I no longer needed to doubt whether the long-dead Caravaggio was one of her closest friends. She could communicate with the dead just as well as with the living. Perhaps even better?
She carried on talking until she suddenly fell silent. The man behind the counter had woken up. He yawned as he opened a plastic bag of chips that he tipped into the deep-fryer.
We sat there for a long time without speaking. Then she stood up and went to refill her cup.
When she came back I told her how I had amputated the wrong arm of a patient. I hadn’t thought about what to say, it simply tumbled out, as if it were inevitable that I should now describe the incident that I had hitherto thought was the most significant happening in my life. At first she didn’t seem to understand that what I was telling her had actually happened to me. But the penny dropped in the end. That fatal mistake had happened twelve years ago. I was given a warning. That would hardly have been the end of my career if I had accepted it, but I thought it was unjust. I defended myself by insisting that I had been placed in an impossible situation. Waiting lists were growing longer and longer, but at the same time cutbacks were being enforced. All I did was work, day in and day out. And one day the safety net failed. During an operation shortly after nine o’clock in the morning, a young woman lost her healthy right arm, just above her elbow. It was not a complicated operation — not that an amputation is ever a routine matter, but there was nothing to make me aware that I had made a fatal mistake.
‘How is it possible?’ Louise asked when I had finished talking.
‘It just is possible,’ I said. ‘If you live long enough, you’ll realise that nothing is impossible.’
‘I’m intending to live for a long time,’ she said. ‘Why do you sound so angry? Why do you become so unpleasant?’
I flung my arms out wide.
‘That wasn’t my intention. Perhaps I’m tired. It’s nearly half past six in the morning. We’ve spent the whole night here. We need a few hours’ sleep.’
‘Let’s go home, then,’ she said, getting to her feet. ‘The hospital hasn’t rung.’
I remained seated.
‘I can’t sleep in that narrow bed.’
‘Then I’ll sleep on the floor.’
‘It’s not worth going home. We’ll have to return to the hospital as soon as we get there.’
She sat down again. I could see that she was just as tired as me. The man behind the counter had fallen asleep again, his chin hanging down towards his chest.
The neon lights on the ceiling continued to stare down at us, like the scheming eyes of a dragon.
Chapter 5
Dawn came as a relief.
We returned to the hospital at half past eight. It had started snowing, just a few flakes. I could see my tired face in the rear-view mirror. It made me wince, gave me a feeling of death, of inexorability.
I was on a downward path, hemmed in by my own epilogue. There were a few entries and exits still to go, but not much more.
I was so absorbed in my thoughts that I missed the turning for the hospital. Louise looked at me in surprise.
‘We should have turned right there.’
I said nothing, drove round the block and then took the correct turning. Standing outside the A&E entrance was one of the nurses who had received us during the night. She was smoking a cigarette and seemed to have forgotten who we were. In another age, I thought, she could have been in one of Caravaggio’s paintings.
We went in. The door to Harriet’s room was open. The room was empty. A nurse approached along the corridor. I asked about Harriet. She looked searchingly at us. We must have resembled a pair of woodlice that had crept out into view after a night spent under a cold stone.
‘Mrs Hörnfeldt is no longer here,’ she said.
‘Where have you sent her?’
‘We haven’t sent her anywhere. She simply went away. She got dressed and vanished.’
She seemed angry, as if Harriet had let her down personally.
‘But somebody must have seen her go, surely?’ I said.
‘The night staff kept checking regularly, but when they looked in at a quarter past seven, she had left. There’s nothing we can do.’
I turned to Louise. She made a movement with her eyes that I interpreted as a signal.
‘Did she leave anything behind?’ Louise asked.
‘No, nothing.’
‘Then she must have gone home.’
‘She ought to have informed us if she didn’t want to stay here.’
‘That’s the way she is,’ said Louise. ‘That’s my mother for you.’
We left through the A&E entrance.
‘I know what she’s like,’ said Louise. ‘I also know where she is. We have an agreement that we made when I was a little girl. The nearest cafe, that’s where we’ll meet. If we ever get separated.’
We walked round the hospital to the main entrance. There was a cafe area in the big foyer.
Harriet was sitting at a table with a cup of coffee. She waved when she saw us coming. She appeared almost cheerful.
‘We still don’t know what’s wrong with you,’ I said sternly. ‘The doctors ought to have been given an opportunity to check the samples they’ve taken.’
‘I’ve got cancer,’ said Harriet, ‘and I’m going to die. Time is too short for me to lie around in hospital and start panicking. I don’t know what happened yesterday. I expect I drank too much. I want to go home now.’
‘To my place, or to Stockholm?’
Harriet took hold of Louise’s arm and pulled herself up. Her walker was standing by a newspaper stall. She grasped at the handles with her frail fingers. It was impossible to understand how she had managed to pull me out of the forest pool.
When we got back to the caravan, all three of us lay down on the narrow bed. I lay on the outside with one knee on the floor, and soon fell asleep.
In my dreams, Jansson approached me in his hydrocopter. It carved its way towards me like a sharp saw cutting through ice. I hid behind a rock until he had gone away. When I stood up I saw Harriet standing on the ice with the wheeled walker. She was naked. Next to her was a large hole in the ice.
I woke up with a start. The two women were asleep. I thought of grabbing my jacket and getting out of there. But I stayed put. Soon, I fell asleep again.
We all woke up at the same time. It was one o’clock. I went outside for a pee. It had stopped snowing and the clouds had started to part.
We drank coffee. Harriet asked me to take her blood pressure as she had a headache. It was only slightly above normal. Louise wanted me to take her blood pressure as well.
‘One of my first memories of my father will be that he took my blood pressure,’ she said. ‘First the buckets of water, and now this.’
It was very low. I asked if she sometimes had bouts of dizziness.
‘Only when I’m drunk.’
‘Never on other occasions?’
‘I’ve never fainted in my life.’
I put my blood pressure monitor away. We had finished the coffee, and it was a quarter past two. It was warm inside the caravan. Perhaps too warm? Was it the stifling air, short of oxygen, that caused them to lose their tempers? But whatever the cause, I was suddenly attacked from two sides. It started with Harriet asking me what it felt like, having a daughter, now that I’d known about it for a few days.
‘What does it feel like? I don’t think I can answer that one.’
‘Your indifference is frightening,’ she said.
‘You know nothing about how I’m feeling,’ I said.
‘I know you.’
‘We haven’t met for nearly forty years! I’m not the same as I was then.’