The hottest summer in living memory.
Malin takes another mouthful of beer. Its bitterness and coolness ease the residual heat in her body.
Outside the city is sweaty, tinted dull sepia, pale-green and grey. Linköping is empty of people, and only those who have to work or have no money or no place to escape to are left in the city. Most of the university students have gone back to their home towns. The streets are eerily empty even in the middle of the day, businesses stay open only because they have to, seeing as the summer temps have already been taken on. Only one business is booming: Bosse’s Ice Cream, homemade ice cream sold from a hole in the wall on Hospitalsgatan. Day after day there are queues outside Bosse’s; it’s a mystery how everyone gets there without being visible anywhere along the way.
It’s so hot that you can’t move.
Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty degrees, and the day before yesterday a new local record was reached, forty-three point two degrees at the weather-station out on the plain at Malmslätt.
Record-breaking heatwave!
Old record smashed.
This summer unlike any other.
There’s a cheerfulness in the tone, an energy in the headlines of the Östgöta Correspondent that isn’t matched by the pace of life in this heat-stricken city.
Muscles protesting, sweat dripping, thoughts muddied, people searching for shade, coolness, the city drowsy, in sympathy with its inhabitants. A dusty, smoky smell in the air, not from the forest fires but from grass that’s slowly burning up without flames.
Not a single drop of rain since Midsummer. The farmers are screaming disaster, and today the Correspondent published an article by its star reporter, Daniel Högfeldt, in which he interviewed a professor at the University Hospital. The professor said that a manual labourer in this sort of heat needs to drink between fifteen and twenty litres of water a day.
Manual labourers?
Are there any of those left in Linköping these days?
There are only academics. Engineers, computer experts and doctors. At least that’s what it feels like sometimes. But they aren’t in the city at the moment.
A gulp of her third beer lets her relax, even though she is really in need of a pick-me-up.
The pub’s customers disappear one by one. And she can feel loneliness swelling inside her.
Tove with her bag in the hallway eight days ago, full of clothes and books, some of the new ones she’d bought. Janne behind her in the stairwell, Janne’s friend Pecka down in the street in his Volvo, ready to take them to Skavsta Airport.
She had lied several days before they left when Janne asked if she could drive them, saying that she had to work and couldn’t take them. She wanted to be short with Janne, to show her disapproval that he was insisting on taking Tove with him all the way to Bali, on the other side of the fucking planet.
Bali.
Janne had won the trip in the public employees’ holiday lottery. First prize for the heroic fireman.
A summer dream for Tove. For Janne. Just father and daughter. Their first real trip together, Tove’s first trip outside Europe.
Malin had been worried that Tove wouldn’t want to go, that she wouldn’t want to be away from Markus, her boyfriend, or because Markus’s parents, Biggan and Hasse, might have plans that involved her.
But Tove had been pleased.
‘Markus will manage,’ she had said.
‘And what about me, how am I going to manage without you?’
‘You, Mum? It’ll be perfect for you. You’ll be able to work as much as you like, without feeling guilty about me.’
Malin had wanted to protest. But all the words she could have said felt lame, or, worse still, untrue. How many times did Tove have to make her own meals, or go and put herself to bed in an empty flat simply because something at the station demanded Malin’s full attention?
Hugging in the hall a week or so ago, bodies embracing.
Then Janne’s firm grip on the handle of the bag.
‘Take care.’
‘You too, Mum.’
‘You know I will.’
‘Bye.’
Three voices saying the same word.
Hesitation.
Then it had started up again, Janne had said silly things and she was upset when the door finally closed on them. The feelings from the divorce twelve years ago were back, the lack of words, the anger, the feeling that no words were good enough and that everything that was said was just wrong.
Not with each other. Not without each other. This single sodding love. An impossible love.
And she had refused to admit to herself how put out she felt by their holiday, like a very young girl being abandoned by the people who ought to love her most.
‘See you when I pick you up from the airport. But we’ll speak before that,’ she had said to the closed grey door.
She had been left standing alone in the hall. They had been gone five seconds and already she felt an infinite sense of loss, and the thought of the distance between them had been unbearable and she had gone straight down to the pub.
Drinking to get drunk, just like I’m doing now, Malin thinks.
Downing a shot of tequila, just like I’m doing now.
Making a call on my mobile, just like I’m doing now.
Daniel Högfeldt’s clear voice over the phone.
‘So you’re at the Pull?’
‘Are you coming or not?’
‘Calm down, Fors. I’m coming.’
Their two bodies facing each other, Daniel Högfeldt’s hairless chest beneath her hands, slipping moistly under her fingertips. I am marking you, Malin thinks, marking you with my fingerprints and why have you got your eyes closed, look at me, you’re inside me now, so open your eyes, your green eyes, cold as the Atlantic.
Their conversation in the pub just ten minutes before.
‘Do you want a drink?’
‘No, do you?’
‘No.’
‘So what are we waiting for?’
They took their clothes off in the hall. The church tower a black, immovable shape in the kitchen window.
And the sounds.
The ringing of the church bell as it struck two, as Malin helped him out of his worn white T-shirt, the cotton stiff and clean, his skin warm against her breasts, his words: ‘Take it slow, Malin, slow,’ and her whole body was in a hurry, starting to itch and ache and hurt and she whispered: ‘Daniel, it’s never been more urgent than it is now,’ thinking, you think I’ve got you for slow? I’ve got myself, other people for that. You, Daniel, you’re a body, don’t try to smooth-talk me, I don’t fall for that sort of thing. He pushed her into the kitchen, the crippled Ikea clock ticking tick tock and the church grey-black behind them, the tree branches brittle with drought.
‘That’s it,’ he said, and she was quiet, spreading her legs and letting him get closer and he was hard and rough and warm and she fell back on the table, her arms flailing, that morning’s half-full mug of coffee sliding off onto the floor and shattering into a dozen pieces on the linoleum.
She pushed him away.
Went into the bedroom without a word.
He followed her.
She stood at the window and looked out at the courtyard, at the street beyond, at the few hesitant lights in the windows of the buildings.
‘Lie down.’
He obeyed.
Daniel’s body naked on the bed, his cock sticking up at a slight angle towards his navel. The gun cabinet with her service revolver on the wall next to the window, Daniel closing his eyes, reaching his arms up towards the pine bed-head, and she waited a moment, allowing the ache of longing to become real pain before moving towards him, before she let him in again.