Virus: Stockholm - S1

PART 1

She wakes. The world is twisting, her head exploding.

Her lips are dry. She tries to moisten them, but her mouth has no saliva. She is having difficultly orientating herself. She lifts her right arm and starts groping away from her body, fumbles and finds something soft, but also scratchy. She pulls back, her pulse leaps. Then she realises what it is – a bearded cheek.

Okay, she’s not alone.

She lifts her other hand, feels along the sheets, and stretches out her arm. No wall. A calm spreads through her aching body.

Thank God she’s not at home.

Amanda opens her eyes. Slowly, no need to hurry. The body next to her is still, but breathing heavily. It’s probably still early morning.

She is lying in a recess shielded by a bookcase. Diagonally left in front, through the space between the wall and the shelves, she can see a projector screen pulled down. The sun is glittering on its white surface and it blinds her. This must be what woke her up.

What happened yesterday? It started with a beer with Filip which quickly turned into two and a guilty conscience because he wasn’t at home with his wife and kid. She stayed, ten minutes of loneliness before a guy – this one? – came and sat next to her.

She slowly twists her head towards him. He is turned away from her, his face in half profile, a bearded cheek and a shaved head. Maybe it was him.

Amanda remembers a couple of drinks, a lame “No, I’ll probably head home now” followed by another drink and… a taxi ride? Yes, definitely a taxi. The question is, in what direction? As long as it wasn’t east, anything but Östermalm. Can’t deal with that. Although it would mean a smooth metro-ride home.

She gently pulls herself up to sitting, looks over at him, and tries not to wake him. The room spins, she has to wait a few seconds before getting up completely. Is he really asleep? Yes, his breathing sounds genuine.

Where did the taxi go? She tiptoes over the parquet towards the window. It can’t have come straight here, she’s too hung-over.

The room is tidy, indie movie posters hang on the wall to the right, a green mid-century sofa with matching coffee table sits below and a light green kitchen is just visible through the door to the left. There’s a reasonable selection of spirits in the corner unit. An iPad on the windowsill. Typical media guy. Not that she needed to explore his apartment to know that. This is her modus operandi.

Amanda looks down at the view below, squints in the bright sunlight. A colourless street without shops, a 1920s block opposite, no intersection in sight. Still in the city at least.

In the kitchen she gently turns the tap and fills one of the two big wine glasses that the guy apparently had time to wash before they went to bed. An empty bottle of red wine by the sink. Beer, cocktails and red wine in one evening – hello headache. She fills the glass a second time and drinks eagerly.

The taxi stopped because of a blue light. “What the hell’s going on,” she remembers the driver saying. He gesticulated, opened the window and peered out. The spire. They were stuck by a blue hoarding. She glanced upwards and remembers seeing a church spire.

She rinses the wine glass silently and puts it back in the dish rack.

Cordoned off. The road was cordoned and there were ambulances, ambulances and a fire engine, honking cars, the guy was angry, chucked a hundred at the driver and jumped out. It’s not far, he said, only four or five blocks, but the flashing lights and the noise on the street had broken the spell. “Where are you going?” he cried, but his protests had no effect. She turned and said, “Bye. It was nice meeting you,” and continued on towards the familiar “T” that marks the entrance to Stockholm’s metro system.

Amanda goes back to the bigger room, peers over at the alcove. The guy hasn’t moved.

Her clothes are beneath the bed. She sneaks, crouches down and

ow!

Her temples are throbbing, she swallows a scream, shuts her eyes and gropes, gets hold of her bra, vest, jeans, no socks – where are they? Whatever. She crawls backwards, gets dressed still sitting. The guy’s mobile is on the coffee table. She clicks to reveal the time. 07.52. Later than she thought.

Odenplan. She remembers that she ran into the metro at Odenplan, took the stairs two at a time by the building site for the new City Rail, down to the gates, rifled in her handbag and…

Shit!

It hits her the moment she reaches the little hall. She grabs the handbag lying on the floor by the apartment door.

Her mobile. She checked it in the taxi, not sure why, and then came the sudden braking and the blue lights, the guy huffing at the driver and the descent. She has no memory of putting it back into her bag again. Did she leave it on the backseat of the taxi? She rushed up the stairs, past the long wall of adverts, towards the blue lights and the people gathered to watch the ongoing pandemonium, but no: taxi gone. Bye-bye iPhone.

She walks back to the coffee table, trying not to make the parquet creak, and grabs his mobile. Presses the home button, slides to unlock – no pin thank you very much – clicks the phone symbol followed by recent calls. There. Her mobile number, seven attempts to phone her between 23.27 and 00.32. All rejected. No answer.

She feels in her trouser pockets. A receipt, one beer for 59 crowns purchased at 23.21.

Amanda remembers. His back walking east towards Norrtullsgatan, she shouted,

humiliated

herself, called to him to follow her into the bar, bought beer, borrowed his phone, called her own in the hope that the driver would answer and come back with it.

Well, at least according to the receipt she paid for the beer.

She deletes her number from his call list. Hopefully she hasn’t given him more than a first name.

She starts to feel sick. Time to go.

The guy is stirring. Amanda flinches, drops his mobile on the table and the bang wakes him up.

“Oh, hello,” he says in a raspy, cracked voice. “Are you… uuuh, up?”

“Mm,” she says quickly, gets up and goes out into the hall without looking back at him.

“Shit… I feel awful,” he says. “My stomach kills.”

“Hardly surprising,” she says, picking up her bag and unlocking the apartment door. “Goodbye.” She steps out into the stairwell, closes the door behind her and almost runs down the stairs.

Out on the street, Amanda looks around. Where is she? She can’t place herself and it bothers her. She hates not being in control. She walks towards the nearest intersection, she needs street signs. Soon she sees that she is on Hagagatan, at the crossing with Vanadisvägen. Okay, he wasn’t lying, she’s only four or five blocks from Odenplan. She can just take the subway home. Presumably they came the same way last night, although in the other direction.

The sun blinds Amanda as she walks. She feels sweaty, her mouth is dry, but also furry. As long as she isn’t coming down with something. She has to get some work done this afternoon, once she’s slept off the worst of last night.

Thankfully the streets are quiet, apart from an elderly woman with a dog who gives her a disapproving look, and a middle-aged man wearing a suit running past. Oh God, she just wants to go home. She continues due south to the station. Nearly there.

At Odenplan, everything is quiet. It’s the first Tuesday after Midsummer and everyone must be on holiday. Three people at the crossing. She doesn’t even look in their direction, stares straight ahead as the nausea gathers strength. Green. Amanda takes a deep breath and walks past the now familiar blue hoarding towards the entrance to the metro.

STATION CLOSED IN ACCORDANCE WITH POLICE DIRECTIVES. The sign on the locked gate is handwritten and sloppy, as if it was scribbled in a hurry.

“What the hell…” Amanda tugs angrily at the gate, just to show her irritation. She needs to get home. Her stomach is churning and the splitting pain in her head is getting worse.

She turns towards Rådmansgatan. That station can’t also be closed, surely? The shutdown must have something to do with the blue lights yesterday, something has happened to the building, a workplace accident. At the next crossing a bus passes and comes to a halt at a stop twenty metres on. It’s heading towards, the next subway station, but in the wrong direction. She doesn’t think, just jumps, wants to sit down and

OW OW OW,

the pain sends a wave of darkness across her vision as her feet hit the ground. She slips through the rear doors, protected from view by a father reversing a twin buggy out. She sits quickly in the nearest seat, hoping the driver hasn’t seen her. She has money in the emergency pocket in her bag, but what good will that do her when they don’t take cash and without a mobile she can’t buy an SMS ticket. She decides it’s their fault that she’s riding without paying.

The bus runs west along Odengatan. The outdoor café in Vasaparken is empty, the chairs are stacked and locked with a long chain. A homeless man lies crumpled under a table.

She gets off at the end of the park, continues on, down to the station. No cordon here, at last she is heading home. She sneaks through the barrier behind a stressed, middle-aged woman, the jaws almost clamping down on her back foot. Fast down the static escalator, her head thumping, stomach aching. Next train is in two minutes. She leans against a pillar, rests her forehead against the cool tiles and enjoys every soothing millisecond.

Then the clanking on the rails starts – oh how she loves the sound of an incoming train. The loudspeaker system

dings

a confirmation.

She finds an empty four at the back, the air is stuffy, but she just wants to be home, home, home. She can hold her breath to Södermalm if she has to. Then her stomach churns again. No, not here. What did she drink last night?

Before closing the doors, the driver makes an announcement.

“By order of the police, there are no trains stopping at Odenplan this morning. So please exit either here, or Rådmansgatan. No disembarking at Odenplan.”

And the doors close.

The train has hardly had the chance to gain momentum before the driver brakes again and rolls the train slowly towards Odenplan. Despite her befuddled head, Amanda pulls herself up from her slumped position, keen to see what’s going on.

She doesn’t understand at first, then she sees that the lights in the station have been extinguished. The glare from inside the carriage illuminates the platform momentarily as they pass. A supermarket bag on the floor by a bench: a couple of tins and a tomato have rolled out across the platform. Further ahead stands a lone suitcase. She watches the scene, turns her head so as not to lose sight of it. Why did they leave their things? Then she sees the tent.

In the middle of the station, on the other side of the platform, almost on the tracks. A white tent, about ten metres long. Inside, two beams of light have been directed towards the ground.

“What the…” she mumbles and gets to her feet, wobbles as a wave of dizziness washes over her. She steadies herself on the seat in front, her eyes still fixed on the tent until it disappears out of sight. The train rolls onwards and her gaze shifts momentarily back into the carriage. She wants to see if anyone else found the whole thing as peculiar as she did.

She stares out of the window. Someone in a yellow protective suit is sitting on a bench just before the end of the platform. As the train moves into the tunnel, she watches the person slowly place their elbows on their knees and rest their head in their glove-clad hands. Then the moment is over, she is staring at a grey, concrete wall swishing past as the train gathers speed.

She looks around. Didn’t anyone else see? There are only eight people in the carriage, but they either didn’t notice the person in the suit or were just strangely untouched. When the doors open she steps out and walks along the platform to the next carriage and they start rolling on towards Hötorget. Hardly anyone in here either, only two young guys talking loudly.

Amanda walks towards them, just as one says, “Well, I heard it. Whole damn force was out, and I live three streets away.” The other man shrugs, “I didn’t notice a thing. What time was that?” The first man replies with the same jerk of his shoulders, “Nine maybe, maybe before.” The second shakes his head, “Nope, didn’t notice a thing. What does the paper say about it?”, but at that moment, the first man looks up at the door, pats his friend on the shoulder and says, “this is us,” and tucks the

Metro

newspaper under his arm.

Hello? Who takes the

Metro

with them? Amanda sighs and walks on in the direction of the train, the carriage lurches and the driver brakes sharply. Amanda stumbles into an older man who is sitting down. They look at each other and she wonders if he recognises the pained look in her face the way she does his. What’s happened to the thermostat in here? It’s boiling.

“Sorry,” she says and the doors close again. The nausea returns, something is welling, it reaches her throat and the disgusting, but unfortunately all too familiar taste of the night before fills her mouth. She lunges for the door,

come on, out of the tunnel.

Light returns as the train surfaces and approaches the overland station,

faster please,

she

can’t

puke here, she’s too old, there’d be no youthful charm to it, especially not a Tuesday morning when people should be heading to work not be in the last stages of a walk of shame.

With a mouth full of vomit, she leans her head against the door,

open, open, open,

and then finally, the sound of doors jerking apart and she tumbles. As she is falling she looks up at the sign for the opposite platform, next train

4 mins.

Enough time. She stumbles across and sits, supporting herself with her arms, and vomits over the edge onto the empty tracks. She is huffing, my God the pain in her stomach, it’s as if someone is gnawing at it from inside. She retches, dry this time, there’s nothing left, her mouth is like sandpaper and she is sweating like a fountain.

Finished, she pushes herself back away from the edge, ignoring the stares.

The speakers ping, a train is arriving. Amanda pulls herself up onto shaky legs, gathers her strength and steps on board. The red line. Finally.

Slussen passes as if in a fog. She hears the automated voice announce the next stop, and stands once again. With the help of the overhead bar, she makes her way through the carriage to the door. The gnawing inside her continues, a hint that it’s about to start again,

come on, open,

and then it does and she falls out, ah the cool breeze soft against her skin, but she doesn’t have time to enjoy it. She is losing her balance but she manages to stumble to the escalator . It doesn’t move at first, tears gather, she can’t walk up it, then the motor whirs and it starts moving, up, towards home.

Amanda sits down on the ribbed treads, holds her stomach and notices a dark spot on her top, just above her breasts. A sweat patch? What’s going on? Why does her stomach hurt

this

bad?

She tumbles off the escalator, her legs too slow, and her left slams into something

OUCH

! She closes her eyes, trying to think away the fresh new pain pulsing in her leg, shuffles sideways so that no one has to step over her.

Somehow she makes it out onto the street and almost collides with a bearded guy in a cap rolling past on a longboard. “Watch out!” he shouts. She swallows the desire to kick him. The café on the corner isn’t open yet, the place is dark, which is a good thing, she could never have managed the usual small talk today. She reaches the door, a big truck is parked outside on the pavement and two tense young men are mounting a ramp on the steps while a third, wearing a carry belt, is lugging boxes out of the truck’s open back.

He is dumping the boxes theatrically. One of the other men sniffs, “You can sulk later. Wait till we get to the piano, there’s no chance it’s going to fit in the lift.”

Amanda can’t help herself. “A piano?” she asks, her face pained. Having fixed the moving ramp in place, one of the guys stands and stretches.

“Yeah, a big bastard, but it’s furthest in at the back of the truck. We always save the best to last,” he says and laughs.

“What floor?” Amanda asks.

“Fourth. You live on the same floor?”

She sighs. “Third. Which will be just as bad I guess.” This answer gets her a laugh. She waves limply, walks inside and sees the boxes stacked along the wall. The elevator has arrived. She pushes on the number 3 and they start sliding upwards. She barely dares to breathe in case of more retching and fishes out her key before she reaches her floor. With shaking hands, she unlocks the door.

Amanda steps inside, closes the door behind her and kicks off her shoes. She heads for the kitchen, takes a large glass from the cabinet and fills it with water, slumps heavily to the floor and leans back against the cool refrigerator. She begins to drink slowly, forcing herself to take a few minutes to empty the glass. Then she slides down, defenseless against the stupor.

Please, let the piano just be an ornament, she thinks before closing her eyes on the world as she knows it forever.

The moment Iris first realises something is wrong, she is standing behind the information desk and registering returned titles. She scans the barcodes and places them onto a trolley beside the desk. Occasionally a message pops up onto the screen about late fees and she clicks them away. The fine is added to the lender’s account and they will have to pay next time they want to borrow something.

It’s almost half past eleven. In the last hour and a half, only three people have borrowed books. She has helped people search for a few titles, a man was looking for a book that hadn’t been released yet and she also sent a woman to the City Library who was looking for a specific title about natural remedies. She even organised a card for a girl who only seemed interested in the Wi-Fi.

Three people. Eight titles in total. Five novels, two non-fiction books about knitting and one collection of poetry. It should have been at least double that by now, maybe even three times as many if it hadn’t been the week after Midsummer.

She scans in the last books. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Ramir approaching, but he stops dead when he sees an obviously drunk man stumble through the revolving door from Sergels square. The man’s clothes advertise the night spent outside. He notices a guard also watching, straightens and walks nonchalantly towards the toilets.

The first four or five steps go well enough, but then he sways and gets a foot caught in one of the chairs that has strayed outside the designated café area. He tries to continue in a forced but ultimately hopeless attempt to conceal what has just happened, but then overturns another chair and the table beside it. He falls hard and is left lying on the ground. Ramir runs over, followed closely by their colleague Susanne, who has also been watching the scene play out from afar.

Something isn’t right. The man moaning on the ground is the first windswept visitor of the day. “Are you OK?” Ramir asks in an officious tone. The homeless and broken usually form a steady procession throughout the day. Their doors straight onto the drug-addled Sergel’s square is a direct invitation.

“I’m afraid I have to go home.” Lotta, one of the librarians, is approaching behind her. “I’m getting worse… Oh, what’s happened here?” she asks and looks at the scene five metres in front of her.

“He fell over or something,” Iris says. Lotta nods.

“I’m sorry, I really can’t stay. I’ve got the world’s worst headache and I feel like I’ve got a forty degree fever.” Lotta tries to smile, but her expression is more abject than jolly.

Iris looks at her and decides her assessment is an understatement. “It’s fine, go home. We’ve hardly got any visitors today anyway.”

“Yeah, it’s unusually quiet,” Lotta says, taking no notice of the fact that the man on the floor has started shouting something about being attacked. “You’ll be OK? I’ll tell Juan I’m going, so he knows. I’m not sure I’ll make it tomorrow either.”

“It’s Wednesday, I’d aim for Monday if I were you. You look pretty awful,” Iris says and smiles. Lotta gives a short laugh. “Maybe.”

Iris stands at the counter. Checks her mobile. Two people have liked her latest status update and a question has been posted on the library Facebook page. She types an answer: no we won’t be closed over the summer, we will be maintaining ordinary opening hours throughout July, come whenever it suits.

Yours sincerely.

She reads over her answer and changes the ‘yours sincerely’ to something less formal.

Thanks!

No one is sincere on Facebook.

Holiday countdown: two weeks and two days. A week in a cottage and then two weeks with the in-laws at their summerhouse .

Out of the corner of her eye she sees Ramir approaching.

“Juan is a trained nurse, right? There’s something… not right about that guy. But I don’t want to call an ambulance if it’s not necessary. We rang twice yesterday for what turned out to be plain old drunkenness. Do you think he can come take a look? He’s not being aggressive, the guy, but… I don’t know. There’s just something not right.”

“Yeah, he was a nurse, but if the guy is sick you’ll still have to…”

Her mobile vibrates. She looks down at the screen: Little Pheasants.

“Sorry, it’s my daughter’s nursery. I have to take this. Juan is in the back,” she says and nods vaguely towards the office. “Hi, Iris speaking,” she says, her pulse rising. The nursery teachers never call to make small talk.

“Hi, this is Stina from Little Pheasants. We’re calling all the parents because we… Well we have to close for the day. Birgitta has come down with something very bad this morning and I’m not feeling too good myself to be honest, even if I could perhaps keep working. But you know how it is, we don’t want to give anything to the kids. And I think some of the children are also feeling sick, they’re talking about tummy aches and…”

“What about Sigrid?” Iris interrupts.

“Huh? Oh, she’s OK. Sorry, I should have said. She’s fine, no problems, but we’ve decided we have to close after lunch. Birgitta will leave once we’ve got hold of all the parents and I’ll lock up once all the kids have been picked up. There aren’t too many here today. I know you don’t collect Sigrid on Wednesdays, but I tried your other number and got no answer so… yeah.”

“OK, um. We’re actually low on staff at the library too… But of course I’ll be there. Or, I’ll try to get hold of my husband, but if I can’t reach him I’ll make it work. It’ll take… well at least half an hour. I’m on my bike.”

They hang up.

Ramir has found Juan and they are both crouched over the intoxicated man who is now sitting, leaning against the wall by the toilets. He coughs, grabs his chest and breathes hard. Juan stands, pats Ramir on the shoulder and Ramir answers, “Yeah, I’ll call them. Thanks.” Juan walks back in the direction of the office.

She looks down at her mobile and dials.

Come on, answer.

But it keeps ringing. No breathless “Hello?” followed by a, “I was in the shower”.

Damn.

She checks the till is locked, presses escape twice on the keyboard to log out and grabs the library phone. Juan is at his desk in the office. He looks up as she enters. “Not you as well.”

“What?”

“You want to go home.”

She can’t help but smile. People often say she’s hard to read, but Juan has always been able to see right through her.

“It was the nursery, they have to close. The teachers are all sick. They just called.”

“Can’t your husband collect her?”

“We’ve all tried calling him, me and the nursery, but he’s not answering.”

Juan sighs and looks up at the clock on the wall. Twenty to twelve. “The café is closed. Wait five minutes for me to buy a salad on the second floor. I’ll eat at the front desk.”

Seven minutes later, Iris is riding over Norrbro Bridge on her way to the Old Town. She turns left towards Skeppsbron. The clasp on her helmet is rough against the underside of her chin. In all the stress she tightened it too hard and now she’s heading south with what feels like a noose around her neck. Why didn’t he answer? Was he feeling unwell this morning? Did he say anything?

She awoke at quarter to six this morning because Sigrid had started whining about “bwekfast” as she insists upon calling it despite knowing full well how it should be pronounced. She got up, showered, and they ate together, the three of them, and then she left at seven thirty after reading two chapters of

Nelly Rapp and Frankenstein

for Sigrid before she got bored and started watching

Inside Out

on the iPad for the fourth time in as many days.

Did he say anything? Her cheeks grow hot as she realises she can’t actually remember them having exchanged a single sentence this morning. Pathetic.

The traffic is calmer now, but still she nearly crashes into a bus that has braked suddenly to avoid a cruise ship tourist crossing on a red. “They shouldn’t do that, Mummy,” Sigrid would have said indignantly. Iris manages to swerve at the last moment, down to the right and into the gutter. A bicycle messenger pulls out in front of her from a side alley and gives her a dirty look. She just about manages to stop herself from giving him the finger.

Up the hill at Slussen, the lights turn green as she approaches, to which she thanks her lucky stars, she hates having to start on a slope. Just then, a woman with a walking frame steps into the road without looking.

“Noooo!” Iris shouts just as her wheel smashes into the frame. The woman stares at her in shock as Iris dives, manages to extend an arm towards the frame so that she changes direction, misses the woman, and hears the bicycle smash to the ground to her left as her head cracks against the tarmac – thank God for the helmet – followed by her shoulder

OW!,

then her back,

OW! OW! OW!

Her body is still going as her underarm – the one that just broke her fall against the walking frame – now slams into the sharp edge of the pavement.

“OOOWWW!” The pain beams instantaneously through her body. “Shit shit shit that hurts!” she screams and tries to lift her left arm, to bend it, but white lightning blinds her, she bites her tongue and tears burst in her eyes.

A man leans over and starts to say something, when the sound of crumpling interrupts him and she watches as the bus she just missed turns her bicycle into scrap.

“Shit,” she says with surprising calm, considering the pain pulsing through her body. “Sigrid.”

“Huh?” the man says.

“My daughter,” Iris says through gritted teeth. “I have to collect her from nursery.”

The woman is still staring at her walking frame. Then she turns to look at them, the alarm plain across her face. What is she thinking? That Iris is going to hit her? With her injured arm?

“I don’t want to be the bearer of bad news, but this looks broken,” the man says and nods at her left arm just as the bus driver climbs down, his face flushed red. She doesn’t dare look, she hates seeing mangled body parts, even in pictures. She stares instead at the bus. The number 2. The passengers are standing, crowding the windows, all eyes are on her. Luckily, there are only seven or eight people on it this morning.

“You need to go to hospital,” the man says.

She shakes her head. “Or…” she changes her mind, “maybe I do if it’s broken. But I need to get my child first,” she says, her lips pressed hard together.

She sits up, tries not to move her arm, holds her breath, gets to her knees, holds onto the traffic light with her other hand and slowly pulls herself to standing. Waves of pain are transported to her shoulder, up through her neck and straight to her skull.

“Oh Jesus, it hurts,” she says. The woman is still staring at her, she still hasn’t said a word. The tick of the pedestrian crossing starts as it turns to green, the woman looks forward and obediently starts crossing, seemingly unconcerned that the blue bus is blocking the way a few metres ahead.

A police car pulls up and stops. A broad-shouldered officer aged around forty climbs out and takes in the scene with a concerned look.

“What’s all this then?” he says in an overbearing tone, like something out of a cartoon.

“The woman walked straight out into the road, I rammed into her walker with my bike, fell, broke my arm and the bus crushed my bike,” Iris answers in as contained a tone as she can muster. The pain is alternately a dull rumble and lightning sharp. “And now she’s trying to escape,” she adds lightly, and looks at the woman who has had to stop because of the bus, her nose now almost pressed against the metal.

“Hello there,” the policeman says, turning to the woman just as his colleague, a slender woman in her thirties, steps out of the driver seat and approaches. “You there, with the walker. Let’s…”

“Excuse me,” Iris stops her, “can we just scrape my bike off the road and forget about this. Everything’s fine, apart from my arm. The old lady there did walk out into the bicycle lane when her light was red admittedly, but I have to get to my daughter’s nursery. The staff are sick and no one else can collect her. Maybe you can drive me?”

The officers look at her. They exchange glances. The lady is still staring at the right side of the bus, Iris can hear her snort faintly.

“All of them?”

“Excuse me?” Iris said.

“The nursery. All of the staff are sick?”

Iris’s eyes flicker between the officers. She’s surprised at the speed at which their focus has been redirected.

“Yes. They phoned and said they were sick and that I have to come and pick up Sigrid because...”

“Is she also sick? Your daughter?”

Iris looks at them. Her arm has stopped hurting. Or she just doesn’t care anymore.

“No, she’s fine. Some of the other kids are sick, but not her. At least, that’s what they said.”

The officers exchange looks again. The older of the two opens his mouth to say something, but stops himself.

“What is it? Is something wrong?” Iris asks.

“We have to…” A car starts honking its horn behind the bus and the officer turns towards it. The woman wrinkles her brow, composes herself and straightens her back. Authority reassumed.

“Hold on, what’s going on? What about the staff getting sick?” This time it’s the man who pointed out Iris’ broken arm. “I’m not feeling well either, I’m heading for the pharmacy.”

The police react instinctively. For a moment they look lost, before coming to their senses. It’s the kind of stupid reflex that makes Iris reach for her forehead without thinking, with her left arm. She nearly blacks out as the broken bones rub against each other beneath her skin. The pain! She almost wishes the police would shoot her instead.

“We can’t…” one of the officers begins, but stops when the car behind starts beeping its horn again, followed by the other cars behind that.

What’s their problem?

Iris thinks.

Since when did people start beeping at accidents, or indeed at police cars? Isn’t that a crime?

We’re thirty metres away, they must be able to see what’s happening?

The male officer walks in the direction of the first car and the driver releases the clutch; the car starts rolling. He then presses on the accelerator and swings violently left, out of Iris’ field of vision, past the bus and into oncoming traffic. In the corner of her eye she sees a red van racing down the hill. It disappears behind the front of the bus, a short but hard sound of brakes and half a second of quiet before the vehicles crash into each other.

It’s a familiar sound, like the one that the recycling machine makes as the aluminum cans crash down on the other side. Iris pictures Sigrid when she was little, her smiling face as Iris used to lift her up so that she could place the cans into the machine at the supermarket and her clapping when the gratifying clang of metal came. The illusion breaks just as the car that tried to escape comes flying back like a projectile, its hood crushed so far in that the airbag looks to be in the backseat, followed the next second by the van and its broken windscreen. Both vehicles come to a sliding, scraping halt just as the van’s right rear wheel slams into the edge of the pavement and it flips onto the cycle lane on the other side. It travels, screeching, a few metres before being caught in the embrace of the metal fence that separates the pedestrians from the traffic on the Bridge.

No ride then, Iris thinks.

“Baba, why have we stopped?”

Dano is looking at his father who is sitting with his little sister Line in his lap. His father’s face is sweaty, dripping through the stubble that has decorated his face these last few days. Dano isn’t used to seeing him like this, his father is always cleanly shaved, it’s been his daily ritual even in these last six months as they have all tried to cling to their dignity as much as possible.

“I don’t know,” his father says and looks out of the carriage window. “We can’t be at the central station yet, I don’t see any… station.”

Dano’s father looks at his mother, who is sitting in the seat beside Dano. She has been trying to rock their youngest Bilal to sleep for the last half an hour, and Dano can see how agitated she is. The movements of the train calm Bilal, but now they are still he is wriggling.

“Here, look after this,” she says and gives Dano the only mobile with data they have left. They were lucky to get seats with a charger nearly the whole way from Malmö, and now his mother’s arm is tangled in the charger cable. Before Dano manages to free her, Bilal spits out his dummy. It lands on the floor and bounces into the aisle. A Swedish man sitting across from them reaches and picks it up.

“Thank you,” his mother says in English and breaks into a quick smile. “Thank you so much.”

Dano opens Google Maps on the Samsung, tracing the crack in the screen with his finger as he waits for it to load and for the GPS to connect. He was the one who dropped it when they were being chased out of the overcrowded minibus that took them from Belgrade to Munich. It smashed onto the ground and slid across the asphalt wet with rain. Dano had been lucky not to be hit. He didn’t look, just ran out into the road. The phone was too valuable to be crushed by an oncoming car.

The map emerges slowly on the screen. It’s on satellite view, but he switches to map. It’s easier to see where they are then.

He zooms out a few times until Stockholm appears in the corner of the screen. He looks at the scale in the corner. Two kilometres for the width of his thumb. He measures. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight thumbs.

“About sixteen kilometres left,” he says.

His father sighs. Line straightens, tries to look out of the window. She pulls herself up, sticks her dark, unruly mop above the edge of the window, but soon loses interest when all she sees is a depot: a messy tangle of train tracks and a no man’s land. A barbed wire fence crosses the view a few hundred metres away, and beyond that, she can make out a collection of grey factories or warehouses. A carbon copy of the view she has seen all too many times in the past six months.

Bilal is swaying in his mother’s arms. He doesn’t want to sleep, not even lie down. He wants to stand and after a fruitless tussle, she lets him do as he wishes. She turns him so that his eyes meet hers and holds him loosely under his arms to balance him. Bilal wobbles, but manages to stand by pressing his legs down against her thighs. He laughs, he loves to stand, loves to see the world by standing on his eight-months-old legs.

There is a crackle in the speakers and an announcement is made, probably in Swedish. It sounds a bit like German, Dano thinks, but he doesn’t recognise many words. He hears no “achtung”, no “schnell”, “nein” or “schweine”, only “Stockholm” followed by a long string of incomprehensible babble. Then the woman in the speakers falls silent, clears her throat and begins in a halting, uncomfortable English: “We have been given a red light because of an accident on a pendel train station ahead. We hope to be able to continue our journey to Stockholm Central Station shortly.”

Dano waits for more, the first announcement was so much longer, but after another crackle there is only silence. Dano looks at his mother.

“What’s a ‘pendel train station’?” he asks. She shrugs her shoulders, tries to smile, to keep the mood light, but Dano can see how tired she is, exhausted from never getting to rest, never relaxing, never thinking of herself, always in motion for Dano, Line and Bilal.

“Commuter train station,” says the man opposite. “That’s what you were wondering, yes? What the conductor meant?”

Dano nods and looks at the man who seems to be in his thirties, maybe a little younger. It’s difficult to tell how old they are, he thinks.

“This train passes a commuter train station a, but there has been an accident there on the platform, so we have to wait for that to be handled before we can go on.”

Dano’s father turns to the man. “Thank you,” he says, and the man nods.

“You’re welcome.”

Dano looks back at the depot again and tries to avoid thinking about how much he needs to pee. The toilets have been closed for the last two hours, they were blocked and no one knows why. He was standing in the queue, only one person in front of him, when a woman came out and the conductor, who had just come past, locked the door from the outside. Said something like, “It doesn’t work,” and Dano thought he heard the word “diapers”. How someone could be so stupid as to try to flush a diaper down the toilet Dano couldn’t understand. The toilet in the front end of the carriage was already closed when they boarded and he didn’t want to go further. He was afraid to let his family out of his sight.

The whir of the fan and the engine vibration fade and die. His father has also noticed and together their gazes track up to the ceiling and the long metal plates filled with small air holes.

“They’re saving on energy now that we’re standing still,” his father says, trying to give Dano an encouraging smile, but he seems to know how bleak the situation really is, sighs and looks out at the tracks. Dano studies the furrows in his father’s face. They have both aged too much these last few years.

After what feels like two hours, but according to the mobile in Dano’s hand is actually only fifty-four minutes, the subdued but increasingly irritated mood of the carriage morphs into anticipation as a man wearing workgear and a yellow reflective vest passes through the carriage. A well-stocked tool belt hangs on his hips and he is carrying a well-thumbed book wrapped in plastic. Dano sees that he is sweating heavily as he passes their seats. The man stops at the end of the carriage, where a number of passengers are gathered around the conductor, and taps her on the shoulder. From Dano’s angle, he can only make out part of the text written in black letters on the back of the man’s vest.

“Do you think the train is broken?” he asks his father. Line is now asleep in their father’s arms. “He looks like a repairman.”

His father turns carefully so as not to wake up Dano’s little sister and looks at the crowd at the end of the carriage.

“Looks like it,” he says. “Let’s hope this means we’ll be moving soon. Or at least that they’ll tell us what’s going on.”

Baba’s beard has filled with even more pearls of sweat, Dano thinks. The temperature inside has risen sharply since they turned off the fans. Bilal is being naughty. He tired of standing in mama’s lap a long time ago, but still refuses to sleep. He wants to escape. Even Dano is fidgeting, his urge to pee has gone from annoying distraction to acute emergency.

He gets up.

“I have to find a working toilet,” he says. “Sorry, but I’m going crazy.” Mama looks up at him, he can see the worry in her eyes.

“Bilal and I are coming too,” she says. “He might need a diaper change.” She bends down and roots in the bag at her feet, finds a tatty nappy from the packet they bought when they used up the last of their money in Lidl just before the border with Denmark.

But there wasn’t enough for a new razor blade, Dano thinks, glancing at his father, who, with heavy eyes, is gently caressing a sleeping Line’s hair.

They move forward through the train. Dano goes first, trying to make himself big to clear a path for his mother and little brother. The seats are all taken and some people are standing, which makes it difficult to get through. He hears sighs and huffs, the heat is penetrating and the air is getting worse.

There are other refugees in some of the seats, most of them far worse for wear than Dano and his family. His grandfather’s wealth, the money that Dano knows his father tried to refuse until the threats against his wife became too many, helped them escape. They had been able to avoid many of the worst situations suffered by most refugees, including humiliation at the hands of the worst of the human traffickers.

More have now joined the crowd at the end of the carriage and the conductor is trying to calm a white, middle-aged, red-faced man. The man with the yellow vest is wheezing, he is fat, his breath is strained, and he seems to be suffering from the heat more than the others, even though Dano assumes he has just boarded. He attempts to interrupt the agitated red faced man, but the passenger doesn’t seem interested in listening and instead continues trying to push past, keen to move on to the next carriage.

“Excuse me,” Dano’s mother says, making no secret of the fact that she is holding a baby in her arms. On the contrary, she lifts Bilal higher, makes him visible. “Can we get through here, please?”

The conductor and the man in the yellow vest turn almost in unison to face her. The conductor seems to be trying to determine if she is worthy of his attention, but when he sees the little child in her arms, he makes his decision. He says something to the agitated man, raises a hand as if to calm him and turns to Dano’s mother.

“We can get through please? We need to change the baby’s diaper and my son needs to use the bathroom.”

At first, the conductor hesitates, but then unexpectedly shakes his head. “All toilets have been closed. We have an electrical problem.”

The conductor’s words set Dano’s stomach cramping.

“But he really needs to go,” his mother tries with the same brusque tone as before. She looks through the window. The afternoon sun is scorching the metal tracks. “Can you please open the door so he can go outside?”

The conductor erupts: “No! Why can’t any of you understand?!” he cries, throwing a quick glance at the man with the red face, “it is forbidden to open the doors. A train could come and…”

“But you said there was a red light.”

“What?”

“A red light. Wouldn’t that stop the other trains as well?”

“What do you…? No… I mean… You can’t open the doors!”

Dano notices that all eyes have turned on them. He glances around, meets the questioning eyes, the hint of concern in the faces of the other travellers.

The yellow-vested man leans towards the conductor and says something in a hushed voice. The conductor listens carefully, nods as if in agreement, but the words seem to worry him because his stiff, authoritative expression, the same expression Dano has seen so many times in the past six months, slowly collapses and is replaced by something that at first resembles surprise, then concern. The red-faced man is clearly annoyed to be excluded from the conversation. He gestures angrily with one hand, waving it dangerously close to the man in the vest’s face, who instinctively takes a step back and begins to wheeze even faster.

Dano’s mother puts an arm around her son and pulls him back. “I think he is claustrophobic,” she says to Dano, just as the agitated man lunges at the other man’s tool belt, seizing the handle of the hammer-like object. It catches in the buckle, he struggles, tugs he is surprisingly strong and eventually pulls it free. The man nearly falls, but regains his balance at the last moment and tumbles over the closest seat. He barks something at the two women sitting there. They raise their hands over their faces for protection just as the man strikes the hammer against the window.

A muted thud and subsequent roar of frustration are the only results, and despite being afraid, Dano can’t help reflecting on the fact that Swedish train windows are sealed so tightly shut that not only is it impossible for passengers to open them, but even a hammer can’t dent them. The man raises the hammer again and strikes with even more fury, if that were possible. A small crack appears in the pane. Encouraged by his success, he raises his arm a third time, ready for the final, crucial, blow.

“STOOOOOPP!’ the man with the yellow vest bellows.

Even though Dano doesn’t speak Swedish, he has no trouble understanding this, and surprisingly it works. The man stops and stares back with as much fear as rage at the thick, clammy man in the vest who has now raised his trembling right hand. He is holding something, but Dano doesn’t know what it is. The man is trying to calm himself, collecting his words, before saying something in Swedish.

The conductor looks as if he might be about to protest, but the man in the vest lifts what looks like a heavy manual further in a determined gesture. The conductor says nothing. The people standing in the aisle take a step back and to the side as if obeying a command, so that the man in the vest now has free passage through the carriage.

He moves slowly, stops for a moment to cough heavily, and then continues towards the stairs. Behind him the path closes, and one after another passengers start following him to the exit.

“He’s going to let us out,” Dano says to his mother. He’s afraid of what might happen if he doesn’t.

His mother’s grip around his chest tightens.

“No, we’re going back to our seats. We’re going to wait and see what happens,” she says.

More passengers realise what’s happening and start standing, gathering their things and reaching for bags in the overhead racks. One man pulls his big backpack so hard that it slips from his fingers and falls onto the head of a nearby woman. She snaps, a flash of guilt passes across his face, but disappears just as fast, he quickly grabs the bag as if nothing has happened and starts down the aisle. Dano’s mother just manages to pull Bilal away before he gets squeezed between them. Dano wants to scream “Watch it!” or worse, but he knows it’s better to keep his head down, be invisible, stay calm.

By the time they reach Line and Baba, who is now also standing and searching for his wife, nearly the whole carriage is in motion. A man holding a little girl in his arms asks Dano’s mother what’s going on. He speaks in a North African accent and when she says they seem to be leaving the train, he shouts behind him and hurries forward with his child pressed against him.

Dano’s mother and father gather together the few belongings the family still have left – two big rucksacks and a smaller one father always carries on his stomach. The small rucksack contains their most important possessions except for the passports and money, which he keeps in resealable bags in the front pockets of his jeans.

“We’ll wait,” says Dano’s mother. “Let the others off first. They’re not going to close the doors before everyone is off. If we’re allowed out, we’re all allowed out. Also, we’ll get to see where everyone else is going and we can follow. I don’t think they’re going to let us walk along the tracks.”

Father nods and stands Line back on the seat to rest his arms.

“Do you have the mobile, Dano? And can you hold on for another few minutes to pee?”

Dano smiles, holds up the telephone and nods at his mother.

“Do we have the charger?” she asks, and his father pats the front pocket of the smaller rucksack on his stomach. Bilal is crying quietly in his mother’s arms. She shushes him, whispers that everything will be OK, they’re so close, the nightmare will soon be over.

“Only sixteen kilometres left,” Dano hears her whisper before she suppresses a cough and clears her throat. “Only sixteen of five thousand two hundred kilometres left.”