned out.

‘She’s never home. Have you noticed?’ Janne asked one evening in April when they were off at the same time and Tove had gone to the cinema in the city.

Malin hadn’t noticed, how could she have noticed when she herself was never at home?

They talked about seeing a counsellor, trying to get some family therapy.

Several times Malin had stood with the phone in her hand, ready to call psychoanalyst Viveka Crafoord, who had offered to see her free of charge.

But her tongue was paralysed.

That spring Malin had watched them working in the garden again, father and daughter together, she herself merely a physical presence, her soul taken up with a complicated honour killing.

‘How the hell could a father ask his son to kill his daughter? Janne, tell me?’

‘OK, no more tequila tonight.’

‘I hate it when you give me orders. It sounds as if I belong to you.’

Linkoping is enveloped by ice-cold rain.

What exactly is this city, other than a cocoon for people’s dreams? Side by side, the inhabitants of the country’s fifth-largest city push on with their lives. Watching each other. Judging each other. Trying to love each other in spite of their prejudices. The people of Linkoping mean well, Malin thinks. But when a lot of people’s lives are governed by a constant anxiety about keeping their jobs and making their wages last till the end of the month, while a minority live lives of excess, solidarity doesn’t hold up. The city’s inhabitants live side by side, separated by thin geographic lines. You can shout to the council flats of the sixties and seventies from the gardens of lovely villas, and call back from the shabby balconies.

Autumn is a time of decay, Malin thinks. The whole world is scared, waiting to be enveloped in the chill of winter. At the same time the colours of autumn are like fire, but it’s a cold fire that only cold-blooded animals can love and take any pleasure from. The only promise held by the beauty of autumn, the leaves like flames, is that everything is going to get worse.

Her hands are no longer trembling on the steering wheel.

All that is left is the damp chill against her thin body. It’s strong, my body, she thinks. I may have let everything else slip, but I haven’t neglected my training, I’m strong, I’m so fucking strong, I’m Malin Fors.

She drives past the old cemetery.

She sees the reflection of the cathedral spire hit the windscreen like a medieval lance ready to impale her.

What happened tonight?

What words were spoken?

What raised eyebrow, what nuance in whose voice made them start again?

She has no idea; she’s had a bit to drink, not much, but probably far too much to be driving this car at this moment.

Am I drunk? Adrenalin has erased any intoxication. But I’m not quite sober. None of my colleagues will be out tonight, will they?

You bastard. You pathetic, cowardly bastard, always running away. Calm down Malin, stop being ridiculous, stop it, no more drink, for fuck’s sake stop drinking, why don’t you leave, and did I hit him? Did I hit you in the kitchen, Janne, or did I just have my clenched fist in the air, pissed off at all your fucking ‘don’t’s?

I was flailing at the air, I remember that now, now that I’m pulling up in the car outside the front door on Agatan.

The clock of St Lars Church, enveloped in a brittle fog, says it’s quarter to eleven. A few shadowy crows stand out darkly against the sky.

No one in sight, and I don’t want to think about this evening, this night. Beside the church’s dark-grey stone, on the waterlogged grass, sit great piles of raked leaves. In the darkness it looks as if they’re rusting, surrendering their beautiful colours and letting themselves be consumed by the millions of worms emerging from the drenched ground.

You jerked back, Janne, dancing out of the way — you’ve had plenty of practice with worse blows than mine — and I yelled that I was leaving, leaving and never coming back.

You can’t drive in that state, Malin, and you tried to take the keys, and then Tove was there, she’d fallen asleep watching television on the sofa but had woken up, and she shouted, Surely you can see you can’t drive like that, Mum?

Calm down now, Malin, come here, let’s have a hug, and I lashed out again, but again there was nothing but air where I hoped you were standing.

I pretended I’d asked if you wanted to come with me, Tove, but you just shook your head.

And you, Janne, you didn’t stop me.

You just looked at the kitchen clock.

Then I ran to the car.

I drove through the blackest autumn weather, and now I’ve stopped. I open the car door. Black tentacles tear at the grey-black sky. Open holes of fear where the starlight ought to be seeping through.

My shoes on the wet tarmac.

I’m thirty-five years old.

What have I done?

Thursday, 23, Friday, 24 October

The key in the lock.

Malin fumbles, her hands won’t obey even though they stopped shaking a good while ago.

Miss.

Hit.

Miss.

Like everything else.

The flat became vacant the previous week, but she told Janne that she’d got new tenants, another group of evangelical students. This evening’s explosion, unavoidable, anticipated, postponed until it was feasible.

Malin goes inside, shaking the raindrops from her blonde bob. There’s a smell, a mixture of damp and detergent, and Malin can feel that the autumn has crept through the cracks in the windows and spread across the walls, floors and ceilings.

She’s shaking.

Must turn up the radiators.

Another feeling here now.

A lonely feeling. But also a feeling of something new?

The furniture is all where it should be.

The Ikea clock on the kitchen wall is still broken, the second hand lying still at the bottom of the face.

She stands in the living room, wanting to turn on the light, but she can’t be bothered to press the switch. Better to slump onto the sofa in the welcoming darkness. A darkness that is all her own.

Tove.

Fifteen years old this year.

Still mad about books and top of her class, but all that has a heavier tone now, as if the game has become serious, as if time is taking its toll on her.

You’re too young for that, Tove.

A few boyfriends have come and gone during the course of the year.

Goodbye, Peter. Hello, Viggo.

Can I let her go? I can’t punish her with my own feelings of guilt. And she seems to be fine. Malin can see it in her daughter, the glow in her eyes, the way her girlish posture is becoming that of a woman. Malin’s hopes, unexpressed: Hold your ground, Tove, you don’t want to become a mother for many years yet.

Concentrate on your education.

Aren’t I supposed to be giving a talk in a school sometime soon? Malin thinks. The very thought of babbling in front of a group of tired, disinterested students makes her feel miserable, so she brushes it aside.

Malin lies down on the sofa.

Feels the damp clothes against her skin.

The tequila burned out of her body now.

It feels as if the evangelical students’ sanctimony is still clinging to the flat, making her feel slightly nauseous.

Janne. She wants to say she’s sorry, but doesn’t know where to start. And Tove, how can I explain to you? Could you even understand?

What do I really know about your life now, Tove? I have no idea at all, except that this flat is your home, you can move in here with me, anything else is out of the question.

Your books, out at Janne’s.

I’ve tried sitting down beside you a thousand times over the past year, on the sofa, on your bed, asking you how you are, but the only words I get out of you are: ‘I’m fine,’ accompanied, soundlessly, by: ‘Leave me alone, Mum.’

And what do I want from you, Tove?

Your forgiveness? Reassurance that everything’s all right?

Can things ever be all right? That woman, the murderer, held you down on the floor with her bloody hands and was about to kill you.

And I’m the one who brought that scene into being.

There are a thousand wretched ways for it to rain. Raindrops can have any number of colours, even at night, they can take the copper of autumn leaves and make it their own, the rain can become a shower of sparks in the glow of the street lamps, sparks like flying cockroaches.

Malin has slumped to the floor of the living room.

Watching the red, orange and yellow cockroaches flying through the air, hearing their jaws snapping, and she forces them away, chasing them with a flame-thrower, and she can smell charred cockroach corpses as she hounds them from her sight.