night. They took out the contract on the apartment when they sold the villa in Sturefors thirteen years ago. In those days the housing market in Linkoping was very different. If your affairs were in order and you could afford a decent rent, you had options. Today there’s nothing, only shady deals can get you a contract. Or improbably good contacts.
Malin looks out of the sitting-room window.
From the third floor there is a good view of Infection Park, named after the clinic that was once housed in the barracks that have now been turned into housing.
The sofa she was never allowed to sit on.
The brown leather shines like new to this day. The table, lovely then, overblown now. The shelves full of books from Reader’s Digest. Maya Angelou, Lars Jarlestad, Lars Widding, Anne Tyler.
The dining table and chairs. Having friends over, children who had to sit and eat in the kitchen. Nothing odd about that. Everyone did the same, and children don’t like sitting round the table anyway.
Dad, the welder, promoted to team-leader, then part-owner of a roofing company. Mum a secretary at the county administrative board.
The smell of people getting old. Even if Malin opened the window and aired the place the smell wouldn’t go. Maybe, she thinks, the cold might make the apartment scentless at best.
The plants are drooping. But none of them is actually dead. She won’t let it go that far. She looks at the framed pictures on the bureau, none of her or Tove, just her parents in different settings: a beach, a city, a mountain, a jungle. ‘Can you water the plants?’
Of course I can water them.
‘You can come down whenever you like.’
And how do we afford that?
She sits down on the armchair in the hall and the memory of the silent springs is in her body: she is five years old again, kicking her sandalled feet; there is water a little way away and behind her she can hear Mum and Dad’s voices, not shouting at each other exactly, but in their tone of voice there is a chasm, and the gap between their voices conceals all that is painful, all that the five-year-old in the chair near the water feels but does not yet have a name for.
Impossible love. The coolness of some marriages.
Does it ever get a name? That feeling?
Then she is back.
The watering can in her hand.
Plant by plant. Methodically, in a way her father the team-leader would appreciate.
I’m not hoovering, Malin thinks. Dustballs on the floor. When she used to hoover, as part of her tasks in exchange for pocket money on Saturdays, Mum would follow her round the house, checking that she didn’t knock against the furniture or door frames. When she was finished her mum would hoover again, hoovering the same places, right in front of her as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
What can a child do?
What does a child know?
A child is shaped.
And then it is finished.
All the plants watered. Now they will live a bit longer.
Malin sits down on her parents’ bed.
It’s a Dux. They’ve had it for years, but would they be able to sleep in it if they knew what had happened in this bed, that this was where she lost, or rather made sure she got rid of, her virginity?
Not Janne.
Someone else.
Earlier. She was fourteen and alone at home while her parents were at a party, staying the night with friends in Torshalla.
Whatever. No matter what had happened in this bed, it wasn’t hers. She can’t walk through this apartment, alone or with other people, without a sense of loss. She gets up from the bed, forcing herself through the thick veils of longing that seem to hang in the air. What’s missing?
Her parents in pictures without frames.
In sun-loungers at the house on Tenerife. Three years since they bought it, but she and Tove have never been there.
‘You’re doing the watering?’
Of course I’m watering.
She has lived with these people, she comes from them, but even so the people in the pictures are strangers. Mum, mostly.
She empties the watering can in the kitchen sink.
There are secrets hidden in those drops, behind the green doors of the kitchen cupboards, in the freezer, rumbling away, full of last year’s chanterelles.
Shall I take a bag?
No.
The last thing she sees before she closes the door of her parents’ apartment behind her are the thick wool rugs on the floor of the sitting room. She sees them through the open double doors from the hall, average quality. They’re not as good as Mum always pretends they are. The whole room, the whole home is full of things that aren’t what they seem, veneers concealing a different veneer.
There’s a feeling here, Malin thinks, of never being quite good enough, of nothing ever being quite right. That we aren’t, that I’m not, good enough.
To this day she has difficulty with anything that’s truly good enough, with people who are supposed to be genuinely good enough. Not just rich like Karin Johannison, but doctors, the upper classes, lawyers, that sort of good. Faced with people like that, she sometimes senses her prejudices and feelings of inferiority rise to the surface. She decides in advance that people like that always look down on people like her, and she adopts a defensive posture.
Why?
To avoid being disappointed?
It’s better at work, but it can be stressful in her private life.
Thoughts are flying round Malin’s head as she jogs downstairs and out into the early, wretched, Friday evening.
10
Just a little one, one little beer: I deserve that, I want to watch drops of condensation almost freezing to ice on a chilled glass. I can leave the car here. I can pick it up tomorrow.
Malin hates that voice. She usually tells herself, as if to drown it out: There’s nothing worse than being hung over.
It’s easiest that way.
But sometimes she has to give in.
Just a little one, a little…
I want to wring myself out like a rag. And that’s when alcohol is useful.
The Hamlet restaurant is open. How far away is that? God, it’s cold. Three minutes if I jog.
Malin opens the door to the bar. Noise and steam hit her. There is a smell of grilled meat. But most of all it smells of promise, of calm.
The telephone rings.
Or does it?
Is it something else? Is it the television? Is it the church bell? The wind? Help me. My head. There is something
