A thousand reflections, but still one and the same face. Skin slightly tanned, her prominent cheekbones framed by a blonde page-boy cut, shorter than usual because of the summer heat.
Malin had gone down to the pub when the film on television ended. It was something French about a dysfunctional family where one of the sisters ended up killing everyone. Psychological realism, the announcer had said, and that could well be right, even if people’s actions seldom have such clear-cut and obvious explanations in reality as they did in the film.
The flat had felt too empty, and she hadn’t been tired enough to sleep, but awake enough to feel loneliness dripping down the walls in almost the same way she felt the sweat running down her back under her blouse. The increasingly tired wallpaper in the living room, the Ikea clock in the kitchen, whose second-hand had suddenly fallen off one day in May, the blunt knives that could do with being honed back to finger-slicing sharpness, all of Tove’s books in the bookcase, her latest purchases lined up on the third shelf. Titles that would be advanced for anyone, but improbably difficult for a fourteen-year-old.
Hello, Tove? Can’t you hear Marian Keyes calling you?
Reading.
Infinitely better than a lot of things a fourteen-year-old could come up with.
Malin takes a gulp of her beer.
Still doesn’t feel tired.
But lonely? Or something else?
Summer lethargy at the police station, no work to tire her out, or by which she could be swallowed up. She had spent all day wishing something would happen.
But nothing had happened.
No bodies had been discovered. No one had been reported missing. No summer rapes. Nothing remarkable at all, apart from the heat and the forest fires that were raging up in the Tjallmo forests, resisting all attempts to put them out, and devouring more and more hectares of prime forest with every passing day.
She thinks about the fire brigade, working flat-out. About all the volunteers. A few police cars there to direct the traffic, but nothing for her or her partner, Zeke Martinsson, to do. When the wind is in the right direction she can smell the smoke from the fires, which seems only fitting seeing as the whole of Linkoping is enveloped in a hellish heat, day and night alike, in the hot winds from the south that have parked themselves on top of the southern half of the country, as if they had been screwed down onto the landscape by the prevailing area of high pressure.
The hottest summer in living memory.
Malin takes another mouthful of beer. Its bitterness and coolness ease the residual heat in her body.
Outside the city is sweaty, tinted dull sepia, pale-green and grey. Linkoping is empty of people, and only those who have to work or have no money or no place to escape to are left in the city. Most of the university students have gone back to their home towns. The streets are eerily empty even in the middle of the day, businesses stay open only because they have to, seeing as the summer temps have already been taken on. Only one business is booming: Bosse’s Ice Cream, homemade ice cream sold from a hole in the wall on Hospitalsgatan. Day after day there are queues outside Bosse’s; it’s a mystery how everyone gets there without being visible anywhere along the way.
It’s so hot that you can’t move.
Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty degrees, and the day before yesterday a new local record was reached, forty- three point two degrees at the weather-station out on the plain at Malmslatt.
There’s a cheerfulness in the tone, an energy in the headlines of the
Muscles protesting, sweat dripping, thoughts muddied, people searching for shade, coolness, the city drowsy, in sympathy with its inhabitants. A dusty, smoky smell in the air, not from the forest fires but from grass that’s slowly burning up without flames.
Not a single drop of rain since Midsummer. The farmers are screaming disaster, and today the
Manual labourers?
Are there any of those left in Linkoping these days?
There are only academics. Engineers, computer experts and doctors. At least that’s what it feels like sometimes. But they aren’t in the city at the moment.
A gulp of her third beer lets her relax, even though she is really in need of a pick-me-up.
The pub’s customers disappear one by one. And she can feel loneliness swelling inside her.
Tove with her bag in the hallway eight days ago, full of clothes and books, some of the new ones she’d bought. Janne behind her in the stairwell, Janne’s friend Pecka down in the street in his Volvo, ready to take them to Skavsta Airport.
She had lied several days before they left when Janne asked if she could drive them, saying that she had to work and couldn’t take them. She wanted to be short with Janne, to show her disapproval that he was insisting on taking Tove with him all the way to Bali, on the other side of the fucking planet.
Bali.
Janne had won the trip in the public employees’ holiday lottery. First prize for the heroic fireman.
A summer dream for Tove. For Janne. Just father and daughter. Their first real trip together, Tove’s first trip outside Europe.
Malin had been worried that Tove wouldn’t want to go, that she wouldn’t want to be away from Markus, her boyfriend, or because Markus’s parents, Biggan and Hasse, might have plans that involved her.
But Tove had been pleased.
‘Markus will manage,’ she had said.
‘And what about me, how am I going to manage without you?’
‘You, Mum? It’ll be perfect for you. You’ll be able to work as much as you like, without feeling guilty about me.’
Malin had wanted to protest. But all the words she could have said felt lame, or, worse still, untrue. How many times did Tove have to make her own meals, or go and put herself to bed in an empty flat simply because something at the station demanded Malin’s full attention?
Hugging in the hall a week or so ago, bodies embracing.
Then Janne’s firm grip on the handle of the bag.
‘Take care.’
‘You too, Mum.’
‘You know I will.’
‘Bye.’
Three voices saying the same word.
Hesitation.
Then it had started up again, Janne had said silly things and she was upset when the door finally closed on them. The feelings from the divorce twelve years ago were back, the lack of words, the anger, the feeling that no words were good enough and that everything that was said was just wrong.
Not with each other. Not without each other. This single sodding love. An impossible love.
And she had refused to admit to herself how put out she felt by their holiday, like a very young girl being abandoned by the people who ought to love her most.
‘See you when I pick you up from the airport. But we’ll speak before that,’ she had said to the closed grey door.
She had been left standing alone in the hall. They had been gone five seconds and already she felt an infinite
