The Secret Life of Mr Roos Page 2

  Never any worse than this.

  2

  At half past twelve the following day, Ante Valdemar Roos was on the sofa in his living room, trying to read the newspaper. It wasn’t going unduly well. The text swam before his eyes. His head felt like something that had been left in the oven for too long. His stomach wasn’t in a much better state, and there seemed to be some kind of malignant yellow-flowered coltsfoot clogging the periphery of his field of vision.

  His wife Alice hadn’t spoken to him all morning, but his younger daughter Wilma had told him – just before the two of them slunk out of the door – that they were going out shopping for a few hours. She was sixteen and maybe she felt a bit sorry for him.

  His elder daughter Signe was out on the balcony smoking. Neither Wilma nor Signe was Valdemar’s own; they had come as part of the Alice package when they got married eleven years earlier. They’d been five and nine. Now they were sixteen and twenty. There was quite a difference, thought Valdemar. You couldn’t say things had grown easier with time. Hardly a day passed without him praying to the higher power in whom he didn’t really believe for Signe to stir her stumps and move out. She had been talking about it for three years, but still hadn’t got round to it.

  Ante Valdemar Roos did have a child of his own flesh and blood, however. A son by the name of Greger, who was the product of a bewildering first marriage to a woman called Lisen. It wasn’t a standard name even then, and he didn’t think she had been a particularly standard sort of woman, either. Neither in general nor at any given point in time.

  She was dead now. She had died on a mountaineering expedition in the Himalayas two years before the millennium. The idea had been, if he had understood correctly, to reach some summit or other exactly on her fiftieth birthday.

  They’d been married for seven years when she admitted having had another man on the side almost the whole time, and they had divorced without much fuss. She took Greger with her when she moved to Berlin, but Valdemar had some contact with the boy when he was growing up.

  Not much, but some. School half terms and summer holidays. Some fell-walking and a couple of trips away: a rainy week in Scotland, amongst other things, and four days at the Skara Summerland theme park. Now Greger was entering middle age and lived in Maardam, where he worked at a bank and lived with a dark-skinned woman from Surinam. Valdemar had never met her but he had seen a photo. They had two children and he generally emailed Greger every three or four months. The last time he had seen him was at Lisen’s funeral in a windswept cemetery in Berlin. Ten years had passed since that day.

  Signe came in from the balcony.

  ‘How are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine,’ said Valdemar.

  ‘You look rough.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Mum said you let things get a bit out of hand last night.’

  ‘Pfft,’ said Valdemar, and dropped the paper on the floor.

  She sat down in the armchair opposite him. Adjusted the towel that was wound round her hair. She was wearing her big yellow bathrobe, which he took as a sign that she had managed a shower before her first fag of the day.

  ‘She says you went missing from the crayfish party.’

  ‘Went missing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He picked up the paper and felt the throbbing in his temples as he bent forwards. The coltsfoot seemed to be spreading luxuriantly.

  ‘I . . . took a walk.’

  ‘All the way from Old Kymlinge?’

  ‘Yes. It was a nice evening.’

  She yawned. ‘I heard you come in.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Only ten minutes after I did, actually. Half past four.’

  Half past four? He thought, and a wave of nausea swept over him. Surely that couldn’t be possible?

  ‘It takes a while from Old Kymlinge,’ he said. ‘As discussed.’

  ‘Yeah right,’ sneered Signe. ‘And then you dropped in at Prince for a few beers. Expect that took a while, too.’

  He realized it was true. Signe was as well informed as ever. He had passed a bar on Drottninggatan, seen it was open and nipped inside. He didn’t know it was called Prince, but he suddenly remembered sitting at a shiny bar counter, drinking beer. He’d chatted to some woman too, with lots of red hair and a Yasser Arafat scarf, or at least, some kind of check-patterned headgear, and he might have bought her a drink as well. Or two. If his memory wasn’t playing tricks, she’d had a man’s name tattooed on her forearm. Hans? No, Hugo, wasn’t it? Ante Valdemar Roos groaned inwardly.

  ‘Cilla, my mate, saw you. You were pretty pissed, she said.’

  He chose not to comment, leafing through the paper instead and pretending he had no interest in the conversation. Pretending he wasn’t bothered.

  ‘And she said you were fifteen years older than anyone else in the place. The hag you were with came in at number two.’

  He found the sports pages and started reading the results. Signe went quiet for a moment and sat staring at her nails.

  ‘Mum’s a bit fed up, isn’t she?’ she said, and whisked off into her room without waiting for an answer.

  A day like any other, thought Ante Valdemar Roos, and shut his eyes.

  In the early afternoon he grabbed the chance of a nap, and when he woke up around four he was surprised to discover that he was alone in the house. Wilma and Signe could be anywhere in time and space, but Alice had left a note on the kitchen table.

  Gone to Olga’s. Back late. A

  Valdemar scrunched up the piece of paper and threw it in the rubbish. He took two painkillers and drank a glass of water. His thoughts went momentarily to Olga, who was Russian and one of his wife’s innumerable friends. She was dark-eyed and spoke slowly and mysteriously in a deep voice that was almost a baritone, and he had once dreamt that he had had sex with her. It was a very vivid dream in which they’d been lying on a bed of ferns; she had been sitting astride him and her long black hair had danced in the wind. He had woken just before he climaxed, startled from sleep by Alice turning on the vacuum cleaner half a metre from the bed and then asking him if he was ill or what.

  He opened the fridge and wondered if he was expected to make dinner for the girls. Maybe, maybe not. There were certainly the ingredients for some kind of basic pasta dish. He decided to wait and see. One or the other would presumably turn up in due course, and maybe they’d prefer him to give them some cash so they could stuff their faces in town instead. You never could tell.

  He found his pools coupon and sank into a chair in front of the TV.

  Little did Ante Valdemar Roos think at that moment that his life was about to undergo a radical and fateful change of direction.

  This idiotic phrase was to keep popping into his head in the weeks that followed, and every time it did so he would laugh at it, and with every justification.

  It was his father who had started with that line of numbers. Before he hanged himself he’d been going to the tobacconist on Gartzvägen in K– and playing the same single line of numbers for eight years. Every Wednesday before 6 p.m., and sometimes Valdemar was allowed to go with him.

  Same line? the phlegmatic tobacconist Mr Pohlgren would ask.

  Same line, his father would reply.

  Most of the people who played, Valdemar had come to understand, liked to try their luck with five or eight lines, or with some little system they’d developed, but Eugen Roos stuck to his single line.

  Sooner or later, my boy, he explained, sooner or later it’ll win. When we least expect it – all it takes is patience.

  Patience.

  After his father’s death, Valdemar had taken over, and the very first Wednesday after this misfortune he had gone into Pohlgren’s, filled in the one line on the coupon and paid the forty öre it cost in those days.

  And he had carried on, week after week, year after year. When the pools organizers expanded from twelve to thirteen matches, Valdemar expanded too. From one to three lines. He always hedged hi
s bets on the thirteenth number.

  The same line ever since 1953, in other words. Sometimes he wondered if it was some kind of world record. It had been over fifty years now, a considerable chunk of time however you looked at it.

  The remarkable thing was that neither he nor his father had ever won so much as a krona. Twenty times he’d got nine right; three times it was ten, but there had been nothing paid out for ten on any of those occasions.

  Patience, he would tell himself. If I leave the line to Greger when I die, he’ll be a millionaire one of these days.

  He dozed off in his armchair for a while, he just couldn’t help it. From the twentieth to the forty-fourth minute of the second half, more or less, but he was wide awake for the results round-up at the end. He was still alone in the flat, and as he reached for his pen he thought that if he couldn’t be a cat in his next life, at least he could ask to be a bachelor.

  And then, as the world went on as usual, as innumerable winds blew from all corners and nothing or everything happened or didn’t, the miracle ticked into life.

  Match after match, result after result, tick after tick; Valdemar’s first thought when it was all over was that he’d been the one supervising the whole procedure. That it was all thanks to him – and his careful supervision. He wasn’t in the habit of doing it, and very rarely watched the show these days; he usually made do with checking the winning line on teletext or in Sunday’s or Monday’s paper. Noting that he’d got four or five or six right as usual, and there was nothing to do but try again.

  Thirteen.

  He tasted the word. Said it out loud to himself. Thirteen right.

  He suddenly started to doubt he was awake. Or even alive. The dusky light in the room and in the flat suddenly didn’t feel real, but more like a shroud, so perhaps he was actually dead; apart from the TV there was not a single source of light and for the first time he also noticed that it was raining outside in the world and that the sky over Kymlinge was as dark as freshly laid tarmac.

  He pinched his nostrils, cleared his throat loudly, wiggled his toes and said his name and date of birth in a clear, firm voice, after which he cautiously drew the conclusion that he was neither sleeping nor dead.

  Then they announced the payout.

  One million . . .

  His headache gave a kick as he opened his eyes wide and leant closer to the TV set.

  One million nine hundred and fifty . . .

  The telephone rang. Alexander Graham Bell, go and play with yourself, thought Ante Valdemar Roos, and wondered why such a phrase, and in English to boot, should suddenly pop into his convalescent brain, but it did, only to be blown away and forgotten the next moment.

  One million, nine hundred and fifty-four thousand, one hundred and twenty kronor.

  He found the remote control, switched off the TV and sat stock still in his armchair for ten minutes. If my heart doesn’t stop I’ll live to a hundred now, he thought.

  It was half past nine in the evening by the time Alice got back from her friend Olga’s, and Valdemar had totally recovered.

  ‘I’m sorry about yesterday,’ he said. ‘I somehow had a few shots too many.’

  ‘Somehow?’ said Alice ‘It’s pretty simple, you just downed them.’

  ‘You could be right,’ said Valdemar. ‘I drank too much, anyway.’

  ‘Are the girls home?’

  He shrugged. ‘No.’

  ‘Wilma called my mobile and promised to be home by nine.’

  ‘Did she?’ said Valdemar. ‘No, they’ve both been out all evening.’

  ‘Did you deal with the washing?’

  ‘No,’ said Valdemar.

  ‘Water the plants?’

  ‘No, not that either,’ admitted Valedemar. ‘I haven’t been feeling great, as I said.’

  ‘I presume you didn’t ring Hans-Erik and Helga to apologize, either?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Valdemar. ‘Another thing I failed to do.’

  Alice went out into the kitchen and he followed her because he could see the way things were going.

  ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said. ‘Not to just walk out like that. But it was such a fine evening and I thought—’

  ‘That story you told, did you think it was appropriate for the occasion?’

  ‘I know I forgot the punchline,’ he acknowledged. ‘But it is quite funny. It’s come back to me now, so if you like—’

  ‘That’s enough, Valdemar,’ she interrupted. ‘I can’t take any more right now. Do you really want to stay married to me?’

  He subsided onto a chair but she stayed on her feet, staring out of the window. Nothing happened for a long time. He sat there with his elbows chafing the table, his eyes fixed on the pot plant, a droopy little mind-your-own-business, and the diminutive salt cellars they had bought in Stockholm Old Town on a rainy weekend break seven or eight years before. Well it was a cruet set, of course, one salt, one pepper. Alice stood there with her broad fundament turned his way, and it occurred to him that this generously proportioned part of her anatomy was what their whole marriage rested on. It truly was. Admittedly she was only forty-eight, but it wasn’t easy to find a new partner when you were twenty kilos overweight, not in these times so obsessed with appearance, superficiality and slimness – and possibly not in any other time, either. He knew nothing frightened her more than the prospect of having to live alone.

  The equation had already been written and calculated when they married. Valdemar had been ten years too old but Alice, in return, had been twenty-five kilos too heavy; neither of them had ever voiced this sad truth, but he was convinced she was as conscious of it as he was.

  In the cheerless name of this same truth – he had time to note while wearing out his elbows as he waited – Alice had actually shed a few kilos since their wedding, whereas Valdemar had not grown any younger in recompense.

  ‘We haven’t made love for over a year,’ she said now. ‘Do you find me so disgusting, Valdemar?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘But I find myself disgusting, that’s the problem.’

  He briefly wondered if that was true or just a clever answer, and presumably Alice was doing the same, because she turned round and looked at him with a slightly sad and quizzical expression. She seemed to be weighing up whether to say more but then gave a deep sigh and went out to the laundry room.

  Two million, thought Ante Valdemar Roos. If I add on the winnings for the twelve out of thirteens, it must come to over two million. What the hell shall I do?

  And suddenly that image of his father in the forest popped into his perforated mind. There he was again, pipe in hand, his face seeming to loom closer, and when Valdemar closed his eyes he could see his father’s lips moving. As if he had a message for his son.

  What? he thought. What are you trying to tell me, Dad?

  And then, at the very moment he heard his wife set the tumble dryer going, he could also hear his father’s voice. It sounded faint and distant as it found its way through the noise of past decades, but it was still unmistakable – and clear enough for him to understand without difficulty.

  You needn’t play that line next week lad, he said.

  And you needn’t be patient any more.

  3

  After three weeks at the home in Elvafors, Anna Gambowska knew she would have to run away.

  There was no way round it.

  She had spent the first week crying from dawn till dusk. Sometimes all night, as well; there was something in her soul that needed the lubrication of these tears to soften it and bring it back to life. That was exactly how it felt. It was therapeutic weeping, designed to heal, even if it had its source in great sorrow.

  It was the first time she had thought about her soul in that way. Like a pitiful little plant that had to be watered and nourished before it could cope with life. Before it could grow and take its rightful place in this bare and inhospitable world. But when life grew too hard it was better to let it stay hidden deep down in the frozen groun
d and pretend it didn’t even exist.

  A soul deep-frozen in the ground. Or a soul in the deep-frozen ground. It sounded like a grammar exercise from school.

  Things had been like this for a while now. All through the spring and summer at least, maybe even longer. Her soul had lain forgotten at the bottom of the frozen pit inside her, and if she hadn’t got into the home at Elvafors in time, it could easily have perished entirely.

  Thinking that thought made her cry even more. It was as if her soul could wring nourishment from its own sadness. Yes, that really was how it seemed to be.

  It was her mother who realized the state she was in. Anna stole money from her to buy heroin to smoke. It was her mother, too, who saw to it that the authorities were called in.

  She stole four thousand kronor. It was beyond Anna why her mother had so much cash at home, and in her first few days at Elvafors, as she thought back over what she had done – referred to in the twelve-step programme as the ethical collapse – her soul knotted painfully and demanded a retreat down to the depths. Her mother worked at a daycare centre, four thousand was more than she earned in a week, and she had been saving up so she could buy Marek a new bike.

  Marek was eight and Anna’s little brother. Instead of a bike it went on heroin for his big sister.

  She cried over that, as well. Cried over her shame and her wretchedness and her ingratitude. But her mother loved her, she knew that. Loved her anyway, in spite of everything. Even though she had her own problems to tussle with. When she discovered the money was gone she was livid, but it didn’t last. She took Anna in her arms, comforted her and told her she loved her.

  Without her mother she would never be able to turn her life around, Anna Gambowska knew that.

  Maybe not even with her, but absolutely not without.

  She arrived at Elvafors on the first of August. That was eight days after her mother found her out, and it happened to be her twenty-first birthday. They stopped at a cafe on the way and celebrated with coffee and cake. Her mother held her hands, they both shed some tears and promised each other this was the start of a new life. Enough was enough.