Three Seconds

going to die.
    Sixteen cells here as well. Voluntary isolation was built to look like any other unit in any prison – the wardens’ room, the TV corner, the showers, the kitchen, the ping-pong table – the people who asked to come here could move around freely without the risk of bumping into prisoners from other units in the prison. The faces he saw were the only ones he would meet.
    A week.
    He would wait, avoid confrontation; he could stay alive here, survive here. Outside the door he was dead – every part of the big prison was a potential screwdriver to the throat, a table leg against his forehead as many times as was needed to make it cave in. In one week, Erik and the City Police would come and get him. He wouldn’t die, not yet, not with Hugo and Rasmus, not with Zofia, he wouldn’t
    would not
    would not
    would
    not
    ‘Are you all right?’
    He had fallen to the floor without using his hands, hitting his cheek and chin, and for a few seconds was somewhere else: the attack, the screws in the aquarium, the mouths forming
stukatj
, the riot guys in their black uniforms … He suddenly found it hard to breathe and had felt his legs swaying as he tried to stay upright.
    He hadn’t known until now that all the bloody energy just drains from your body when the only thing that exists is a fear of death.
    ‘I don’t know. Toilet, I need to wash my face, I’m sweating.’
    The sink in the middle looked almost clean. He turned on the tap and let the water run until it was cold, stuck his head under it to cool his neck and back, then filled his hands and rubbed against the skin of his face, as if he was returning – he wasn’t even particularly dizzy.
    The kick caught him on the side.
    The pain was intense, burning from somewhere on his hip.
    Piet Hoffmann hadn’t seen or heard the solid, long-haired guy in his twenties coming in, running towards him, but with screws from the riot squad outside he wasn’t going to do much more, he just spat and whispered
stukatj
and closed the door when he left.
    Death sentence. Already on his head.
    He got up, coughed and felt over his hip with one hand. The kick had caught him further up than he first thought, broken a couple of his ribs. He had to get out of here. To the next level. Solitary confinement. Total isolation, only contact with the screws, never have any contact with other prisoners, twenty-four hours a day, locked in a cell with no way in and no way out.
    Stukatj.
    He had to get away again. He mustn’t die.
    __________
    Ewert Grens had stopped halfway back from Aspsås, at the OK petrol station in Täby, and was sitting on one of the stools by the window with an orange juice and a cheese sandwich.
Soaring temperatures. Barrier nursing. Three, maybe four days.
He had stood in the visiting room with its toilet rolls and plastic-covered mattress and wanted to thump the walls, but had refrained; it would be pointless to argue with a prison doctor about infections he’d never heard about. He bought another artificial sandwich, it was the final stretch back to Stockholm and he couldn’t put it off any longer. He turned off the E4 at Haga South, drove past the hospital and stopped some way down Solna kyrkväg. Entrance 1, as far as he had come the last time.
     
    He was not alone.
    Visitors, park attendants and watering cans, all heading towards the grass and rows of headstones. He wound down the window, it was muggy, air that stuck to your back.
    ‘Do you work here?’
    A person in blue overalls with two spades on the back of a moped. The park attendant, or church warden, stopped by the man who was still in his car, shielded by the door, not daring to get out.
    ‘Have done for seventeen years.’
    Grens fidgeted uneasily and moved the sandwich wrapper that rustled on the seat. His eyes followed an old lady leaning over a small grey stone that looked new, a plant in one hand and an empty pot in the other.
    ‘So you know the place well?’
    ‘You could say that.’
    She started to dig, then with great care put the plant in the soil, had just enough room in the thin strip between the headstone and the grass.
    ‘I was wondering …’
    ‘Yes?’
    ‘I was wondering … if you want to find out about a particular grave, where someone is buried … what do you do?’
    __________
    Lennart Oscarsson stood by the window at the far end of a room he had aspired to all his adult life. The governor’s office at Aspsås prison. After twenty-one years as a prison