The Asylum Read Online Free Page B

Rami on his way to work at the nursery. The shortest route was through a dense coniferous forest; he ambled along the paths listening to her whispering voice:
    Murder is always suicide;
    I kill you, I kill me
    Hatred can be called love
    then I know where I am with you
.
    Life can be death
    and strength can be weakness
,
    when lambs fill the trains every day
    Other texts were about power, darkness, drugs and moon shadows. Jan listened and listened all summer until he knew the words by heart; he felt as if Rami was singing to him. Why not? She even had a song on the album with the name ‘Jan’ in it.
    In the middle of August a number of new children started at the nursery. One of them was special. A little boy with blond, curly hair.
    Jan was standing by the entrance to Lynx when the boy appeared. He actually saw the boy’s mother first; Jan thought he recognized her. A celebrity or an old acquaintance? Perhaps it was just that the mother looked older – between thirty-five and forty, quite old to have a child at nursery.
    Then Jan caught sight of the boy – small and as thin as a rake, but with big blue eyes. Five or six years old. He had golden-blond hair, just like Jan had had at his age, and he was wearing a tight red jacket. He walked towards the nursery holding his mother’s hand, but they went past Lynx and headed for the door leading to Brown Bear.
    He thought they were an ill-matched pair: the mother was tall and slim, dressed in a light brown leather jacket with a fur collar, while her son was so small he barely came up to her knees. He was having to trot along with short, scampering steps just to keep up with his mother’s strides.
    The boy’s outdoor clothes looked inadequate in the autumn chill. He could do with new ones.
    Jan had opened the door of Lynx, on his way into the warmth with half a dozen children in front of him, but he stopped and watched when he saw the mother and child. The boy kept his eyes fixed on the ground, but the mother gave Jan a passing glance and an impersonal nod. He was a stranger to her, an anonymous classroom assistant. Jan nodded back and remained in the doorway long enough to see them walk up the slope and open the door to Brown Bear.
    On the outside of the door was a dark-brown bear cut out of chipboard, and on the door Jan had just opened was a yellow lynx. Two forest carnivores. Ever since he had started at the nursery the previous summer, Jan had thought the names sounded wrong; after all, bears and lynx were no ordinary animals. They were predators.
    The boy and his mother had disappeared. Jan couldn’t stand here in the doorway, he had work to do. He went to join his own group of children, but he couldn’t forget the brief encounter.
    The registers for all the nursery classes were held on the computer, and before Jan set off home accompanied by Rami’s music, he sneaked into the office to find out what the new boy at Brown Bear was called.
    He found the name straight away: William Halevi, son of Roland and Emma Halevi.

4
    ‘COFFEE, JAN?’ ASKS Marie-Louise.
    ‘Yes please.’
    ‘A drop of milk?’
    ‘No thanks.’
    Marie-Louise is the supervisor at the Dell. She is between fifty and sixty years old, with light-grey curly hair and deep laughter lines around her eyes; she smiles a great deal and seems to want everyone around her to feel comfortable, whether they are big or small.
    And Jan actually does feel comfortable. He doesn’t know what he expected the pre-school to be like, but in here there is no hint of the high concrete wall just a few metres away.
    After St Patricia’s bare corridors and Högsmed’s white office, Jan has entered a rainbow world where vibrant children’s drawings cover the walls, where green and yellow wellingtons are lined up in the entrance hall, and where big boxes in the playroom overflow with cuddly toys and picture books. The air in here is slightly warm and heavy, just as it always is in a room where children have been