tired to read it properly.
Janne is standing in the hall next to Tove. He looks tired, the skin stretched tight across his sharp cheekbones, and his tall, muscular body seems to be hanging from a swaying gallows. Has he lost weight? And aren’t those a few mute grey hairs at his temples, scattered among the otherwise so glossy amber locks?
Tove off school, a study day, early Friday pick-up instead of late. Changes of shift. A jigsaw puzzle.
She sent Janne a letter in Bosnia when she had packed her and Tove’s belongings and moved into a small flat in the city, a stop on the road to Stockholm.
‘You can have the house. It suits you much better than me, you’ve got room for your cars. I’ve never liked the countryside that much, really. Hope you’re well, and not having to witness anything awful. Or put up with anything awful. We can work out everything else later.’
His answer came on a postcard.
‘Thanks. I’ll get a mortgage when I get home and buy you out. Do as you like.’
Do as you like?
I would have liked to have things the way they were before. Back at the start. Before it all became routine.
Because there are events and days that can drive people apart, breaking points. We were young, so young. Time, what did we know of that then, other than that it was ours?
Malin thinks about his dreams, the ones he always wants to talk about when they meet, but which she can never quite bear to listen to and he can never quite articulate even when she is trying to listen.
Instead Janne’s voice: ‘You’re looking tired, Malin. Don’t you think, Tove?’
Tove nods.
‘Working too much,’ Malin says.
‘The bloke in the tree?’
‘Mmm.’
‘You’ll have your work cut out this weekend, then.’
‘Did you come in the Saab?’
‘No, I used the Volvo. It’s got winter tyres. I haven’t bothered to change the others.’
Men are car fanatics. Most of them. And Janne in particular. He has four cars in the garage next to the house. Four cars in varying stages of decay, or restoration, as he would put it. She could never stand the cars, not even at the start; she couldn’t bear what they represented. What? A lack of willpower? Or imagination? Listlessness? Crass systematic thinking. Love demands something else.
‘What have you got planned?’
‘Don’t know,’ Janne says. ‘There’s not too much you can do in this sort of cold. What do you think, Tove? Shall we rent some films and get a load of sweets and lock ourselves in? Or do you want to read?’
‘Films sound good. But I’ve got some books as well.’
‘Try to get a bit of fresh air anyway,’ Malin says.
‘Mum. That’s not up to you.’
‘We can go to the firestation,’ Janne says. ‘Play a bit of fireman’s indoor hockey. Tove, what do you think, that would be fun, wouldn’t it?’
Tove looks up at the ceiling, then adds, as if not quite daring to trust her father’s sarcasm, ‘Not in a million years.’
‘Oh well. Films it is, then.’
Malin looks tiredly at Janne, and his grey-green eyes meet hers, he doesn’t look away, he never has. When he disappears he takes his perfect physique and his soul and goes to places where someone might need the help he thinks he can’t survive without giving.
Help.
The name he has given to flight.
When the flat, the house, everything got too cramped. And then over and over again.
She gave Janne a hug when he arrived today, held him tight and he responded, he always does and she wanted to keep hold of him, pull him to her for a long time, ask him to sit out the cold snap with them here, ask him to stay.
But instead she came to her senses, found a way of breaking free of him, as if he were the one who had initiated the embrace. A way of getting her muscles to ask quietly, ‘What are you doing? We’re not married any more and you know as well as I do that it’s impossible.’
‘And what about you, have you been sleeping okay?’
Janne nodded, but Malin could see that the nod concealed a lie.
‘I just sweat so much.’
‘Even though it’s so cold?’
‘Even though.’
‘Have you got everything, Tove?’
