sunshine and swimming on the skerries. There had been many such days. Her mother had not come along, as usual. She had always blamed a host of small matters she had to attend to, and chose to stay home. That’s how it always was. Erica could easily count on the fingers of one hand the excursions that had included her mother Elsy. She chuckled when she saw a picture of Anna from the same boat trip. As usual, she was playing monkey; in this picture she was hanging daringly outside the railing and making faces at the camera.
‘Your sister?’
‘Yes, my little sister Anna.’
Erica’s tone was curt, indicating that she didn’t want to discuss that subject any further. Julia got the message and kept paging through the album with her short fat fingers. Her nails were bitten to the quick. On some of her fingers she had bitten the nail so much that sores formed around the edges. Erica forced her gaze away from Julia’s wounded fingers and looked instead at the pictures flipping past in her hands.
Towards the end of the second album Alex was suddenly no longer included in the pictures. It was quite a sharp contrast. Before she was on every page; now there were no more pictures of her. Julia carefully stacked the albums on the coffee table and leaned back in the corner of the sofa with her coffee cup in her hands.
‘Would you like some fresh coffee? That must be cold by now.’
Julia looked at her cup and saw that Erica was right. ‘Yes, if there’s more I’ll take some, thanks.’
She handed over her cup to Erica, who was happy for a chance to stretch her legs a bit. The wicker sofa was lovely to look at, but after sitting on it a while both her back and her bottom were protesting. Julia’s back seemed to share this opinion, since she got up and followed Erica into the kitchen.
‘It was a nice funeral. Lots of friends for the reception at your place as well.’
Erica stood with her back to Julia and poured fresh coffee into their cups. A noncommittal murmur was the only reply she got. She decided to be a little nosy.
‘It looked as though you and Nelly Lorentz were quite well acquainted. How do you happen to know each other?’
Erica held her breath. The paper she had found in the wastebasket at Nelly’s house made her very curious about Julia’s answer.
‘Pappa worked for her.’ The reply came reluctantly from Julia. She put a finger in her mouth without even seeming to be conscious of it and began gnawing at it frantically.
‘Yes, but that must have been long before you were born,’ said Erica. She was still fishing for information.
‘I had a summer job at the cannery when I was younger,’ said Julia.
Her replies still came like pulling teeth. She stopped biting her nails only long enough to answer.
‘You looked like you were getting along well.’
‘Well, I suppose that Nelly sees something in me that nobody else does.’ Her smile was bitter and introspective. All at once Erica felt great sympathy for Julia. Life as the ugly duckling must have been hard. She said nothing, and after a while the silence forced Julia to go on.
‘We were here every summer, after all. The summer after tenth grade Nelly rang Pappa and asked if I’d like to earn a little extra and work in the office. I could hardly turn it down, so after that I worked there every summer until I started at the teachers’ college.’
Erica understood that this answer left a good deal unsaid. But it would have to do. She also understood that she wouldn’t get much more out of Julia about her relationship with Nelly. They sat down on the sofa on the veranda again and drank a few sips of coffee in silence. Both of them gazed blankly out across the ice that stretched towards the horizon.
‘It must have been hard for you when Mamma and Pappa and Alex moved away.’ It was Julia who spoke first.
‘Yes and no. We were no longer playing with each other by then, so of course it was sad, but it wasn’t as dramatic as if we’d still been best friends.’
‘What happened? Why did you stop hanging out together?’
‘If I only knew.’
Erica was astonished that the memory could still hurt so much. That she could still feel the loss of Alex so strongly. So many years had passed since then, and it was probably the rule rather than the exception that childhood best friends often slipped away from each other. Maybe it was because there had never been any natural ending and above all no explanation. They didn’t have a disagreement, Alex didn’t find a new best friend; none of the reasons why a friendship usually dies. She simply withdrew behind a wall of indifference and vanished without saying a word.
‘Did you have a fight about something?’
‘No, not that I know of. Alex just lost interest somehow. She stopped ringing me and stopped asking if we should think up something to do together. If I asked her to do something she wouldn’t say no, but I could tell that she was utterly uninterested. So finally I stopped asking.’
‘Did she have new friends she hung around with?’
Erica wondered why Julia was asking all these questions about her and Alex, but she had nothing against reviving old memories. She might be able to use them in the book.
‘I never saw her with anyone else. At school she always kept to herself. And yet…’
‘What?’ Julia leaned forward eagerly.
‘I still had a feeling that there was someone. But I could be wrong. It was just a feeling.’
Julia nodded thoughtfully. Erica had the feeling that she had merely confirmed something that Julia already knew.
‘Excuse me for asking, but why do you want to know so much about when Alex and I were kids?’
Julia avoided looking her in the eye. Her answer was evasive.
‘She was so much older than I was, and she’d already left the country by the time I was born. Besides, we were really different. I don’t think I ever really got to know her. And now it’s too late. I looked for pictures of her at home, but we have hardly any. So I thought of you.’
Erica felt that Julia’s reply contained so little truth as to qualify as a lie, but she reluctantly accepted it.
‘Well, I have to get going now. Thanks for the coffee.’
Julia got up abruptly and went to the kitchen to put her coffee cup in the dish tub. She was suddenly in a big hurry to leave. Erica walked her to the door.
‘Thanks for letting me see the pictures. It meant a lot to me.’
Then she was gone.
Erica stood in the doorway a long time watching her walk away. A grey and shapeless figure who hurried down the street with her arms held tight to her body as protection from the biting cold. Erica slowly closed the door and went back inside where it was warm.
It was a long time since Patrik had felt so nervous. The feeling he had in the pit of his stomach was wonderful and frightening at the same time.
The pile of clothes on the bed grew as he tried on yet another outfit. All the clothes he put on felt too old- fashioned, too sloppy, too dressy, too square, or simply too ugly. Besides, most of the trousers were uncomfortably tight around the waist. With a sigh he tossed another pair of trousers on the pile and sat down in his shorts on the edge of the bed. He immediately lost all sense of anticipation for the evening and instead got a serious touch of good old anxiety. Maybe it would be better if he rang and cancelled.
Patrik lay back on the bed and looked up at the ceiling with his hands clasped behind his head. He still owned the double bed that he and Karin had shared, and now he stroked his hand over her side of the bed in a fit of sentimentality. It was not until recently that he had begun rolling over onto her side in his sleep. Actually, he should have bought a new bed as soon as she moved out, but he hadn’t been able to face it.
Despite all the sadness he felt when Karin left him, he’d sometimes wondered if it really was Karin he was missing, or whether he missed the illusion he’d had of marriage as an institution. His father had left his mother for another woman when he was ten years old. The divorce that followed had been heart-rending, exploiting him and his little sister Lotta as the primary weapons. He had promised himself that he would never be unfaithful, but above all that he would never ever get a divorce. If he got married it would be for life. So when he and Karin got married five years ago in Tanumshede Church, he didn’t doubt for a second that it would last forever. But life seldom turns out the way one thinks it will. She and Leif had been meeting behind his back for over a year before he caught them.
