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But obviously you would still never rob a bank. Of course not.

But perhaps, though, you’ve been in love? Almost everyone has, after all. And love can make you do quite a lot of ridiculous things. Getting married, for instance. Having children, playing happy families, and having a happy marriage. Or you might think that, anyway. Not happy, perhaps, but plausible. A plausible marriage. Because how happy can anyone really be, all the time? How could there be time for that? Mostly we’re just trying to get through the day. You’ve probably had days like that as well. But when you get through enough of them, one morning you look over your shoulder and realize that you’re on your own, the person you were married to turned off somewhere along the way. Maybe you uncover a lie. That’s what happened to the bank robber. An infidelity comes to light, and even if no one’s actually been unfaithful to you, you can probably appreciate that it’s enough to knock a person off balance.

Especially if it wasn’t just a fling, but an affair that had been going on for a long time. You haven’t only been cheated on, you’ve also been deceived. It’s possible for someone to be unfaithful to you without really thinking about you at all, but an affair requires planning. Perhaps that’s what hurts most of all, the millions of tiny clues that you didn’t notice. Maybe you’d have been even more crushed if there wasn’t even a good explanation. For instance, maybe you could have understood if it was about loneliness or desire, “You’re always at work and we never have any time for each other. ” But if the explanation is “Well, er, if you want me to be really honest, the person I’ve been unfaithful with is your boss, ” then it can be harder to get back up again. Because that means that the reason you’ve been working so much overtime is also the same reason why you no longer have a marriage. When you get to work on the Monday after the breakup, your boss says: “Well, er, obviously it’s going to be uncomfortable for everyone involved, so… perhaps it would be easiest if you no longer worked here. ” On Friday you were married and had a job, and on Monday you’re homeless and unemployed. What do you do then? Talk to a solicitor? Sue someone?

No.

Because the bank robber was told: “Don’t make a scene now. Don’t cause chaos. For the children’s sake! ” So the bank robber didn’t. Didn’t want to be that sort of parent, so just moved out of the apartment, left work, eyes closed, jaw clenched. For the children’s sake. Perhaps you’d have done the same. Once the frog said she’d heard an adult on the bus say “love hurts, ” and the monkey replied that maybe that’s why hearts end up jagged when you try to draw them. How do you explain a divorce to them after that? How do you explain about infidelity? How do you avoid turning them into little cynics? Falling in love is magical, after all, romantic, breathtaking… but falling in love and love are different. Aren’t they? Don’t they have to be? Good grief, no one could cope with being newly infatuated, year after year. When you’re infatuated you can’t think about anything else, you forget about your friends, your work, your lunch. If we were infatuated all the time we’d starve to death. And being in love means being infatuated… from time to time. You have to be sensible. The problem is that everything is relative, happiness is based on expectations, and we have the Internet now. A whole world constantly asking us: “But is your life as perfect as this? Well? How about now? Is it as perfect as this? If it isn’t, change it! ”

The truth of course is that if people really were as happy as they look on the Internet, they wouldn’t spend so much damn time on the Internet, because no one who’s having a really good day spends half of it taking pictures of themselves. Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit. Not that that really makes much difference, because now we’ve learned that every day needs to be special. Every day.

Suddenly you find yourselves living alongside each other, not with each other. One of us can go around for a shocking length of time thinking our marriage is good. Or at least no worse than anyone else’s. Plausible, anyway. Then it turns out that one of us wants more, just getting through the day isn’t enough. One of us worked and went home, worked and went home, worked and went home, trying to be amenable in both places. And then it turns out that the person you were married to and the person you were working for have been extremely amenable to each other the whole time.

“Love one another until death do us part, ” isn’t that what we said? Isn’t that what we promised each other? Or am I remembering wrong? “Or at least until one of us gets bored. ” Maybe that was it?

Now the monkey and the frog and one parent and the boss live in the apartment, and the bank robber parent lives somewhere else. Because the apartment was only in the name of the other parent, and the bank robber parent didn’t want to make a fuss. Not cause chaos. But it isn’t exactly easy to get a home in this part of town, or any other part of any other town, really, if you haven’t got a job or any savings. You don’t put your name on the list for public housing when you’re married and have children and a life, because it never occurs to you that you might lose all of it in the course of an afternoon. The worst thing a divorce does to a person isn’t that it makes all the time you devoted to the relationship feel wasted, but that it steals all the plans you had for the future.

Buying an apartment is completely out of the question, the bank said, because who’d lend money to someone without money? You only lend money to people who don’t really need to borrow money. So where are you to live, you might ask. “You’ll have to rent, ” the bank said. But in order to rent an apartment in this town when you don’t have a job, you have to put down four months’ rent as a deposit. A deposit you get back when you move out, for all the good it’ll do you then.

Then a letter arrived from a lawyer. It said that the monkey and frog’s other parent had decided to apply for sole custody of the children because “the current situation, in which their other custodian has neither a home nor a job, is untenable. We really must think of the children. ” As if there were anything else a parent with no home and no job ever thinks about.

The other parent also sent an email saying: “You need to pick up your things. ” Which means of course that you have to pick up the things that the other parent and your old boss, after pinching all the good stuff, have decided are rubbish. They’re packed away in the storeroom in the basement, so what do you do? Maybe you go there late one evening, to avoid the shame of bumping into any of the neighbors, and maybe you realize you’ve got nowhere to take the things. You haven’t got anywhere to live, and it’s starting to get cold outside, so you stay in the storeroom in the basement.

In another storeroom, belonging to a neighbor who’s forgotten to lock up, is a box full of blankets. You borrow them to keep yourself warm. For some reason, beneath the blankets is a toy pistol, so you sleep with that in your hand, thinking that if some crazy burglar breaks in during the night, you can scare them away with it. Then you start to cry, because you realize that you’re the crazy burglar.

The next morning you put the blankets back but keep the toy pistol, because you don’t know where you’re going to sleep that night, and it might come in useful. This goes on for a week. You might not know exactly how it feels, but perhaps you’ve also had moments when you stare at yourself in the mirror and think: This wasn’t how life was supposed to turn out. That can terrify a person. So one morning you do something desperate. Well, not you, obviously, you’d have done something different, of course. You’d have found out about the law and what your rights were, and you’d have gotten hold of a lawyer and gone to court. Unless perhaps you wouldn’t have done that. Because perhaps you didn’t want to make a fuss in front of your daughters, you didn’t want to be one of those chaotic parents, so maybe you’d have thought: “Somehow, if I get the chance, I’ll find a way to sort this out without upsetting them. ”

So when a small apartment becomes available fairly close to the apartment where the monkey and the frog live, right by the bridge, a sublet from someone already subletting from someone else subletting, at a cost of six thousand five hundred a month, you think: If I can just manage a month I’ll have time to find a job, then they won’t be able to take the children away from me, as long as I just have somewhere to live. So you empty your bank account and sell everything you own and scrape together enough money for a month, and you lie awake thirty nights in a row, wondering how you’re going to afford another month. And then suddenly you can’t.

You’re supposed to go to the authorities in that situation, that’s what you’re supposed to do. But perhaps you stand outside the door and think about your mom and what the air in there was like when you sat on a wooden bench with a numbered ticket between your fingertips, you remember how much a child can lie for their parents’ sake. You can’t force your heart to cross the threshold. The stupidest thing people who have everything think about people who have nothing is that it’s pride that stops a person from asking for help. That’s very rarely the case.

Addicts are good at lying, but never as good as their children. It’s their sons and daughters who have to come up with excuses, never too outlandish or incredible, always mundane enough for no one to want to check them. An addict’s child’s homework never gets eaten by the dog, they just forgot their backpack at home. Their mom didn’t miss parents’ evening because she was kidnapped by ninjas, but because she had to work overtime. The child doesn’t remember the name of the place she’s working, it’s only a temporary job. She does her best, Mom does, to support us now that Dad’s gone, you know. You soon learn how to phrase things in such a way as to preclude any follow-up questions. You learn that the women in the welfare office can take you away from her if they find out she managed to set fire to your last apartment when she fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand, or if they find out she stole the Christmas ham from the supermarket. So you lie when the security guard comes, you take the ham off her, and confess: “It was me who took it. ” No one calls the police for a child, not when it’s Christmas. So they let you go home with your mom, hungry but not alone.

If you had been that sort of child, and then grown up and had children of your own, you would never have subjected them to that. Under no circumstances would they have to learn to become such good liars, you would promise yourself that. So you don’t go to the welfare office, because you’re scared they’ll take the girls away from you. You accept the divorce and don’t put up a fight for your apartment or your job, because you don’t want the girls to have parents who are at war with each other. You try to sort everything out yourself, and eventually you get a stroke of luck: you manage to find a job, against the odds, not the sort you can live comfortably on, but one you can survive on for a while. That’s all you need, a chance. But they tell you your first month’s wages are being withheld, meaning that they won’t pay you for the first month until you’ve worked two months, as if the first month weren’t the time when you can least afford to go without money.

You go to the bank and ask for a loan so that you can afford to work for no wages, but the bank tells you that isn’t possible, because it isn’t a permanent job. You could get fired at any time. And then how would they get their money back? Because you haven’t got any, have you?! You try to explain that if you had money, you wouldn’t need a loan, but the bank can’t see the logic in that.

So what do you do? You struggle on. Hope that’ll be enough. Then you receive another threatening letter from the lawyer. You don’t know what to do, who to turn to, you just don’t want to start a fight. You run to the bus in the morning, imagine that the girls can’t see how you’re feeling, but they do. You can see in their eyes that they want to sell subscriptions to magazines and give you all the money. When you leave them at school you go into an alleyway and sit down on the edge of the sidewalk and cry because you can’t stop thinking: You shouldn’t have loved me.

All your life you’ve promised yourself that you’ll cope with everything. Not be a chaotic person. Not have to beg for help. But Christmas Eve arrives, and you suffer your way through it in lonely despair, because the girls are going to spend New Year’s Day with you. The day before New Year’s Eve you put the latest letter from the lawyer who wants to take them away from you in your pocket, next to the letter from your landlord which says that if you don’t pay the rent today you’re going to be evicted. Right there, right then, it takes next to nothing to knock you off balance. One really bad idea is enough. You find the toy pistol that looks like a real pistol. You make holes in a black woolly hat and pull it down over your face, you go into the bank that wasn’t prepared to lend you any money because you didn’t have any money, you tell yourself that you’re only going to ask for six thousand five hundred kronor for the rent, and that you’ll return it as soon as you get paid. How? a more ordered mind might be asking, but… well… perhaps you haven’t really thought that far ahead? Perhaps you just think you’ll go back, in the same ski mask and with the same pistol, and force them to take the money back? Because all you need is one month. All you need is one single chance to sort everything out.

Later it turns out that that damn toy pistol, the one that looked almost real, looked real because it was real. And in a stairwell a drawing of an elk and a frog and a monkey flutters on the breeze, and in an apartment at the top of the building is a rug soaked in blood.

This wasn’t how life was supposed to turn out.

It wasn’t a bomb.

It was a box of Christmas lights that one of the neighbors had strung up on his balcony. He had actually been thinking of leaving them up over New Year’s Day, but then he had a row with his wife, because she thought “there are far too many lights, don’t you think? And why can’t we have ordinary white lights like everyone else? Do we have to have flashing lights, all different colors, so it looks like we’ve opened a brothel? ” He had muttered back: “What sort of brothels have you been to, if they have flashing lights? ” and then she had raised her eyebrows and suddenly demanded to know “what sort of brothels have you been to, seeing as you know exactly what they look like…? ” and the row had ended with him going out onto the balcony and pulling the damn lights down. But he couldn’t be bothered to carry the box down to the storeroom in the basement, so he left them on the landing outside the door to their apartment. Then he and his wife went off to her parents’ to celebrate the New Year and argue about brothels. The box was left outside the door, on the floor below the apartment that ended up being the location for a hostage drama. When the postman at the start of this story came up the stairs and suddenly caught sight of the armed bank robber going into the apartment that was open for viewing, obviously he couldn’t get downstairs fast enough and stumbled over the box, accidentally dislodging the wires from the top of it.

It didn’t look like a bomb, it really didn’t, it looked like an overturned box of Christmas lights. From a brothel. But in Jim’s defense perhaps it looked like it could have been a bomb, especially if you’d mostly only heard about bombs but never actually seen one. Or a brothel. Rather like if you’re really frightened of snakes and are sitting on the toilet and feel a slight draft on your backside, and you automatically think, Snake! Obviously that’s neither logical nor plausible, but if phobias were logical and plausible they wouldn’t be called phobias. Jim was considerably more frightened of bombs than he was of Christmas lights, and at times like that your brain and eyes can have a bit of a falling-out. That’s the point here.

So, the two police officers had been standing down in the street. Jim had looked for advice on Google, and Jack had phoned the owner of the apartment where the hostages were to find out roughly how many people might be in there. The owner turned out to be a mother with a young family in a different town altogether. She said the apartment had been passed down to her and that she hadn’t been there in person for a very long time. She didn’t have anything to say about the viewing. “The real estate agent’s in charge of all that, ” she said. Then Jack called the police station and spoke to the woman at the café who was married to the postman who first raised the alarm about the bank robber. Unfortunately Jack didn’t find out very much more, except for the fact that the bank robber was “masked and fairly small. Not really small, but normally small! Maybe more normal than small! But what’s normal? ”

Jack tried to come up with a plan based on this scant information, but didn’t get very far because his boss called and—when Jack couldn’t immediately present him with a plan—the boss called the boss’s boss, and the boss’s boss’s boss, and all the bosses naturally agreed, predictably enough, that it would probably be best if they called Stockholm at once. All of them apart from Jack, of course, who wanted to deal with something himself for once in his life. He suggested that the bosses should let him and Jim go into the stairwell and up to the apartment to see if they could make contact with the bank robber. The bosses agreed to this, despite their doubts, because Jack was basically the sort of police officer that other police officers trusted. But Jim was standing beside him, and heard as one of the bosses shouted down the line that they should “take it really damn carefully, and make sure there are no explosives or other crap in the stairwell, because it might not be about the hostages, it could be a terrorist incident! Have you seen anyone carrying any suspicious packages? Anyone with a beard? ” Jack wasn’t bothered by any of that, because he was young. But Jim was seriously bothered, because he was someone’s father.

The elevator was out of order, so he and Jack took the stairs, and on the way up they knocked on all the doors to see if any of the neighbors were still in the building. No one was home, because the day before New Year’s Eve anyone who had to work was at work, and anyone who didn’t have to work had better things to do, and anyone who didn’t must have heard the sirens and seen the reporters and police officers from their balconies and gone outside to see what was going on. (Some of them were actually afraid that there was a snake loose in the building, because there’d recently been rumors on the Internet that a snake had been found in a toilet in a block of apartments in the neighboring town, so that was pretty much the level of probability for hostage dramas in those parts. )

When Jack and Jim reached the floor with the box and the wires, Jim started so hard with fear that he hurt his back (here it should be noted that Jim had recently hurt his back in the same place when he happened to sneeze unexpectedly, but still. ) He yanked Jack back and hissed: “BOMB! ”

Jack rolled his eyes the way only sons can and said: “That isn’t a bomb. ”

“How do you know that? ” Jim wondered.

“Bombs don’t look like that, ” Jack said.

“Maybe that’s what whoever made the bomb wants you to think. ”

“Dad, pull yourself together, that isn’t…”

If it had been any other colleague, Jim would probably have let him carry on up the stairs. Maybe that’s why some people think it’s a bad idea for fathers and sons to work together. Because Jim said instead: “No, I’m going to call Stockholm. ”

Jack never forgave him for that.

The bosses and the bosses’ bosses and whoever was above them in the hierarchy who issued orders immediately issued an order that the two officers should go back down to the street and wait for backup. Obviously it wasn’t easy to find backup, even in the big cities, because who the hell robs a bank the day before New Year’s Eve? And who the hell takes people hostage at an apartment viewing? “And who the hell has an apartment viewing the day before…? ” as one of the bosses wondered, and they carried on like that for a good while over the radio. Then a specialist negotiator, from Stockholm, called Jack’s phone to say that he was going to be taking charge of the entire operation. He was currently in a car, several hours away, but Jack needed to understand very clearly that he was expected merely to “contain the situation” until the negotiator arrived. The negotiator spoke with an accent that definitely wasn’t from Stockholm, but that didn’t matter, because if you asked Jim and Jack, being a Stockholmer was more a state of mind than a description of geographic origin. “Not all idiots are Stockholmers, but all Stockholmers are idiots, ” as people often said at the police station. Which was obviously extremely unfair. Because it’s possible to stop being an idiot, but you can’t stop being a Stockholmer.

After talking to the negotiator Jack was even angrier than he’d been the last time he’d had to speak to a customer service representative at his Internet provider. Jim in turn felt the weight of responsibility for the fact that his son wasn’t now going to get the chance to show that he could apprehend the bank robber on his own. All their decisions for the remainder of the day would come to be governed by those feelings.

“Sorry, son, I didn’t mean…, ” Jim began sheepishly, without knowing how he was going to finish the sentence without admitting that if Jack had been any other man’s son, Jim would most likely have agreed that it wasn’t a bomb. But you don’t take any risks if the son is your own son.

“Not now, Dad! ” Jack replied sullenly, because he was talking to their boss’s boss on the phone again.

“What do you want me to do? ” Jim asked, because he needed to be needed.

“You can start by trying to get hold of people living in the neighboring apartments, the ones we never reached because of you and your ‘bomb, ’ so we know that the rest of the building is empty! ” Jack snapped.

Jim nodded, crushed. He looked up the phone numbers on Google. First the owner of the apartment on the floor where Jim had seen the bomb. A man replied, said he and his wife were away, and when his wife snapped: “Who’s that? ” irritably in the background, the man snapped back: “It’s the brothel! ” Jim didn’t know what that was supposed to mean, so he asked instead if there was anyone in their apartment. When the man said there wasn’t, Jim didn’t want to worry him by talking about the bomb, and there was no way the man could possibly have known at that point that if he had just said: “By the way, that box on the landing contains Christmas lights, ” then this whole story would have changed instantly, so the man merely asked instead: “Was there anything else? ” and Jim said: “No, no, I think that’s everything, ” then thanked him and hung up.

Then he called the owners of the apartment at the top of the building, the one on the same floor as the apartment where the hostage drama was going on. The owners of that one turned out to be a young couple in their early twenties, they were in the middle of splitting up and had both moved out. “So the apartment’s empty? ” Jim asked, relieved. It was, but in two separate conversations Jim still had to listen as two twentysomethings took it for granted that Jim would want to know why they had split up. It turned out that one of them couldn’t live with the fact that the other one had such ugly shoes, and the other was turned off by the fact that the first dribbled when he brushed his teeth, and that both of them would rather have a partner who wasn’t quite so short. One said that the relationship was doomed because the other liked coriander, so Jim said: “And you don’t? ” only to receive the reply: “I do, but not as much as her! ” The other one said they’d started to hate each other after an argument that, as far as Jim could understand, started when they were unable to find a juicer in a color that reflected them both as individuals but also as a couple. That was when they realized that they couldn’t live together another minute longer, and now they hated each other. It struck Jim that today’s youngsters had far too much choice, that was the whole problem—if all those modern dating apps had existed when Jim’s wife first met him, she would never have ended up becoming his wife. If you’re constantly presented with alternatives, you can never make up your mind, Jim thought. How could anyone live with the stress of knowing that while their partner was in the bathroom, they could be swiping right or left and finding their soul mate? A whole generation would end up getting urinary tract infections because they had to keep waiting to pee until the charge on their partner’s phone ran out. But obviously Jim said none of this, merely asked one last time: “So the apartment’s empty? ”

They each confirmed that it was. All that was left in there was a juicer in the wrong color. The apartment was going to be put up for sale in the new year, with an estate agency whose name one of them couldn’t remember, only that it was “really corny, kind of dad-joke corny! ” The other one confirmed this: “Whoever named that estate agency has a worse sense of humor than hairdressers! Did you know there’s one here called ‘The Upper Cut’? I mean, like, what? ”

Jim hung up then. He thought it was a shame that they’d split up, those two, because they deserved each other.

He went over to Jack and tried to tell him about it, but Jack just said: “Not now, Dad! Did you get hold of the neighbors? ”

Jim nodded.

“Is anyone home? ” Jack asked.

Jim shook his head. “I just wanted to say that…, ” he began, but Jack shook his head and resumed his conversation with his boss.

“Not now, Dad! ”

So Jim didn’t say anything more.

What then? Well, then everything slid out of control, little by little. The whole hostage drama took several hours, but the negotiator got caught up in traffic and ended up stuck behind the worst multi-vehicle pileup of the year on the motorway (“Bound to be Stockholmers who set out without proper studded tires, ” Jim declared confidently), so he never arrived. Jim and Jack were left to deal with the situation themselves, which wasn’t without its complications seeing as it took them a long time before they even managed to establish contact with the bank robber (culminating in Jack getting a large bump on his head, which itself is quite a long story). But eventually they managed to get a phone inside the apartment (which is an even longer story), and once the bank robber had released all the hostages and the negotiator made a call to that phone, that was when the pistol shot was heard from inside the apartment.

Several hours later Jack and Jim were still sitting in the police station, interviewing all the witnesses. That didn’t help at all, of course, because at least one of them wasn’t telling the truth.

The truth is that the bank robber went to ridiculous lengths not to point the pistol at anyone inside the apartment, to avoid frightening anyone. But the first person the bank robber accidentally happened to aim the pistol at was a woman called Zara. She’s somewhere in her fifties, and beautifully dressed in that way that people who have become financially independent on the back of other people’s financial dependency often are.

The funny thing is that when the bank robber rushed in, stumbled, and ended up waving the pistol in such a way that Zara found herself staring straight down the barrel of the gun, she didn’t even look scared. Another woman in the apartment, on the other hand, let out a shriek of panic: “Oh, dear Lord, we’re being robbed! ” Which seemed a little odd, because the bank robber had absolutely no intention that this bit should be a robbery. Obviously no one likes being treated in a prejudiced way, and the fact that you just happen to be holding a pistol doesn’t automatically make you a robber, and even if you are, you can still be a bank robber without necessarily wanting to rob individuals. So when another woman cried, “Get your money out, Roger! ” to her husband, the bank robber couldn’t help feeling rather insulted. Not unreasonably, really. Then a middle-aged man in a checkered shirt who was standing by the window—Roger, evidently—muttered sullenly: “We haven’t got any cash! ”

The bank robber was about to protest, but caught sight of the reflection captured in the balcony window. A figure with a masked face armed with a pistol, and the other people in the room. One of them was a very old woman. Another was pregnant. A third looked like she was about to burst into tears. They were all staring at the pistol, eyes wild with fear, no one’s wilder than the eyes staring out through the holes in the ski mask in the reflection. Then the bank robber reached a crushing realization: They’re not the captives here. I am.

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