You’re probably still asleep, and when you wake up it’ll be warm and sunny. But here, the frost reigns unchallenged.
Should I wake Tove? Thirteen-year-olds can sleep for ages, right round the clock if they’re given the chance, and in a winter like this it would be lovely to hibernate for a few months, not having to go out, and waking up fully restored when the temperature creeps above zero.
Tove can sleep. Let her tall, gangly body rest.
Her first class doesn’t start until nine. Malin can see it all in her mind’s eye. How her daughter forces herself to get up at half past eight, stumbles to the bathroom, showers, gets dressed. She never wears make-up. And then Malin sees Tove skip breakfast, despite all her cajoling. Maybe I should try a new tactic, Malin thinks: Breakfast is bad for you, Tove. Whatever you do, don’t eat breakfast.
Malin drinks the last of the coffee.
The only time Tove ever gets up early is when she wants to finish one of the mass of books she devours almost obsessively; she has unusually advanced taste for her age. Jane Austen. How many Swedish thirteen-year-olds apart from Tove would read something like that? But, on the other hand . . . She’s not quite like other thirteen- year-olds, never has to try hard to be top of the class. Maybe it would be good if she did have to make more effort, encounter a bit of real resistance?
Time has run on, and Malin wants to get to work, doesn’t want to miss the half hour between quarter to seven and quarter past when she is almost certain to be on her own in Police Headquarters and can plan the day ahead undisturbed.
In the bathroom she takes off the dressing gown. Tosses it on to the yellow synthetic floor.
The glass in the mirror on the wall is a little bowed, and even though it makes her height of 1.70 metres appear slightly squashed she still looks slim; athletic and powerful and ready to meet whatever crap comes her way. She’s met it before, crap, she’s dealt with it, learned from it and moved on.
Not bad for a thirty-three-year-old, Malin thinks, her self-confidence doing its job:
Her body. She concentrates on that.
Pats her stomach, takes in a deep breath so that her small breasts stick out, but just as she sees the nipples pointing forward she stops herself.
Instead she quickly bends down and picks up the dressing gown. She dries her blonde pageboy with the dryer, letting her hair fall over her prominent but soft cheekbones, forming a pelmet above her straight eyebrows, because she knows that emphasises her cornflower-blue eyes. Malin pouts her lips, wishes they were bigger, but maybe that would look odd beneath her short, slightly snub nose?
In the bedroom she pulls on a pair of jeans, a white blouse and a loose-knit black polo-neck sweater.
Glancing at the hall mirror, she adjusts her hair, reassuring herself that the wrinkles around her eyes aren’t too visible. She puts on her Caterpillar boots.
Because who knows what lies ahead?
Maybe she’ll have to head out into the countryside. The thick, synthetic down jacket she bought from a branch of Stadium in Tornby shopping centre for eight hundred and seventy-five kronor makes her feel like a rheumatic spaceman, her movements sluggish and clumsy.
Have I got everything?
Mobile, purse in her pocket. Pistol. Her constant companion. The gun was hanging on the back of the chair next to the unmade bed.
By the mattress with space for two, plus enough room for a decent gap, a gap for sleep and loneliness during the very darkest hours of night. But how can you find someone you can put up with if you can’t even put up with yourself?
She has a picture of Janne beside the bed. She usually tells herself that it’s there to make Tove happy.
In the photograph Janne is suntanned and his mouth is smiling, but not his grey-green eyes. The sky behind him is clear, and beside him a palm tree is swaying gently in the wind, while in the background you can make out a jungle. Janne is wearing a light blue UN helmet and a camouflage cotton jacket bearing the logo of the Swedish Rescue Services; he looks like he wants to turn round, to make sure that nothing’s about to jump out at him from the dense vegetation.
Rwanda.
Kigali.
He’s told her about dogs eating people who weren’t even dead yet.
Janne went, goes, has always gone as a volunteer. At least that’s the official version.
To a jungle so dense that you can’t hear the sound of the heart of darkness beating, to mined and blood- drenched mountain roads in the Balkans, trucks with sacks of flour rumbling past mass-graves, poorly concealed by sand and scrub.
And it was voluntary from the start, for us.
The short version: a seventeen-year-old and a twenty-year-old meet in a bog-standard disco in a bog-standard small town. Two people with no plans, similar but different, but with some shared essence, ideas that work for both of them. Then, after two years, the event to be avoided at all costs happens. A thin membrane of rubber breaks and a child starts to grow.
‘We have to get rid of it.’
‘No, this is what I’ve always wanted.’
