The Considerate Killer Read online

  His unconscious presence was somehow provoking, but, she admitted to herself, probably not the only reason why her brain seemed to have reached a state of permanent wakefulness. Her sleep rhythms, unstable at the best of times, had been shattered completely during her hospital stay, and when she stayed with her mother she never slept very well anyway—neither peacefully nor deeply.

  Ida’s fear continued to haunt her. You’re not leaving us, are you? The thick oozing black substance of it mixed with the memory of her dream father, spilled oil and brackish water, a dull, evil-smelling upwelling from the depths of her unconscious.

  “Most of us show clinical symptoms of depression if we are woken between three and four in the morning,” her new therapist had explained when Nina finally admitted that she often woke up after just a few hours of sleep. “You are vulnerable, all defenses are down, and you have zero control. Remember that it doesn’t last. Morning comes; the light returns.”

  It was her old boss Magnus who had recommended Marianna, who, apart from being highly trained in crisis psychology, was also calm, classically beautiful, and fond of hand-woven shirts and sandalwood perfumes. Without either of them acknowledging it, Nina had the sense that she and Magnus were childhood friends, maybe even childhood sweethearts. But where Magnus’s Swedish accent was thick enough to grease a Volvo, Marianna’s had almost disappeared. Nina liked her, which was probably a good start. In the daylight, when she was herself, and held distance as a shield in front of her more vulnerable parts, she could smile ironically at Marianna’s metaphors. Now, in the dark, they weren’t just images.

  “Didn’t you think I’d come back?” her father had asked in the dream, while he held her, alive, physical and palpable, an attempt, she supposed, on the part of her subconscious to lay to rest that ancient, hopeless horror. In Ida’s eyes, she had recognized the same fear. You’re not leaving us, are you?

  She wished that she had been able to give a better answer. She wished that her self-image wasn’t as cracked as her all too vulnerable skull.

  She cursed quietly. The worst and most insufficient oaths she knew.

  Luckily it would soon be morning.

  There were no clocks in Hanne Borg’s spare room. Marianna had taught her to take off her wristwatch before she went to sleep, as a part of her battle against her somewhat obsessive time checking. “Time will look after itself while you sleep,” was the way she put it. But there was no sleep right now . . . Nina fumbled for the damned watch but couldn’t find it. Had she actually put it in the drawer?

  In the end, she found her cell phone instead. 3:27. As soon as the screen darkened, she touched it again, not because she thought the time it showed would have changed, but simply to keep alive the cold digital glow a little longer.

  Yet another Facebook message had arrived. Yet another Bible quote.

  “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” Psalms 30:5. I’ll be in Denmark soon. Can we meet? Very important! God bless, Victor.

  THE PHILIPPINES, THREE YEARS EARLIER

  Coffee?”

  His mother didn’t wait for an answer, but resolutely placed the jar with instant coffee and creamer on the table in front of him and poured boiling water into his glass. From the patio of his parents’ house they had a view of his uncle’s yard and his ten long-legged fighting cocks, each tied by the leg to its stake. The heat made the air billow and shimmer above the pocked asphalt of the driveway. Vincent had arrived half an hour ago, but had gotten no further than the plastic chairs and cracked paving of the patio, where he was served sweet, ripe mangos, bananas, and kutsinta rice cakes by his mother and his aunt. His father was still at work.

  San Marcelino.

  His home. And his hometown. It all looked exactly as it did when he had left it. The dogs barking on their chains behind the house, the white cats slinking around the table on the patio, and a small army of barefooted grandnephews and grandnieces fiddling with their bikes in the shade by grandma’s house. Two puppies were bounding about underfoot, snapping at the tires and the children’s flip-flops with sharp baby teeth, and at regular intervals the children tipped them onto their backs and rubbed their bellies in a distracted fashion.

  “Did you bring me a present?”

  His little sister Mimi landed on the white plastic chair next to him and stretched out her long brown legs. She had grown tall since he had last visited, and there was a pair of small, pointy girl’s breasts under her T-shirt. It didn’t look as if she had much interest in either bikes or puppies any longer.

  “Of course I didn’t bring a present,” he said and laughed. “Only good girls get presents, you know that.”

  Mimi laughed with her big white teeth and gave him a soft punch. She was wearing lip gloss, he noticed. Pink with glitter.

  “Where is it?”

  Vincent sighed, searched around in his backpack and pulled out the bag with Mimi’s present. Two T-shirts and a pair of Calvin Klein shorts, which he hoped would fit her new, slightly rounder bottom. He had bought it all at the market, no doubt copies, but neither he nor Mimi cared.

  She got up and kissed him fleetingly on the cheek. She smelled of strawberries and pineapple and the scented rinse that their mother usually used in the wash. Still very much a child.

  “I’ll try them on right away,” she said and disappeared on fleet feet across the sun-warmed paving stones of the patio.

  “And it’s going well?”

  His mother was observing him with anxious eyes.

  Here it came. He had been waiting for it. “Why don’t you ever visit us?” “Why didn’t you go see Uncle Alfredo when he invited you?” “Cousin Maria says you’ve only been by once, and she hasn’t seen you in church either.”

  He had already had the full barrage over the phone. His mother thought he was letting the family down. She was especially annoyed about Cousin Maria and church. Maria didn’t live far from him on Antonio Vasquez Street, and when he moved into his dorm room, she had brought him to church at once and introduced him to the priest and a couple of even more distant relatives. Try as he might, he could not remember their names or how he was related to them, but there was no doubt that they carried on a busy correspondence with his mother. All the old people had learned how to text in record time and this was one of the reasons why his mother was so well informed about his skipping church. His mother was deeply religious, but it was probably Cousin Maria’s jibes that bothered her the most. His mother might call her “a sanctimonious busybody,” but the taunts stung.

  “I’m studying, Mom,” he said. “Do you have any idea how massive the first year curriculum is?”

  His mother picked up a paper plate from the table and fanned herself with it. The heat was oppressive today.

  “You’ve always had lots to study,” she said. “But it never stopped you from attending church before. I worry about you. We never hear from you.”

  “I’m fine. I’m just . . . busy.”

  He hoped she couldn’t hear the lie.

  It was almost six months since he had last been home. It took three hours each way in a crowded and hellishly hot jeepney, which was not a very tempting way to spend your weekend. Vincent hated the trip, and he always got carsick and had to bring about a million bags he could vomit in and then toss out the back of the jeepney.

  But that wasn’t the main reason. He just didn’t want to go home.

  There were the weekends with Vadim and Victor, the nights out on the town with a few bottles of San Miguel and girls who slinked softly through the dark. He didn’t touch them; he had Bea. He just loved the slight buzz, Vadim’s laughter, and Victor’s calm and slightly crooked smile, which followed on the heels of the first five San Miguels. Victor normally didn’t say much, and seemed to have the same unflappable nature as the water buffaloes he had bossed around in the rice paddies. But when he got drunk, he sang Britney Spe
ars on the bar’s karaoke system.

  Vincent couldn’t explain that to Bea and his family at home in San Marcelino. Plus, there was that other pang of conscience that jabbed him every time he thought of them.

  His grades on the year-end exams had been catastrophic. Nothing less. He had no proper grasp of the material, didn’t understand the professors during the lectures, and was behind with his reading both of the textbooks and of the compendiums of notes which were placed in his pigeonhole once a week. The others did not seem to suffer the same agonies. Victor appeared to have everything under control, and Vadim did too. And Vadim had reassured him again and again

  “Weren’t you top of your year in high school? What the hell are you afraid of?”

  So he had suppressed his initial anxieties and had calmed his nerves with more San Miguels and more Vadim. Evenings under the open sky on Vadim’s balcony with endless and exalted conversations about life and death. Vadim borrowed a motorcycle from a dealer and kept it for almost two months. At night they drove through Manila’s humid darkness, in shorts and without lights. The wind blew coolly against his gleaming sweaty skin, and it felt as if they were headed directly for the future. As if the future was an actual place, shiny and unused, waiting for them just around the corner. It had felt so right and so secure. As if nothing could go wrong. Which was of course a lie. He knew that now.

  He knew it the same moment he sat down in his seat in the meltingly hot examination room. The papers with the many questions and far-too-multiple choices flickered in front of his eyes, and he knew, knew, knew right there and then that he was in trouble. The realization was a black hole, a sucking vacuum that it had taken him a frantic half an hour to escape, and after that there was nothing to do but try to patch up the damage. He crossed off the answers blindly or based on vague notions and then waited with fear and loathing for the grade lists to be posted on the wall in front of the director’s office.

  He had passed, but only just. He, who had always been at the top of every class at every point in his life, had barely made it through first-year anatomy and had been stumblingly close to failing three other tests in the laboratory. With such low grades, he would not get his scholarship renewed. That much was certain.

  The fee for the third semester would be an unimaginable fifty thousand pesos. A dizzying and impossible amount. And then there was his rent, and food, too. He did not need a detailed knowledge of his parents’ finances to know that this was beyond them. Unless they broke into the money they had saved for Mimi. She wanted to be a nurse and work in Europe, like all other sensible girls. He did not want his future to come at the cost of his sister’s.

  “What do you think?”

  Mimi was back from their parents’ bedroom in the new jean shorts and T-shirt. The shorts were a bit of a tight fit, but she looked happy, and their mother smiled too.

  “You look nice, sweetie. She’s getting big, isn’t she? High school next year and she’s already begun looking at colleges.”

  He fiddled with his coffee cup. Suddenly felt as if it was much too hot here. One of the cockerels stretched its neck and began to crow like mad, and as if on command, all the others did the same.

  The noise was deafening, and his mother sighed, got up and walked with stiff, uneven strides down the patio steps and across to the wooden bin that contained food for the raucous creatures.

  She was getting old. He could see that her back was bothering her. Arthritis. There wasn’t much to be done, but she got pills from the pharmacy to help with the pain. The back problem was the result of her three years as a maid in Saudi Arabia. Washing by hand for a family of nine. The heavy niqabs that had to be dragged in and out of the laundry tub, rinsed and wrung out. His mother still spoke about it with dread in her voice. But that was how she had saved up for his schooling, from when Vincent was seven until he was ten. She had been like a stranger when she finally came home. His father had been working in Germany.

  She scattered a handful of corn for each of Uncle’s cockerels, and they immediately calmed down, settled their wings, and started to eat.

  “Would you like another mango?” she asked on her way into the kitchen.

  “No, thank you. Later.” He smiled and got up. “I think I’ll drop by Bea’s.”

  “Young love.” His mother smiled, and the worry in her gaze melted away for a short, grateful moment.

  He cringed, slipped into his flip-flops and headed for Bea’s house.

  “Vincent! You’re here already? So the traffic from Manila wasn’t so bad?”

  Bea’s mom, Tia Merlita, was outside on the family’s bit of land, weeding around a few young coconut palms. She lit up when she saw him. She was a tall, thin woman with light skin and high cheekbones. Her late father had been Chinese, a relatively wealthy entrepreneur who had founded the family business, a cultured pearl farm that lay a few kilometers further south. It was a good business; Bea’s family was wealthier than Vincent’s.

  He walked over to Bea’s mother and raised the back of her hand to his forehead as a sign of respect.

  “No, it wasn’t so bad,” he said. “It only took three hours.”

  She nodded and sighed with all signs of sympathy. If you were unlucky, the trip from Manila could sometimes last up to six hours. Endless roadwork, rush hour congestion, accidents . . . or you might simply get stuck behind one of the pig transports. Big open trucks with sweating and exhausted sows who had to be doused regularly with water by the equally sweaty farmers balancing on the truck beds. Journeying on the foul-smelling rivers of Manila’s traffic was no pleasure trip for anyone.

  “Bea is inside,” said Tia Merlita, giving a quick toss of her head in the general direction of the house. “She’s not well.”

  A faint uneasiness coursed through Vincent.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Upset stomach. She must have eaten something that didn’t agree with her.” She shrugged. “She’ll be feeling better now, I think. Probably just needed something to drink and a bit of a lie-down. Her exam went well, but you probably know that.”

  He continued up the driveway and opened the door to the small living room. It was cool and dark inside. The air conditioning hummed loudly above the worn plush sofa where Bea lay slumped. The television was on, but Bea had her eyes closed. He hadn’t seen her since that weekend at the resort with Vadim and Victor and Diana. Her face seemed pale in the gloom and the blue flickering light from the tv, and her forehead was covered in sweat. She was wearing a thin, sleeveless black-and-red checked dress that made her look like a serious and intense little girl.

  Everything in him grew tender.

  “Hey . . .” he whispered, raising her hand to his lips and kissing it gently.

  “Hey.” She didn’t open her eyes but smiled. It struck him that she had the most beautiful teeth in the world. And the most beautiful lips.

  “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said. She stretched and finally opened her big dark eyes. “I thought we could go for a walk down to the river. If you feel like it?”

  He didn’t feel like it. It was almost noon, and the heat outside was a hostile and consuming force. But he knew that it was important to her. They had kissed for the first time on the suspension bridge by the river, and when they were younger, they had bathed together and had splashed water at the washerwomen and at people picking bayabas by the shore. The river was their place.

  Vincent’s mother liked to say that God had brought them together, long before it occurred to the families that it would be a good idea. That his mother had mentioned quite early on that Vincent was planning to become a doctor, and that Bea’s parents had ambitions on their daughter’s behalf, may have eased the Lord’s work considerably, thought Vincent.

  They walked hand in hand down the road, and Vincent bought a couple of bottles of water in the little shop selling gum, rice, cola, and canned food. The lady behi
nd the counter smiled and revealed a couple of black gaps in her teeth. She was the mother of Georgio from his old class. He had left school after high school and traveled to Norway to work in the oil industry. Now his mother had bought the shop and the little brick house behind it.

  “You haven’t written to me since we saw each other last,” said Bea and gave his hand a small, firm squeeze. “You haven’t forgotten me, have you?”

  “Are you kidding?” He gave her a crooked smile. “I haven’t thought about anything but you and . . . it.”

  It was a bit of a lie, but not much.

  The two nights with Bea had been impossible to shake off, and he took pleasure in replaying them when he went to bed at night. He missed her more than ever. But it took up too much space to fit in one of the usual letters. He wasn’t good at putting feelings into writing.

  “I did call,” he defended himself.

  “Yes.” She laughed. “But it’s not very easy to say what you are thinking with a mother or an aunt constantly hanging over your shoulder. They are so curious. One day it’ll kill them.”

  She became serious.

  “I envy you, Vincent, because you moved away. Because you’re in Manila doing new things. And I’m afraid of losing you; I’m afraid you’ll find another girl—some bright and pretty medical student with as much money as Vadim and expensive black underwear and sky-high stilettos.”

  She pointed down at her flip-flops, and they both couldn’t help laughing. Bea’s slender brown legs and narrow ankles were covered by a thin layer of dust from the road. It was the dry season.