“Did I wake you?” I say. And I suddenly realise I have done just that, but she makes no reply. She does not understand anything.
“I hope you were awake,” I say, “I saw the light was on. It was the only light in the whole block, so I came here. I didn’t know where else to go,” I say, and as I speak I try to get up from where I am sitting without shaking. It’s not so damned easy, and she swallows quite visibly, and then she says in a surprisingly deep voice: “I always sleep with the light on.”
“Oh,” I say, and her eyes slowly focus. Now she is really staring at me, she recognises me, and I am on my feet now, I am standing straight, if not steadfast. But my teeth are chattering.
“Hell, you’ll have to forgive me,” I say. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I saw the light was on, and I just came up here. That’s all. I’m sorry to have woken you up. I’ll go away now.” And I start to walk, but I can’t stop shaking, and there is a clattering in my mouth, that step I sat on was far from warm, and I must look pretty weird.
“Are you ill?” she asks.
“I don’t know. I’m freezing, I can tell you that. I’m as cold as hell,” I say, and laugh, “ho, ho, ho.”
She is awake now, and my laughter confuses her. She bites her lip.
“So why are you so terribly cold?”
“I fell asleep down on the hillside. Luckily something woke me up.”
“An angel, maybe,” she says, and suddenly smiles such a sweet smile that I could have fallen to my knees and kissed her dressing gown, but that would have been way too much for me in the state that I am in, and certainly for her. She is younger than I had imagined, or rather, certainly younger than me, which is not saying much at present, for everyone I see these days who is definitely a grown-up is younger than I am, and it doesn’t help no matter how long I look at myself in the mirror. I see the same person I have always seen, whereas everyone else keeps changing, and I have a shock each time I realise that this is not how it is.
There is a vein in her neck that pulses almost unnoticeably. She doesn’t know that herself, but I can see it and that is where I keep my eyes fixed.
“It was a helicopter,” I say.
“A modern angel then,” she says and laughs softly in her deep voice, and then I know I don’t want to leave.
“Maybe it was,” I say. I shiver and hang in there, she might laugh once more, she might ask me in, anything might happen on a night like this when no-one else is awake except perhaps a nurse who at certain intervals walks down a corridor to check a curve on a screen. I wish she would ask me in. I cannot just stand here indefinitely.
She bites her lip again and says: “Maybe you had better come in for a while. You don’t look too well.” She opens the door wider and steps aside. I can see into the hall and straight into the mirror hanging on the opposite wall. If that is me in the mirror by God I don’t look well, my face white and unfamiliar, my hair sticking out in all directions and there are big stains on my jacket and the knees of my trousers. How does she dare, I wonder.
She keeps it nice and warm in her place. I feel it on my face as I cross the threshold. There is a chair just to the right of the door. I sit down on that. I do not want to intrude, I don’t know what I am doing here really, it is just that I can’t find my keys. But I have not told her that yet. She stands barefoot in the middle of the hall with a dressing gown tied tightly round her waist with a leather belt, like a paramilitary dressing gown, I think, and she runs her hand through her hair and bites her lip, and I close my eyes and let the heat ooze gently in through my clothes, through my skin until my hands and feet start to tingle so sharply that it hurts, and I could not have moved if I wanted to. But I do not want to. I want to sit right here.
When I open my eyes again she looks different. Her hair has been brushed back from her face.
“I can’t see very well without glasses,” she says. “I thought you were drunk, you frightened me a bit.”
I nod. “I’m not drunk,” I say.
“No,” she says. “You’re not drunk. I can see that now.”
She stands short-sighted in front of me, and I sit on the chair. We are waiting for something. Here in the no man’s land right inside her door; the to-and-fro place, but no place really. Finally, she sits down on the chest underneath the mirror. She is tired.
“Could I just sit here for a bit?” I say. “Then I’ll go away. You go back to bed. I’ll be fine.”
She runs her hand through her hair. “Oh, but I can’t do that,” she says.
No, of course she can’t. We wait again. She thinks my eyes are closed, and they are, in a way, at least very nearly, but I can see her all the same and I like her and I like the skin of her throat and know how warm it is just there and then on and on into extents and roundings beyond comprehension. But she doesn’t know that, I can see she does not, and I would have to talk her out of that belt and that dressing gown and into her bed and then do what I had to do, which I honestly have nothing against, but really am not up to right now, to get into that warmth and thaw myself out as Erik Lagus did in the Stockholm of The Class Warrior thirty-three years ago when I was only ten and knew all there was to know about skin without even giving it a thought, for the warmth was everywhere then, in the walls of houses and rough stones and in the bark of the tall pine tree by the path down to Dumpa and in the hoods of black cars and in my father’s blue T-shirt and what was inside that shirt. But all that was lost long ago, and I do not have the strength to try. It is hard work. It would take me at least an hour to get her there even if it was at all possible, and I only have a few minutes left before I must leave. It is too late now to say I have no keys.
I open my eyes wide, looking straight at her, and then she gets up from the chest, not impatiently, but restlessly maybe, at a loss.
“May I tell you something?” I ask.
“About what?”
“Something about my father.”
She bites her lip again and does not know what to say, and then she says: “I suppose you may. Will it take long?”
“Oh, no,” I say.
*
Only six months before my father died he had to go to hospital. He had been there earlier for a minor operation. Now they were afraid he had cancer. He was seventy-six, but on the few occasions I saw him he looked the same as he had always done. Maybe I was being dim. I don’t know. There were so many other things. My head was full of cotton wool. I was always tired. My first book had just been published. Almost everything in that book was about him, and I knew he had read it, my mother said he had, but he never mentioned it when I went home to visit. Their neighbours too had read it and the other old chaps stopped him on the road in front of the house and said: “Well, well, Frank, we didn’t know you used to be such a tough guy,” and then he just smiled secretively and would not say a word. Perhaps he was a little proud, or he smiled because he had no choice. I will never know. But he and I could not talk.