THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 7
At half past six in the morning, Mimmi took her breakfast break. She’d been working in the bar since five. The aroma of coffee and newly baked bread mingled with the meaty smells of freshly made lasagne and stew. Fifty aluminum food containers stood cooling on the stainless steel worktop. She’d been working in the kitchen with the door propped open so that it wouldn’t be so hot. And because they liked it, the old men. It was company for them, she supposed. Watching her fly about, working, filling up the coffee pot. And they could eat in peace, no critical eyes watching if they happened to chew with their mouths open or spill coffee down their shirts.
Before she sat down to eat her own breakfast, she dashed out into the dining room and gave the customers a little treat, going round with the coffee pot to offer a top-up. She pressed them to accept and offered round the bread basket. At that moment she belonged to all of them, she was their wife, their daughter, their mother. Her stripy hair was still damp from her morning shower, done up in a plait under the handkerchief she wore tied around her head. The looks she got said it all. She would never run around in the bar with loose, wet hair, dripping onto her tight sweater from H &M. Miss Wetter and Wetter T-shirt. She put the coffee pot down on the hot plate and announced:
“Just help yourselves, I’m going to sit down for quarter of an hour.”
“Mimmi, come over here and have a chat,” one of the men sang out in reply.
Some of them were on their way to work. They were the ones taking quick little gulps of coffee to get it down as rapidly as possible, although it was still too hot, bolting their sandwich in two bites. The others spent an hour or so here before they ambled home to loneliness. They tried to start conversations and flicked aimlessly through the previous day’s newspaper, today’s wouldn’t be here for ages. In the village people didn’t say they were unemployed or off sick or had taken early retirement. They said they were at home.
Their overnight guest Rebecka Martinsson was sitting alone at a table by the window, looking out over the river. Eating her muesli and drinking coffee, in no hurry.
Mimmi lived in a one-room apartment in town. She’d hung on to it although she practically lived with Micke in the house nearest the bar. When she’d decided to stick around for a while her mother had said something feeble about moving in with her. It had been so obvious that she’d felt obliged to offer, it would never have occurred to Mimmi to say yes. She’d been running the bar with Micke for just about three years now, and it wasn’t until last month that Lisa had given her a spare key to the house.
“You never know,” she’d said, looking everywhere but at Mimmi. “If anything was to happen… I mean, the dogs are in there.”
“Of course,” Mimmi had replied, taking the key. The dogs.
Always those bloody dogs, she’d thought.
Lisa had seen that Mimmi was annoyed and sullen, but it wasn’t her style to pretend she’d noticed something and to try and talk. No, it was time to leave. If it wasn’t a meeting of the women’s group, then it was the animals at home, maybe the rabbit hutches needed cleaning out or one of the dogs had to go to the vet.
Mimmi clambered up onto the oiled wooden worktop next to the refrigerator. If she drew up her legs she could squeeze in next to the fresh herbs growing in tin cans that had been washed out. It was a good place. You could see Jukkasjarvi on the other side of the river. A boat, sometimes. That window hadn’t been there when the place was a workshop. Micke gave it to her as a gift. “I’d like a window just here,” she’d said. And he’d sorted it.
It wasn’t that she was angry with the dogs. Or jealous. Most of the time she called them her brothers. But when she was living in Stockholm, Lisa never once came to visit. Didn’t even ring. “Of course she loves you,” Micke always said. “She’s your mother after all.” He didn’t understand anything.
There must be something genetically wrong with us, she thought. I mean, I’m incapable of loving as well.
If she met a guy who was a total shit, she could fall in love, of course-no, that was far too tame a word, the cheap supermarket version of the feeling she had; she became psychotic, dependent, an abuser. It had happened. There was one time in particular, when she lived in Stockholm. When you tore yourself free of a relationship like that, you left great chunks of flesh behind.
With Micke it was something quite different. She could have a child with him, if she’d actually believed she was capable of loving a child. But he was good, Micke was good.
Outside the window some of the hens were scratching about in the autumn grass. Just as she sank her teeth into her freshly baked bread, she heard the sound of a moped out on the track. It pulled into the yard and stopped.
Nalle, she thought.
He was always turning up at the bar in the mornings. If he woke up before his father and managed to sneak away without being heard. Otherwise the rule was that he was supposed to have breakfast at home.
After a little while he materialized outside the window where she was sitting and knocked on the glass. He was wearing a pair of bright yellow dungarees that had belonged to a telecom engineer once upon a time. The reflector strip down by his feet was almost completely worn away through frequent wearing and washing. On his head he had a blue cap of imitation beaver with big earflaps. His green fleecy jacket was much too short. Stopped at the waist.
He gave her one of his priceless crafty smiles. It split his powerful face, the big jaw shifting to the right, eyes narrowing, eyebrows shooting upward. It was impossible not to smile back, it didn’t matter that she wasn’t going to be able to have her sandwich in peace.
She opened the window. He shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and fished out three eggs. Looked at her as if he’d performed an amazing trick. He usually went into the henhouse and collected the eggs for her. She took them off him.
“Brilliant! Thanks! So, is it Hungry Harry who’s come to visit us?”
A rumbling laugh emerged from his throat. Like a starter motor that isn’t keen, in slow motion, hmmm- hmmm.
“Or maybe it’s Dennis the Dishwasher?”
He answered with a delighted no, knew she was joking with him, but still shook his head vigorously to be on the safe side. He hadn’t come here to wash up.
“Hungry?” she asked, and Nalle turned on his heel and vanished around the corner.
She jumped down from the worktop, closed the window, took a gulp of coffee and a big bite of her sandwich. By the time she got into the dining room, he was sitting opposite Rebecka Martinsson. He’d hung his jacket over the back of the chair next to him, but kept his cap on. It was a habit of his. Mimmi took off the cap and ruffled his thick, short hair.
“Wouldn’t you rather sit over there instead? Then you can see if any cool cars go past.”
Rebecka Martinsson smiled at Nalle.
“He’s welcome to sit with me,” she said.
Mimmi’s hand reached out and touched Nalle again. Rubbed his back gently.
“Do you want pancakes or yogurt or a sandwich?”
She knew the answer, but it was good for him to talk. And to make his own decisions. She could see the word being shaped in his mouth for a few seconds before it came out. His lower jaw moved first in one direction, then the other. Then, decisively:
“Pancakes.”
Mimmi disappeared into the kitchen. She took fifteen little pancakes out of the freezer and chucked them in the microwave.
Nalle’s father Lars-Gunnar and her mother Lisa were cousins. Nalle’s father was a retired policeman, and had been the leader of the local hunt for almost thirty years. That made him a powerful man. He was physically big too, just like Nalle. A policeman who commanded respect, in his day. And nice too, according to what people said. He still went to funerals when some old petty criminal died. On those occasions it was often only Lars-Gunnar and the priest who were there.
When Lars-Gunnar met Nalle’s mother, he was already over fifty. Mimmi remembered when he brought Eva to see them for the first time.
I can’t have been more than six, she thought.
Lars-Gunnar and Eva sat on the leather sofa in the living room. Lisa dashed in and out of the kitchen with cake
