‘This sort of thing always makes you nervous. Going to someone’s house. And they
‘As if that makes any difference.’
‘Over there,’ Tove says, pointing along the street. ‘Third house on the left.’
Malin sees the villa, a two-storey building of white brick, surrounded by a low fence and with clipped shrubs in the garden.
Inside her the house expands. It becomes a fortified Tuscan hill-town, impossible for a lone foot-soldier to capture.
Inside the house there is a smell of warmth and bay leaves and the cleanliness that only a hard-working Polish cleaner can conjure forth.
The Stenvinkels are standing in the hall, they have shaken Malin by the hand and she is swaying, unprepared for the unrelenting friendliness.
Mum, Birgitta, is a senior physician at the Ear Clinic, and wants to be called Biggan, and it’s sooo lovely to meet Malin at laaast, when they’ve read so much about her in the
‘Am I wrong,’ she asks, ‘but can I hear that you’re both from Stockholm?’
‘Stockholm? Does it really sound like it? No, I’m from Boras,’ Biggan says. ‘And Hasse’s from Enkoping. We met when we were studying in Lund.’
I know their life history, Malin thinks, and we haven’t got further than the hall.
Markus and Tove have disappeared into the house, and now Hasse is leading Malin into the kitchen. On a sparkling stainless-steel worktop sits a misted cocktail shaker and Malin capitulates, doesn’t even contemplate trying to resist.
‘A martini?’ Hasse asks.
Biggan adds, ‘Watch out, though. He makes them
‘Tanqueray?’ Hasse says.
‘Please,’ Malin replies, and minutes later she is standing with a drink in her hand and they say a toast, and the alcohol is clean and pure and she thinks that at least he knows his drink, Hasse.
‘We usually have an aperitif in the kitchen,’ Biggan says. ‘It livens up the atmosphere so.’
Hasse is standing by the cooker. With one hand he waves Malin over to him as his other hand opens the lid of a blackened, well-used cast-iron casserole.
The smell hits Malin as she approaches.
‘Take a look,’ Hasse says. ‘Have you ever seen such lovelies?’
Two pheasants swimming in a puttering yellow sauce and Malin feels hunger grip her stomach.
‘Well?’
‘That looks wonderful.’
‘Oops, that disappeared quickly,’ Biggan says, and at first Malin doesn’t understand what she means, then she sees the empty glass in her hand.
‘I’ll mix you another,’ Hasse says.
And as he is shaking the cocktail in the air Malin asks, ‘Does Markus have any brothers and sisters?’
Hasse stops shaking abruptly.
Biggan smiles before saying, ‘No. We tried for a long time. But then we had to give up.’
Then the ice rattles in the cocktail shaker again.
65
Her head.
It’s heavy, and the pain is like a fruit-knife thrust between the lobes of her brain. If you feel pain like that you don’t sleep. In dreams there is no physical pain. That’s why we love them, dreams.
No, no, no.
She remembers now.
But where’s the engine? The car? She isn’t in the car any more.
Stop it. Let me go. I’ve got someone who needs me.
Take this blindfold off my eyes. Take it off. Maybe we could talk about this? Why me?
Is there a smell of apples here? Is that earth under my fingers, cold but still warm earth, biscuit crumbs?
There’s a stove crackling.
She kicks in the direction the warmth is coming from, but strikes no metal; she tenses her back but doesn’t get anywhere. Only a dull thud, a vibration through her body.
