Dark Angel (4 page)

‘We’ll take along our own lunch so we can sit in that wonderful park over near Solliden. From there you have a view of the whole city, let me tell you. Oh, it’s going to be marvellous!’

She dashed into the bathroom to put mascara on her beautiful long lashes, making them even longer. I sat on the lid of the toilet and watched with admiration as she got ready.

‘You have such beautiful eyes, Mamma.’

‘You think so?’ she replied, giggling with pleasure. ‘Thank you, my sweet little boy!’

Grandma was too frail to go with us. Instead, we were going to meet Aunt Ruth and my cousin Stefan at the zoo. He was a few years older than me. Aunt Ruth was on her own, just like Mamma. Her husband had left her because he’d fallen in love with his secretary. The family used to live in Saltsjöbaden and were ‘well to do’, as my mother put it. Now Aunt Ruth and Stefan had moved to a small flat in Östermalm.

We took the train, since Grandma lived some distance outside the city. I grew more and more excited with every station we passed. I could hardly sit still. My siblings chattered away with Mamma, commenting on the view from the window and discussing the people who walked past on the platform whenever the train stopped at a station.
Look at the strange hat that old woman is wearing! Where are we now? Did you see that man – was he drunk? Are we almost there? What a cute puppy!

I couldn’t concentrate. I just wanted to sit in silence until we reached our destination.

After what seemed like an eternity, we finally arrived at Stockholm’s central station. From there we took a bus out to Skeppsbron in Gamla Stan. That was where we could catch the ferry to Skansen. Mamma didn’t like taking the underground. She said it smelled bad, and it was filled with so many unsavoury characters.

Aunt Ruth and Stefan were waiting at the ferry dock when we arrived. Mamma and Ruth hugged each other, while my siblings and I shook her hand. We didn’t see her very often, only a few times a year. Stefan seemed happy to see us, which was a relief to me. It was something I’d been worrying about.

We boarded the ferry and I stayed out on deck with the other kids. The sun shone; the water sparkled. It was May. Soon it would be summer and I would be out of school. Stefan and I stood next to each other, leaning over the railing and looking at the churches and other buildings in the narrow streets of Gamla Stan, which was receding more and more into the distance behind us.

Mamma and Aunt Ruth were sitting inside to stay out of the wind. Both of them had pinned up their hair under a scarf. Ruth’s scarf was navy blue, while Mamma’s was pink. That was her favourite colour. She was looking stylish in a tight-fitting black dress and a short pink jacket with big buttons. I was proud of my mother because she looked so pretty. In comparison, Ruth looked like an old woman, even though they were almost the same age. Mamma was slender and seemed much younger. She sat inside the ferryboat, laughing and looking lovely. I was glad to see her so happy.

And soon I was going to meet in real life all the animals that I’d seen only in pictures or on TV. I could hardly believe it.

All of a sudden the zoo was right in front of us. Stefan pointed. ‘Do you see the amusement park? And the rollercoaster? Over there. I’ve ridden on it a whole bunch of times. Don’t you think it looks scary?’

I shook my head. I’d never been there before, but at that moment it didn’t matter. I was going to Skansen.

The boat docked and everybody disembarked. There were a lot of people and I lost sight of the others in the crowd in front of the entrance to Gröna Lund. Suddenly I felt somebody give me a hard pinch on the arm.

‘Where on earth were you?’ snapped Mamma in annoyance. That ugly voice of hers was back, even though she had just been laughing so merrily. ‘You need to stay close. Don’t you understand that?’

The lump in my stomach came back, settling into its familiar place. I tried to block out its presence from my mind, tried to forget it was there. We had almost reached the zoo. I tossed a remark to Stefan in a halfhearted attempt at a joke, making a great effort to act normal. We were here to have fun. I’d been looking forward to this day for such a long time. The animals were waiting inside.

At the entrance we had to stand in a queue. Mamma started looking tense because there were at least thirty people ahead of us. The nervous feeling in my stomach got worse. ‘I’m sure it won’t take very long, Mamma. Here, let me carry the bag.’

The sun was shining, it was warm outside, and no one else seemed at all concerned about the wait. They were talking and laughing and joking. I wished that Mamma could be as relaxed as they were.

The queue slowly moved forward. Ruth powdered her nose. Mamma lit a cigarette. ‘God, why is this taking so long? What can they possibly be doing up there?’

When we finally passed through the turnstile, everyone had to use the loo. But I was too excited to pee.

Skansen was located high atop a hill and we began making our way up the slope. Suddenly we found ourselves right next to an ice-cream stand, and Ruth stopped.

‘OK, I’m treating everybody to ice cream! Then we’ll sit down and get re-energized before we climb any further. Skansen is a big place, kids. It takes a long time to walk all the way around. Right over there are the elephants, but you have to finish your ice cream before we can go and see them. Or else they might swipe the cone right out of your hand! All right. Choose any kind of ice cream you want!’

The strained look on Mamma’s face disappeared when she sat down at a café table with a cup of coffee and a vanilla cone.

‘This is exactly what we all needed,’ she told Ruth, giving her sister a grateful smile.

The mood immediately lifted, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

When we each had to choose the ice cream we’d like to have, I was too
timid
at first to ask for a soft ice cream in a waffle cone, which is what I wanted most. But Ruth refused to give up until I admitted that was what I wanted. The man in the ice-cream stand gave me a wink and let the soft ice cream come swirling out of the machine until I had the tallest ice-cream cone I’d ever seen. Delighted, I carefully took the cone from him. It was a blend of vanilla and chocolate, and it tasted wonderful. I’d only had a soft-ice cone a few times before, and this was the best one of all. I sat down at the table next to Mamma.

I felt butterflies churning in my stomach as I looked towards the entrance to the elephant house. Soon we’d be going inside. All the kids had ordered the same kind of cone, but when I looked around at everyone else seated at the table, I was happy to see that mine was a little taller than everyone else’s.

As if my cousin Stefan could read my thoughts, he suddenly cried: ‘Who has the biggest cone?’

He leaned forward, holding out his cone to compare it with mine. I rose halfway out of my chair to do the same. But in my eagerness, I happened to bump into Mamma’s coffee cup. It toppled off the table and landed in her lap. I can still hear her angry shout as the hot coffee spilled over her skirt and bare legs. I jumped up so quickly that all the ice cream fell out of my cone.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, you little idiot!’ she bellowed. The next second she burst into tears.

Ruth leaped up and nervously began wiping Mamma’s skirt with paper napkins from the holder on the table as she tried to console her sister. ‘Hush now, it’s not so bad. We’ll just wipe you off here and then go into the loo to wash off the rest with water. Your skirt will dry in no time in the sun. You’ll see.’

The other children and I sat in horrified silence as Mamma sobbed. She kept switching between feeling sorry for herself and yelling at me.

‘Why does everything always have to get wrecked? Why can’t I ever be happy for just one minute?’

I noticed that the people at the other tables were staring at Mamma with a mixture of surprise and alarm. And then, to my dismay, I suddenly
felt
something running down my legs. When Mamma saw it too, she got even angrier.

‘So now you’re peeing your pants like a baby? Haven’t you already done enough? Haven’t you? You stupid sodding brat! You always ruin everything – absolutely everything!’

Terrified, I sat frozen to my chair, incapable of moving. In one hand I still held the empty cone.

Mamma was silent and withdrawn the whole way back to Grandma’s flat. I never got to see the elephants. I would never visit Skansen again.

SUNDAY STARTED OFF
slowly at the editorial offices of Regional News in Visby. Johan Berg rarely had to work on Sundays; it only happened a few times a year. What annoyed him most was that on this particular day, the editors in Stockholm had decided that they didn’t need any stories from Gotland. The news reports would consist entirely of stories compiled at headquarters on the mainland. Having to sit in the office when nothing was going on seemed to Johan like the stupidest waste of resources. But there’s no use trying to second-guess the managers of Swedish TV, he thought morosely. He really could have used a few more hours’ sleep.

At the moment he was sitting at his desk, having his morning coffee and eating a sandwich. He listlessly rocked his chair, casting a critical eye at the cramped quarters of the editorial office. He let his gaze wander over the bookshelves, the computers, the bulletin boards and the windows overlooking a park. He also glanced at the stacks of jumbled documents and the map of Gotland, which always gave him a guilty conscience because there were so many small parishes that they almost never visited.

Although Gotland was Sweden’s largest island, the distance between the northern tip of Fårö and the southernmost district, Hoburgen, was no more than 180 kilometres. And the island was barely 50 kilometres at its widest. That’s why we ought to be doing more, thought Johan. We should be covering more of the island.

As a reporter for Regional News in Stockholm, with Gotland as his beat, he’d become a bit jaded after so many years of meeting deadlines and working with inadequate resources. Although things had definitely
improved
: they’d moved from a musty cubbyhole of an office into the new and modern building that housed Swedish TV and Radio, only a ten-minute walk from the centre of Visby. The premises were admirably suited to their jobs, but they’d been forced to change their routines. They’d had to become much more organized. Now they set themselves goals, and pursued a specific strategy in their work. Usually he or his cameraperson, Pia Lilja, decided which stories to investigate, yet, since they were the only two employees in the local editorial office, it was difficult to find time to do the necessary research. Their boss in Stockholm, Max Grenfors, wanted them to deliver a story every day in a steady stream so that he had no problem filling the TV news programmes. He preferred their reports to be no more than two minutes long, which was considered just right in terms of newsworthiness and relevance, since the further away from Stockholm the programme ventured, the less important the news was deemed. At least that was how Grenfors viewed things. Johan couldn’t even count the number of times he’d beaten his head bloody against the brick wall that was Max Grenfors, trying to stir up interest for some issue on Gotland. The issue might be a regional problem, but it could still be placed in a larger national context.

Johan switched on his computer. They were working on an urgent topic that was even relevant to Stockholm – and the rest of the country, for that matter. It was the increasing incidence of violence among young people. He pulled up a photo of a sixteen-year-old boy that filled the entire screen: Alexander Almlöv, brutally assaulted late one night outside a popular club for teenagers in Visby. He had been beaten so badly that he had been taken into intensive care at the Karolinska Hospital in Stockholm. Now, two weeks after that fateful night, the boy was still in a coma, hovering between life and death. He’d got into a fight with a classmate outside the Solo Club down near Skeppsbron. The club had advertised a special evening for students. Hundreds of young people from all over the island had turned up, and even though no alcohol was served to anyone under eighteen, the kids had brought their own booze from home and consumed great quantities of it out on the street. The fight had started with a row inside the club and escalated when those involved were thrown out by
the
bouncers. Then several others jumped into the brawl. It ended with Alexander getting chased down to the harbour, where he was beaten unconscious behind a shipping container. He was kicked and punched, receiving blows both to the head and to the body. After he passed out, he was left on the ground to his fate. Some of his friends went out looking for him and found him only a few minutes later, which undoubtedly saved his life. If he survived. The outcome was still uncertain.

The number of assaults among young people had increased dramatically over the past few years, and they were getting more severe. Weapons were being used to a greater extent – knives, clubs and even guns. Johan wanted to do a story on the growing violence and its possible causes. Fights among teenagers usually occurred in the summertime when the island was invaded by tourists. Visby was popular because of its sunny weather, long sandy beaches and the lively bar scene.

‘Hi.’

Startled out of his reverie, Johan looked up from his editing. He hadn’t noticed that Pia Lilja had come in.

With a big yawn, she sat down at her desk across from Johan and switched on her computer.

‘How boring that we have to work on a Sunday. Is there really anything we should be doing?’

‘Not a thing, apparently. Are you tired?’

She gave him a sly look. As usual, she had put on a good deal of eye make-up.

‘Yeah. I didn’t get much sleep last night.’

‘A new boyfriend?’

‘You might say that.’

Pia seemed to have a steady stream of new boyfriends. Her appetite for men was apparently insatiable, and the men seemed equally infatuated with her. Pia was twenty-six, tall and slender, with black hair sticking out in all directions. She’d had both her nose and her navel pierced and adorned with gemstones in various colours. And it was no exaggeration to say that her choice of eye shadow was vibrant. Right now her lids were painted a bright turquoise.