His publisher called, proposing a meeting. Some of his older titles were going to be reissued, and they wanted him to look at cover designs. Reluctantly he left his office and took a taxi into the city. He needed to ask for more advance money, which was always humiliating. Alice didn’t know, but there was good reason to worry. If he didn’t get something written soon, the situation could well become alarming.
He was received with coffee and rolls, and not until the end of the meeting did his publisher ask how it was going with the new book. He lied and said everything was going well. He might be able to finish by spring. He regretted the remark at once, as he realised the consequences. But an additional advance was approved.
When he stepped outside, it had finally stopped raining. He stood in the entrance for a moment, wondering whether he should take a little walk. Perhaps all the way down to Slussen and then take the commuter train home. He was just setting off when he felt a hand on his shoulder. It may have been the cigarette smoke, maybe just his instinct, or maybe he had been expecting it the whole time, but he knew who it was before he even turned round. He was greeted by her smile. Nothing of what he’d planned to say to her remained, not a word would pass his lips. The strength of his displeasure gave him a feeling of inferiority. Even the note slipped into his pocket on the train had felt like an infringement. All the days of dreading new attempts at contact came as an assault.
She dropped her cigarette and made a move to embrace him. He fended her off and took a step back.
‘Listen to me, Halina, I…’
‘Sshh.’
She put her finger to his lips and he was caught off guard.
‘Just let me look at you for a moment.’
He noticed the smell of tobacco. He removed her hand from his face and dropped it as if wanting to be rid of something unpleasant. Her smile faded as abruptly as she had appeared.
‘What is it? Why are you acting so strangely?’
The door to the publisher’s opened and two men came out. Axel recognised one of them and nodded in greeting, doing his best to seem nonchalant. The whole time he was watched by Halina, who seemed to be reconsidering the situation. She fished around in her handbag for another cigarette, lit it and took a quick puff.
‘Shouldn’t I be the one who’s angry? Do you know how long I sat waiting for you at Prinsen?’
‘I never said I’d come.’
‘Oh, I see. So you didn’t even think you could take the time to ring the restaurant and let me know you weren’t coming? That would have saved me a lot of bother.’
He changed the subject and tried to assume a conciliatory tone.
‘Halina, I don’t know what you were hoping for, but you have to stop contacting me. You know I’m married.’
She snorted. ‘It didn’t seem to matter in Västerås.’
‘No, I know. I was… it was stupid that things turned out the way they did, but I thought it was understood that it didn’t… that it only… that it was just then…’
‘That you wanted to have a sneaky little fuck?’
Axel closed his eyes and put his hand over his face. The situation he was in was so absurd that despite his profession he was at a loss for words. Forty-eight years old and he was standing here in the street trying to break off a relationship he had never started. In the hope of making himself understood he threw out his arms.
‘I’m sorry if I led you to believe there could be anything between us, I really am. I don’t usually behave that way but, well, things just turned out the way they did. I assumed that we both knew it was a one-off. I have a family and children and I, well, I really do beg your forgiveness.’
She smiled, but now it was another sort of smile.
‘So that’s all it was?’
‘Yes, unfortunately, that’s how it has to be.’
She gave a flat little laugh.
‘So, you, Axel Ragnerfeldt, the famous fucking author with a pole up his arse, you think it’s okay just to screw me a little and then throw me away like an old towel?’
‘Halina, please,’ he appealed to her, but she just shook her head.
‘How the fuck could I be so stupid?’
He suddenly got the feeling that he was dealing with a child.
‘Halina, please, I sincerely apologise for what happened. Can’t we just try to part as friends? Can’t we at least do that?’
She took a drag on her cigarette.
‘Do you know what I do when I get angry with myself?’
He sighed.
‘Can’t we just…’
‘This is what I do.’
She stretched out her arm. He couldn’t stop her. With a sizzling sound she pressed the tip of the cigarette onto her bare wrist. He slapped away her hand and looked in horror at the reddish-black hole the burn had left behind.
‘Are you mad?’
She stood quite still, as if the pain had numbed her. He looked around to see if anyone had seen what happened, but there was no one nearby. The sleeve of her jacket fell down over the wound and he gently took hold of her arm. She wrenched it free and stepped back a couple of paces, turned round and walked away. Axel stood there watching her go, utterly at a loss. She crossed the street and he still stood there, incapable of understanding what had just happened. What scared him was not only what she had done, but also what he had seen in her eyes. Something in her look that had escaped him the first time, but this time he had seen it clearly. He wanted to get out of her consciousness. He didn’t want to be a part of what occupied her thoughts.
On the other side of the street she suddenly stopped and turned to him.
‘Hey, Axel!’
He watched her, waiting.
‘You with the great imagination, why don’t you go home and wonder about what I do when I get angry with someone else?’
19
Jan-Erik woke up alone in room 403. His only company in bed was an empty bottle of Glenlivet and some colourful miniatures from the minibar spread helter-skelter over the flowery bedspread. He realised he’d fallen asleep with his clothes on. The key he had so ingeniously handed over in the theatre dressing-room had been returned to the reception desk when he arrived at the hotel; the delay had apparently made her change her mind. Now he was grateful, but the dreary hotel room had driven him to empty the minibar. He hated hotel rooms. The anxiety-filled isolation; the claustrophobic feeling of being cut off from the world. He always checked all the emergency exits so he’d know which way to run if a fire started. Tried to convince himself that the probability of the hotel catching fire on the very night he was there was negligible. On the other hand hadn’t all hotel guests that died in a fire thought the same thing just before being engulfed by the flames or suffocated by the smoke that prevented them from finding their way out?
With great effort he propped himself up on his elbow and looked around for some water. There was a bottle on a little side table, but the distance seemed insurmountable. He fell back onto the pillows and closed his eyes. He wanted to be somewhere else, at some other time. It couldn’t be a hangover, this was something else. He must have come down with some illness. His heart’s laboured beating seemed audible throughout the room. The anxiety lent each thought sharp barbs. Every molecule in his body was trying to fight the poisoning. He couldn’t possibly have caused this himself, it couldn’t be self-inflicted.
He lay utterly still and tried to convince himself that his condition was not life-threatening.
It was ten minutes to six.
His drunken state wouldn’t even allow him to sleep.
He fell into a restless doze and managed to kill forty minutes. Then he was involuntarily back in reality. Cautiously he broached the thought of the day before. Sporadic mem ories arose, gradually trying to arrange themselves in some sort of order. He had woken up at home. Morning in Stockholm. Louise and Ellen had already left. He had thought about Annika, about the choice she’d made, about the new grief that had to be endured, and how he would handle his parents’ thirty-year-old lie.