A breadcrumb wings it across the desk as I hit the spacebar for the fifty-eleventh time in a minute. I should really ask for a new keyboard. This one must be from the nineties or something, it even has a cable.
Crumbs and grains of salt lie like patches of sandy beach between the plastic keys worn shiny from use—the remains of my many deskbound mealtimes. It’s filthy, actually. I look around the room: a complete bombsite. My office is a public health hazard. Besides my tip of a keyboard, my desk is loaded with coffee mugs. There’s even one on the floor—how did it even get there? I hope it hasn’t left a ring on the carpet.
I pick up the mug from the floor. The carpet is still an uninterrupted grey. I inspect the mug, trying to establish its age. A pink, greasy lip-mark has imprinted itself on the white china, which tells me it must be at least a week old: I haven’t worn lip-gloss since last Wednesday. I put the mug on a bookshelf instead. I’ll take it out later. Just as soon as I finish writing this draft agreement.
My office is small, but at least it’s mine. I don’t have to sit in an open-plan setup, like most of the people I know. That would never have worked: whenever Isabelle next door is talking loudly on the phone, I need my headphones on to just write an email.
The wide windowsill is covered in piles of paper from a project that ended two months ago. On the floor lie stacks of year-old documents that should be sent for filing. And my desk is a heady mix of ongoing projects and study materials for my next law course. And coffee cups.
My wastepaper bin is clean, at least. Always something.
She just came, the woman who emptied it. Our offices are cleaned every evening, so as not to interrupt the working day. Not that that makes much of a difference for us associates; our work isn’t limited to the day.
She normally comes by around seven, her trolley brimming with rubbish bags and dusters and mops, like the Rolls-Royce of cleaning trolleys.
I wonder if she gets paid better, if she feels slightly superior to her colleagues who clean schools and hospitals and other public spaces with ugly, taxpayer-funded linoleum floors and their doors open to the plebs. I wonder if she’s above my mother in the cleaner hierarchy. Is it a little more luxurious to empty the bins of the elite?
She seems to always do the same rounds. I would never be able to do that, I’d have to change the order of the floors and rooms to stop myself from going bananas. Start on the first floor on Monday, then the middle of the third floor on Tuesday.
She’s Somali. I’ve never heard her say more than “hello” and “thank you” in Swedish and I don’t know her name, but she has classic East African cheekbones and wears a hijab.
It’s her and me, the only Somalis in the office. The only Africans.
Every evening she empties my bin and tries to give my filthy desk a wipe, where she can reach it for all the paper. She used to collect my mugs for the dishwasher, too, before I told her not to. That felt like too much. I couldn’t take the sight of her compensating for my inability to look after myself like a grown woman. She could be my mother.
I said it in Swedish: “You can leave them—I’ll take them later, but thanks.” I didn’t want to give myself away, acknowledge that band between us, that we have something in common. Here I am sitting among the Swedes, while she—some thirty years my senior—is emptying my bin. Our bins. Mine and the Swedes’.
That a few short words can feel like such rude, wilful deceit.
There are other immigrants here: a girl with a Balkan-sounding surname; a guy with a Spanish name; a few industrious Iranians. But Iranians don’t count. They’re everywhere. Always best in class, the well-integrated, assimilated, highly educated immigrants with the lowest unemployment rates of them all. The ones who reject Islam and eat ham and just float along in Swedish society, like an alibi for their Swedish friends to say racist things and then pull out the fact that they have a friend (or, failing that, a dentist) who’s an immigrant. Everyone knows Iranians don’t count. They’re too effectual. So proud of their universities and their contributions to science. They probably have a few fucking Nobel Prize winners, too.
I hadn’t planned on becoming a corporate lawyer, on being one of only two Somalis in Norrmalm—the other being the one who clears up my shit. Initially I wanted to become a human rights lawyer. Defender of human rights, deliverer of justice. That was my dream when I started law school seven years ago. I wanted to make the world a better place, maybe even sort out Somalia, so Mum and Dad could move home and happily live out the rest of their days without howling, minus-degree winds that make your nose go numb, or mango that tastes of wood (Dad’s opinion, I’ve never tasted the fresh mangoes he tells us kids about, while heaving a sigh). Then they could gossip with their childhood friends and eat dinners with their relatives, too. Almost everyone in my class got picked up from after-school clubs by a grandparent at some point. I can’t imagine how that would feel.
Mum has a cousin in Husby, but they were brought up in different cities and only got to know each other in Sweden. And the only relative I’ve met on Dad’s side is his fifteen-years-older half-brother who lives in Holland. He was very short and had a droopy eyelid and didn’t look like Dad at all. Maybe they looked more alike as kids. I wouldn’t know, as there are no pictures of my parents when they were young. My parents, our family, is an island. An island out in the Baltic Sea.
So anyway, my intention was to become a human rights lawyer. But then reality happened, a.k.a. International Law in my third semester. I already knew the world was unfair—I wanted to fix it, after all. But what I didn’t know was how sick and unfixably vile and corrupt it is. How the UN just plays to the gallery. How little people truly care about each other. How the whole global community is just a hog-tied joke. I had no idea how evil humanity is.
First we got to learn what we already knew, hear what we wanted to hear. That blah and blah isn’t allowed, and that X number of Yugoslav war criminals were convicted in The Hague.
But then we moved on to all the ones who don’t follow the rules. And all the ones who don’t do a thing about it, who stand idly by and let it happen. We got to learn that the same rules don’t apply to everyone—that the Iraq war was illegal and didn’t conform with the UN Charter, and that no one cares. No one cares about the hundreds of thousands of lives the USA cost with its war on terror and boundless pursuit of control over the Middle East’s oil reserves. No one.
In those six short weeks, I changed. I started that course a giddy seven-year-old on the first day of school, keen and naïve and eager to learn, but left it a burnt-out teacher, shocked and weary, my dream crumpled like a used tissue in my hand. All that stuff about hope being the last thing to die is wrong. Hope left me the day I saw how uneven the playing field was.
Margaret Thatcher called the ANC “terrorists”. Terrorists. The world isn’t what the world is, it’s what the West calls it.
Being right and winning are not the same thing.
So here I am instead, tapping away meaningless letters on a keyboard built by some kid in China while a war refugee empties my bin.
Caroline wanted to be a corporate lawyer all along, like her mother. Everyone in her la-di-da family is oh-so posh and well-educated.
We met on the first day of law school. She arrived late to our first seminar in Introduction to Law, wearing ripped jeans, sunglasses in her hair and lip-gloss, looking like Britney Spears at the height of her career. She apologised with a wide, newly-whitened smile—clearly used to getting away with things that way—and sat down in the only free chair, which happened to be right next to me. I remember wondering what this girl was doing studying law. She doesn’t deserve it, I thought. She has holes in her jeans and sandals and pink toenails, she isn’t taking this seriously. How can anyone not take this seriously?
We were put into the same study group. I would probably never have spoken to Caroline Hedman otherwise. But that forced me to—we had to work together to complete our seminar assignments.
And then some. She and I did all the work. The other two members of our group were total thickos. If Caroline was Britney, these guys were your average X-Factor no-hopers.
One of them, a short, blindly self-confident guy from Skåne, would lean back in his chair and waffle on incomprehensibly about the questions we had been assigned. A few months later he completely flunked our first exam and screamed outside the professor’s office, demanding a re-mark. Then he disappeared off the face of the earth. I think I saw him on the metro a few years ago.
The fourth member of the group was in the last place in the world he wanted to be: “What am I doing here, please stop with these questions, I don’t know.” We don’t know what you’re doing here either, pal, but please, please, just pull yourself together and try to analyse this legal case, and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD stop clicking that pen before you give me a nervous breakdown.
Caroline was actually pretty smart, I realised, and funny. She always had well-thought-through answers and analyses, plus wild stories about everything from her mother to her friends’ latest Tinder misadventures. I was a little ashamed about my initial preconceptions, but after a few weeks they were long forgotten—we were already spending all our weekdays together.
I was lonely when I moved to Stockholm. I was renting a room from a family down in Högdalen, a city suburb. Mum and Dad wanted me to live with Mum’s cousin in Husby, but I wanted to stand on my own two feet. I knew that, if I moved in with relatives, I would have to be a part of their household, their family, complete with shared dinners and evenings in front of the TV. That wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to be independent.
So I rented that little room instead. It had a separate entrance at the side of the house, an en-suite bathroom, and a sorry excuse for a kitchenette, with no extractor—I had to get a cross-breeze going whenever I wanted to fry something, or else risk all of my clothes stinking for the rest of the week.
Mum and Dad found it mind-boggling. How could I choose to live with strangers, when my own flesh and blood would open up their home to me for free? They’ll never understand. My need for independence went completely against our intimate family culture.
But I had a romanticised view of independent life. I saw myself as a strong, self-sufficient woman who was ready to stand on her own two feet, ideally yesterday. Someone who set her own agenda and didn’t adapt for—or need—anyone else.
What I’d overlooked was the fact that I’m also a social being, a family member, a daughter, a sister. And so I sat there, desperately lonely in a big-city suburb, without friends or connections. Stockholm isn’t exactly your average student town; a lot of the people studying here are from here, not fresh off the train and looking for friends, a big bunch of kids all fumbling their way towards a new life. Sure, they were nice and fun on campus, but then they would take the metro home to their real lives with their old friends.
It was like standing alone on the dancefloor while everyone else was hanging out at the bar. Hello?
I cannot express the loneliness I experienced that first semester, when the trees went from green to yellow to bare to white and I had no one to eat dinner with. It was piercing. On some mornings when I got up, the ground beneath my feet felt like a thick, doughy mass.
I think I got through Netflix’s entire catalogue in those six months—anything just to make the evenings seem less silent, as I sat curled up on my hard, dirt-brown Ikea sofa with a cup of Mum’s tea, my stomach writhing with homesickness for Sundsvall.
I got an evening job selling insurance over the phone a few days a week. I despised calling strangers, despised the small desks and the constant noise of the call centre, but without that job I would never have made it through, neither financially nor psychologically. I’ve lost touch with my colleagues from that time. I guess we didn’t have all that much in common, really, but in that moment they were some of my rocks. Linn, who also lived in a southern suburb and would get in touch for Sunday walks; Nahal, who invited me to his Halloween party.
I lived for the group projects and coffee breaks, for the daily FaceTime conversations with my family. I lost four kilos and would wake up in the middle of the night from nightmares that all my family were dead, my sweaty nightshirt clinging to my back.
But I refused, refused to move.
Thing is, I was never supposed to be alone. Two of us moved, one week apart, with identical checklists for household utensils, carefully drawn up in our gridded maths books in our last few classes of high school. But I only saw Amanda—my so-called best friend since the age of six—a handful of times in that semester. She was too busy with her new life at Stockholm School of Economics, with parties and drinking sessions and fresher’s pranks; cursory or non-existent replies to my messages.
After three years of it’s been too longs and we have to meet up soons in comments on my Insta, she suddenly got in touch and wanted to meet up for real. Said something about how she’d “had to get away from Sundsvall for a while,” and that “sometimes you have to turn over a new leaf.” She hoped that everything was good with me. It turned out that her mum had called her in floods of tears because a boy called Isak had moved into the house opposite. Amanda had no one else to turn to but me: she hadn’t mentioned her brother’s name to a single person in Stockholm.
What could I say? She was clearly frayed, even more so than I remembered her. I said that everything was good with me, that I had a summer internship at a law firm and so might be sticking around in the city. That summer was like winding back the clock three years. We did boat tours out to the archipelago, played kubb in Rålambshov park with her new friends, and partied our way through Visby’s annual Stockholm Week with Caroline. But I don’t think things will ever go back to the way they were before. I’ll never forget how she sat there in her city-centre apartment paid for by her parents, completely wrapped up in her new social life, when I would have killed for someone to talk to, to laugh with.
Caroline took pity on me that first semester, after noting my repetitive answers to what I had done at the weekend. She invited me to parties and dinners, introduced me to her friends. Caroline was a gift from above. And she was carefree and invigorating—just what I and my overactive imagination and performance anxiety needed.
“Do you write when the lecturer coughs, too?” she asked me once with a smile, and I realised that I might have let my diligent note-taking get out of hand.
Caroline wanted to work at a law firm.
“I’m going to pick up where my mum left off, when she decided Dad’s career was more important than hers”, she said. I admired her ambition; it felt like an homage to her mother.
But then she went on a semester abroad to San Diego and got dumb. She became the person I had taken her for on that first day. We all got to follow her downward spiral on Instagram, each day a little worse than the one before; embarrassing validation-bait with incomprehensible captions that were at best free of some braindead “feminist message”. One day it was #freethenipple, the Instagram campaign to desexualise the female breast, the next a push-up bikini or—even worse—an emoji-filled clapback at Instagram personalities who had voiced negativity about breast implants ( “haters”), since silicone breasts ( “for yourself”) are the definition of women’s liberation. One day rainbow nails for Pride, the next Throwback Thursday to a sunny day in Dubai.
It happened fast, and it was painful to watch.
She met this Katie person, who she decided had the answers to all of life’s questions. A rich, self-fulfilling bimbo who got it into Caroline’s head that they were “artistic souls”, and that people with office jobs were some sort of lesser beings.
She stayed on an extra semester in San Diego, doing those doss courses that only rich kids have the luxury of studying. And then she came back, took even more non-courses and started hanging out with some hipster who’s apparently going to teach her how to write. All while posting every contrived selfie imaginable, and manufactured still-lifes that anyone can see have taken indefensible amounts of time and effort to put together. Who arranges their entire picnic in a perfectly styled, perfectly lit spread on their kitchen table before packing it up? Who even has picnics? Who has enough (matching) cup and tablespoon measures to set out all the ingredients for a mud cake, measured and ready to mix?
Sometimes I miss the old Caroline so much it hurts. Sure, she was also naïve and completely disconnected from reality and all, but in a refreshing, manageable way, not like this. Old Caroline would ask me if I’d ever been “down to Africa”; new Caroline asks me what’s so tough, really—just a little positive thinking and everything will be fine: all the loans and interest and everything we normal people have to think about will just sort themselves out. Hip hip hooray.
She met Alex a few months before leaving for San Diego. I don’t know if he makes things better or worse. I don’t know him all that well. We’ve had a few dinners together, but otherwise I mainly just see him when we’re out.
We don’t really click. He feels slippery to me. Far too nice to be genuine, always smiling in the wrong places.
He and Erik could be from two different planets, but they seem to get along well enough—they have the same silly, Sven-ish sense of humour. Still, they would probably never set foot on the same streets if it weren’t for Caroline and me.
Amanda “struggles” with Alex. Clearly not enough to stop her from using him as a free tap. One day he’s Harvey Weinstein, the next a Selecta machine deluxe.
Obviously I know. But I don’t think Amanda knows that—I think she thinks she’s oh-so subtle and discreet.
Another thing that isn’t exactly discreet is the way she stares at me when I drink. That she has the nerve to judge me for a glass of cava, when she’s off doing lines in the first cubicle she can find. At least that’s what I think she’s doing, though who knows what else it might be. I don’t care—it’s her choice if she wants to run around with dazed eyes and clenched jaws, sponsoring South American drug cartels.
I should dump her, really—she’s so draining. I don’t know how many times I’ve had to end my night early to look after her because she’s spewing up or getting herself kicked out. But I can’t—part of me feels sorry for her. She’s always been in my life, was my first real friend. And, unlike her, I can’t just throw away my friends like winter clothes I’ve grown out of. Plus, I feel a moral duty to keep an eye on her, to make sure she doesn’t do something stupid, something she can’t take back.
