is ripped open by a black wind. Out there I hear something slithering towards her legs. She screams and there is silence. Then she’s back, but she is someone else now, the faceless person I have missed all my life. Who is she really?
I can wipe out the longing. I can give up breathing.
But if longing and breathing disappear, you are left with belonging. Aren’t you?
I have woken up. I am many years older, but my hovel, the cold, the winter night and the forest are the same. I have to do something. But I’ve done it already; something has happened.
Where does the blood on my hands come from? And the noises.
The worms and mice are inaudible over all the commotion.
I hear your voice. I hear you banging on the nailed-together planks that make up the door of my hovel. You’re here, you’ve finally come.
But is it really you? Or is it the dead?
Whoever is out there, tell me that you mean me no harm. Tell me that you have come in love.
Promise me that.
Promise me that much.
Promise.
PART ONE
This last sort of love
1
Love and death are neighbours.
Their faces are one and the same. A person need not stop breathing in order to die, and need not breathe in order to be alive.
There are never any guarantees where death or love are concerned.
Two people meet.
Love.
They make love.
And they love and they love and then, after a while, the love runs out, just as abruptly as it first appeared, its capricious source blocked by circumstances, internal or external.
Or else love continues until the end of time. Or else it is impossible from the start, yet still unavoidable.
And is this sort of love, this last sort, is it really nothing but a nuisance?
That’s just what it is, thinks Malin Fors as she stands in her dressing gown by the kitchen sink, fresh from the shower, spreading butter on a slice of wholemeal bread with one hand, and lifting a cup of strong coffee to her lips with the other.
Six fifteen, according to the Ikea clock on the whitewashed wall. Outside the window, in the glow of the streetlamps, the air seems to have solidified into ice. The cold embraces the grey stone walls of St Lars Church, and the white branches of the maples seem to have given up long ago: not another night of temperatures below minus twenty; better to kill us outright and let us fall dead to the ground.
Who could love this sort of cold?
A day like this, Malin thinks, is not meant for the living.
Linkoping is paralysed, the city’s streets draped limply upon the crust of the earth, the condensation on the windows making the houses blind.
People didn’t even make the effort to get to the Cloetta Centre last night for the ice hockey, just a couple of thousand instead of the usual full house.
I wonder how Martin’s getting on? Malin thinks, her colleague Zeke’s son, a local lad, a forward with a chance of a place in the national team and a career as a professional. She can’t actually summon up much interest in ice hockey, but if you live in this town it’s pretty much impossible to avoid hearing about events on the ice.
Hardly anyone about.
The travel agent’s on the corner of St Larsgatan and Hamngatan mocks with its posters for one exotic destination after the other; the sun, beaches, the unnaturally blue skies belong to another planet, a habitable one. A lone mother is wrestling with a twin buggy outside the Ostgota Bank, the children nestled in black bags, almost invisible, sleepy, obstinate, yet still so unimaginably vulnerable. Their mother slips on patches of ice hidden under a powder of snow, she lurches but drives herself on as though there were no other option.
‘Winters here are the devil’s work.’
Malin can hear her father’s words within her, his justification a few years ago for the purchase of a three-room bungalow in a retirement village on Tenerife: the Playa de la Arena, just north of Playa de las Americas.
What are you doing right now? Malin thinks.
The coffee warms from within.
