The Asylum (10 page)
Authors: Johan Theorin
Back home that evening he flicks through
The Animal Lady
and looks at the words
Zylizylon
and
taminal
. Then he switches on the computer and looks them up on the internet. They both exist, and they are both drugs. Drugs that are used to suppress anxiety.
Then he thinks about the name Maria Blanker. Where has he heard it before? He gets out Rami’s only album,
Rami and August
, and reads through the sleeve notes. He was right. At the bottom, after the usual blurb about which musicians played on the album and who produced it, there is one more line:
WITH SPECIAL THANKS TO MY GRANDMOTHER, KARIN BLANKER.
Suddenly
The Animal Lady
feels like a book he is going to have to read over and over again, until he knows the story by heart. He puts it down in front of him on the kitchen table and stares at the cover. Then he glances over at his box of pens and pencils.
Perhaps he won’t just read it? He reaches out and picks up a Faber-Castell. A soft lead pencil. And he begins to fill in the spidery lines in the book, deepening the shadows. It feels so good that he carries on in black ink. Slowly the drawings become clearer,
more
detailed. The only things Jan doesn’t touch are the faces; he decides to leave them looking vague and indistinct.
The work takes up the entire evening. When the ink has dried he can’t help himself; he goes and fetches his watercolours and begins to do some careful colouring. The sky above the island becomes pale blue, the sea dark blue; Maria’s dress is white and her frog has just a hint of yellow. Mr Zylizylon remains dark grey.
By midnight Jan has finished twelve drawings. He stretches his fingers and straightens his back; he has done a good job.
The Animal Lady
is starting to look like a real picture book.
Gradually he has become totally convinced that it was Alice Rami, sitting in her room behind the concrete wall, who dreamed up the story of Maria and the Great Mr Zylizylon. She might not want this to happen, but he is going to help her to finish it.
Lynx
The bunker was ready now, but there were still a few more things to sort out.
By the middle of October Jan had been at the nursery for almost four months, and had got to know the staff in both Lynx and Brown Bear. They were all women, and one of them was Sigrid Jansson. He knew that Sigrid was a cheerful and spontaneous classroom assistant who sometimes found it a little difficult to keep a close eye on the children. Sigrid was kind and pleasant, but her thoughts were often elsewhere. Whenever Jan spoke to her in the playground she was ready to chat, but rarely looked at the children.
At the weekly planning meeting, after the menus and cleaning rota had been discussed, he put up his hand and suggested a little excursion into the forest, a joint outing for the children in Lynx and Brown Bear. He also suggested a date: the Wednesday of the following week, when he knew that he and Sigrid would be on duty. He looked at her encouragingly across the table. ‘Shall we sort it out, Sigrid – you and me? Make packed lunches and take the children out for a couple of hours?’
She smiled at him. ‘Absolutely – brilliant idea!’
He had counted on the fact that she would react positively.
And Nina, who was in charge of the nursery, nodded her agreement. ‘We need to make sure they’re all wrapped up warmly,’ she said, writing the excursion into the timetable.
Jan smiled in turn. The bunker was now clean and well
equipped;
almost everything was prepared. He just needed to sort out the food.
But the next day he saw William’s mother arrive at Brown Bear to pick up her son, and something trembled inside him. She didn’t look at Jan, but he thought she seemed stressed and tired. Problems at work?
The weariness made her seem more human, and for the first time this didn’t feel like just a mind game any more. For the first time, Jan hesitated. He would be risking his job at Lynx – but then again, it wasn’t much of a job to lose. It was a temporary post, and he had less than two months left.
What was worse was the thought that he could harm a little boy, and he spent a lot of time brooding over that in the days leading up to the excursion. He made the final preparations up in the forest: he left the metal door of the bunker and the iron gate in the ravine wide open, and put up arrows made of red material, like a kind of paperchase along the hillside.
The bunker was going to feel like a hotel room – clean and cosy – and full of food and drink and toys. And lots and lots of sweets.
13
‘JAN! JAN!’ THE
children shout happily. ‘Over here, Jan!’
Jan really likes the children at the Dell, and they have accepted him completely. Everything feels fine.
His first late shift starts at one o’clock on Wednesday afternoon and ends at ten in the evening. It almost feels like a practice for the night shift, when he will be alone with the three children who are staying at the pre-school all the time at the moment: Leo, Matilda and Mira.
Andreas and the children are out in the playground when Jan arrives. The temperature is only six degrees today, and Andreas has a thick blue woollen scarf wound around his neck.
‘Hi there!’ He is standing there with his hands pushed down into the pockets of his jeans, steady as a rock in the autumn wind.
‘Everything OK?’ says Jan.
‘Absolutely fine,’ says Andreas. ‘We’ve been outside most of the time.’
They let the children play for another fifteen minutes or so, then they go inside where it’s warm and hand out the lunch boxes which have been prepared over in the hospital kitchen.
Andreas stays on for an extra half-hour, but Jan doesn’t want to ask why. Perhaps he’s following orders from Marie-Louise; has she asked him to keep an eye on Jan?
Eventually Andreas leaves; the sun is low on the horizon. Jan is now solely responsible for the Dell.
But everything will be fine; he will take good care of the children.
First of all he gathers them together in the playroom. ‘What would you like to do?’
‘Play!’ says Mira.
‘And what would you like to play?’
‘Safari parks!’ Matilda shouts, pointing. ‘Like over there!’
Jan doesn’t understand until he grasps that she is pointing at the window and the fence outside. ‘That’s not a safari park,’ he says.
‘Oh yes it is!’ Matilda says firmly.
She doesn’t seem to connect her visits to the hospital with the high fence, and Jan decides not to tell her that there is a link.
The most important duties during the evening shift are to serve the evening meal, make sure the children brush their teeth, and put them to bed. So Jan makes cheese sandwiches for Matilda, Leo and Mira, gets out their pyjamas and asks them to get changed. It is pitch dark outside by now; the time is half past seven. All three children are quite tired, and they scramble into their little beds in the snuggle room without protest. He reads them a bedtime story about a hippopotamus who changes places with an ordinary man and finds himself looking after the man’s little girl, then Jan gets to his feet. ‘Goodnight everyone … See you in the morning.’
He can hear suppressed giggles once he has switched off the light. He waits for a moment, wondering whether to say something, but soon everything goes quiet.
Another evening duty is to air the building, so at eight o’clock he gently closes the door of the children’s bedroom and opens the other windows wide, letting the cold evening air rush in.
Jan can hear music coming from outside, but it is not the thump of a disco beat from some party – rather the gentle, slightly melancholy sound of an old Swedish pop classic. It is coming through the window at the back of the pre-school, and when he looks out he can see a glowing dot in the shadows down below St Patricia’s. The dot is moving up and down – someone is standing outside the hospital, smoking and listening to the radio.
The hospital is not full of bellowing lunatics
, Dr Högsmed had said.
The patients are often calm and completely capable of interaction
.
Is the smoker a patient or a nurse? Jan can’t tell in the darkness.
He closes the windows. What can he do now? He goes into the playroom to have a look through the book boxes. Josefine had taken
The Animal Lady
from the middle of the box on the left; Jan kneels down beside it.
The Animal Lady
has provided him with a task. This morning he completed the drawings on three more pages. When it is finished he will put it back in the box – but he wonders if there are any more handmade books in there.
Slowly he goes through each box, past
Pippi Longstocking
and
Grimms’ Fairy Tales
. Right at the back he finds more thin books that look handmade; there is no author’s name on them. Jan pulls out three and reads the titles:
The Princess with a Hundred Hands, The Witch Who Was Poorly
and
Viveca’s House of Stone
.
He slowly turns the pages in each book, one by one, and sees that these too are handwritten, illustrated here and there with pencil sketches. Just like
The Animal Lady
, all of them seem to be sad tales about lonely people.
The Princess with a Hundred Hands
is about Princess Blanka, whose palace has sunk down into a bog. Blanka has managed to reach safety in one of the towers, but she has no control over anything except the hands of other people; she has to get them to do things for her.
The main character in
The Witch Who Was Poorly
is a sorceress sitting in her cottage deep in the forest, no longer able to cast her spells.
And the third book is about an old woman who wakes up alone in a big, dusty house, with no memory of how she got there.
Jan closes the books and puts them in his bag.
An hour later Marie-Louise arrives.
‘Good evening, Jan!’ She is wearing a scarf and a woolly hat. Her cheeks are glowing red. ‘I had to dig out my winter hat! It gets really cold once the sun has gone down.’
She has a small rucksack with her, and in the staffroom she takes out her knitting and a book entitled
Develop Your Creativity
. She smiles at Jan. ‘OK, I’ll take over now. You can go home and get some sleep.’
When she pulls a black-velvet eye mask out of the rucksack, Jan asks, ‘Are you going to sleep here?’
‘Oh yes,’ Marie-Louise says quickly. ‘Of course you can sleep when you’re on the night shift; that’s fine … but you’re not allowed to wear earplugs. You have to be able to wake up if anything happens.’
Jan is silent, wondering what could possibly happen, but she goes on: ‘Sometimes the children wake up and need a bit of reassurance, if they’ve had a bad dream, for example. Never anything more serious – and even that doesn’t happen very often.’
‘OK … So how long do they usually sleep?’
‘Some of them can be real sleepy-heads, but I usually get up at half past six when I’m on the night shift, and I wake them half an hour later. They have their breakfast, and the shift is over.’
Jan leaves Marie-Louise and the sleeping children. He goes out into the street and glances to the right. St Patricia’s is just over there, like a big dark aircraft hangar behind the wall.
All of a sudden he stops; someone is standing waiting ahead of him in the street, a tall, dark figure – a man in a black coat, motionless under one of the oak trees lining the pavement. The light from the street lamps barely reaches him, and Jan can see only an indistinct, pale face.
They stare at one another. Then the man moves at last, waving some kind of thin rope he is holding in his hand.
Jan realizes it is a dog lead, and almost immediately the dog itself comes trotting out from behind the oak tree. A white poodle. The man bends down, takes out a little plastic bag and carefully scoops up whatever the poodle has left on the ground. Then they continue with their walk.
Jan slowly breathes out.
Get a grip
, he thinks as he sets off. There are no lunatics out here on the streets, just dog owners.
The buses into the town centre don’t run at this late hour, but the
night
air is fresh and he enjoys the walk. It’s only fifteen minutes to his apartment block; when he gets there, most of the windows are in darkness.
My home
, he thinks, but of course it doesn’t really feel like home. That will take a long time.
Then he notices someone smoking a pipe on the balcony two floors below his own. It’s the white-haired man from the laundry room, the one who was (possibly) carrying a scruffy laundry bag from St Psycho’s. The man sucks on his pipe and blows big white clouds into the darkness; he seems lost in thought.
Jan stops and raises his hand. ‘Evening.’
The man nods and coughs out another cloud of smoke. ‘Evening.’
Jan heads inside; he pauses on the second floor and sees that the sign on the right-hand door says V. LEGÉN.
Aha. So at least he knows the name of the pipe-smoker now, and which apartment he lives in.
He carries on up the stairs to the darkness of his own apartment, but he doesn’t stay in. He quickly drops off his rucksack containing the picture books, changes his jacket and goes out again.
He’s just going down to Bill’s Bar for a little while. Perhaps he’ll try to become a regular there – that’s something Jan has never been before, not anywhere.
14
‘CHEERS!’ SHOUTS LILIAN,
raising her glass.
‘Cheers,’ Jan says quietly.
‘Cheers,’ says Hanna, even more quietly.
Lilian drinks the most, knocking back half the contents of her glass. ‘Do you like Bill’s Bar, Jan?’ she asks.
‘I do, yes.’
‘What do you like about it?’
‘Er … the music.’
They are talking loudly, almost the way they do to the children at the pre-school, in order to be heard above the house band. The Bohemos are made up of four youngish men in scruffy leather jackets, standing on a small raised stage. The singer’s hair is pulled back in a blond ponytail, and he delivers rock songs in a hoarse baritone. The stage is cramped, but the band manage a few simple dance steps with their guitars from time to time without bumping into one another. Even though the people in the bar chat away through most of the music, they are still generous enough to give the Bohemos a brief round of applause when each number comes to an end.