The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared

her idol, the singer, Sonya Hedenbratt. This was followed by several days’ negotiations between Sonya and the Alsatian, Buster, before the two agreed to get along.
    Winter arrived, meaning an endless search for food for poor Sonya who ate like the elephant she was. Conveniently, The Beauty’s father had just popped his clogs and left an inheritance of one million crowns to his only daughter. (When he became a pensioner twenty years earlier, he had sold his successful brush-making factory and subsequently looked after his money well.) So The Beauty resigned from her job at the local clinic in Rottne, to be a stay-at-home mum for a dog and an elephant.
    Then spring arrived and Sonya could once more sustain herself with grass and leaves, and then that Mercedes drove into the yard, the first visitor since daddy, bless his dear departed soul, had come to see his daughter one last time two years before. The Beauty said that she wasn’t one to argue with fate, so it never occurred to her to try to keep Sonya a secret from the strangers.
    Allan and Julius sat quietly and let The Beauty’s story sink in, while Benny said:
    ‘But what was that bellowing from Sonya? I feel she must be in pain.’
    The Beauty stared at him wide-eyed:
    ‘How the hell could you hear that?’
    Benny took a bite to give himself time to think. Then he said:
    ‘I’m almost a vet. Do you want the long or the short story?’
    They all agreed that they would prefer the long version, but The Beauty insisted that first she and Benny should go to the barn so the almost-vet could have a look at Sonya’s painful left front foot.
    Allan and Julius remained at the dinner table, both wondering how a vet with a pony tail could end up as a failure of a hot-dog-stand proprietor in one of the most out-of-the-way places in the county of Södermanland. A vet with a pony tail, what sort of sense did that make? These really were strange times.
    Benny examined poor old Sonya with confidence, he had done this sort of thing before, during the practical part of his studies. A broken-off twig had become jammed under her second toenail, and made part of her foot swell up. The Beauty had tried to get the twig out but she had not been strong or dextrous enough. It didn’t take Benny more than a couple of minutes to manage it, with the help of calm talk with Sonya and a pair of tongs. But the elephant’s foot was badly swollen.
    ‘We need antibiotics,’ said Benny. ‘About a kilo.’
    ‘If you know what we need, I know how to get it,’ said The Beauty.
    But ‘getting it’ would require a visit to Rottne in the middle of the night, and to pass the evening Benny and The Beauty returned to the dinner table.
    They all ate with a good appetite and washed the food down with beer and bitters, all except Benny who drank juice. After the last mouthful, they moved into the living room and the armchairs beside the fire, where Benny was asked to explain how he came to be an almost-vet.
    It all began when Benny and his one-year-older brother, Bosse, who grew up just south of Stockholm, spent several summers with their Uncle Frank in Dalarna. Uncle Frank, who was never called anything other than Frasse, was a successful entrepreneur who owned and ran a number of different local businesses. Uncle Frank sold everything from campers to gravel and most things in between. Besides eating and sleeping, work was his great passion. He had some failed romances behind him, since all the ladies soon got tired of Uncle Frasse just working and working, eating and sleeping (and showering on Sundays).
    Anyway, during a number of summers in the 1960s, Benny and Bosse had been sent to Dalarna by their father, Uncle Frasse’s older brother, on the grounds that the children needed some fresh air. It is doubtful whether they got much of that, because Benny and Bosse were quickly trained to look after the big stone crushing machine at Uncle Frasse’s gravel pit. The boys liked working there, even though it was hard, and for two months they had to breathe in stone dust rather than fresh air. In the evenings, Uncle Frasse delivered moral sermons, regularly exhorting:
    ‘You boys make sure you get a proper education; otherwise you’ll end up like me.’
    Now neither Benny nor Bosse thought it would be such a bad thing to end up like Uncle Frasse – at least until he fell into the stone crusher and came to a gravelly end – but Uncle Frasse had always been bothered by his own limited