sense of loss, and the thought of the distance between them had been unbearable and she had gone straight down to the pub.
Drinking to get drunk, just like I’m doing now, Malin thinks.
Downing a shot of tequila, just like I’m doing now.
Making a call on my mobile, just like I’m doing now.
Daniel Hogfeldt’s clear voice over the phone.
‘So you’re at the Pull?’
‘Are you coming or not?’
‘Calm down, Fors. I’m coming.’
Their two bodies facing each other, Daniel Hogfeldt’s hairless chest beneath her hands, slipping moistly under her fingertips. I am marking you, Malin thinks, marking you with my fingerprints and why have you got your eyes closed, look at me, you’re inside me now, so open your eyes, your green eyes, cold as the Atlantic.
Their conversation in the pub just ten minutes before.
‘Do you want a drink?’
‘No, do you?’
‘No.’
‘So what are we waiting for?’
They took their clothes off in the hall. The church tower a black, immovable shape in the kitchen window.
And the sounds.
The ringing of the church bell as it struck two, as Malin helped him out of his worn white T-shirt, the cotton stiff and clean, his skin warm against her breasts, his words: ‘Take it slow, Malin, slow,’ and her whole body was in a hurry, starting to itch and ache and hurt and she whispered: ‘Daniel, it’s never been more urgent than it is now,’ thinking, you think I’ve got you for slow? I’ve got myself, other people for that. You, Daniel, you’re a body, don’t try to smooth-talk me, I don’t fall for that sort of thing. He pushed her into the kitchen, the crippled Ikea clock ticking tick tock and the church grey-black behind them, the tree branches brittle with drought.
‘That’s it,’ he said, and she was quiet, spreading her legs and letting him get closer and he was hard and rough and warm and she fell back on the table, her arms flailing, that morning’s half-full mug of coffee sliding off onto the floor and shattering into a dozen pieces on the linoleum.
She pushed him away.
Went into the bedroom without a word.
He followed her.
She stood at the window and looked out at the courtyard, at the street beyond, at the few hesitant lights in the windows of the buildings.
‘Lie down.’
He obeyed.
Daniel’s body naked on the bed, his cock sticking up at a slight angle towards his navel. The gun cabinet with her service revolver on the wall next to the window, Daniel closing his eyes, reaching his arms up towards the pine bed-head, and she waited a moment, allowing the ache of longing to become real pain before moving towards him, before she let him in again.
I dream that the snakes are moving again, somewhere. How a girl the same age as you, Tove, is moving though the green-black trees of something that seems to be a park at night, or a forest beside a distant, black- watered lake, or shimmering blue water that smells of chlorine. I imagine her drifting across yellowed grass, as far, far away a water-sprinkler wisps corrosive drops above a freshly cut lilac hedge.
I dream that this is happening, Tove.
It is happening now and I get scared and stiffen as someone, something creeps out of its hiding place in the darkness, rushing up behind her, knocking her to the ground and the roots of the surrounding trees wrap around her body, snaking deep within her like warm, live snakes, whose slithering bodies are full of hungry, ancient streams of lava.
She screams.
But no sound comes out.
And the snakes chase her across a wide-open plain that was once verdant but is now reduced to a charred, flaking skin. The ground is cracked and from the jagged depths bubbles a stinking, hot, sulphurous darkness that whispers with a scorching voice: We will destroy you, little girl. Come. We shall destroy you.
I scream.
But no sound comes out.
This is a dream, isn’t it? Tell me it’s a dream, Tove.
I reach out my hand across the sheet beside me but it’s empty.
Janne, you’re not there, your warm warmth.
I want you both to come home now.
Even you have gone, Daniel. Taken your cool warmth and left me alone with the dream and myself in this depressing bedroom.
I think it was a bad dream, but perhaps it was good?
2
Tove and Janne are eating bacon and eggs on a spacious balcony with a view of Kuta Beach, and not even the memory of the terrorist bombs remains.
Tove and Janne are tanned and rested and their radiant smiles reveal shining white teeth. Janne, muscular, has already taken a morning swim in the cooled hotel pool. As he got out of the water a beautiful Balinese woman was waiting on the edge with a freshly laundered and ironed towel.
Tove is beaming fit to match the sun.
Smiles even more broadly at her father and asks:
‘Dad, what are we going to do today? Eat rice with honey and nuts in a Buddhist temple of ivory-white marble? Like the pictures in the brochures?’
Malin adjusts her Ray-Bans with one hand, and the image of Janne and Tove vanishes. Then she takes a firmer grip on the handlebars of her bicycle as she pedals past the Asian fast-food stall on St Larsgatan just before Tradgardstorget, thinking that if you only let your thoughts go, they can come up with all sorts of things, conjuring up images of anyone at all, making caricatures of even the people that you know and love most.
The self-preservation instinct. Let your subconscious make parodies of your loss and anxiety and jealousy.
It’s no more than a quarter past seven and Janne and Tove are in all probability on the beach now.
And Janne doesn’t even like honey.
Malin presses the pedals down, picking up an almost imperceptible smell of smoke in her nostrils, the city tinted slightly yellow by her sunglasses.
Her body is starting to wake up.
But she feels a resistance. It feels as if it’s going to be even hotter today. She didn’t want to look at the thermometer in the kitchen window at home. The tarmac is oily under the wheels, it feels as if the ground might crack open at any moment and release hundreds of glowing worms.
A cycling summer.
Nothing’s any distance away inside the city. At this time of year everyone who can cycles in Linkoping, unless the heat just gets too much. She prefers the car, but somehow all the talk about the environment in the papers and on television must have got to her. Think of future generations. They have the right to a living planet.
At this time of day Malin is completely alone on the streets, and in the plate-glass windows of H&M in the square there are adverts for the summer sale, the words flame-red above pictures of a famous model whose name Malin realises she ought to know.
SALE.
