‘Will you go in and switch off the light, Erik?’ she said as people began to move from their seats and leave the room. I followed holding Vanja’s hand, and just managed to find a position against the wall furthest away when Frida entered the darkened hall with the illuminated cake in her hands. As she came into view from the table she began to sing Ja må hon leva, whereupon the other adults immediately joined in, and the birthday song rang around the small room as she placed the cake on the table in front of Stella, who was watching with gleaming eyes.
‘Shall I blow now?’ she asked.
Frida nodded as she sang.
Everyone clapped afterwards, me too. Then the lights came back on, and for a few minutes slices of the cake were distributed among the children. Vanja didn’t want to sit at the table, but on the floor by the wall, where we settled down, her with a plate of cake on her lap. It was only then I noticed she wasn’t wearing her shoes.
‘Where are your golden shoes?’ I asked.
‘They’re stupid,’ she said.
‘No, they’re not, they’re lovely,’ I said. ‘They’re a proper princess’s shoes!’
‘They’re stupid,’ she repeated.
‘But where are they?’
She didn’t answer.
‘Vanja,’ I said.
She looked up at me. Her mouth was white with cream.
‘Over there,’ she said, motioning towards the other room. I got up and went in, looked around, no shoes. I went back.
‘Where did you put them? I can’t see them anywhere?’
‘By the flower,’ she said.
Flower? I went back, peered between the flower pots on the windowsill, no, not there.
Could she have meant the yucca?
Yes, indeed. They were in the pot. I grabbed them, brushed the earth off over the pot, took them to the bathroom and wiped off the rest, then put them under the chair where her jacket was.
The interruption for cake, which had occupied all the children’s attention, might give her a chance for a new beginning, I thought, perhaps it would be easier to be there after that.
‘I’m going to have a piece of cake too,’ I said to her. ‘I’ll be in the kitchen. Just come and find me if there is anything you want, OK?’
‘OK, daddy.’
It was only half past six according to the clock above the kitchen door. No one had left yet, so we would have to wait for a while. I cut myself a thin sliver of the cake on the worktop, put it on a plate and sat at the other side of the table as my seat was occupied.
‘There’s coffee as well if you’d like some,’ Erik said, looking at me with a kind of pregnant smile, as if there lay more in the question and what he said than met the eye. For all I knew, it was a technique he had learned so as to appear important, more or less like the tricks the average writer resorts to when trying to lend his stories the semblance of immense profundity.
Or had he really seen something?
‘Yes, please,’ I said and got up, took a cup from the pile and filled it with coffee from the grey Stelton pot nearby. By the time I got back to my seat he was on his way out of the room. Frida was talking about a coffee machine she had bought, it was expensive and she had been torn, but she had no regrets, it was definitely worth the money, the coffee was fantastic, and it was important to spoil yourself with such things, perhaps more important than was generally thought. Linus talked about a Smith and Jones sketch he had seen once, two guys sitting at a table with a cafetière in front of them, one presses the plunger, but everything is pushed down, not just the coffee grains, until the jug is empty. No one laughed, and Linus hunched his shoulders and raised his palms.
‘A simple coffee anecdote,’ he said. ‘Anyone got a better one?’
Vanja stood in the doorway. Her gaze took in the table, and when she had found me, she came over.
‘Do you want to go home?’ I said.
She nodded.
‘Right, do you know what?’ I said. ‘I do too. I’ll just eat this cake first. And drink my coffee. Do you want to sit on my lap in the meantime?’
She nodded again. I lifted her up.
‘Nice you could come, Vanja,’ Frida said to her with a smile from the other side of the table. ‘Soon it’ll be fishing time. You want to join in, don’t you?’
Vanja nodded and Frida turned back to Linus. There was a TV series on Home Box Office she had seen, but he had missed it, and she couldn’t praise it enough.
‘Do you want to?’ I asked. ‘Shall we wait for the fishing game before going?’
Vanja shook her head.
In the game each child was given a little fishing rod which they would cast over a sheet behind which an adult sat waiting to attach a bag containing a prize, some sweets or small toy or the like. In this family they would probably fill it with peas or artichokes, I thought, manoeuvring my fork down past Vanja to my plate, where I cut off a piece with the edge — brown crust under the white cream, yellow inside, with red streaks of jam — twisted my wrist so that the piece of cake remained on the fork, raised it past Vanja, and inserted it in my mouth. The base was too dry, and there was far too little sugar in the cream, but with a mouthful of coffee it wasn’t too bad.
‘Would you like a bit?’ I asked. Vanja nodded. I forked a piece into her open mouth. She looked up and smiled.
‘I can go into the living room with you,’ I said. ‘Then we can see what the others are doing. And maybe join in the fishing game as well?’
‘You said we were going home,’ she said.
‘I did. Let’s be off.’
I placed the fork on the plate, finished off the coffee, put her on the floor and stood up. Looked around. No eyes met mine.
‘We’ll be on our way now,’ I said.
Right then Erik came in with a small bamboo pole in one hand and a plastic Hemköp bag in the other.
‘We’re going to do the fishing now,’ he said.
Some got up to join in, others remained where they were. No one had noticed that I had said goodbye. And since people’s attention around the table had been drawn in different directions now, I saw no need to say it again. Instead I laid my hand on Vanja’s shoulder and led her out. In the living room Erik shouted ‘Fishing!’ and all the children hurried past us to the end of the hall where the cover, a white sheet, hung from wall to wall. Erik, who followed them like a shepherd, told them to sit down. Standing in the hall with Vanja and putting on her jacket, we could see right into the room.
I pulled up the zip on her red bubble jacket, which was already a little tight, set the red Polarn O. Pyret woolly hat on her head and buttoned up the chinstrap, placed her boots in front of her so that she could stick her feet in them herself, and zipped them from the back when she was ready.
‘There we are,’ I said. ‘Now all we have to do is say thank you and we can go. Come on.’
She raised her arms towards me.
‘Can’t you walk?’ I said.
She shook her head, keeping her arms outstretched.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘But first I’ll have to put on my things.’
In the hall Benjamin was the first to ‘fish’. He cast his line, and someone, I suppose Erik, caught it on the other side.
‘I’ve got a bite!’ Benjamin shouted.
The parents standing along the wall smiled, the children on the floor shouted and laughed. The next second Benjamin yanked at his rod, and a red and white Hemköp goodie bag came flying over the sheet, attached by a clothes peg. He removed it and took a few steps away to open the bag in peace and quiet while the next child, Theresa, grabbed the fishing rod, helped by her mother. I wound my scarf round my neck and buttoned up the reefer jacket I had bought on offer last spring at Paul Smith in Stockholm, put on the hat I had bought at the same place, bent down over the pile of shoes by the wall, found mine, a pair of black Wrangler shoes with yellow laces I had bought in Copenhagen when I was at the book fair, and which I had never liked, not even when I bought them, and which furthermore were now tainted by the thought of the catastrophe that had befallen me there, as I had been incapable of answering sensibly a single question the enthusiastic and insightful interviewer had asked me on the stage. The reason I hadn’t thrown them out long ago rested exclusively on the fact that we were hard up. And the laces were so yellow!