We got into the freezing cold car.
I had noticed an all-night hamburger restaurant on the edge of town, so we drove there. Several shaven-headed and overweight youths looking like Teddy boys from the distant fifties were sitting round one of the tables. All of them were drunk, apart from one — there was always one who stayed sober, and did the driving. A big, highly polished Chevrolet was parked outside. There was a smell of hair cream as we passed by their table.
To my astonishment, I heard them talking about Jussi Björling. Louise had also noticed their loud-voiced, drunken conversation. She pointed discreetly at one of the four men, with gold earrings, a beer belly falling out of his jeans and salad dressing smeared round his mouth.
‘Bror Olofsson,’ she said in a half-whisper. ‘The gang call themselves the Bror Brothers. Bror has a lovely singing voice. When he was a young lad he used to sing solos in the church choir. But he stopped all that when he became a teenager and a tearaway. There are those who are convinced he could have gone far — he might even have made it to the opera stage.’
‘Why are there no normal people up here?’ I asked as I studied the menu. ‘Why are all the people we meet so unusual? Italians who make shoes, or a retro Teddy boy who talks about Jussi Björling?’
‘There’s no such thing as normal people,’ she said. ‘That’s a twisted view of the world that politicians want us to believe. That we are all a part of an endless mass of normality, with no possibility, never mind desire to claim that we are different. I’ve often thought that I ought to write to Swedish politicians. To the secret team.’
‘What team is that?’
‘That’s what I call them. The ones with the power. The ones who receive my letters but never answer them — they just send pin-up photos. The secret team with all the power.’
She ordered something called the King’s Platter, while I made do with a large coffee, a small bag of crisps and a hamburger. She really was hungry. She gave the impression of wanting to stuff everything on her tray into her mouth at one go.
It was not a pretty sight. Her table manners embarrassed me.
She’s like an impoverished child, I thought. I remembered a trip I’d made to Sudan with a group of orthopaedists, in order to find out the best way of setting up clinics for landmine casualties requiring artificial limbs. I had watched those penniless children attacking their food in extreme desperation — a few grains of rice, a single vegetable, and perhaps a biscuit sent from some well-meaning country dedicated to assisting the Third World.
In addition to the four Teddy boys who had crept out from under a stone from another age, there were a few lorry drivers dotted around the restaurant. They were hunched over their empty trays, as if they were either asleep, or contemplating their mortality. There was also a couple of young girls, very young — they couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen years old. They sat there whispering to each other, occasionally erupting into laughter before reverting to whispers. I could remember that atmosphere, all those confidential certainties one could pass on and feel informed about as a teenager. We all gave promises but broke them almost immediately, promised to keep secrets but spread them as quickly as possible. Nevertheless, they were far too young to be sitting there in the middle of the night. I was shocked. Shouldn’t they be in bed? Louise noticed what I was looking at. She had gobbled her slap-up meal before I had even taken the lid off my plastic beaker of coffee.
‘I’ve never seen them before,’ she said. ‘They’re not from these parts.’
‘Are you saying you know everybody who lives in this town?’
‘I just know.’
I tried to drink the coffee, but it was too bitter. It seemed to me we ought to go back to the caravan and try to get a few hours’ sleep before we needed to return to the hospital. But we stayed put until dawn. The Teddy boys had gone by then. So had the two girls. It hadn’t registered with me when the lorry drivers left: suddenly they were no longer there. Louise hadn’t noticed when they left either.
‘Some people are like migratory birds,’ she said. ‘Those vast distances they fly are always covered during the night. They just flew away without our noticing them.’
Louise ordered a cup of tea. The two dark-skinned men behind the counter spoke Swedish in a way that was difficult to understand, then lapsed into a language that was very melodic but filled me with melancholy. Louise occasionally asked if we ought to go back to the hospital.
‘They have your mobile number if anything should happen,’ I said. ‘We might just as well stay here.’
What we had in prospect was boundless conversation — a chronicle embracing almost forty years. Perhaps this hamburger joint, with its neon lights and the smell of deep-frying, was the framework we required?
Louise continued telling me about her life. At one point she had dreamt about becoming a mountaineer. When I asked her why, she said it was because she was afraid of heights.
‘Was that really such a good idea? Hanging from ropes on a sheer cliff face when you are scared stiff of climbing a ladder?’
‘I thought I’d get more out of it than people who aren’t scared of heights. I tried it once, up in Lappland. It wasn’t a very steep cliff, but my arms weren’t strong enough. I buried my mountaineering dreams in the heather up there in the far north. By the time I’d got as far south as Sundsvall — which wasn’t all that far, let’s face it — I’d stopped crying over my abandoned dream, and decided to become a juggler instead.’
‘And how did that go?’
‘I can still keep three balls in the air for quite a long time. Or three bottles. But I was never as good as I wanted to be.’
I waited for what was coming next. Somebody opened the squeaky outside door, and there was a blast of cold air before it closed again.
‘I thought I would never find what I was looking for. Especially as I didn’t know what it was. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that I knew what I wanted, but didn’t think I’d ever get it.’
‘A father?’
She nodded.
‘I tried to find you in the games I played. Every eleventh man I passed in the street was my father. At midsummer, every Swedish girl picks seven different wild flowers and places them under her pillow in order to dream about the man she’s going to marry: I picked lots and lots of flowers in order to see you. But you never appeared. I remember once being in a church. There was an altarpiece, Jesus soaring up in a beam of light that seemed to be coming from underneath him. Two Roman soldiers were on their knees, terrified of what they had done when they nailed him to the cross. All at once, I was certain that one of those soldiers was you. His face was identical to yours. The first time I saw you, you had a helmet on your head.’
‘Didn’t Harriet have any photos?’
‘I asked her. I searched through all her belongings. There weren’t any.’
‘We took lots of pictures of each other. She was always the one who kept and looked after our snaps.’
‘She told me there weren’t any. If she’s burnt them all, you are the one she’ll have to answer to.’
She went to refill her cup of tea. One of the men working in the kitchen was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall — fast asleep. His jaw had dropped.
I wondered what he was dreaming about.
Now the story of her life featured horses and riders.
‘We never had enough money to pay for me to have riding lessons. Not even when Harriet had been promoted to manageress of a shoe shop, with a better salary. Sometimes I still get angry when I remember how mean she was. I used to turn up for the riding lessons, but I was on the wrong side of the fence: I had to stand outside and watch as the other girls rode around like little female warriors. I had the feeling of being forced to act as both horse and rider. I divided myself up into two parts: part of me was the horse and the other part the rider. When I was feeling good, and found it easy to get up in the morning, I would sit on the horse and there would be no split in my life. But when I didn’t feel like getting out of bed in the morning, it was as if I was the horse — as if I’d retired to a corner of the paddock and refused to respond, no matter how much they whipped me. I tried to feel that I and the horse were one and the same. I think that doing that helped me to survive all the difficulties I experienced as a child. Perhaps later as well. I sit on my horse, and my horse carries me — except when I jump off of my own accord.’