Part 8 (2/2)

Joel set off home. As soon as he started down the hill from the square, the feeling came creeping up on him again. He placed his hand over his heart. Wasn't it beating faster than usual?

Fear.

It was a form of fear. He hadn't felt like this for a long time. He had read a series of articles in Dagens Nyheter last summer about panic attacks. They were most common among young people, but could affect a person at any age. The fear itself wasn't dangerous, but the premonition led to panic, which led to...

A rose is a rose is a rose...

The tower blocks stood out like darker silhouettes against the grey sky. From where Joel was standing, the buildings were almost exactly in a line. He stopped, looked. Tilted his head to one side, squinted.

What the h.e.l.l...

The sides of the buildings stood next to one another, two lines running from the ground to the sky. Joel blinked hard and looked again. No. He wasn't seeing things: the lines were not parallel. They weren't parallel because the closest block, his block...was at an angle. Only a degree or two, but enough to make the two sides next to one another form a very long, upside-down V instead of two Is.

He took a few steps back, a few steps forward, to the side, but however he looked, the phenomenon remained. The building was listing towards the east. When he stood at his kitchen window watching the sunset he had been standing on a sloping surface, about to fall over backwards.

People on their way home from the subway looked at him as he stood there motionless, staring up at the building. They looked in the same direction to see if they could spot what he was gazing at, but didn't seem to notice anything odd. Nothing was moving, thank G.o.d. The block wasn't about to collapse. In the end he couldn't help himself; he stopped a young man.

'Excuse me?'

The man took off his earphones.

'What?'

'Sorry, but...would you mind looking at those apartment blocks and telling me if you can see anything strange?'

The man immediately did as Joel had asked. He stared for a few seconds, then shook his head. 'No. Like what?'

'It's listing. The building nearest to us is listing.'

The man looked again. For a little while longer this time. Music was whispering from the earphones round his neck.

'Yes,' he said eventually. 'Yes, it is. A little bit.' Joel looked at him encouragingly and the man pushed his lips forward, repeated, 'Yes, it is.' He was about to put the earphones back on, but stopped and said, 'Maybe that's normal?' He replaced the earphones and went on his way.

Joel stayed where he was. Did tower blocks list slightly? He couldn't remember ever reading about any such building falling over all by itself. Not in Sweden, anyway. But the bad feeling had only come today. It must have happened overnight, during the storm.

He'd called Anita around ten, because he couldn't stand the way the building swayed when the wind was strong enough. Couldn't sleep. So he had called Anita, and as soon as he said who it was, she asked, 'Is it the wind?'

'Yes. Can I come down?'

He could. He had spent the rest of the night in her apartment. Been beaten at Scrabble then made love routinely, without pa.s.sion or any sense that something was missing. It was fine just the way it was. Neither of them wanted more, neither of them wanted to stop. They didn't want to merge their lives. If differences of opinion arose, they simply stayed away from one another for a few days and let things settle down. Then they got together again.

They had parted in the morning with a dry kiss, a caress on the cheek, and Joel had gone off to the ironmonger's feeling relatively happy. That was the state he was aiming for: relatively happy. Happiness could easily tip over into its opposite, and depression was hard to break. You could be relatively happy all the time, if you took it easy.

At the bottom of the stairs Joel stopped and looked at the list of names. Column after column of names he couldn't put a face to. Right at the top of the left hand column: Andersson. Down at the bottom of the right hand column: Andersson. Between these known poles an undivided village on a hill. Plastic letters that could be swapped around all too easily, rearranged into new names without faces.

He didn't bother ringing Anita's doorbell because there were no lights on in her apartment; instead he went straight up in the lift. Now that he had something concrete to which he could attribute the bad feeling, it was no longer so strong. His building was falling down, that was all. Probably quite normal.

But he couldn't shake off the thought. As soon as he got inside he took the spirit level out of the bottom drawer in the kitchen and placed it on the floor. He lay down on his stomach next to it so that he could see properly and studied the little air bubble. It was possibly a fraction of a millimetre closer to the window. He changed position and lay alongside the spirit level with his feet pointing towards the kitchen window.

Yes. He could feel it. He might possibly have been a little oversensitive, but his head was definitely lower than his feet. He took a pair of pliers, broke open a bearing that was lying among all the rubbish in the drawer and tipped the b.a.l.l.s on the floor. They didn't roll away.

Hard to stop once you've started. He thought for a while, then remembered what to do. He took out a reel of thick string and tied a heavy nut on the end, opened the kitchen window and lowered the nut until it reached the ground, tied the end of the string to the broom handle, fixed it in place with a stool and measured so that it was protruding exactly thirty centimetres through the window. Then he wound the string around the handle several times so that it was hanging free above the ground. A plumb line.

With the ruler in his hand he went back down in the lift. Outside he met the kids who had been sitting in the oak tree earlier on. They were looking up at his kitchen window. They were both wearing identical black jackets, and were presumably brothers. The older one pointed up at the window and asked, 'What are you doing?'

'Measuring,' said Joel, unfolding the ruler.

'Can we help?'

'Come on then.'

The younger one held out his hand for the ruler. 'Can I measure?'

'No,' said Joel, walking over to the weight that was slowly swinging to and fro among the bare rose bushes. He had had bad experiences with children and folding rulers. Five seconds and they were busted. The rulers.

He could have managed without the ruler. As soon as he stopped the weight from moving, he could see with the naked eye that it was less than ten centimetres from the wall. He measured anyway. Eight centimetres. A difference of twenty-two centimetres, therefore, between the ground and his apartment.

How tall is the building? Thirty metres? Twenty-two divided by three thousand makes...

No. What were you supposed to do? Joel turned to the older boy. He was about eleven or twelve years old, and looked clever.

'How do you calculate degrees?' he asked.

The boy shrugged his shoulders. 'With a thermometer, I suppose.'

'Not that kind of degree.'

'What kind, then?'

The younger boy, who might have been about nine, pointed to the nut. 'Can I have that?'

Joel tried to undo the knot. When he couldn't do it he used his door key to break the string and gave the nut to the boy. 'Just don't drop it on anybody's head.'

Together they stood looking up at the building. Joel wanted to tell the boys it was listing, but didn't want to frighten them. The younger boy pointed halfway up, a few windows below Joel's.

'That's where we live,' he said. 'There's a mouse in our kitchen.'

'There is not,' said the older boy.

'There is too! Daddy showed me the mousetrap so I wouldn't hurt myself on it.' The boy measured something in the region of twenty centimetres between his hands. 'It's this big.'

'The trap,' said Joel.

'Yes,' said the little boy and his older brother laughed out loud. The younger one realised some joke had been made at his expense, and looked crossly from Joel to his brother and back again.

'Daddy said it had taken things from the bathroom, so there!'

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