‘Come on, you weakling, try!’
She’s asked him to talk like that, call her a weakling, because otherwise he’d never say that sort of thing. He had trouble the first few times, Malin noticed, but now he sounds completely natural.
. . . three times, four, five, down, then six, seven, eight . . .
Her energy, so obvious just a few seconds before, is gone.
The curved armature in the ceiling above explodes, the room turns white, her muscles white, mute, Johan’s voice: ‘Try harder!’
And Malin pushes, but no matter how she pushes the bar is sinking towards her throat.
Then the pressure eases, the weight on her body disappears and the white walls and yellow ceiling come into view again, the apparatus in the windowless gym in the cellar, the smell of sweat.
She gets up. They are alone in the room. Most of their colleagues go to gyms in the centre of the city: ‘They’re better equipped.’
Johan is grinning. ‘That eighth one seems to be the problem,’ he says.
‘You shouldn’t have stepped in,’ Malin says. ‘I would have done it.’
‘You’d have crushed your windpipe if I’d held back any longer.’
‘Your turn,’ Malin says.
‘No more for me today,’ Johan says, tugging his sweaty, washed-out blue Adidas top away from his chest. ‘The kids.’
‘Yeah, blame the kids.’
Johan laughs as he walks away. ‘It’s only exercise, Malin. No more, no less.’
Then she is alone in the room.
She gets on to the treadmill. Turns up the speed, almost to maximum. Then she runs until her vision starts to go white again, until the world disappears.
Jets of warm water on her skin.
Closed eyes, black around her.
A conversation with Tove some hours before.
‘Can you heat up something from the freezer? Or there’s some curry left from the weekend. Dad didn’t quite manage to eat all of it.’
‘Don’t worry, Mum. I’ll sort something out.’
‘Will you be there when I get home?’
‘I might go and study with Lisa. We’ve got a geography test on Thursday.’
Study, Malin thinks. Since when did you have to do that?
‘I can test you if you like.’
‘Thanks, that’s okay.’
Shampoo in her hair, soap on her body, her breasts, unused.
Malin turns off the shower, dries herself, throws the towel in the wash-basket before taking her clothes out of her locker. She gets dressed, puts on the yellow and red Swatch Tove gave her for Christmas. Half past seven. Zeke would be waiting outside in the car. Best to hurry. The professor who is going to tell them about rituals probably doesn’t want to have to wait all evening for them either.
19
They walk quickly between the panelled, brick-coloured buildings. The ground crunches beneath their feet, the grey paving carefully gritted, but with patches of ice every now and then. The path between the silent, oblong buildings becomes a wind-tunnel where the cold can gather its strength and get up speed to hit their bodies. The cones of light from the lamps hanging above them sway in the wind.
The university.
Like a rectangular city within the city, laid out between Valla and the golf course and Mjardevi Science Park.
‘I didn’t know academic life could seem so bleak,’ Zeke says.
‘It isn’t bleak,’ Malin says. ‘Just tough.’
She spent two years studying law part-time, with Tove crawling round her legs and Janne off in some jungle or on some mined road God knew where, and her patrol duties and nightshifts and night nursery, alone, alone with you, Tove.
‘Did you say C-block?’ The letter C shines above the nearest entrance. Zeke’s voice sounds hopeful.
‘Sorry, F-block.’
‘Fuck, it’s cold.’
‘This cold stinks.’
