What was Linnea trying to show. What didn’t Annette want to see?
A man with a bent back and glasses, and a dog with a large, prickly tongue?
Now she can see that it says U1660.
U1660?
Stockholm, 1988
WE CYCLE AROUND the world, we play in streets and squares.
We play anything that makes a noise, even our old bike.
Inside the villa in V?rmd? Victoria Bergman stands and looks at the fetish figures on the living-room wall.
Grisslinge is a prison.
She doesn’t know what to do with all the dead hours of the day. Time runs through her like an irregular river.
Some days she doesn’t remember waking up. Some she doesn’t remember going to sleep. Some days are just gone.
Other days she reads her psychology books, takes long walks, goes down to the water by the beach, or goes down Mormors v?g to Sk?rg?rdsv?gen, main road number 222, almost perfectly straight towards the V?rmd? road, where she turns at the roundabout and walks back. The walks help her think, and the cold air against her cheeks reminds her that she has a boundary.
She isn’t the whole world.
She goes over and takes down the face mask, which looks like Solace in Sierra Leone, and puts it in front of her face. It smells strongly of wood, almost like perfume.
Inside the mask is a promise of another life, somewhere else, one Victoria knows she can never have. She is shackled to him.
She can hardly see through the small holes in the mask. She can hear her own breathing, feels its warmth bounce back and settle like a moist film over her cheeks. Outside in the hall she stops in front of the mirror. The mask makes her head look smaller. As if she were a seventeen-year-old with a ten-year-old’s face.
‘Solace,’ Victoria says. ‘Solace Manuti. Now we’re twins, you and I.’
Then the front door opens. He’s returned from work.
Victoria takes the mask off at once and runs back into the living room. She knows she’s not allowed to touch his things.
‘What are you doing?’ He sounds cross.
‘Nothing,’ she replies, hanging the mask back in its place. She hears the shoe rack creak and the wooden hangers rattle against one another. Then his footsteps in the hall. She sits down on the sofa and grabs a newspaper from the table.
He comes into the room. ‘Were you talking to someone?’ He looks around the room before sitting down in the armchair next to the sofa.
‘What are you doing?’ he asks again.
Victoria folds her arms and stares at him. She knows that makes him nervous. She enjoys watching the panic grow inside him, watching him nervously pat the arms of the chair with his hands, shifting position again and again, unable to utter a word.
But when she’s sat there silent for a while she feels anxiety building. She notices that his breathing is getting faster. It looks like his face is giving up. It loses colour and collapses.
‘What are we going to do with you, Victoria?’ he says forlornly, hiding his face in his hands. ‘If the psychologist can’t sort you out soon, I don’t know what we’re going to do.’ He sighs.
She doesn’t answer.
She sees Solace standing there in silence, watching them.
They resemble each other, she and Solace.
‘Can you go down and turn the sauna on,’ he says firmly as he gets up. ‘Mum’s on her way, so we’ll soon be ready to eat.’
Victoria thinks that there ought to be some salvation. An arm reaching in from an unexpected direction and grabbing her, pulling her away from there. Or that her legs were strong enough to take her far away. But she’s forgotten how to go about leaving, forgotten how to create a goal.
After dinner she hears Mum clattering around in the kitchen. Forever sweeping, dusting and clearing things away, all to no avail. However much she cleans and washes up, everything always looks exactly the same.
Victoria knows that it’s all a sort of safe bubble that Mum can creep into in order to avoid seeing what’s going on around her, and the pots and pans always make extra noise when Bengt is home.
She goes downstairs to the basement and sees that Mum has once again managed to miss cleaning the gaps between the steps where the needles from the Christmas tree are still stuck.
She goes down to the sauna, gets undressed and waits for him.
Outside the house it’s February and icy cold, but in here the temperature has crept up to almost ninety degrees. That’s because the sauna heater is so efficient, and he’s fond of boasting of how he’s connected it to the electricity network without permission.
Outside the sauna is a drainage pipe from the kitchen that runs down into the basement, and the warmth of the new heater makes the smell from the drain stronger.
The smell of onions and food waste, blood bread, beetroot and rancid cream mixes with a smell reminiscent of petrol.
Then he comes down to her. He looks sad. At the other end of the pipe Mum is washing up, while he takes off his towel.
When she opens her eyes she is standing in the living room with her towel around her body. She realises that it’s happened again. She has lost time. She can feel the chafe marks in her crotch, the tenderness of her arms, and feels relieved that she didn’t have to be there during the minutes or hours that have passed.
Solace is hanging in her place on the living-room wall and Victoria goes up to her room alone. She sits down on the bed, throws the towel on the floor and curls up under the covers. The sheets are cool, and she lies on her side looking at the window.
The February cold almost makes the panes crack, and she can hear the glass complain at the hard embrace of fifteen degrees below zero.
A window divided into six panes by wooden struts. Six framed pictures where the seasons have changed since they came home. In the two upper panes she can see the top of the tree outside, in the middle two the neighbours’ house and the tree trunk and the chains of her old swing. In the bottom panes she can see a white covering of snow and the red plastic swing, moving back and forth with the wind.
In the autumn there was yellow, scorched grass, the leaves falling and rotting. And since the middle of November a covering of snow that looks different every day.
Only the swing is the same. It hangs from its chains behind the six little windowpanes, like bars surrounded by ice crystals.
Glasbruksgatan – a Neighbourhood
AUTUMN IS SWEEPING in from the Baltic, bathing Stockholm in a cover of heavy, cold damp.
From Glasbruksgatan, up on Katarinaberget, just below Mosebacke, the island of Skeppsholmen is barely visible through the rain. Kastellholmen, only slightly further out, is veiled in grey mist.
It’s just now six o’clock.
She stops under one of the street lamps, takes the note out of her pocket and checks the address once more.
Yes, she’s in the right place; now it’s just a matter of waiting.
She knows he leaves at six and gets home a quarter of an hour later.