Studio Sex aka Studio 69 / Exposed

'Fuck!' she said, and pulled at the door in exasperation. To her surprise, the door opened. A small piece of light-green cardboard fell to the ground. Annika bent down to pick it up. She recognized the pattern; it came from the box of a Clinique moisturizer she had.

Patricia, Annika thought. She knew I wouldn't be able to get in so she put the piece of paper in the lock.

She walked up the stairs, a short journey that felt interminable. Taped to the front door was an envelope; the keys jangled inside when she took it off.

Thank you so much for everything. Here are your keys, I've made copies. I'm at the club and will be back early tomorrow morning.

P.S. I've done some shopping, I hope you don't mind.

Annika opened the door. She was met by the fresh smell of floor cleaner. The voile curtains flew dramatically in the draft. She shut the door and the curtains sank back down. She wandered slowly through the rooms, looking around.

Patricia had cleaned the whole apartment, except for Annika's room, which was as messy as ever. The fridge was full of fresh cheeses, olives, hummus, and strawberries, and on the counter were plums, grapes, and avocados.

I'll never be able to eat all this before it goes bad, Annika thought. Then she remembered there were two of them now.

She opened the door to the maid's room a crack. Patricia's mattress lay in a corner, neatly made with flowery bedclothes. Next to it was a carryall with clothes and, on a hanger on the wall, Josefin's pink suit.

I want to stay here, Annika thought. I don't want to go back to my old apartment. Neither do I want to spend the rest of my life in Grandma's cottage at Lyckebo.

That night she dreamed for the first time about the three men from the radio program Studio 69: the studio reporter, the field reporter, and the commentator. Silent, faceless, and dressed in black, they were standing at her bedside. She could feel their malice like a cramp in her stomach.

'How can you say it was my fault?' she cried out.

The men drew nearer.

'I've thought it through! Maybe I did the wrong thing, but at least I tried!'

The men tried to shoot her. Their weapons thundered inside her head.

'I'm not Josefin! No!'

All together they leaned over her, and when she felt their icy cold breaths, she was woken up by her own scream.

The room was pitch-dark. The rain was pouring down outside. The rolls of thunder and flashes of lightning were almost simultaneous. The bedroom window was banging in the wind and the room was quite cold.

She struggled to her feet to close the window; it was hard to push it against the wind. In the silence after the rain outside, she felt the trickle down her leg. Her period had started. The bag with sanitary napkins was empty, but she had a few loose ones in her handbag.

While the storm went by, she lay crying in her bed for a long time, curled up in a little ball.

Eighteen Years, Six Months, and Fourteen Days

He feels deeply offended and my protests seem so feeble. I know he's right. No one could ever love me the way he does. There is nothing he would hesitate to do for me, and yet I care more about the outside world than I do about him.

My despair grows, my imperfection blossoms: poisonous, ice-cold, blue. It's so demoralizing, never to be up to standard. I want to watch TV when he wants to make love, and he twists my arm out of joint. The big void gets the upper hand, black and wet, shapeless, impenetrable. He says I let him down, and I can't find a way out.

We have to work together, find the way back to our heaven. Love is eternal, fundamental. I will never doubt it. But who says it should be easy? If perfection were universal, then why should anyone strive for it?

I can't give up now.

We are the most important thing

ever to happen

to each other.

Friday 3 August

Anders Schyman got soaked running the short distance to his car. It was teeming down, avenging all the boiling-hot days in one single cloudburst. Squeezed in behind the steering wheel, the deputy editor swore as he tried to wrestle out of his jacket. His shirt was soaked through on his back and shoulders.

'It'll dry off,' he said to himself.

His breath had already misted up the windows, so he put the defroster on full blast.

His wife was waving from the kitchen window. He wiped the side window, blew her a kiss, and started his journey into town. He could hardly see a thing, even though the windshield wipers were on full speed. He had to wipe the inside of the windshield constantly to see anything at all.

Traffic was flowing reasonably well on Saltsjobads Way, but once he was past Nacka, it came to a standstill. An accident on Varmdo Way had caused a five-mile backup. Schyman groaned out loud. Exhaust fumes rose like a fog into the rain. In the end he turned the engine off and let the defroster recycle the air.

He couldn't quite work Kvallspressen out. He'd been reading it closely for four months now, ever since he was asked to step into the driver's seat. Certain things were a given. The paper was always teetering on the brink of what was morally and ethically defensible, for example. Any self-respecting tabloid should be like that. Sure, there were occasional transgressions, but they were surprisingly few. He had analyzed complaints to the press ombudsman and the Press Council, and obviously the tabloids had far more complaints against them than all the other papers, which was as it should be. It was their job to provoke a reaction in the reader. And still, only a few complaints per year were upheld. He had been surprised to learn that the articles singled out for censure often came from small-town papers around the country that hadn't been able to judge where to draw the line.

He concluded that Kvallspressen was an extremely smart publication with well- balanced articles, front pages, and headlines. It was committed to openness and a dialogue with its readers.

So it was in theory at least. The reality was distant from that.

The people at Kvallspressen often didn't have a damn clue what they were doing. For instance, they'd sent that country girl out among the dead bodies and lynch mobs, expecting her to make clear and rational assessments of the situation. He'd spoken to the news and night editors the night before, and none of them had really discussed the coverage of the murder of Josefin Liljeberg with her. In his eyes, that was both irresponsible and incompetent.

And then there was the peculiar affair with the female terrorist group. None of the editors seemed to know how the story had got into the paper. A summer freelancer waltzed into the newsroom with the sensational pictures in his hand, and everybody just cheered and published them without a moment's thought.

It couldn't go on like that. To be able to sail that close to the wind, you had to know exactly which way it was blowing. A disaster was just waiting to happen; he could smell it. The radio program the day before was a first sign that Kvallspressen was becoming fair game. If the newsroom started bleeding, the vultures would soon be circling. The competition would line up to tear the paper apart. It wouldn't matter what they wrote or how they wrote it, it would all be wrong. Unless the general level of awareness of all the staff was raised, and quickly and thoroughly, they were ruined, in terms of the circulation, journalism, and finances.