'Fine, thank you.'

Silence. If it was true that the doctor facing him actually was interested in the state of his health, then it was obvious that the reply had not satisfied him. There was a grave look in his eyes. An ominous gravity that made it clear that the conversation they were going to have was something more than just a normal report.

Jonas shifted his position in the chair. Don't touch the armrests.

'How old are you, Jonas?'

He swallowed. Not five. Not even with a two in front of it.

'I'll be twenty-six next year. Why do you ask? I thought we were going to talk about Anna.'

Dr Sahlstedt regarded him and then looked down at the table.

'It's not about Anna any longer. It's about you.'

Borlange to Boden 848, Bors to Bstad 177.

'What . . . I don't know what you mean.'

Sahlstedt raised his eyes again.

'What kind of job did you have? Before all this happened, I mean.'

'I was a postman.'

He nodded with interest.

'I see. Do you ever miss your colleagues from work?'

Was he toying with him? Or maybe postmen worked in flocks in the high-class neighbourhood where he imagined Dr Sahlstedt lived.

The doctor in front of him gave a little sigh when he got no answer and opened the brown casebook.

Had he really not brushed against the armrest when he sat down? He was no longer certain. If he had, he would have to touch it again to neutralise the first time he touched it. But what if he hadn't touched it? Good Lord, he had to neutralise it somehow.

'You've been on sick leave for almost two and a half years now. As long as Anna has been here.'

'Yes.'

'Why is that, actually?'

'What do you think? So I can be here with Anna, of course.'

'Anna can get along here without you. The staff will take care of her.'

'You know as well as I do that they don't have time to work with her as much as necessary.'

Dr Sahlstedt suddenly looked sad; he sat quietly and looked down at his hands. The silence was about to drive Jonas crazy. With all his might he tried to resist the compulsion's rage which was going berserk inside his body.

The doctor looked up at him again.

'Necessary for what, Jonas?'

He couldn't answer. The wash basin was on the wall to his left. He had to go and wash his hands. Had to wash away the touch if he had indeed happened to touch the armrest.

'As you know, the fever is not going down, and we did a new EKG yesterday. The infection in the aortic valve is not subsiding. At regular intervals it's releasing small septic embolisms, small particles, one might say, filled with bacteria. These bacteria go straight up to her brain stem, and that's why she continues to be struck by new blood clots in the brain.'

'I see.'

'This is the third clot she has had in two months. And with each new one her level of consciousness drops.'

He had heard things like this before. The doctors always told him the worst so as not to give him false hopes.

'You have to try and accept that she will never wake up from her coma.'

He could no longer fight it, and he stood up and went over to the wash basin.

Four steps. Not three.

He had to wash his hands.

'There is nothing more we can do to help her. Deep inside you know that too, don't you?'

He let the water run over his hands. Closed his eyes and felt the relief when the pressure eased.

'You have to start to let go now. Try to move on.'

'She reacted when I massaged her this morning.'

Dr Sahlstedt sighed behind his back.

'I'm sorry, Jonas. I know how hard you've struggled to help her, and we all have. But it could be a matter of weeks or months now, we don't know. In the worst case she could remain like this for another year.'

In the worst case.

He let the water run. Stood with his back to the man who claimed to be Anna's doctor. Ignorant idiot. How could he claim to know what was moving inside her? How many times had he massaged her legs? Sat next to her and tried to straighten out her crooked fingers? Brought her perfume and fruit to keep her sense of smell alive? Never. The only thing he had done was to hook up some wires to her skull, press a button, and then draw the conclusion that she was incapable of feeling anything.

'Why does she react then?'

Dr Sahlstedt sat in silence for a moment.

'I've been trying for a long time to get you to talk with some of our . . . some of my colleagues here at the Karolinska Institute, but . . . now I've actually taken the liberty of making an appointment for you. I'm convinced that it could help you get through this. You have your whole life ahead of you, Jonas. I don't think that Anna would want you to spend it here at the hospital.'

The sudden fury came like a liberator. The compulsion died down and retreated to the side.

He shut off the tap, took two paper towels, and turned around.

'You just said that she couldn't feel anything. Then why would she care about that?'

Dr Sahlstedt sat utterly still. A sudden beep from his breast pocket broke the silence.

'I have to go. We'll talk more another day. You have an appointment with Yvonne Palmgren tomorrow morning at 8.15.'

He tore off a yellow Post-It note from the pad and held it out to him. Jonas stood motionless.

'Jonas, it's for your own good. Maybe it's time you started thinking a little about yourself.'

Dr Sahlstedt gave up and stuck the note on the desk top before he went out the door. Jonas just stood there. Talk to a psychiatrist! What about? She would try to get into his thoughts, and why should he permit that? He'd been so successful at keeping everyone away from them up till now.

Anna was the only one he had let in.

She was his and he was hers. That's how it would always be. For two years and five months he had devoted all his time to making her well again. Trying to make everything all right. And now they wanted to get him to accept the fact that it had all been in vain.

Nobody was going to take her away from him.

Nobody.

When he came outside it had started to rain. On the nights he spent at the hospital he always took public transport because the parking fees were so high. They charged round the clock, and he couldn't afford it any more. He buttoned up his jacket and walked towards the subway.

He was terrified of the night, well aware of what was waiting. It was in the loneliness of his apartment that the control took over. The constantly nagging feeling that there was something important he had forgotten. The tap in the bathroom, had he turned it off properly? And the gas rings on the cooker? And what about the door, did he really lock it? Then the temporary calm when he had checked that everything was as it should be. But what if he had bumped into the light switch in the bathroom when he walked past without noticing it? Maybe he had managed to turn on the cooker just as he was checking that it was off. And he was no longer sure that he had locked the door. Had to check again.

The simplest thing was to stay away. Then he knew that everything was under control. Before he left the apartment he always turned off all the gas rings, unplugged the cords of all the electrical appliances and devices, and wiped the dust off the plugs. One never knew if a spark might start a fire. He stored the remote control for the TV in a drawer; it absolutely mustn't be left out on the table so that a ray of sunlight through the window might strike the sensor and make it catch fire.

And then going out the door. For the past six months the locking ritual had become so complicated that he had to write it down on a piece of paper he kept in his wallet to make sure he didn't miss something.

He stood down on the street looking up at the black windows of the flat. A man in his fifties he had never seen before came out the front door and gave him a suspicious look. He couldn't bring himself to go up to the flat. Instead he took his keyring from his pocket and got into his car, turned the ignition and let the engine idle.

Only with Anna was he left in peace. Only she was strong enough to vanquish the annihilating fear.

And now they thought he would just let go and move on.

Where to?

Where was it they wanted him to go?

She was all he had.

It was after the accident that it started again. It came sneaking up, lying in wait for him, at first only as a diffuse need to create symmetry and restore balance. And later, when the gravity of her injuries had become more and more obvious, the pressure to perform the complicated rituals had intensified to an inescapable compulsion. The only way to neutralise the threat was to give in. If he didn't obey the impulses properly, something horrible would happen. What, he didn't know, only that the fear and pain grew intolerable if he tried to fight back.

When he was a teenager it had been different. Then the pressure eased if he just avoided touching door handles with his hands or walked backwards down the stairs or touched all the lampposts he passed. Back then it had been easier to handle, when it was possible to hide behind the self-centredness of a teenager.

No one knew, either now or then, and well aware of the insanity of what he was doing he had invented tricks and gestures to make the compulsory rituals look like a natural part of his behaviour.

Every day a secret war.

Only during the year with Anna had he been free.

He loved Anna. He would never leave her.

His mobile rang in his jacket pocket. He took it out and looked at the display. No number. Two rings. He had to answer after the fourth or forget it.

It might be Karolinska Hospital.

'Jonas.'

'It's Pappa.'

Not now. Damn.

'You've got to help me, Jonas.'

He was drunk. Drunk and sad. And Jonas knew why he was calling. It had been eight months since the last time he called, and it had been the same story then. It always was. He probably didn't call more often to plead with his son because he was seldom sober enough to remember the number.

Jonas could hear the sound of people in the background. His father was drinking in some bar somewhere.

'I don't have time to talk right now.'

'Damn it, Jonas, you've got to help me. I can't go on living like this, I can't stand it any more . . .'

His voice broke and there was silence on the line. Only the murmur of voices.

Jonas leaned back against the headrest and closed his eyes. His father had begun to use his tears as a last resort early on. And frightened by his father's vulnerability, Jonas had tried to be loyal and thus was forced into betrayal.

He was thirteen years old when it started.

Just tell her I have to work late tonight. Damn it, Jonas, you know that this woman . . . well, shit, she gives a hell of a good ride.

Thirteen years old and his father's loyal coconspirator. The truth, whatever and wherever it was, had to be kept secret from his mother at all costs.

To protect her.

Year in and year out.

And then the constant question inside him of why his pappa did what he did.

There were plenty of people in town who knew. He remembered all the conversations that would suddenly stop when he and his mamma entered the grocer's and that resumed again as soon as she turned her back. All the sympathetic smiles that were directed at her from neighbours and girlfriends, people she thought were her friends, but who year after year out of sheer cowardice held their tongues about the truth. And he, too, walking beside her and holding his tongue as well, he was the worst traitor of them all. He recalled a conversation he had heard once when she was sitting with a neighbour in the kitchen. His mother thought that he had gone out and didn't hear, but he was lying in bed reading a comic book. He heard her in tears, talking about her suspicions that her husband had met someone else. Heard how she sat there at the kitchen table and overcame her own reservations enough to dare express her shameful misgivings. And the woman lied. Straight into his mamma's face she lied as she accepted coffee and home-baked buns. Lied and said that his mamma was surely just imagining things and that every marriage had its ups and downs and that there was certainly nothing to worry about.

And then the slaps on the back from the men urging his father on to new conquests, and more overtime to keep alive his reputation as an irresistible ladykiller, while Jonas stayed at home covering for him. Constant lies that were compensated for by the growing pressure to perform his rituals to dull the sense of dread. And then new lies, to hide the compulsion.

How he had wondered about all those women. Who were they, what were they thinking? Did they know that his father had a wife and a son somewhere, waiting for the man they were seducing? Did it mean anything to them? Did they care? What made them give their bodies to a man who only wanted to fuck them and then go home and deny them to his wife?

He never could understand it.

The only thing he knew was that he hated each and every one of them.

Hated them all.

The bubble burst a few months before his eighteenth birthday. Something as trivial as a little lipstick on a shirt collar. After five years of lies the constant betrayal was revealed, and his father had used Jonas's knowledge like a scared rabbit to protect himself from her pain. To avoid bearing all the guilt himself.