country.’
‘What – are you still at primary school?’
‘I just want you to know one thing,’ Ida says, taking off her skis. She looks almost unnaturally healthy, as if she lives on vitamins, organic vegetables and outdoor activities in clean alpine air. ‘This term’s going to be different. You took away everything that was mine, and now I’m taking it back. You can’t stop me. You’re going to regret ruining my life.’
So says Ida. The Ida who had made Anna-Karin’s life miserable for nine excruciating years.
It’s as if something bursts inside her, something she hasn’t been completely aware of. It’s like the thin membrane inside an eggshell, a protective layer that has somehow held together the roiling mass of angst, fear and rage. Now it breaks, and all the ugliness and venom pour out, spreading through her: a dark, seething sludge of pure hatred.
‘Everybody hates you, Ida,’ Anna-Karin says. ‘Don’t you know that?’
‘Thanks to you, yeah. But don’t go thinking—’
‘No,’ Anna-Karin carries on relentlessly. ‘Everybody has always hated you. They just pretended to like you because they were afraid of being your next victim. It makes no difference what you do to me. It won’t change what they think of you.’
For a moment Ida looks as if she’s about to cry –the tears are just beneath the surface. ‘Nobody’s friends with you because they want to be either,’ she says.
Anna-Karin moves a step closer and Ida backs away. ‘Maybe, but I never hurt anyone. You did, all the time. What I did is nothing compared to what you’ve been doing.’
‘You’re such a fucking freak!’
‘You ruined my entire life,’ Anna-Karin says. She walks forwards a few more steps. Ida’s heels are pressed against a snowdrift.
‘It wasn’t just me,’ Ida says defiantly.
‘No. But you were one of the ones who started it. I never understood why you picked on me. I used to lie awake at night trying to work out what was wrong with me so I could change. I discovered loads of things to hate about myself. I tried everything. But it was never enough. Not even when I gave up, when I did everything not to draw attention to myself.’
Anna-Karin glimpses a momentary hesitation in her.
‘No, it wasn’t enough,’ Ida says slowly, as if she really wants Anna-Karin to hear every word. ‘You should have killed yourself.’
The dark wave that has built inside Anna-Karin washes over her. She allows herself be swept along by it.
She throws herself forward. She’s heavier than Ida and adrenalin makes her strong. Ida topples to the ground. Anna-Karin pins her shoulders to the snowdrift and straddles her waist. Ida struggles, twists and strains, but to no avail.
‘Let go! I can’t breathe!’
It’s as if the power inside Anna-Karin has a life of its own. A living entity that has been lying in wait, biding its time for this very moment.
Go away, leave this town and never show your face here again.
Ida’s pupils widen. Anna-Karin sees her struggle to resist, her face turning redder and redder.
Be gone …
There is an invisible wall between her and Ida.
Anna-Karin recognises it from the practice exercises. Ida resists.
Anna-Karin pushes harder, puts all her will and concentration behind her power to break through the wall between them. It buckles but doesn’t break. Finally Anna-Karin realises she has nothing left to draw from.
Exhaustion overcomes her. She tumbles to the side, into the snowdrift. Ida gets up, staggering, but triumph shines in her eyes. And Anna-Karin realises she fell into Ida’s trap. She allowed herself to be provoked. Just as Ida had wanted.
‘I’m not afraid of you any more,’ Ida says. ‘The book taught me how to do it. It’s on my side.’ She stumbles towards her skis and puts them on. Anna-Karin is unable to speak.
‘You should follow your own advice,’ Ida says. ‘You should leave. Tomorrow school starts for real, and then everything will be just as it should be.’
She glides down the track. Anna-Karin shuts her eyes. If she lies here long enough she’ll freeze to death. It wouldn’t matter much. ‘I can’t take it any more,’ she whispers. ‘I can’t take it any more.’
45
NUMBER SEVENTEEN. NUMBER nineteen.
What am I doing? Minoo thinks as she walks along Uggelbovägen Street.
Number twenty-one. Twenty-three.
The sodium streetlamps cast their eerie glow over the freshly cleared road. The banks of snow are marked here and there with random squirts of dog pee. She passes numbers twenty-five, twenty-seven and twenty-nine.
This is something Vanessa might do. Or Linnéa.
Thirty-one and thirty-three.
Definitely not Minoo Falk Karimi.
She stops at number thirty-five