could just bloody well stay away. If he never came back.’
Teresa almost recoiled. It was rare for Johannes to swear; she hadn’t really thought he knew any swear words. Now he’d used two in the same sentence. An almost nasty expression played around his mouth and eyes as something scrolled through his mind.
The sheep were still there, and Johannes and Teresa walked out into the field, running their fingers through the wool. Johannes was distant, answering Teresa’s questions in monosyllables.
A wolf had recently been spotted in the area, and as Teresa moved among the woolly bodies she tried to imagine herself as that wolf. The muscles that could bring death, the powerful jaws. The field a bloodbath after she had passed through. All the sweet little sheep lying among their own innards.
Johannes was lost in his own thoughts, Teresa in hers. They parted without deciding when to meet up again.
Teresa went home and looked up wolves on the internet. They kill because the flight response of the prey triggers the hunting response of the wolf. If all the sheep stood still after the first one had been killed, they’d survive.
She clicked on the next link, went on reading. Each fact led to fresh questions, and after a couple of hours she knew more about wolves than any other animal. There was something fascinating about the fact that this mythical creature still existed in Sweden, albeit in small numbers. Terrifying. And promising.
The day before she was due to go back to school after the Christmas holiday, Teresa was standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom. She hated her appearance. Her cheeks were too round and her eyes were too small, she had a slightly upturned nose, and all in all it made her look like a pig.
She wished someone could tell her what to do. Should she pluck her eyebrows, use a kohl pencil, should she bleach her hair? If someone could guarantee that it would help, she’d do it. But she didn’t think it would help. She’d look like a tarted-up pig instead of just a pig, and that would be worse. She could already hear the taunts.
But the worst thing was something that had happened over the last few months. Over the waistband of her knickers hung folds of pale, flabby skin. She had started to get fat. The bathroom scales showed fifty-eight kilos, only four kilos more than in September, but they had settled in the wrong places.
She probably had the largest breasts in the class but instead of showing them off with a push-up bra and tight tops as some of the girls did, she just wanted to hide them, squash them down. All they did was make her feel even more clumsy and disgusting.
Teresa looked herself in the eye in the mirror and made a decision. She wasn’t going to sit around feeling sorry for herself. She was going to do something about it. She found a facial scrub among her mother’s things and rubbed it over her face until the skin was red, then rinsed it off and dried herself. The greasy sheen on her cheeks had disappeared for the moment.
She dug out her hooded top and jogging pants and put on her trainers. She would take up running. Four days a week, at least. Yes. That would suit her. Running alone along the roads, torturing herself. She would become a wolf, a lone wolf, strong and swift as she raced past people’s homes. The wolf would eat up the pig with a huff and a puff.
Her cheeks were still burning from the facial scrub and her determination as she ran out from her drive. After two hundred metres the cold air started to make her chest hurt. She gritted her teeth and staggered on.
When she had covered another two hundred metres the pain in her chest was so bad she wanted to stop, but then she heard a moped chugging along behind her and forced herself to go on; she didn’t want anyone to see her give up.
The moped caught up with her. In the saddle sat Stefan, who was in Year 8, and behind him Jenny, who was in Teresa’s class. Jenny never missed an opportunity to relay what Stefan said and what Stefan did, just to emphasise the fact that they were very much an item.
Stefan slowed down and puttered alongside Teresa.
‘Faster! Faster!’ he yelled.
Teresa forced a smile and carried on at the same speed, moving so slowly that Stefan had to use his feet to balance the moped and stop it falling over. Her chest was about to explode.
Above the chugging of the engine Jenny shouted, ‘Move your backside!’ and leaned over to smack Teresa’s bottom. The shift in weight distribution made the moped wobble, and Teresa had to step onto the verge, where she slipped on the frosty grass. She managed to avoid falling by running down into the ditch.
The moped accelerated and shot off up the road, Jenny’s white-blonde hair flying out behind her, as clear as the rump of a fleeing deer. Teresa stood panting in the ditch, her hands on her hips. She felt as if she were dying. Her windpipe was constricted, her lungs were aching and she was embarrassed, embarrassed, embarrassed.
After catching her breath for a couple of minutes she went back the way she had come. As she sat in the hallway taking off her trainers, Goran came down the stairs.
‘Hi sweetheart. What have you been doing?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Have you been out jogging?’
‘No.’
Teresa walked past him and went into the kitchen, where she took three cinnamon buns out of the freezer and put them in the microwave. Goran lingered in the doorway. He cleared his throat a couple of times as if he were gathering himself, then asked, ‘How are things?’
Teresa stared at the buns, slowly rotating in the microwave. ‘Fine.’
‘Fine? I don’t think you look as if things are fine.’
‘No. Well. They are.’
Teresa mixed a glass of O’Boy chocolate milk and when the microwave pinged she took out the three buns, put them on a plate, pushed past Goran, placed the glass and the plate on the coffee table in the living room and switched on the television. The Discovery Channel was showing a documentary about elephants.
Goran came and sat down next to her. Since he had stepped down from his managerial role and become an ordinary assistant again, the dark rings under his eyes had faded and he had become more available as a father. The problem was that nobody was interested in his availability anymore. Teresa couldn’t say exactly when it had happened, but at some point she had stopped talking to her father about anything important.
But still. When they had been sitting there for a while, and had learned that elephants can express emotions in a similar way to humans, and that they drink approximately two hundred litres of water a day, there was a kind of quiet companionship between them. Teresa ate her buns and drank her O’Boy. It felt good.
She turned to her father to start a conversation in spite of everything by asking how things were with
The program had moved on to explaining how elephants had been used as executioners and killing machines in large parts of Asia. Crushing heads, crunching bones with their trunks. Human emotions. Yeah, right.
In February a For Sale sign appeared by the roadside, and it was pointing to Johannes’ house. Teresa hadn’t seen much of him lately, and the sign came as a surprise to her. She hadn’t been round to his house since his father moved out, but when she saw the sign she went over and rang the bell.
Johannes opened the door. When he saw her his face lit up and he gave her a quick hug. ‘Teresa! Good to see you! Come in!’
She only had to take one step into the hallway to see how much the house had changed. Shoes and boots that used to be arranged on a shoe rack as if they were standing to attention were now lying around all over the place. When she took off her jacket she could feel that the house was several degrees warmer than it used to be.
