name for.
Impossible love. The coolness of some marriages.
Does it ever get a name? That feeling?
Then she is back.
The watering can in her hand.
Plant by plant. Methodically, in a way her father the team-leader would appreciate.
I’m not hoovering, Malin thinks. Dustballs on the floor. When she used to hoover, as part of her tasks in exchange for pocket money on Saturdays, Mum would follow her round the house, checking that she didn’t knock against the furniture or door frames. When she was finished her mum would hoover again, hoovering the same places, right in front of her as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
What can a child do?
What does a child know?
A child is shaped.
And then it is finished.
All the plants watered. Now they will live a bit longer.
Malin sits down on her parents’ bed.
It’s a Dux. They’ve had it for years, but would they be able to sleep in it if they knew what had happened in this bed, that this was where she lost, or rather made sure she got rid of, her virginity?
Not Janne.
Someone else.
Earlier. She was fourteen and alone at home while her parents were at a party, staying the night with friends in Torshalla.
Whatever. No matter what had happened in this bed, it wasn’t hers. She can’t walk through this apartment, alone or with other people, without a sense of loss. She gets up from the bed, forcing herself through the thick veils of longing that seem to hang in the air. What’s missing?
Her parents in pictures without frames.
In sun-loungers at the house on Tenerife. Three years since they bought it, but she and Tove have never been there.
‘You’re doing the watering?’
Of course I’m watering.
She has lived with these people, she comes from them, but even so the people in the pictures are strangers. Mum, mostly.
She empties the watering can in the kitchen sink.
There are secrets hidden in those drops, behind the green doors of the kitchen cupboards, in the freezer, rumbling away, full of last year’s chanterelles.
Shall I take a bag?
No.
The last thing she sees before she closes the door of her parents’ apartment behind her are the thick wool rugs on the floor of the sitting room. She sees them through the open double doors from the hall, average quality. They’re not as good as Mum always pretends they are. The whole room, the whole home is full of things that aren’t what they seem, veneers concealing a different veneer.
There’s a feeling here, Malin thinks, of never being quite good enough, of nothing ever being quite right. That we aren’t, that I’m not, good enough.
To this day she has difficulty with anything that’s truly good enough, with people who are supposed to be genuinely good enough. Not just rich like Karin Johannison, but doctors, the upper classes, lawyers, that sort of good. Faced with people like that, she sometimes senses her prejudices and feelings of inferiority rise to the surface. She decides in advance that people like that always look down on people like her, and she adopts a defensive posture.
Why?
To avoid being disappointed?
It’s better at work, but it can be stressful in her private life.
Thoughts are flying round Malin’s head as she jogs downstairs and out into the early, wretched, Friday evening.
10
Just a little one, one little beer: I deserve that, I want to watch drops of condensation almost freezing to ice on a chilled glass. I can leave the car here. I can pick it up tomorrow.
Malin hates that voice. She usually tells herself, as if to drown it out: There’s nothing worse than being hung over.
