The Secret Life of Mr Roos Read online

  HÅKAN NESSER

  THE SECRET LIFE OF MR ROOS

  Translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death

  Contents

  ONE

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  TWO

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  THREE

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  FOUR

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  The towns of Kymlinge and Maardam do not exist in real life, unlike the Romanian writer Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu whose work is cited at several points in this book.

  ‘All my life I have longed to be alone in a place like this’

  Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

  (translated by Anne Born)

  ONE

  1

  The day before everything changed, Ante Valdemar Roos had a vision.

  He was walking with his father in a forest. It was autumn and they were holding hands; the sunlight filtered through the lofty crowns of some tall pines; they went along a well-worn path that wound its way between mossy rocks and low, twiggy clumps of lingonberry. The air was clear and bright, with a scent of mushrooms as they passed some spots. He was probably five or six, and could hear birds calling and a dog barking in the distance.

  Here’s Gråmyren, said his father. This is where we usually see the elk.

  It was the 1950s. Father was in a leather waistcoat and a checked cap, which he now took off, letting go of his son’s hand to wipe his forehead with the arm of his shirt. He took out his pipe and tobacco and started the filling process.

  Look around you, Valdemar my lad, he said. Life never gets any better than this.

  Never any better than this.

  He wasn’t sure if it had really happened. If it was a genuine memory or just an image floating to the surface of the enigmatic well of the past. A yearning back to something that possibly never existed.

  On this particular day, more than fifty years later, sitting on a sun-warmed rock beside his car, he shut his eyes and turned his face to the sun, and it wasn’t easy to work out what was true and what just seemed to be real. It was August, there were thirty minutes of his lunch hour left. Valdemar’s father had died in 1961 when he was a boy of twelve, and his memories often had this sort of shimmer of a lost idyll. He tended to think it wouldn’t be so very odd if it had never happened. But his father’s words had a genuine ring, and didn’t feel like something he’d invented himself.

  Life never gets any better than this.

  And he remembered the cap and the waistcoat vividly. He was five years younger than I am now, when he died, he thought. He only reached fifty-four.

  He drained his coffee and got back behind the wheel. He reclined the seat as far as it would go and closed his eyes again. Opened the side window so the warm breeze could reach him.

  Sleep, he thought, I’ve got time for a fifteen-minute nap.

  Perhaps I’ll get another glimpse of that moment in the forest. Or perhaps some other lovely vision.

  Wrigman’s Electrical made thermos flasks. When the firm started in the late fifties and for a decade or so thereafter, its range had comprised a variety of electrical goods such as fans, food processors and hairdryers, but from the mid-seventies onwards it had produced only flasks. The change was made primarily because the founder, Wilgot Wrigman, as good as went up in smoke in a transformer fire in October 1971. That sort of thing can give an electrical company a bad name. People don’t easily forget.

  But the name lived on; there were those who felt Wrigman’s Electrical had become a recognized brand. The factory was out in Svartö, about twenty kilometres north of Kymlinge, the company had around thirty employees and Ante Valdemar Roos had been its head of accounts since 1980.

  Twenty-eight years, to date. Forty-four kilometres by car every day; and if you calculated on the basis of forty-four working weeks a year – for the sake of a pleasing balance if nothing else – and five days a week, that came to 271,040 kilometres, which was the equivalent of roughly seven times round the globe. The longest journey Valdemar had ever made in his life was to the Greek island of Samos, that second summer with Alice, twelve years ago now. Say what you liked about time, it certainly did have a way of passing.

  But there was also another kind of time; in fact, Ante Valdemar Roos would sometimes imagine that two vastly differing concepts of time existed in parallel.

  The time that rushed by – adding days to days, wrinkles to wrinkles and years to years – there wasn’t much you could do about that. You simply had to hang on in there as best you could, like young dogs chasing after a bitch in heat, or flies after a cow’s arse.

  But the other time, the recurring kind, that was something different. It was slow and long-drawn-out, sometimes coming to a complete standstill, or at least that was how it seemed; like the sluggish seconds and minutes when you were seventeenth in the queue and waiting at the red light at the junction between Fabriksgatan and Ringvägen. Or when you woke up half an hour too early and couldn’t get back to sleep for the life of you – only lie there on your side, watching the alarm clock on the bedside table and slowly getting used to the idea of dawn.

  It was worth its weight in gold, that uneventful time, and the older he grew, the more evident that became.

  The pauses, he would think, it’s in the pauses between events – and as the ice forms on the lake on a November night, if you want to be a touch poetic – that I belong.

  I and people like me.

  He hadn’t always thought that way. Only for the last ten years or so. Maybe it had gradually crept up on him, but there had been one particular occasion when he became aware of it – and put it into words. It was one day in May, five years ago, when the car suddenly died halfway between Kymlinge and Svartö. It was morning, and a minute or so after he passed the crossroads at Kvartofta church. The car ground to a halt at the roadside and Valdemar tried to start it a few times but without even a hint of success. First he rang Red Cow to say he would be late, then he rang the roadside assistance firm, and they promised to be there with a replacement car within the half hour.

  An hour and a half passed, and it was in the course of those ninety minutes, as Valdemar sat behind the wheel, watching the birds in flight beneath the clear skies of a May morning, with the light playing over the fields and over the veins on his hands, where his blood pumped round with the aid of his trusty old heart, that he realized it was at times like this his soul made a space for itself in the world and set up home there. At exactly these times.

  He didn’t care how long it took the breakdown truck to arrive. He was unperturbed by Red Cow ringing to ask if he was making a bid for freedom or what. He felt no need to talk to his wife or to any other human being.

  I should have been a cat instead, Ante Valdemar Roos had thought. Hell yes, a fat farm cat basking in the sun outside a cowshed, that really would have been something.
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  He thought of the cat again now, as he woke up and looked at his watch. The lunch hour would be over in four minutes, so it was high time to make his way back to Wrigman’s.

  It would only take him two from this secluded clearing he had found, just off a disused forest track and a stone’s throw or two from the factory. Sometimes he came on foot, but he generally took the car. He liked a fifteen-minute nap and it was nice simply to recline the back of the seat and doze off. A man asleep on the ground in a forest glade could have aroused suspicion.

  The staff room at Wrigman’s Electrical was a bare fifteen square metres in size and decked in dark-brown lino and mauve laminate, and after spending an eternity of lunch hours there, Ante Valdemar Roos had dreamt one night that he was dead and had gone to Hell. It was 2001 or 2002 and the Devil had received him personally, holding open the door for the new arrival with his characteristically sardonic smile, and the space inside had proved to be nothing more or less than the staff room at Wrigman’s. Red Cow was already sitting in her usual corner with her microwaved pasta and her horoscopes, and she hadn’t even looked up to give him a nod.

  From the next day onwards, Valdemar had swapped over to having sandwiches, yogurt and coffee at his desk. A banana and a few ginger snaps that he kept in his top right desk drawer.

  And now, at least if the weather was decent, he liked to take the car and get away completely for an hour or fifty minutes.

  Red Cow thought he was odd, and she made no secret of the fact. But it wasn’t only on account of his lunch habits and he’d learnt to take no notice of her.

  It was the same with the rest of them, actually. Nilsson and Tapanen and Walter Wrigman himself. The population of the office; he realized they found him a difficult type, and he’d heard Tapanen use that very phrase when he was on the phone to someone and thought nobody could hear.

  Yes, you know that Valdemar Roos is a difficult type, thank goodness I’m not married to anyone like that.

  Anyone like that? Valdemar parked in his usual place next to the rusty old container, the removal of which had been under discussion since the mid-nineties. Tapanen was only a couple of years younger than he was and had worked at Wrigman’s for almost as long. He had four children with the same woman but had got divorced a while back. He bet on the horses and had been claiming for the last 1800 weeks that it was only a matter of time until he hit the jackpot and bloody well said goodbye to that moth-eaten firm. He always took care to say it in earshot of Walter Wrigman, and the managing director would shift the wad of snus inside his cheek, run his hand over his balding head and declare that nothing would give him greater pleasure. Nothing.

  Valdemar had never liked Tapanen, not even back in the days when he still liked people. There was something petty and vindictive about him; Valdemar often thought Tapanen must be one of those people who would desert his comrades in the trenches. He didn’t entirely know what that meant or where the image had come from, but it seemed as intrinsic to the man as warts were to a warthog.

  But he’d liked Nilsson. The round-shouldered Norrlander spent most of his time out on the road, admittedly, but every now and then he’d be sitting in his place to the right of Red Cow’s glass box. He was no more than forty now, and had been even younger when he started, of course; he was quiet and amiable, and married to an even more reticent woman from Byske, or was it Hörnefors? They had five or six children and were members of some free church, but Valdemar could never remember which one. Nilsson had started at Wrigman’s about six months before the millennium, taking over from Lasse with the leg, who had died in unlucky circumstances in a fishing accident out Rönninge way.

  He had a solemnity to him, Nilsson, a greyish, lichen-like quality that less sympathetic souls, Tapanen for example, would have called dullness, and however much Valdemar would have liked him to, he couldn’t recall Nilsson coming out with anything that might have been called a joke, either. It was hard even to say if he had ever laughed in his almost ten years at Wrigman’s Electrical.

  So it probably said something about Ante Valdemar Roos that he approved of someone like Nilsson. Used to approve of, that is. Before.

  That image of the walk with his father still lingered, anyway. The tall, straight trunks of the spruces, the twiggy clumps of lingonberry, the damp hollows with their meadowsweet and bog myrtle. When he was back in his place behind the desk and switching his computer back on, it was as if his father’s words were going round on an endless sound loop in his head.

  Life never gets any better than this.

  Never any better than this.

  The afternoon passed in an atmosphere of gloom. It was Friday. It was August. The dog days of summer were still hanging on, the first working week after the holidays would soon be over and the immediate future was set out like a hopelessly ill-laid stretch of railway track: a party at his wife Alice’s brother and sister-in-law’s in the old part of Kymlinge down by the church.

  It was a tradition. The Friday after the second Thursday in August they went for a crayfish supper at Hans-Erik and Helga Hummelberg’s. They observed all the usual rituals, donning gaudy little party hats, drinking six different kinds of beer and home-spiced schnapps and slurping crayfish with all the trimmings. There were usually a dozen of them, plus or minus a couple, and for the past three years, Valdemar had fallen asleep on the sofa.

  Not as a result of too much strong liquor, but rather from sheer boredom. He could just about bring himself to join in the conversation, produce a sufficient number of witty remarks and show an interest in all sorts of esoteric nonsense for two or three hours, but then it was as if all the air went out of him. He started to feel as out of place as a seal in the middle of a desert. He spent half an hour in the loo, and if nobody noticed he’d been missing he would generally allow himself another half hour a bit later, sitting on an unfamiliar brown-varnished toilet seat with his trousers and underpants round his ankles, wondering how he would go about it if he ever decided to kill himself one day. Or kill his wife. Or run away to Kathmandu. He had learnt to use the so-called children’s bathroom in the teenagers’ part of the house. They were never home for their parents’ parties anyway, and here he could sit undisturbed and unloved under a brooding cloud of pessimism for as long as he wanted.

  But there must be something wrong, he’d thought the previous year, something seriously wrong with life itself, if in your sixtieth year or thereabouts you couldn’t think of any better solutions than going to a party and locking yourself in the toilet.

  So what to do? he thought when the working week came to an abrupt end and he was once again seated at his steering wheel. What to do? Slam his fist on the table? Declare his opposition and explain politely but firmly that he wasn’t coming with her to Hans-Erik and Helga’s?

  Why not? Why not tell Alice without further ado that he disliked her brother & co. as much as he disliked rap music and blogs and shouty headlines on newsstands, and that he had no intention of setting foot in their quasi-intellectual drinking club ever again?

  As he drove the twenty-two kilometres back to Kymlinge, these questions bounced back and forth in the desolate vacuum inside his head. He knew they were fictional, not real; this was nothing more than the usual litany of cowardly protestations that droned pretty continuously inside him. Questions, formulations and venomous phrases, which never ever passed his bloodless lips and served no other purpose than to make him even more dispirited and melancholy.

  I’m dead, he thought as he passed the new Co-op complex out in Billundsberg. In all essential respects there’s less life in me than in a plastic pot plant. There’s nothing wrong with the others, it’s me.

  Seven hours later he actually was sitting on the toilet. His prediction had come true in every last detail, with the minor addition of his being drunk. Out of pure boredom and in an attempt to infuse life with some meaning he had downed four shots of schnapps, a large amount of beer and two or three glasses of white wine. He had also told the assembled compan
y a long story about a whore from Odense, but when he reached the punchline he unfortunately found he had forgotten it. Such things happen in the best families, but the woman who was one half of a new couple – a bosomy, dyed-blonde psychotherapist with roots in Stora Tuna – had observed him with a professional smile, and he had seen Alice gritting her teeth so hard that she was white around the jaw.

  He had no idea how long he had been sitting on the varnished brown ring, but his watch said quarter to one and he didn’t think he’d dozed off. In Ante Valdemar Roos’s experience it was well nigh impossible to sleep on a toilet. He pressed the flush as he got to his feet to adjust his clothes. He splashed his face with cold water a couple of times and tried to comb the thin strands of hair still growing sparsely on his uneven head into some kind of pattern. Helped himself to a blob of toothpaste and gargled.

  Then he staggered cautiously out of the bathroom and headed for the big sitting room, where Spanish guitar music mingled with loud voices and smooth laughter. Unless anyone else had slipped away to hide, there ought to be eleven of them in there, thought Valdemar; a whole football team of people in various stages of middle age, successful, quick-witted and enjoying their well-earned inebriation.

  Suddenly he hesitated. All at once he felt manifestly old, a genuine failure and not remotely quick-witted. His wife was eleven years younger than him, all the others in the gang were between forty and fifty and the psychotherapist could even still be in her thirties. As for him, it was only a few months until his sixtieth birthday.

  I’ve nothing to say to a single one of them, he thought. None of them has anything to say to me.

  I don’t want to be part of this any more, the best I can wish for is to be a cat.

  He looked around the hall. The décor was entirely white and aluminium. There wasn’t a single object of interest to him. Not a single damn thing he’d have felt like pocketing if he were a burglar. It was just too pitiful.

  He turned on his heel, let himself out quietly through the front door and was met by the cool, clarifying night air.