You fall silent, sister.
Turn fifteen and sixteen on cakeless birthdays and we kept to the trees on the edge of school, kept to ourselves as if everyone knew, as if there were no solace in being with the others, and the summers are colourless, windless, and we lie beside each other on the floor on the hottest days and you say nothing, don’t answer when I ask if we can go for a bike ride.
The hospital. You’re sitting on a bed in the corner. You’re there several times.
I call your name.
You’ve gone home from school before me and I call your name when I get home.
Elisabeth, I call in the hall, but you don’t answer.
The living room is empty and I want to go out again, run away from there, cycle with the wind to another world, away from this rotten little flat where we try to cling to our lives.
But not you.
The bathroom smells of damp, the white tiles are loose, but the hooks in the ceiling for the drying frame above the bath are strong enough to hold your weight.
The white rope is wrapped twice around your neck, your face winter blue, panic-stricken, and your eyes, my blue eyes trying to burst from their sockets. Your thin blond hair hanging down over your naked and unnaturally clean body, your feet in the air, still.
Small cuts on your lower arms and shins. As if you changed your mind and tried to get free.
Yellow piss on the bottom of the bathtub.
No water from the shower. I missed the water then. Wanted it to be gushing, full of life.
I went over and held you, my dear sister, dreaming that you and I would wait for each other again, sharing the secrets of the darkness once more. But you were mute and cold and I could hear my own wailing, the way it sounded like a distillation of loneliness.
I held you up, hugged you hard, and felt our lost love flow between us.
You aren’t scared any more, sister, I asked, are you?
But you didn’t answer.
There was no innocence left in that moment.
And I promised you, myself, us, that one day I would put all this right.
That the world, our love, would be reborn one day.
62
You were the one who let him in, Dad.
If you hadn’t left me and Mum, he’d never have crossed our threshold, come into my life, in under my sheets, into me, in, in, in.
He wanted me to call him Daddy, Daddy, that fucking bastard Folkman.
He came at night.
The floorboards creaked when he came.
And he said: Louise, I’m just going to touch you a bit down there, feel me, the way I feel, and then he would come, his hands were cold, all of him was cold and hard and stank of vodka.
Sometimes, on the nights when the floorboards never creaked, I used to think about you, Dad, and how you vanished, replaced us with other girls, the woman that Mum said you’d met who had two children that you adopted.
Forget him, Mum said.
We don’t exist for him.
And I hated you on the nights when he came.
And all the other nights. And I hate you now.
But still: the only thing I ever wanted to happen was for a shiny silver car to pull up outside the house and you would get out of the car and embrace me, saying: I’ve come to take you away with me, from now on everything’s going to be all right, you’re my daughter and I’m going to love you the way a father should.
You never came.
When I got older I used to take the car and go down to Nassjo, where you lived then, and I would sit in the car outside your house and watch you coming and going, sometimes I would see your new wife’s daughters, grown up now, just like me, and when I saw you together I could see that you loved them, a misplaced love, what should have been my love.
My love.
You never noticed my car.
The way I used to follow you.
But you must have guessed it was me who made the anonymous phone calls, that I was the one who never dared to speak on the other end of the line.
What could I say, Dad?
Because even if I had seen you, you were only a smell, a touch, an image, a voice from when I was little, and I longed for you here at Skogalund, I longed to see your silver Vauxhall coming up the drive, to see you instead of him come into my room in the cellar, among my toys.
You were going fishing that day, like so many times before.
You were starting to get old.
I parked some distance from the isolated jetty and walked over to you.
I was child, girl and woman, all at the same time.
It was an early autumn day, chilly but sunny, and you caught sight of me in the forest and you knew who I was, you knew straight away, and when I came out onto the jetty you shouted at me: ‘Get lost, I don’t want anything to do with you, get lost, I’m going fishing.’
One of the oars was still on the jetty, long and hard, with a metal-edged blade.
Did you know who you were letting in? I wanted to ask. I came here to get your love, I wanted to say.
‘Get lost,’ you yelled.
The oar.
At the reading of your will it emerged that you’d left everything you owned to your new wife and her children.
I got five thousand, three hundred and twenty kronor in the end.
63
‘Tove? Tove? TOVE! TOVE! Tove? Tove.’
Malin is going through the flat, running, walking, searching room after room, but Tove isn’t there, not under the sheets of her own bed, nor in Malin’s bed, nor in the wardrobe or kitchen cupboards, how the hell would she ever fit in a kitchen cupboard?
Fuck it’s hot.
‘Tove!’
Don’t panic now, Fors, don’t panic, and she sits down on one of the chairs in the kitchen, feeling the sweat on her scalp, and the mantra inside her: Think, think, think.
Not at Markus’s.
Call them anyway.
She takes out her mobile, calls the number. Hasse answers.
Evidently unaware that they’ve broken up.
‘No, Malin, she’s not here. You don’t know where she is?’
No time for small-talk.
‘Hasse, my other phone’s ringing. I’ve got to go.’
Friends?
