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!’
‘In that case,’ said his brother, ‘why didn’t he put the trap in there?’
‘So we wouldn’t stand on it, of course!’
As if to emphasise the danger posed by the mousetrap, he stamped on the ground and marched off towards the sandpits. The older one looked at Joel and raised his eyebrows: Kid brothers, what can you do, and followed him.
Joel went back inside and rang Anita’s doorbell. When no one answered, he took the lift up to his apartment. As soon as he walked in he could feel the tilt.
Hasn’t anyone else noticed anything?
He considered going over to see Lundberg on the other side—they were on nodding terms—but didn’t know how to explain the situation. Lundberg would probably react in the same way as the man with the earphones: ‘Yeah? And?’
He sat down and took out his modelling tools. Instead of gluing the matchsticks in place one at a time, he worked in the same way as a real shipbuilder: first of all he made a plank out of three hundred and twenty matchsticks, then hammered the plank in place with rivets and strengthened it with glue. He had half-finished one of the final planks for the deck. Since he didn’t have the heart to completely cover the construction of the hull on which he had spent so much time and effort, he was planning to leave part of the deck unfinished so that it would be possible to admire the intricate skeleton of the framework through the gap. He might even put a small lamp inside.
He had been working for perhaps half an hour and had put eight matchsticks in place when he looked up at the ship and the feeling of seasickness came over him again. The ship was listing to one side.
It’s my imagination. I’m listing as well, in that case. I can’t see it.
However, the unpleasant feeling was still enough to break his concentration. He took a turn around the ship; it was as if he was walking on a swaying deck, and he had to sit down. He picked up the phone and called Lasse, who answered on the fifth ring.
‘Yes?’ He sounded annoyed.
‘Hi, it’s Joel.’
‘Hi. Listen, I’m in the bath. I just got home. They’re absolute slave-drivers down there, you know. Was it anything in particular?’
‘No, I was just wondering how to calculate degrees.’
‘Degrees?’
‘Yes, the angle if a building is listing one way, that kind of thing.’
‘Were you away when we did that in school?’
‘I was probably standing in the corner.’
Lasse laughed. ‘I’ll ring you back in quarter of an hour, OK? Are you going to build something, or is it for your ship?’
‘No, it’s…I’ll speak to you later.’
Joel hung up and sat on the sofa for a while, rocking back and forth to relieve the churning in his stomach. Then he went into the kitchen and looked at the spirit level, which was still on the floor. He lay down on his stomach, put his ear to the floor and looked at the bubble. Had it moved a fraction? He would make a mark and check it again the following day.
He was about to get up and fetch a pen when he heard something. From downstairs. In order to hear better, he stuck his index finger in the ear that wasn’t next to the floor and closed his eyes.
It could of course be his neighbour downstairs doing something or other, but the boy’s talk of mouse traps immediately evoked the image of a mouse moving around under the floor. A slow, sinuous movement. Joel sat up and stared at the linoleum. He wasn’t scared of mice, but he couldn’t work out how they could possibly have got into an apartment block, all the way up to the top storey.
He knocked on the floor. The response was a dull, solid sound against his knuckles. Concrete. Mice were supposed to live in wooden buildings, in the spaces between the walls where they could build nests and do whatever it is mice do when they’re not shitting and eating and shitting. It was unthinkable that a mouse could have eaten its way through the concrete. It must be making its way through drainpipes, ventilation shafts.
Joel looked around the kitchen. It was easy to summarise the phenomena he had observed during the course of the evening:
This building is going to hell.
In his mind’s eye he could see an army of mice gnawing through the concrete, perforating the block like a roll of toilet paper, making it soften, tilt. Al-Qaeda mice, working with a long-term objective. He snorted at the image of bearded mice in turbans infiltrating the swanky buildings of the western world.
The telephone rang. Lasse was out of the bath.
‘So,’ he said. ‘What was it you wanted? Something about angles, you said.’
Joel told him about the unpleasant feeling he’d had that morning, how he could see the building listing to one side with the naked eye, the measurements he had taken. Lasse wrote down the numbers, and Joel could hear a faint tapping sound of fingers on a calculator.
‘OK,’ said Lasse. ‘If what you say is accurate, then you have a divergence of approximately one degree.’
‘Which means?’
‘You know that already. The building is listing about twenty centimetres.’
‘So how bad is it?’
‘Well, you say bad…It’s not good, definitely not, but I mean it’s not going to fall down tonight, if I can put it like that. It was built in the sixties, wasn’t it? Part of the Million Program, all that stuff?’
‘I think so.’
‘Mm. We’ve had a certain amount of trouble with those buildings. The strange thing in your case is that you s
ay it kind of happened overnight. Are you sure about that?’
‘Quite sure.’
‘There ought to be cracks in the façade, down at the bottom. Concrete doesn’t like to bend, as you know. When there are problems it’s usually the main load-bearing girders. But the concrete cracks. Listen, I’ll come over and have a look tomorrow evening, I’ll bring a few bits and pieces with me. Maybe we could rent a film or something. Have you seen the new Coen brothers film, whatever it’s called?’
‘No. Sounds like a plan.’
‘OK. I’ll be there around seven, God and the boss willing.’
They said goodbye and hung up. Joel remembered the mice, picked up the phone again and started to key in Lasse’s number, but stopped. They could discuss it the next day. They were best friends, admittedly, but Joel didn’t want to sound like some hysterical lunatic: ‘Lasse, the building’s listing! Lasse, there’s a mouse in the kitchen! Lasse, help!’ Clearly there was no immediate danger.
He got up and took a walk around the ship.
No immediate danger.
But he wasn’t convinced. At least the boat had stopped listing, and Lasse’s comments had made Joel feel calmer. He would have a couple of glasses of wine, watch TV for a while, then go to bed. He went into the bathroom and scooped some wine into a jug from the big plastic container. Sometimes he took the trouble to decant the wine into bottles, but he had noticed that it matured almost as well in the container, and he didn’t have to bother fiddling about with a load of empty bottles.
The container was half full. When it was empty he would start a fresh batch, drinking wine from boxes in the meantime. He didn’t have room for two containers side by side in the bathroom. Perhaps he was a bit of an alcoholic; he drank three glasses of wine each evening, but seldom more. Alkie lite.
A person has to have something.
When he lifted the toilet lid to pee, he noticed that the water level in the bowl was low, much lower than usual. He wouldn’t have paid much attention if it hadn’t been for the fact that it was all part of the same problem. There was something wrong with the building. He had a pee anyway, and the flush worked normally. He’d give the company that owned the building a call if it got any worse.
The evening passed in the usual way. He watched a debate about Economic and Monetary Union in the EU, with both sides predicting a disaster if they didn’t get their way. At a quarter to ten he rang Anita, but there was no reply. Perhaps she’d gone away on a course or something. He thought about using his key and going downstairs to sleep in her apartment, but decided against it. It wasn’t a lasting solution.
When he did get to bed, he lay tossing and turning for a long time. Thought he could hear mice scrabbling and scuttling through the pipes. Or maybe it was the building creaking as it bent down further towards the ground.
The first thing he did when he woke up in the morning was to go into the kitchen and check the spirit level. Unfortunately he had forgotten to make a mark, but still, he was more or less certain that the bubble had moved towards the window. The feeling in his stomach told him the same thing: the tilt had got worse. He couldn’t manage any breakfast before he went to work.
When he reached the spot where he had spoken to the man with the earphones, he turned around and studied the building. At first he thought nothing had changed: the top intersected with the building next door in the same place. Or did it?
Hang on a minute…
It wasn’t that the angle had increased; it had changed. The sides of the buildings no longer formed an upside down V, but rather an extended D or a bow, with his own block forming the bow and the other the string. The top had been pushed back towards its original position, while the middle now bellied out towards the west. If you measured with a plumb line now, you wouldn’t notice anything.
From the point of view of balance, it was no doubt better, but… there was something deeply unsettling about a structure made of concrete and steel behaving as if it were made of rubber. Particularly when you lived in it.
He took the subway to Vällingby and managed to suppress his worries during the day. After all, Lasse had said there were often problems in blocks like his; perhaps fluctuations in the angle of inclination were part of the normal pattern.
The only time the anxiety pushed its way through was when a customer came in to buy a reinforcing bar for a tool shed he was building at his summer cottage. The customer weighed the bar in his hand, his expression sceptical.
‘Will this really be strong enough?’ he asked.
‘Definitely,’ Joel replied.
The customer did a quick sketch on a piece of paper to show what he was planning to do.
‘You see what I mean? All the weight will be resting on the bar from directly above.’
Joel hesitated briefly, then went to check the product catalogue just to be on the safe side. As he ran his finger over the figures showing the strength of the various dimensions, he thought: I wouldn’t have done this yesterday. Yesterday I would just have guaranteed that it would hold.
He showed the figures to the customer.
‘It will tolerate a load of three tonnes. If you’re planning on putting a Sherman tank in the shed it might not hold, but otherwise…’
The customer laughed, shook his head.
‘No, it’s just the lawn mower, that kind of thing.’
‘In that case it’ll be strong enough, no problem.’
When the customer had left Joel stood at the counter looking at the columns of impressive figures. The strongest flat bars they sold would bear seven tonnes. They were as thick as a broom handle.
How much does an apartment block weigh?
He had been out a couple of times to look at projects Lasse was working on. It was fascinating to think that the steel structure that looked so fragile from a distance would carry the lives and walls of hundreds of people, but you could hardly get both arms around those girders, and they were arranged in a self-bearing triangular system.
Lasse had pointed to the crane that was as tall as the building they were constructing, and said, ‘Buildings are nothing. But the crane—now there’s the miracle! Just thin metal struts, as if it were made out of your matchsticks. If it was built in rectangles, it wouldn’t even be able to lift an elephant. It would collapse. But the triangles…everything presses on everything else, so all the weight goes down into the ground. Unbelievable. It’s hardly surprising that Pythagoras was religious.’
Joel closed the catalogue and thought about the World Trade Center. The buildings hadn’t collapsed, they hadn’t even bent after the planes crashed into them. It was the fire that had done for them. The power that was needed to bring down a tall building.
He finished work at three and caught the subway home. He wasn’t keen on going back to his apartment, so instead he went up the steps leading to the square, intending to go to the pizzeria, have a couple of beers and read the papers. He had hardly got through the door before Berra shot up from his table, holding out his hand. Joel took it, shaking his head enquiringly.
‘Congratulations,’ said Berra. ‘You’re three thousand kronor richer. Three thousand two hundred and sixty-one, to be precise.’
‘We won?’
‘We certainly did. Six right, thirteen thousand and forty-four kronor. Come and sit down.’
Joel sat down with the regulars and ordered a beer. They were all a bit bleary-eyed, having started the celebrations a couple of hours earlier. The winning coupon was in the place of honour in the middle of the table. Joel got his beer, took a swig and looked at the coupon where certain numbers were circled.
‘Was it…Black Riddle?’ he asked.
‘Oh no,’ said Berra. ‘That bag of bones bolted after two hundred metres and was disqualified. If we’d gone with Morgan’s nag we’d have had four hundred and twenty thousand between us.’
Joel looked at Morgan, who pulled a face, finished off his beer and stood up. Despite the fact that he was in his sixties he was wearing a
denim jacket over a Hawaiian shirt. His thinning hair was slicked back with something that was presumably Brylcreem. He picked up a battered cowboy hat from the back of his chair and plonked it on his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough of this. Hard to celebrate three thousand when it could have been a hundred.’
‘Don’t be like that,’ said Berra.
‘I tried, I tried,’ said Morgan, pointing to his empty glass. ‘I just can’t bring myself to feel really happy. Sorry. See you.’
He went out and headed across the square with his hands pushed deep in his pockets.
‘The thing is,’ said Berra by way of explanation, ‘life hasn’t been all that easy for Morgan. Cheers, Joel.’
Joel stayed for an hour, chatting to Berra and Östen who both, unlike Morgan, regarded Joel as a lucky mascot. They hadn’t won anything for over a year; along came Joel, and hey presto—their biggest win since they started picking numbers together. He was welcome to join them in future, as long as he left the actual selection to them.
‘That Black Riddle,’ said Berra. ‘It’s practically a hamburger factory on legs.’
Joel didn’t really think he should have a share of the winnings; he suggested they should just give him back his hundred kronor, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They had already collected the money and Berra counted out Joel’s share on the table, down to the last krona.
They parted with slightly drunken protestations of friendship. The beer swilling gently around their stomachs, the comforting sense of companionship and the lingering feeling of happiness made Joel less than keen to deal with the Problem, and he didn’t even look up as he walked down the hill. The apartment block was still there, anyway.
He rang Anita’s doorbell, and when no one answered he pushed open the letterbox and peered in. There were letters and junk mail lying on the floor behind the door. He took out her key and stood there deliberating for a moment. Anita worked part time as a cleaner down at the hospital, and…a course? What kind of bloody course would she be on? New cleaning products?