She gets up, goes over to the sink and turns on the hot tap. The hot water makes the skin on her hands tighten up and sting, and they turn red, but she keeps them there. She tests herself, forcing herself to stick it out.
The only reason she had embarked on a relationship with Mikael was that she wanted revenge on Lasse. Now it seems utterly pointless. Empty and tawdry. Lasse is dead, and his son Mikael has slowly but surely become increasingly uninteresting to her since he’s been away, even if she feels tempted to reveal to him who she really is.
I’m going to end it, she thinks, finally pulling her hands out of the hot water. She switches taps and holds them under ice-cold water. At first it’s nice, soothing, then the cold takes over, and once again she forces herself to stick it out. Pain must be vanquished.
The more she thinks about it, the less she misses Mikael. I’m his stepmother, she thinks, and at the same time his lover. But it’s impossible to tell him the truth.
She turns the tap off and empties the sink. After a while her hands revert to their normal colour, then, when the pain has subsided completely, she sits down at the kitchen table again.
Her phone is in front of her and she knows she ought to call Jeanette. But she’s reluctant. She doesn’t know what to say. What she ought to say.
Anxiety hits her in the solar plexus, and she puts her hands on her stomach. She’s trembling, her heart is racing, and all her energy is draining away as if someone has just cut an artery. Her head is burning and she feels that she’s losing control, and has no idea what her body’s about to do.
Bang her head against the wall? Throw herself out the window? Scream?
No, she needs to hear a real voice. A voice that can prove to her that she still exists, that she’s tangible. That’s the only thing that will silence the cacophony inside her, and she reaches for the phone. Jeanette Kihlberg answers after a dozen rings.
She can hear distortion on the line. Background noise interrupted by a bleeping sound.
‘How is he?’ is all Sofia can manage to say.
Jeanette Kihlberg sounds like she’s in as bad a state as the line. ‘We found him. He’s alive, and he’s lying here beside me. That’s enough for the time being.’
Your child is lying beside you, she thinks. And Gao is here with me.
Her lips move. ‘I can come today,’ she hears herself say.
‘Please do. Come in an hour or so.’
‘I can come today.’ Her own voice echoes between the walls of the kitchen. Did she just repeat herself? ‘I can come today. I can …’
Johan had been missing all of one night, while Sofia was at home with Gao. They slept. Nothing else. That’s right, isn’t it?
‘I can come today.’
Her uncertainty spreads, and suddenly she realises that she hasn’t a clue about what happened after she and Johan got in the cradle to ride on Free Fall.
Distantly she hears Jeanette’s voice. ‘Good, see you later. I miss you.’
‘I can come today.’ The phone is silent, and when she looks at the screen she sees that the call lasted twenty-three seconds.
She goes out into the hall to put her shoes and jacket on. When she gets her boots down from the rack she notices that they’re damp, as if they’d just been used.
She looks at them closely. A yellow leaf is stuck to the heel of the left boot, the laces of both are full of pine needles and bits of grass, and the soles are muddy.
Calm down, she thinks. There’s been a lot of rain. How long does it take for a pair of leather boots to dry?
She reaches for her jacket. It too feels damp, and she takes a closer look at it.
A tear in one sleeve, about five centimetres long. She finds some small pieces of grit in the exposed padding.
There’s something sticking out of one pocket.
What the hell?
A Polaroid picture.
When she sees what it’s of, she doesn’t know what to think.
It’s a photograph of her, maybe ten years old. She’s standing on a deserted beach. There’s a strong wind, and her long fair hair is sticking out almost horizontally from her head. In the sand there’s a row of broken-off wooden poles, and in the background she can make out a small, red-and-white-striped lighthouse. A few seagulls are outlined against the grey sky.
Her heart is pounding. The photograph means nothing to her, and the location is utterly unfamiliar.
Denmark, 1988
SLEEPLESS, SHE LISTENED for his steps and pretended to be a clock. If she could control time, he would be fooled and would leave her alone.
He’s heavy, he’s got a hairy back, and he’s sweaty and smells of ammonia after grappling with the muck spreader for two hours. The swearing from the outhouse is audible all the way up to her room.
His bony hips chafe against her stomach as she stares up beyond his dipping shoulders.
The Danish flag draped across the ceiling is an inverted cross, its colours blood red and skeleton white.
It’s easiest to do what he wants. Stroke his back and groan in his ear. It shortens the whole thing by a good five minutes.
Once the squeaking of the old bed’s springs has stopped and he’s gone, she gets up and goes into the bathroom. The stench of manure has to go.
He’s a repairman from Holstebro, and she calls him the Holstebro pig, after the local breed, specially developed for slaughter.
She’s written his name in her diary, along with the others, and at the top of the list is her pig farmer, the one she has to be grateful to for giving her somewhere to stay.
The other one is actually well educated, a lawyer or something, and works in Sweden when he’s not at the farm killing pigs. She calls him the German bastard, but never when he can hear.
The German bastard is proud of using tried-and-tested, traditional working methods. His Jutland pigs are scorched rather than boiled to remove their bristles.
She turns the tap on and scrubs her hands. Her fingertips are swollen from her work with the pigs, because the pig hair catches under her nails and causes inflammation. Wearing protective gloves doesn’t make any difference.
She’s killed them. Numbing them with electric shocks and draining their blood, cleaning up after and rinsing the drains and taking care of the mess after the slaughter. Once he let her shoot one of them with a bolt gun, and she came close to using it on him instead. If only to see if his eyes ended up as vacant as the pigs’.
Once she’s scrubbed herself reasonably clean, she dries herself and goes back to her room.
I can’t bear it, she thinks. I have to get away from here.
As she gets dressed she hears the Holstebro pig’s old car start up. She peeps through the curtain and looks out of the window. The car is driving away from the farm and the German bastard is walking over to the outhouse to continue repairing the muck spreader.
She makes up her mind to walk out onto Griset? Point, and maybe over the bridge to Oddesund.