The picture window in the kitchen looked out over Kattholmen, and despite the cloud both the tiles and stainless steel worktops were bathed in light from the sky and the sea. Everything was as clear as in a photograph. Anders sat down with his back to the window while Elin filled his glass with Gato Negro from a cask. They raised their glasses to each other and drank. Anders made an effort not to gulp.
'How are you?' he asked.
Elin ran her finger over the cat on the wine cask. 'We used to spend whole evenings sitting here, didn't we? When Mum and Dad were out.'
'Yes. And nights too. Later on.'
Elin nodded, still following the contours of the cat with her finger. As she wasn't looking at him, Anders plucked up the courage to study her face.
Her nose, which had been slender and straight, was now twice as big and flattened. Her chin, which had been firm, quite prominent and somewhat square, was now pointed and receding, so that it became part of her throat. Her high cheekbones and dimples had disappeared, and her lips…
Those lips that had pouted in so many close-ups, topless glamour shots and full-length shots, and which had been desirable even before the silicon implants, had now been compressed into two narrow lines that did no more than mark where her mouth began and ended, if that.
She had bags under her eyes that would have looked unnatural on a woman twenty years older, and the baffling thing was that in the clinical brightness of the kitchen Anders could see the marks of badly healed scars beneath her eyes. As if she had had surgery on the bags. As if they had been worse at some point.
He took a large gulp of his wine, almost half the glass, and when he realised what he was doing it was too late, he could hardly spit it out, so he swallowed it. Elin was looking at him, and he couldn't interpret her expression. It was impossible to read her, just as it would be impossible to read a book that had been torn to pieces.
Time for small talk.
Time for him to pick up the thread and chat about all the times they had sat here, everything they had done all those years ago, and he wouldn't mention her face or the boathouse on Kattholmen where everything had come to an end.
What did we actually do?
He searched for some amusing memory. Something they could laugh at, something that might dispel the strange atmosphere between them. He couldn't think of anything. All he could remember was that they used to drink tea, lots of tea, with honey, that sometimes they ran out of honey and…The words came tumbling out of his mouth, 'What have you done to your face?'
The groove between Elin's lips widened and the corners moved up towards her cheeks; it could be interpreted as a smile. 'It's not just my face.'
She walked into the middle of the kitchen floor and ran her hands over her body. Anders looked down, and Elin said, 'Look.'
He looked. The heavy breasts that had given the caption writers at Slitz an excuse to write Bouncing beauties! had shrunk and been flattened until they were hardly noticeable. Elin pulled up her sweatshirt.
Her stomach was hanging over the waistband of her jeans. The lips pretended to smile again.
'It was actually possible to use the breast implants and put them in here.' She grabbed hold of the bulge above her right hip and squeezed it. 'Then I had to have quite a lot cut away, of course. They were quite big to start with, beforehand.'
She pulled up the sweatshirt a little further, so that the lower part of her breasts was visible. Anders saw the badly healed scar, and looked down at the floor again. 'Why?'
She straightened her sweatshirt and sat down at the opposite side of the table again, took a sip of her wine and topped up his glass.
'I just wanted to.'
Her voice was breaking slightly. Someone with serious injuries or deformities might behave this way, showing them off as a challenge to the other person-to say something, to dare to question. But now her voice was breaking.
'I haven't finished yet.'
'What do you mean?'
'I haven't finished yet. I'm going to have more work done. More surgery.'
Anders searched her altered face, her eyes, for signs of insanity, but found none. He thought she ought to be radiating something other than sorrowful resignation. Some kind of fanaticism, at least.
'I don't understand.'
'Neither do I,' said Elin. 'But that's the way it is.'
'But what…what are you aiming for, so to speak?'
'I don't know. I just know I haven't finished.'
'But what doctor would agree to…'
Elin interrupted him. 'If you've got money, there's always someone. And I do have money.'
Anders turned and looked out of the window. The wind was blowing among the few random fir trees still standing upright on Kattholmen. A storm a few years earlier had brought down most of the trees, and the island became one huge game of pick-up sticks, almost impossible to find a way through. The boathouse might have been smashed to pieces. He hoped it had.
'Are you thinking about the same thing as me?' asked Elin.
'Probably.'
'Everything disappears. In the end.'
'Yes.'
They avoided the topic and started talking about things that had disappeared, what had become of old friends. Anders told her about Maja, making a huge effort not to fall down the shaft that always opened up beneath him when he relived the story by retelling it. He managed to balance on the brink.
The afternoon had drawn a veil of darker grey across the sea, and the wine cask was all but empty when Anders got to his feet, steadied himself on the table and announced he was going home. 'I live here now. I think.'
He had to concentrate hard in order to tie his shoelaces in the dark hallway. Elin stood watching him, her head on one side.
'Why did you come back?'
Anders closed his eyes so that he could manage the laces without being distracted by the way the room was moving. Why had he come back? He tried to find the right words, and eventually said, 'I wanted to be close to something that has some meaning.'
He hauled himself to his feet with the help of the door handle. The door opened and he almost fell out on to the porch, but straightened up and regained his balance. 'What about you?'
'I just wanted to get away. From all the eyes.'
Anders nodded tipsily and for a long time. Completely understandable. All the eyes. Away from all the eyes. He remembered something, something to do with eyes, but he couldn't quite get hold of it. He waved goodbye and closed the door behind him.
The afternoon was rapidly darkening into evening as Anders made his way towards the forest. The wind was picking up; a few particularly playful gusts made him wobble to one side. He was thinking about Elin.
I haven't finished yet. I'm going to have more work done.
He laughed. If you looked at it as a project it was odd, but not incomprehensible. You have to have projects, and destroying your own body is just one of many options. He certainly knew that, if nothing else. Throwing away your money by going under the knife and getting uglier every time, that was grandiose in its way, a real cultural commentary.
Or an atonement.
A big paper bag full of food stood outside his door. He sent grateful thanks across the inlet, hauled the bag into the kitchen and put everything away in the fridge and the larder. When he had finished he drank almost a litre of water to dilute his alcohol-laden blood, then he sat down at the kitchen table and started fiddling with the beads. He added a few blue ones at random around the edge of the tile.
The kitchen curtains were billowing out slightly in the draught from the ill-fitting window, and he lit a fire in the kitchen stove to drive out the dampness that had gathered since the morning. Then he went back to the beads.
Ten blue dots around the edge of big white pattern, like a little patch of sky behind a cloud. He added a few more.