‘But you do like teenage girls, then?’
Paul Anderlöv’s eyes are fixed to the Ikea clock, the same sort I’ve got in my kitchen, Malin thinks. But the second-hand still works on yours.
Paul Anderlöv doesn’t respond to Zeke’s insinuations.
Relinquishes the day to the unending ticking of the clock.
‘Why do I feel like a complete bastard, Zeke?’
The heat envelops them, forcing sweat from their pores, the sunlight reflected in the cars around them.
‘Because you are a bastard, Fors. A case like this one turns us all into bastards, Malin.’
‘The price of truth.’
‘Stop philosophising.’
Boundaries crossed, moved.
‘Lunch?’ Zeke says. ‘I could murder a pizza.’
Conya on St Larsgatan.
Best pizza in the city. Big, greasy, unhealthy.
The owner usually lets them off paying when he’s there.
‘Police, free of charge.’
Like an American cop film. Zeke loves it. Corrupt? Maybe a little, but the owner refuses to let them pay.
One of the many hard-working, frowned-upon immigrants in this city, Malin thinks as she takes a bite of her Capricciosa.
The piece of paper Viktoria Solhage gave her is on the table in front of her.
The name on it: Louise ‘Lollo’ Svensson. An address, a phone number.
‘Louise,’ Zeke says. ‘Could a Louise have Lovelygirl as a nickname?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. Don’t you think?’
‘Lovelygirl,’ Zeke says. ‘A healthy dose of self-irony?’
‘It’s a long shot, Zeke, to put it mildly,’ Malin says, feeling how the pizza is making her feel fatter and greasier with every passing second.
‘Lovelygirl,’ Zeke says once more. ‘Isn’t that what all men want, really? A Lovelygirl?’
‘Yes,’ Malin says. ‘I suppose so.’
‘Bloody good pizza,’ Zeke says, giving a thumbs-up in the general direction of the open kitchen.
The man standing by the pizza oven smiles, picking out ingredients from small plastic tubs and burying some of them in tomato sauce on a freshly spun base.
21
I’ve been lying here, fettered to time and this cold darkness for far too long now.
Where are you, Dad?
Just tell me, you’re not coming. Not now. Not ever. Or maybe sometime far, far in the future. I don’t want to be stuck here that long.
It’s horrid here. And I’m so frightened, Dad.
So just come.
Take me away from the voices.
Voices.
Like worms on top of me.
I’ve heard your fawning, bloated noises for ages now.
Your voices.
You’re happy about something.
Why?
I have no idea why you sound so happy, because here, here with me everything is damp and cold and the dream never seems to end. But maybe this isn’t a dream? Maybe it’s something else?
Swimming! Swimming!
Is that what you’re shouting?
I love swimming. Can I join in? Can we go swimming together? I’ve got a pool in my garden at home.
Am I in the pool now, with my eyes shut?
A dog is barking, but everything’s dark, so dark and, if I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d free myself from my muscles, my body, and then the being that is me would drift off.
But that isn’t allowed in this dream.
No.
So instead, your happy cries. Up there? That’s right, isn’t it?
Earth and sand and a wet chill, a damp plastic chill, the grains close but not actually inside.
Is this a grave?
Have I been buried alive?
I’m fourteen, so tell me, what would I be doing in a grave?
Swimmers.
More than usual on a Sunday.
No entrance fee to the beach at Stora Rängen, you just leave your car further up and walk over the meadow where Farmer Karlsman has been kind enough not to put any bulls this year.
He did that one summer a few years back, before the kiosk was here. They wrote about it in the Correspondent. But the farmer didn’t back down that year.
The visitors are so carefree, with their families, children and women and men all enjoying the heat and the dubious cooling effect of the warm water, protecting their skin with expensive sunblock, their eyes with even more costly glasses.
And now, Slavenca Visnic thinks, now they’re queuing at my kiosk, waiting impatiently for me to open up. Just hold on a bit, you’ll get your ice cream. The children so happy to be getting ice cream, you can’t buy more happiness than that for seventeen kronor.
Just hang on, be grateful that I’m here at all.
Aftonbladet? Expressen?
Sorry, no newspapers.
Who are you really, you whom society has left behind, you who don’t have anywhere else to go? We share that fate at least. In one sense, anyway.
Slavenca puts the key in the door of the beach kiosk, tells the crowd in front of the shutters to calm down, I’m about to open up, you’ll get your ice cream in a minute.
Beyond the people, almost naked, she can see the water of the lake, sees them strutting in the sun, thinks that the reflections make the surface of the water look like transparent skin. And the big oak tree over there by the lake. Always so secretive.
Her kiosk at the Glyttinge pool is closed.
Spoiled youngsters who don’t want summer jobs. Future ministers of leisure.
Sometimes she thinks that the whole of Sweden is one big leisure committee consisting of people who’ve always had it too good, who don’t have the faintest idea about sorrow.
Then she opens the shutters.
An ugly kid, eight years old or so, a girl, is at the front of the queue.
‘A Top Hat,’ she says.
‘I’m out of those,’ Slavenca says, and smiles.
A dog is barking down by the oak, on the patch of ground where the grass has somehow vanished and been replaced by bare earth.
The dog has just peed up against the tree, but now he’s frantic.
Standing to attention, marking that there’s something there, something hidden that needs to be found.
He barks and barks and barks.
His paws digging, digging, digging.
I can hear noises, barking.
Slowly, slowly they drag me out of my dream, up, up. I want to wake up now, I want to wake up.
But I’m not going to wake up. Am I?
Am I going to wake up, Dad?
I’m stuck in something much worse, much stranger than sleep. But how did I get here?
Someone has to tell me, tell everyone, tell Mum and Dad. They must be worried; I don’t usually sleep this late. And what are those other noises? It sounds like digging, and someone, a woman’s soothing voice saying: ‘OK, Jack, OK. Come here now,’ and the barking turns into whimpering, and someone says: ‘OK, stay there, then, stay there.’
Slavenca is taking a break from the relentless selling of ice cream, ignoring the next customer, leaving the surprised woman to stand there glaring into the kiosk, at the fridge full of drinks.