“More Malmö people than usual today,” observes LommaLars73, in a comment attached to an screenshot of differently-coloured dots moving around a map of the town. Lars lives down near Lomma station, and likes to keep an eye on the comings and goings.
“Well, the weather is nice, isn’t it,” Ebba types in reply.
She imagines happy people stepping off of the train, carrying towels and coolboxes and those inflatable things for children. Perhaps Frida might be among them, bringing her kids to visit their grandma? Well, probably not.
The weather really is spectacular, though. Looking out of the picture window in her living room, Ebba can see the summer sun shining down on the meadow on the other side of Gamla vägen. She remembers how it used to look before the man who bought the land—what was his name again?—decided to cover it with the solar panels, maybe ten years ago. They face south, so she can see the grasses and flowers growing between the rows, but even so, it’s not so pretty as it was when she and Nils first bought the house.
Still, she thinks, it’s good to have the clean electricity. She pokes at the tablet on her lap to change windows, bringing up the map that shows her where Lomma’s energy is being generated and used. The meadow shows up as a happy yellow, while the houses of Little Lomma village—hers included—are shaded in a light grey that indicates low levels of consumption. She could tap on the little icons, if she liked, to find out the exact numbers, all those joules and watts, but she doesn’t find the details of much interest.
Numbers were always more Nils’s thing. She remembers the pleasure her husband used to take in watching the read-out on the smart-meter thing he’d installed when he put the panels on their roof, how he’d happily announce how much money they’d saved each evening at dinner. Eight years after he died, she still misses him. The house feels lonely without him pottering about in it, both their children long since moved away. It’s somehow both too small and too large at the same time—though maybe it feels too large because it’s so hard for her to move around on her own nowadays? There’s always so much to do to keep things nice... but even with her walking frame, it’s a long way to the kitchen, and the shelves are too high for her to reach.
Well, the new help should arrive soon. The agency told Ebba they’re sending one of their best, with great numbers—4.8 stars from seventy-two reviews! They’d better be the best, really, given the rates they’re charging. Nothing ever gets any cheaper, she thinks to herself; it’s not fair, really, all the outsiders driving up prices. At least Lomma was trying to do something about it, and protect its true residents. Ebba likes to feel that she’s contributing, so she flicks back to the social window again, where LommaLars has responded to her reply.
“They should stick to their own bloody beaches. Lomma’s beach is for Lommabor. We should charge them for entry, really.”
“That wouldn’t be fair, Lars,” she types. “What about allemansrätt?”
“That was fine when it was just us. Swedes should be able to go where they like in Sweden.”
“Malmöbor are Swedes too.”
“Not REAL Swedes, though. Not all of them. You know what I mean. It means more than a passport or an ID card. It used to, anyway.”
A little bubble-trail of thumbs-up emojis and tiny Swedish flags follows Lars’s message, as other users express their support.
“I know your girl’s down there, Ebba,” Lars continues. “She’s OK. Could be true Lomma, if she came back. It’s all the others, isn’t it? You go to Malmö, it’s a mess. Too busy, graffiti everywhere. You can’t even drive in half of it now! Because THEY complained, didn’t they?”
Ebba knows Lars well enough not to have to ask who “they” are.
Ebba’s son Peter says Lars is a grouchy old racist, but that’s not really fair. There are some perfectly decent Arabs in Sweden, as Lars is happy to admit, and some of them have gone to a lot of effort to integrate! But some of them, well… like Lars says, all you have to do is go to somewhere like Rosengård, and it’s plain to see they’ve just come here to impose their way of life on true Swedes.
Ebba’s never actually been there, of course—what would there be there for her, anyway? But she’s seen pictures in the newsfeeds, heard the stories. Drugs, gangs. Terrorism. Terrible, really.
But it doesn’t do to dwell on the bad stuff, does it? She glances out at the meadow again, and types: “At least Lomma still looks like Sweden used to look.”
“Maybe,” allows Lars. “But the rot will spread if we don’t keep vigilant.”
The little dot by his name changes from green to yellow as Lars stops typing, presumably to request random identity checks on the various outsider marks that are moving around on the Lomma grid’s live map. While Ebba doesn’t always see eye to eye with Lars, she respects his commitment to the vigilance he repeatedly recommends; too many people just complain, without actually doing anything to make a difference. She switches to the map as well, to see if she can be of any help.
One of the outsider marks seems to be heading north from the station toward the big Lidl on the roundabout, and at quite a speed, too. Ebba taps on the little dot, which brings up a list of things the Lomma grid knows about this person. Top of the list is a tag from a care-at-home agency, indicating this person is in town to work—ah, this must be Ebba’s new help, then.
The dot draws to a stop near the Lidl, and Ebba’s finger hovers over the other items in the list. The Lomma grid can pull in data from all over the place on visiting outsiders, and make it available for residents—it’s a condition of access, basically. She doesn’t really need to know more about this person; the agency is very professional, they surely wouldn’t send anyone bad.
But their home-address tag has a Malmö code... and some of these terrorists and drug-dealers are very clever, she’s heard. More than clever enough to fake a work permit! It does no harm to check, does it? After all, if they’ve nothing to hide, they’ve nothing to fear.
#
Tala hears the cheap, cheery ding yet again, just as she’s coming up on the big Lidl by the roundabout on Järngatan. She bites down on the temptation to swear, and pulls over her scooter to the side of the cycle path as quickly as she can without looking reckless. This is the fourth identification request she’s been hit with since her train pulled in at Lomma station.
She pokes and prods at the screen of her phone in a sequence which, after having worked care contracts in Lomma for nearly six months, has become as familiar as the keypad code to her apartment block: confirm, scroll down, accept terms and conditions, verify with thumbprint. And then your reward: that damned chime sound again, this time signalling your permission to continue.
Four times in nineteen minutes! She considers messaging Malin to inform her of this new personal best, but decides against it, preferring to avoid yet another lecture on Lomma’s implementation of a geriatric Swedish remix of 1984, and the argument which may follow it. Malin would rather that Tala didn’t work contracts in Lomma, not least due to the town’s grotesquely invasive “grid” system—though she has little love to spare for the place or its people in general, despite (as she proudly admits) never having been there. For her part, Tala likes the premium rate her agency pays on Lomma home-care contracts far more than she likes the place itself, though at times like this it can feel like that premium comes with a cost that’s measured in more than just time.
Right now, though, time is the crucial factor. She should be at the client’s house by the turn of the hour, and that’s just nine… no, eight minutes away, now. Forcing herself to be patient, mindful of the slightly tubby Ordningsvakt vaping at the edge of the Lidl carpark, she reactivates her map app, clips the phone back to the bars of her scooter, looks both ways like a responsible road user, and then slowly eases back onto the cycle path.
A pothole in the cycle path makes her realise how hard she’s clenching her jaw, how much she dreads hearing that damned ding one more time. The ID checks make Tala tense. For that reason, being in Lomma makes Tala tense. Arguments with Malin, real or imagined, also make Tala tense, and this is perhaps the worst thing: to be tense about talking (or not) to one’s lover.
When the topic came up last week, Malin had actually suggested they move to Lomma.
“If the money’s that much better, fine—we’d be able to save even more if you were closer to the jobs, right? I can work from anywhere. Less of your time travelling, less of the Orwellian crap. Win-win, right?”
Malin meant well. She always does; that’s why Tala loves her. But the logic that serves her so well in her IT security job doesn’t always help in matters where the heart is more involved. Tala had explained that things weren’t much better for Lomma residents who didn’t fit the profile—perhaps even worse, in that they never got the pleasure of leaving the surveillance zone at the end of the day. “Don’t forget,” she’d said to Malin, “we’d have two black marks against us as a household: not just one obvious Arab, but a ‘non-traditional family arrangement’, too.”
“They surely couldn’t tell you’re queer just by looking at you.” Malin had laughed. “You’re as femme as it gets. Me, though, I guess that’s a different matter.”
“Maybe they can’t tell by just looking,” Tala had snapped back, “but they can tell by cross-referencing publicly available data and tying it to my phone, Malin. You told me that yourself.”
She hated losing her temper, hated that stone-faced look Malin would wear when she did. But she’d managed to defuse the bomb by putting her hands on Malin’s shoulders, raising an eyebrow.
“As for ‘just looking’, you are a little more obvious, yes.”
“Hey—you can take the girl out of Möllan, but you can’t takeMöllan out of the girl.”
“That’s what’s written under your name in the toilet cubicles at Plan B, I heard.”
For most of her life, Tala has had to try to pass as two things she is not: a straight girl, and a ‘real’ Swede. Life in Malmö with Malin has meant being able to lay those two burdens down, most of the time. She only needs to pretend in front of her grandma now—and her parents help her keep the smokescreen up, bless them. But coming out here to Lomma, every ding of the grid brings it all back: that sense of never quite fitting, of not being ‘real’.
Don’t fit, won’t quit, she mutters to herself—her mantra from school. Four minutes left until her appointment in Lilla Lomma: the blue line of the route pulses on the screen of her phone, and she twists the scooter’s grip for a little more speed.
#
Tala’s finger has hardly left the doorbell button before the door opens on a small blonde woman with a walking frame, who looked like she might have been clicked up from some image-generator website using the prompt “nice little Swedish grandma”. Tala introduces herself, showing her agency-issued ID card as recommended by protocol, and follows Ebba into the house. The interior is likewise kind of generic, though Tala pegs it at the more pricey end of that aesthetic—no Ikea, and the retro stuff looks like it’s probably original rather than reproduction.
“Can I get you a drink, young lady?” Ebba asks.
Tala has been doing care work for years, and knows from experience that—quite apart from politeness—clients like the opportunity to demonstrate that they’re capable of doing things without help.
“I’ll take a coffee, but instant is fine.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all, really,” says Ebba, grabbing the glass jug from the coffee machine. “I’ll have one myself, while we get to know each other.” Water whooshes into the jug from the faucet. “I thought you’d maybe be wanting tea instead?”
“No, thank you. Coffee by preference.”
The kitchen looks far too large for this tiny woman as she goes about the slow, steady business of putting on a jug of skånerost, and Tala has to remind herself it was probably a family home for years, even as she’s making a mental list of ways she might move stuff around to make it easier to access. Clients are often very committed to old ways of doing things, to familiar locations for much-used objects, long past the point where they’re practical. You can’t force them to change, either: things frequently drift back to where it’s felt that they should belong.
“Perhaps you’d like to tell me a bit about yourself?” Ebba asks, and Tala has a well-rehearsed response for this, polished like a river-bed pebble by countless new client encounters.
“My name’s Tala, and I live in Malmö. I’ve been working in care for five years, and for this agency for the last three. I studied occupational therapy at Lund, but as my grandparents started getting older, I realised that I wanted to help people outside of the regular workplace.”
Realised also, she thinks to herself, that there was a reason why she was ghosted time after time when applying for real occupational therapy roles.
“I do a bit of painting in my free time,” she continues, suddenly anxious about the pause in conversation, “but it’s just a hobby. Uh, my partner works in IT.”
Shit—she hadn’t meant to go that far.
“My son works in IT,” says Ebba, with a faintly conspiratorial nod. “Well, in banking, really—but it sounds like IT when he talks about it. Almost everything sounds like IT nowadays, though, doesn’t it?”
“Mmm,” replies Tala, as non-committally as possible.
“He lives in Hamburg now. Almost fifteen years, I think. And my daughter, Frida, she lives in Malmö.”
A frown flashes briefly across the old woman’s face before she continues. “I doubt you’d know her.
Sometimes I wonder if I’d know her myself. She doesn’t come here much any more.”
The gurgle of the coffee machine has finally given way to an awkward silence.
“You’re not married, you and your partner?” Ebba asks, after what feels like an eternity.
“No, just sambo, you know.”
“Well, that’s fine, nothing wrong with that,” says Ebba, suddenly sounding more confident as she pours the coffee. “And it’s much more common with people like you, isn’t it, not to marry.”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” says Tala, regretting it even as the words come out of her mouth.
“Well, you know,” says Ebba, clearly somewhat abashed. “Younger people… a bit bohemian… alternative lifestyles…”
“Do I come across as particularly bohemian?”
“No, not at all, very professional! I just meant, um, you know. Gay people.”
“To the best of my knowledge, Ebba, marriage rates for queer people my age are about the same as for everyone else.”
“Oh! Well, ah. I’m sure you’re right,” Ebba says, looking down at the tabletop. “Why wouldn’t you be?”
Tala is gripping her coffee cup so hard she’s worried it might break. She’s angry at the intrusion, but she’s also angry with her reaction to it, which is a long way from the carefully apolitical engagement with clients that the agency recommends, on pain of dismissal.
In her head, she hears fragments of last week's argument with Malin, playground taunts from her childhood, the cursed ding of the Lomma grid on her phone, all swirling together, and something inside of her—the sensible, cautious part of her, the part that spent so long trying and failing to pass for real—gives way.
“Your husband, Ebba,” she asks, as brightly as possible. “What did he die of?”
The old woman looks up, her brow furrowed. “Excuse me?”
“How much did he earn? How big is your pension?” Tala makes a show of looking around the kitchen.
“This is a pretty big house, isn’t it—how much is it worth?”
“I’m not sure that’s really any of your—”
“Your daughter, who lives in Malmö—how come she doesn’t come to see you very often?”
Ebba won’t meet Tala’s eyes, now, and her moth is working silently.
“I just want to know what sort of person you are, Ebba. We can know so much about people, can’t we, just by finding out a little bit about their personal lives? About where they live, who they love, or how much they earn. I just feel you have the advantage of me, here, you know? It might make being your carer a little easier if I could make some sweeping assumptions about you.”
“I wasn’t…” Ebba looks deeply ashamed. “I don’t have any… it doesn’t bother me, people being gay, you being gay. Really it doesn’t.”
“Then why mention it at all, Ebba?”
“I was just making conversation!” she wails.
“And how did you know that topic was among your options?”
“It was just there, in the details on the grid…”
“Because you’d been spying on me, in other words.”
“It’s not spying! It’s a security system, that’s all.”
“Then I hope you won’t mind me pointing out, Ebba, that it makes me feel pretty bloody insecure to be on the other end of it.”
Tala closes her eyes, unable to keep looking at Ebba, whose nice-granny face is streaked with tears and ugly from crying. Well, now you’ve done it, she tells herself. Guess we’ll see if Malin’s dislike for me doing care work is bigger than her dislike of being the only employed person in our household. “I’m sorry, Ebba,” she says, after a little while. “I’m sure you’re a good person. I try my best to assume that about everyone I meet, until they give me reason not to.” She laughs quietly. “My partner, Malin, she tells me I shouldn’t be so trusting. But then she builds security systems for a living, so, I don’t know.”
Her phone dings—not the Lomma ding, this time, but the agency’s ding. This introductory visit appointment is nearly over; and so, quite possibly, is Tala’s career in home-assist care.
“I’m sorry,” she says again. “The way Lomma works, the grid and the checks, it’s not so different to the way things work everywhere these days, really. But it’s more, do you understand? And it’s exhausting.
“You don’t see it, I guess, because you’re a resident. You don’t know what it’s like to be asked to prove who you are four times every twenty minutes—and not even by a person, but by some anonymous message on your phone. You don’t know what it’s like to know that anyone can just click a button and find out everything about you. And I’m guessing that maybe you haven’t spent most of your life knowing that there’s something about you, some basic fact of your existence that you didn’t choose, and that a lot of people find evil, or weird or icky, or even just fascinating. You don’t know what it feels like to be reduced to that—all of what you are, as a person, folded up and slipped into an envelope marked ‘gay’, or ‘Lebanese’, or whatever it happens to be.”
She stands up, starts gathering her things from the table, checking her bag.
“Or maybe you do know how that feels. I wouldn’t know, and I wouldn’t presume you’d want me to know until you told me yourself.” She puts her coffee cup in the huge, empty sink, turns to face the old woman. “I guess you know what it is to be scared, though. We have that in common, at least—even if it’s very different things we’re scared of.”
“You don’t have to go, do you?” Ebba’s voice is tiny, husky from the crying.
“I have another appointment to get to. Staffanstorp. My train leaves in forty minutes.”
“The station’s not so far away, not with your scooter thingy.”
“It’s not a long way, no,” Tala says, and sighs. “But I have no idea how many times I’ll have to stop before I get there, Ebba.”
#
Ebba watches from the window by the front door as the girl scoots off down the road toward the town center. She feels ashamed, but also invaded, somehow—confronted with things she’d rather not think about.
She makes her way back to her fatål by the picture window, and looks out at the meadow a while, until her tablet makes its little sound. She picks it up, expecting that someone has probably messaged her on the grid—Lars, perhaps, with a report on the afternoon’s goings-on at the beach—but it’s actually a query from the agency that sent Tala, asking for feedback on the introductory visit and confirmation of the next appointment on Thursday.
Please indicate what sort of person you thought our agent was! the app requests, in a cheery baby-blue font.
The options available for her response are the numbers one through five.
SOURCE SCENARIO: THE BIG BROTHER
By 2035, the population of Lomma has increased by 10% since 2025, thanks to policies designed by the local government to attract younger people and families to the municipality. This demographic shift has created tensions in the local society, however. There is a greater number of non-traditional families, people with lower incomes and service-oriented employment, immigrants and progressives.
The older residents who consider themselves to be “true Lomma-bo” are uncomfortable and insecure regarding the new and different faces they see around, and expect the municipality to take action. As a result, the municipality has implemented a security system that is part of a larger structure of data collection. This system was designed primarily to make the built environment and the community more resilient, and has been quite successful, resulting in better decisions regarding planning and energy management that have improved sustainability and environmental safety putting Lomma in the forefront.
However, the system is also used to monitor public spaces against any threats, vandalism and crime, particularly from anyone presumed to be an outsider. The bias baked into the monitoring systems and its data creates greater segregation, and a constant feeling of “us against them”. While many of those who identify as “true Lommabo” are happy with the high control of the municipality, “outsiders”—many of whom are also municipal residents, or regular visitors for reasons of their employment—feel constantly under surveillance and suspicion, and have no way to opt out of the system.
