In the late evening of 28 August, Freedom was ablaze.
It was a little white-painted construction, something between a gazebo and a play house, over by a lilac hedge about ten metres from the edge of the lake. It really only consisted of a wooden floor and roof, held together by four thick wooden uprights, one at each corner. Two low benches facing each other and a simple table between them. The girls would sit out there and chat and smoke. Anna didn’t know where the name had come from; it was known as Freedom and that was that.
All the girls at the centre smoked; drug abuse was pretty much unthinkable if you hadn’t started on tobacco first. Anna remembered how it had been at secondary school when the senior management decided to register all the pupils who smoked; they sent a letter home to the parents, pointing out that their kids could well be in the so-called risk zone. It created a hell of a fuss. Infringements on personal liberty, fascist-style behaviour, unfounded accusations; some of the smokers were members of the Social Democrat Youth League and had been on courses about their democratic rights. It had led to a half-day school strike.
But the poor principal had been right in a way, Anna had thought afterwards. Young people who didn’t start to smoke didn’t start using drugs, either.
Though of course there were people who smoked without moving on to the harder stuff. Plenty of people, in fact most, to be strictly accurate.
At any rate, smoking was allowed at Elvafors. Outside, and in the shelter of Freedom; attempting to get the girls off drugs and tobacco at the same time would have been a step too far. One thing at a time, first the major problems, then the minor ones, Sonja Svensson was in the habit of saying. She didn’t smoke herself, but a number of the staff did, and as far as Anna knew, none of them thought there was anything wrong with that.
She didn’t think so herself, either, except for the cost of the habit. The home gave them weekly ‘pocket money’. Two hundred kronor; learning to handle their own finances was a fundamental requirement for getting their lives in order. All the girls, without exception, had debts: letters from debt-collecting agencies and piles of unpaid bills. In the first few weeks, Lena-Marie, a cousin of Sonja’s who had some form of training in economics – or at any rate had studied the subject for two years in upper secondary – had one-to-one sessions with everyone to try to sort out that particular messy corner of their messy lives. The eventual intention was for the girls themselves to contact those they owed money to, in order to set up some kind of repayment plan. It sounded breathtakingly difficult, Anna thought, and all the others thought so too.
Anyway, more than half their pocket money went on cigarettes, that was just the way it was.
But it wasn’t carelessness with cigarettes that burnt Freedom to the ground. On the contrary, by the next morning everyone knew someone had set it alight.
It was Conny, Sonja’s husband and the only one of his sex who ever set foot in Elvafors, who found an empty petrol can behind a shed. The can had come from inside the shed, where an assortment of supplies for the home was stored: tools, bumper packs of toilet rolls and so on.
The door hadn’t been locked; it hardly ever was because there was nothing inside that anyone would want to steal. Anyone at all could have sneaked in around 11 p.m. – the fire had started about fifteen minutes later – taken the petrol can, poured the contents over Freedom and set light to it. Conny was a volunteer firefighter and had seen a thing or two, and he was in no doubt that was how it started.
That meant one of the girls. In theory, of course, it could have been some passer-by, but only in theory. Sonja Svensson dismissed that alternative more or less out of hand. What motive could an outsider have for setting fire to Freedom?
She did not venture into what motive any of the girls could have for the same thing. At their meeting after breakfast she made a stern speech and told them that unless the culprit came to her in the course of the day and owned up, they would all suffer for it.
If no one took their individual responsibility, the whole group would have to do so, said Sonja. That was a simple rule, which applied in life as much as at Elvafors.
That afternoon, Anna was down by the lake smoking with Turid, a girl from Arvika who was currently living at the first gate, and asked her if she thought the police would be called in.
‘The police!’ scoffed Turid. ‘Not on your life! Sonja’s scared shitless of anything that could give Elvafors a bad name, don’t you get it?’
‘Why?’ asked Anna.
‘Because if social services get the idea things aren’t working here, they’ll stop sending people. We’re worth a thousand a day, remember that. And it’s not exactly fully booked.’
Anna thought about this and nodded. She was right, since Ludmilla made off there had only been five girls in the big house, and there were spaces for another four. And rumour had it that Turid and Maria would soon be moving to the last gate in Dalby.
‘They must be a bit short of junkie bitches in this country,’ she said, trying to joke.
‘Like hell they are,’ said Turid, who virtually never laughed at anything. Anna thought that with her background it was hardly surprising. ‘But they probably don’t think it’s worthwhile spending money on people like us. Better if we die young and aren’t a burden on society.’
Anna felt a lump in her throat and swallowed it.
‘Who do you think started the fire?’ she asked.
‘Well who the fuck do you think?’ said Turid, throwing her cigarette butt out into the water. ‘Mad Marie of course, the crazy cow. Everybody knows that.’
‘Marie?’ said Anna in surprise. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I saw her,’ said Turid, turning her back on Anna and setting off up to the house.
Marie? thought Anna, the lump in her throat returning. Why would Marie set fire to Freedom? If she had had the choice of which of the girls to confide in – or eventually to share the first gate with – she would have opted for Marie. Without much hesitation. She liked her, and that was just the way it was. You simply liked some people and not others. Anna would never grow fond of someone like Turid even if she practised all her life.
Marie was Korean by birth and as pretty as a doll. She had been adopted by Swedish parents when she was two or three. She didn’t know what day or year she had been born. She was quiet and friendly, but had been abused by boys and by an uncle on her mother’s side; she had a child, but custody of it had been taken away from her. When she came to Elvafors – a few weeks before Anna arrived – she had found God. So she claimed, anyway, in her quiet and unassuming way. And Anna had seen her reading the Bible.
Why on earth would Marie set fire to Freedom?
But it struck Anna that she didn’t really know her. In fact it struck her that she didn’t really know any of the other girls. Any one of them could say absolutely anything about any other girl and Anna wouldn’t know if it was true or not.
And this was largely her own doing, she realized that. As she slowly followed Turid up to the house, she started thinking about a comment made by her cousin Ryszard, who lived in Canada and did his best to look like Johnny Depp, that summer, the only time they had met.
But you’re a loner, Anna, that’s just the way it is. You and your fucking soul, you two always have so much to talk about that you’ve never got time for anyone else.
He’d said it in English, because he couldn’t speak Polish any more.
You and your fucking soul, Anna.
Was he right? Well yes, she silently admitted to herself. Maybe he was.
And maybe you could equally well swap one letter in the word loner, too.
Loser.
That evening Sonja came to her room and told her she had a phone call, on the phone in the office.
It was her mother. Anna could instantly tell from her voice that there was something wrong. Something that for once had nothing to do with Anna herself.
‘I can’t come and see you next week.’
It had been agreed that she would come on a half-day visit the following Friday. To get an update on how things were going for Anna, see what progress she had made in her first weeks at Elvafors and have an opportunity to spend some time with her. It wasn’t one of the family days, but it was usual for a parent or other close relative to pay a short visit after about a month.
‘Why not?’ said Anna, giving an involuntary little sob. She hoped her mother wouldn’t notice it.
She didn’t. ‘Mum,’ she said. ‘Your gran, that is, is sick. I’ve got to go to Warsaw and look after her.’
‘Is she . . . is it . . .?’
‘I don’t know,’ her mother said. ‘No, she isn’t going to die. It didn’t seem quite that critical. But I still have to go. Wojtek says he can’t cope with her any more and I’m off work with my knees anyway. I’m afraid I’ve no choice, Anna, you’ll have to forgive me.’
‘Of course I do. What about Marek, though?’
‘He can go and stay with Majka and Tomek for now. And Anna?’
‘Yes?’
‘I promise I’ll come and see you the minute I get back.’
They talked for a few more minutes before they rang off, Anna fighting back her tears the whole time. But she managed it; the last thing she wanted was to give her mother more of a guilty conscience than she already had. After the end of the call she sat there for a while in the dusky office, trying to regain her composure. Trying to understand why she suddenly felt so forlorn. Of course there were lots of contributing factors: Freedom burnt to the ground; Turid’s assertion that it was Marie who set it on fire; her poor mother and grandmother and little Marek; the hopelessness of life in general – despite the fact that she had got her guitar back – yes, there were a lot of things.
And one more; it only occurred to her afterwards, as if she hadn’t really wanted to acknowledge it. But perhaps it was this that felt the hardest of all.
Her mother hadn’t been sober. She must have downed four or five glasses of red wine before she rang.
Her too, thought Anna as she cut across the open area between the buildings. I’ve got it from both sides.
She got to bed a while later, and lay awake for a long time, thinking about her family. She lay on her side, staring out of the window, over to the edge of the forest on the other side of the road and the odd star or two starting to shine above it.
Her family and her life.
The fact that so much could happen from one generation to the next. That it went so fast. Her mother’s mother, who was now seriously ill, had been born in 1930 in the little Polish village a few dozen kilometres south of Warsaw where she still lived. Anna had been there twice, and both times it had felt like travelling to 1930 and even further back. Another time and a completely different life. She had only met her grandmother five or six times all told, and each time she had felt there was something a bit scary about her. She sort of reminded Anna of the Groke in the Moomin books. There was something wrong with her head, too, with her mental health, but her mother had said no more than that.
And now she was evidently in a hospital in Warsaw. And had a granddaughter confined to a clinic for female addicts in some little dump of a place in Sweden – a country she liked less and less each time she was obliged to visit it. It had no religion and no honour, she would say. God had abandoned it. And the dump where her granddaughter was held captive was even smaller than that Polish village, in fact.
Held captive? Anna shook her head and tried to laugh, but nothing came.
Anna’s mother had come to Sweden in 1984. When Anna was born in 1987, her father Krzysztof was with another woman. But the divorce didn’t happen until Anna was six. For some reason, her mother had never really been able to explain it. Be that as it may, by the time Krzysztof was forty he’d had children with four different women, all of whom had moved to Sweden from Poland in the 1980s. All living in or around Örebro or Västerås. He was a handsome, weak man, and women liked drowning in his melancholy eyes, so her mother had once said. For his part, he was drowning in booze.
Born with the soul of a great artist, was another thing she said. But sadly devoid of all talent.
Maybe I’m the same, thought Anna. With my guitar and my pathetic bloody songs.
Marek, her little brother, had a different father by the name of Adam; another unreliable man, according to her mother. That seemed to apply to all the men in the Polish-Swedish environment in which Anna had grown up. It was the women who were the strong ones, holding together families and networks, caring for the children and getting on with life. Somehow. The men drank, were profound and misunderstood, and talked politics.
But Anna hadn’t been strong, and she wondered how her mother was actually coping as well. She couldn’t stop worrying about that inebriated voice on the phone.
And if her mother hadn’t the strength, however was she to find hers?
Swedish or Polish, it was all the same. When she was unhappy at upper secondary before she finally dropped out, she had liked to blame her double identity. But later, and in the name of honesty, she realized that had just been a cowardly cop-out. Sweden and Poland weren’t that different. You couldn’t tell where she came from just by looking at her, for example; she could just as well have been born to 100 per cent Swedish parents in Stockholm or Säffle.
Her life was in her own hands, that was the fact of the matter. If she wanted to throw it away, that was her own choice – just as they always said when they were sitting round in the circle, analysing their shortcomings. It wasn’t circumstances that things depended on. It was oneself.
So damn easy to say, so hard to live by.
Unless you followed the twelve-step programme, that is. That was the salvation. A power greater than myself . . .
Then Steffo popped into her head. That was another sort of power.
How the hell could she have let someone like Steffo into her life? That was the most disagreeable question of all, the one she loathed most and wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. She had never been anywhere near falling in love with him. She hadn’t even thought him particularly fit.
Though the answer was simple. He had kept her supplied with drugs, and that made him more important than everything else. It was the same with the other girls; this was the pattern you inevitably ended up in if you were drug-dependent and a member of the so-called weaker sex. All the girls at Elvafors had been with men who were total bastards, all as evil and egoistic as each other. Steffo perhaps wasn’t the worst; they had only been together a few months and of course she didn’t know how things would have developed if they’d gone on.
But he was certainly evil. One episode suddenly came back to her, and on reflection she realized that it said a good deal about him.
It was something he’d told her. He’d been to see some kind of psychologist, a woman for whom he clearly had nothing but contempt. She had talked to him about empathy, and the ability to appreciate how others feel and think when faced with certain things.
Children who hurt animals, for example, she had evidently said, don’t always understand that the animals can feel pain. And there are people who don’t understand that sort of thing later in life, either.
Do you think I’m that kind of person? Steffo had asked the psychologist. She’d answered that she hoped he wasn’t.
Then Steffo told her she was quite right about that, because when he was twelve and broke the wings of his sister’s two little canaries, he had certainly known it was hurting them.
That was the whole fucking point.
He had laughed as he told Anna about it. As if he was proud of it. Not just what he’d done to the poor birds but also what he’d said to that stupid psychologist.
She felt goose bumps on her arms just thinking about it. That’s how it is, she thought. As the toxins clear from my blood, it starts to hit me how scared I am of him. In reality.
Never again. Anything rather than having to see Steffo again.
None of the girls had owned up to setting fire to Freedom.
Sonja informed them of this at the meeting the next morning. But they were still going to get to the bottom of it. As long as the other girls decided to cooperate.
And they had all agreed to follow the twelve-step programme and the Elvafors rules, hadn’t they? Surely every single one of them understood – deep inside – that this was the only way out for them from the hell in which they had spent their recent years?
Anna didn’t get what she was talking about. What had the twelve-step programme got to do with the fire? What did Sonja mean by saying that they’d either cooperate or founder?
That was what she actually said. Cooperate or founder. Anna looked around her and saw that the other girls looked just as baffled as she felt. Except possibly Turid.
But afterwards it was only Anna who was asked to stay behind. The others got up, put their chairs straight and went out for a smoke. Anna sat there waiting for what Sonja was going to say to her this time.
This time. That was how it felt. She registered that she wasn’t surprised, and she didn’t have long to wait to find out what was going on.
‘I know that you know who set fire to Freedom,’ said Sonja. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
‘You don’t know that at all,’ said Anna.
‘There’s no need to lie,’ said Sonja. ‘Tell me the truth now, otherwise you’ll only make things worse for yourself.’
‘I’m not lying,’ said Anna.
‘One of the other girls said that you knew. That you told her.’
Then she realized what had happened.
Turid.
How the hell . . . how the hell could she? First she’d grassed on Marie to Anna, then she’d . . . well, then she’d told Sonja that Anna knew who the guilty party was.
That was it. That must be how it had happened, and Turid . . . yes, presumably Turid was capable of just that sort of spite and calculation. Anna shook her head and wondered what sort of person she was. Why would anyone do such a thing? Was she trying to get at Marie? Maybe at Anna herself, too? Why? Was it just because Marie was pretty and everyone liked her?
She thought about it. Yes, that would be enough. Turid wasn’t particularly attractive, carried a bit of extra weight around her middle and had already developed the bad skin typical of addicts. As far as Anna knew, no one liked her very much. Was it as simple as that?
Yeah, she thought, it probably was as fucking banal and simple as that. Twenty-two and already bitter. Maybe it was actually her who’d started the fire?
‘I’m waiting,’ said Sonja. She’d crossed her arms on her chest and was rocking in her seat. She looked mightily pleased with herself and her approach, hard but fair. Anna felt a sudden urge to spit at her but held back.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, drawing herself upright, ‘but I’m afraid someone’s deceived you. It wasn’t me who set Freedom on fire and I’ve no idea who did.’
‘I know you’re lying,’ said Sonja Svensson.
‘You can think what you like,’ said Anna. ‘Can I go now?’
‘You can go,’ said Sonja. ‘It’s unfortunate you refused to cooperate. Unfortunate for you.’
When she got out into the open air it had started raining. The other girls had finished their smoking break and were on their way in again. Marie was the only one she was able to make eye contact with. She looked on the verge of tears.
Right, thought Anna. Why should I stay here? My soul’s already trying to bury itself again.