“Yes.” Agnes didn’t know where to begin. She’d tried to call Tobias several times on the way home and before she fell asleep. She wanted him with her. Now. To hold her. Comfort her. Say that everything would be all right and it served that old bastard right that she dropped his bottle. That it was a pity she hadn’t smashed it over his head. She needed Tobias, he was the only one able to pull her back up right now. She knew that all the nastiness would disappear if he could just take her in his arms. His caresses would erase Gérard’s repulsive groping from her body. His comforting words would make her realize that she wouldn’t have to fry hamburgers at McDonald’s for the rest of her life at all. “I wish you were here,” she finally whimpered as the tears started to flow.
“What?” roared Tobias. “You’ll have to speak up! There’s a bit of a party going on here.”
“When are you coming home?” sniffled Agnes as clearly as she could. The line went quiet, and she could hear people bellowing in the background. Someone was playing guitar, another singing. “Can you hear me, Tobias?” she called.
“Yeah, I can hear you. Look, I’ll call you later.…”
Agnes hardly had time to answer before Tobias said goodbye and hung up. It wasn’t always easy to figure him out at times. Like why he called her up in the middle of the night despite the fact that he’d thought she was out and that he clearly wasn’t in a talking mood. He hadn’t been much of a comfort to her, but at least she’d gotten to hear his voice.
Agnes was just about to remove her duffle coat, which she had fallen asleep in, when the phone rang again. This time when she answered her “Hello?” was steadier. The voice at the other end was the same, but the noise in the background had faded somewhat. Tobias must have moved quite a bit away from the party.
“Hi, it’s me again.…”
“What happened?”
Tobias hesitated before answering. She almost got the impression that he was preparing himself.
“Look, babe,” he said slowly. “This might not be brilliant timing and all, but I want to be straight with you.” He paused again. Agnes started to feel ill at ease. Wasn’t he always straight with her? “I’m not really sure when I’ll be coming home, there’ve been some changes to the plans.…”
“What plans?” Agnes tightened her jaw and started to pick at some well camouflaged stains in the gray wool. She couldn’t cope any more with tales of extra gigs in Härnösand and double matinees in Sundsvall. It wouldn’t be the first time the tour was extended, new shows added. Agnes was usually sympathetic, keen to wish him a career and successes, but not today. “I want you to come home, now! I’ve had an awful time, I.…” She started sobbing again.
“Look, please don’t make this more complicated than it is. Agnes.…” He adopted a softer tone.
She relented slightly, but muttered unhappily nonetheless, “That bloody tour of yours always comes before me, doesn’t it.…”
“But baby, this isn’t about the tour.” He paused.
“Is that right?”
“I… I’ve met a girl.…” Agnes stopped sobbing. After a few seconds of silence, Tobias continued, a touch more troubled now. “It’s one of the backing singers. Ida. You know, the blonde one with the navel ring.…” Agnes had gone along a few times and met the group. Said hello to the backing singers, musicians, dancers, and soloists. She’d even met Chris Hammond himself, The King of Rock’n’Roll Show! But she couldn’t recall a navel ring. A very large pair of breasts, yes. Tobias seemed to be reading her mind. “Yeah, well, anyway maybe you never saw her ring, but she’s got rather big.… Well, prime gazongas, if you get my drift.” He gave a laugh, as if to lighten the mood. The effect was minimal and Tobias grew serious again. “I know it’s not that nice of me to do this on the phone, but I want to be straight with you, Agnes. You’ve always been honest with me. And it wouldn’t be right for me to two-time you, would it?”
“No.” Agnes almost whispered. She wasn’t quite sure if she’d understood. Had Tobias just dumped her?
“We’ll have to sort out the practical stuff when I get home. We’ll be carrying on for another three weeks now, and then we’ll break the tour for a bit. So maybe I could pop by then, collect some things.”
“But… where are you going to stay?” Agnes was fumbling for something tangible to hold onto. Facts. Tobias seemed relieved at her question. She hadn’t gone ballistic, started screaming. She seemed to be taking it well, on the whole.
“With Ida. Didn’t I say? Sorry, but you get so spacey when you’re in love!” He gave another laugh. “You’ll be all right now, won’t you, babe? Things won’t be that different, will they? I’m hardly ever at home as it is. You’ll get through this. You’re strong, Agnes!” A faint beep was heard on the line. “Whoops, looks like my batteries are running out. We better call it a day. And anyway it’s not exactly cheap to call from a cell phone either. Call me if you need to, otherwise, as I said, I’ll get in touch when…” And then the line went dead.
It was a while before Agnes was able to put the receiver down. Even though she was still wearing her duffle coat, she was freezing. She could see her reflection in the window. Her face was ashen and her hair had become tangled up at the neck. The tears had made her mascara run down her cheeks and her eyes were rimmed with red.
Slowly, she took off her coat and let it fall onto the bedroom floor. The white work blouse she was wearing under it was quickly removed – only the two bottom buttons were left. She undid her bra and took that off, too. She glanced down at the breasts that no one had ever referred to as “prime gazongas.” She could see a small bruise on the left one. A souvenir from Gérard. She then wriggled out of the black skirt and tights, turned back the white bedspread, and crept down between the sheets, which had become crumpled from her weight. She shut her eyes and thought: “This was a bad day. A very bad day.”
CHAPTER 4
IT TOOK A WHILE FOR AGNES to stop reproaching herself for drinking so much the night before. Her symptoms were the same as after any proper binge: headache, dry mouth, aches and pains, memory gaps. The bright winter sun hit her straight in the face and she blinked irritably, dizzy from sleep. She’d obviously forgotten to pull down the blinds yesterday. It wasn’t because of the sun that she usually did this, but to prevent her neighbors from seeing right into her bedroom, which overlooked the courtyard. She lay for a while looking at the windows of the building opposite. The panes gleamed so much that she couldn’t see through them. It was no doubt the other way round for them. Full view. She felt a little uneasy and sat up in her bed with the cover wound tightly around her. She tried to pull herself together. She’d slept badly, fitfully, and for a few blissful minutes she had no idea why. Now it was all coming back. When she realized why she let out a sigh and collapsed limply back onto her pillow. No, she didn’t want to wake up on a day like this. She screwed up her eyes and buried her face in the pillow. But she soon found it hard to breathe and she had to turn her face to one side. She stared at the alarm clock that ticked quietly on the bedside table. It was still early, and there was no reason to get up yet. No reason to get up at all. She didn’t feel rested, had probably woken up every half hour during the night, so in the end it was no surprise that she went back to sleep.
Agnes woke with a start from the rattle of the mail slot. The mail had come, early morning had become late morning, and Agnes’s laundry room time was booked for twenty minutes ago. So maybe a missed laundry time wasn’t the end of the world, it had happened before. Well, not that often if she was to be honest, but at that moment it felt like her life hinged on a few hours’ access to two washing machines and a dryer with the efficiency of a polar breeze. Sure, she’d lost her job, said goodbye to her career, and been dumped by the love of her life for two silicon breasts with complementary bimbo, but that didn’t mean she had to bring disorder into her life. She threw herself out of bed and wandered about her bedroom without a thought for the neighbors, on the hunt for her jogging pants and a t-shirt wh
ile she tried to gather up her dirty laundry. It took six minutes for her to be ready to throw herself into the utility room with two full Ikea bags and a packet of Ajax that leaked laundry detergent over the length of her hallway. She dismissed the idea of the elevator, which was too small to fit both her and her bags. Instead, she squeezed them down the three flights of stairs to the basement door – only to discover that she had, true to form, forgotten the key to the laundry room. So back up. Her head was starting to spin. She’d not even had any dinner, let alone breakfast.
Once back at the door to her apartment she had to stop for a moment and bow her head toward the floor. She was fighting a blackout. She’d always been tall, the tallest in her class, as thin as a stick with blood pressure as low as the Dutch plains. In eight grade, she’d fainted during the school’s Saint Lucia procession. Marie-Louise, who’d been Lucia, had sulked for weeks afterward on account of Agnes getting all the attention. She, who’d worn the electric candle crown over her thick blonde locks, thought it was unbelievably ill-mannered of Agnes to steal the show. She had even, under humiliating circumstances, made Agnes apologize. Agnes, however, felt that her revenge had come when she discovered that Marie- Louise had had three children by the age of twenty-two. So maybe it wasn’t that strange that she’d cherished her time as beauty queen, given the abrupt end which it must have met.
When Agnes had finally hauled down her bags and, drenched with perspiration, opened the basement door, she remained standing on the threshold of the utility room. A guy she’d never seen before was just starting up one of the washing machines. The other machine was already going, and the faint clatter of jeans buttons could be heard against the glass window of the drum. He looked up at Agnes, smiled, and said hello. Agnes did not smile back.
“Excuse me, but what do you think you’re doing?” she snapped instead. The man stopped smiling.
“Er, doing my laundry,” he said hesitantly.
“I can see that! But why are you doing it during my time?” She put her bags down with a thump. The packet of Ajax fell out of one of them, with the opening facing down. A little mountain of detergent appeared on the floor.
“Sorry, I thought this slot was free. It said on the sign-up sheet that if a machine had not been used in half an hour that…”
Agnes interrupted him. “I’d put my name down, hadn’t I? You saw my name on the sheet, didn’t you? Didn’t it enter your head that I might’ve been late? Have you been standing here with a stopwatch or something? How many minutes late was I? Four?”
“Almost a quarter of an hour, actually. I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to steal someone else’s time, I just thought that…”
“But you did.” Agnes sounded as acerbic as she could. He was starting to look embarrassed. “And anyway, who are you?” She hadn’t seen him before. There weren’t that many apartments in the complex, and if he lived here she should have noticed him. A tenant of her own age would definitely have stuck out amongst all the others. Once, she’d heard two elderly female neighbors talk about Roger Moore as a “dapper young chap.” The guy in front of her might have been a little older than her, it was hard to tell, but he was younger than Roger Moore, at least. “Do you even live here?”
“I’ve just moved in. On the second floor. I really am very sorry.”
Agnes looked at him. He was disheveled and unshaven, dressed in a pair of nasty brown cords, a faded tennis shirt of a beigy gray, and flip-flops without socks. Agnes could see little tufts of hair on his big toes. She looked away in revulsion.
“I could try to interrupt the cycle, but I don’t think you can on these machines. There’s a risk that it might flood the basement, and that would hardly help matters.” He tried to smile again, but stopped himself as soon as he noticed that Agnes was not going to be charmed. “You can have the machine as soon as I’m done with it. Do you want me to knock on your door when I’m ready?”
“No.” She really did not want him, or anyone else, knocking on her door. She wanted to be left in peace. “But thanks for the offer,” she muttered, and left the room. She stopped by the door and signed up for a new time in two weeks – the earliest slot available. And then she shuffled up the stairs again with her overflowing bags.
As she entered her apartment, she caught sight of herself in the hall mirror. She hadn’t washed away the streaks of mascara, and her hair was no longer just bunched up at the back. A large, weird clump of hair stuck out by one of her ears, too. Sex hair, it might have been called under happier circumstances. Her t-shirt, which bore the words Beer makes me hot, an ironic gift from Lussan after a wild weekend ages ago at the Roskilde festival, had two enormous hot chocolate stains on the front. At least her jogging pants were reasonably clean and would probably have looked OK if she hadn’t had them on backward.
Agnes sighed and dumped the bags on the floor. What did it matter if she looked as if she’d just been dragged out of some clinic for the mentally deranged? What did it matter that she’d just missed her laundry time and would now have to wait two weeks for a clean pair of jeans? Everything was relative, isn’t that what they said?
“Is it you, my dear? What a nice surprise!” Maude propelled her daughter into the hallway. “Why didn’t you call? I mean, it’s lucky that we’re in.” She took a step away from Agnes and called with a loud voice: “Sven, come up! Agnes is here!” There was a few seconds’ pause, and then they could hear the familiar creak from the glossy pine planking of the stairs. Her dad appeared in the hall, and when he caught sight of Agnes he took a brisk step forward and embraced her.
CHAPTER 5
“IS IT YOU, LOVE? What a nice surprise! Did you know Agnes was coming over, Maud?”
“No, I had no idea. You should’ve called, sweetheart.…”
“It’s lucky that we’re in!”
Agnes smiled to herself. You could tell that her parents had been married for a long time. And no, she hadn’t called in advance, but the idea that her parents would be anywhere else but home on a Sunday afternoon was unthinkable. She hadn’t had a chance to open her mouth yet, but when her mother paused for breath, she jumped in.
“I was hoping you’d invite me over for Sunday dinner,” Agnes said, sniffing the air. There was already a smell of food despite it still being early in the afternoon. It didn’t surprise her. Her mother enjoyed cooking, and on weekends she liked to start preparing for dinner straight after breakfast. It was usually nice, too, even if her repertoire of dishes could hardly be called innovative.
“Oh, how lovely! I’m making beef casserole, but it needs to simmer for a few more hours. We’re just about to have a little something. Are you dying for a cup of coffee as badly as we are?”
“You bet.”
“Come inside, my dear! Sven, get another cup ready.” Maud turned to Agnes. “Or would you prefer a glass? Madeleine always drinks her coffee from a glass these days. But, really, how practical can that be? Doesn’t it get hot?” She looked anxious.
“It does. And a cup will be just fine.” Agnes had taken off her coat and was following her mother into the kitchen. “How are things back in Länninge, then?” She looked about her. Not much had changed in the house since she’d moved out, despite the fact that it was almost a decade ago. The only new thing she could make out in the kitchen was the supermarket wall calendar. It was new for this year. A rowanberry branch bending under a mantle of snow was the motif for January.
“Oh, well, nothing’s changed.” Maud shot a glance at her husband. “Just the same as normal, aren’t they, Sven?” Sven nodded in agreement.
“Yes,” he added after a moment’s silence. “Apart from down in the center, that is. They’ve made Strömgatan one-way.” He frowned in disapproval.
“Really?”
“I don’t understand the point. Now we have to drive round an entire block just to park on the square.”
“That sounds a bit stupid.” Agnes had to make an effort not to say something sarcastic. Stockholm was so one-way you
had to drive out to the airport if you wanted to get into the center from the west of the city. An extra block didn’t sound that serious to her. She’d hardly driven a car at all since she’d moved out. She didn’t need to. Hardly anyone she knew in Stockholm even had a driver’s license. Here in Länninge, everyone had one.
“Well, it beats me how the politicians think.” It was one of her father’s stock responses.
The politicians were responsible for everything. Everything bad, at least. “So how’s everything else?”
“Everything else is the same as normal,” her mom said. That wasn’t hard for Agnes to imagine. Länninge was no big city. Hardly even a town; more a place, a little industrial community. The little village center basically consisted of two main streets connected by low wooden houses and a few scattered three-story brick apartment buildings from its golden age in the sixties. In the middle was the square, which served as a car park. A natural meeting spot, just like Roland’s, the café. On Saturday afternoons, you never needed to arrange to meet your friends, they were sitting in Roland’s. Where else? At least that’s what it used to be like when they were still at school. These days, most of Agnes’s acquaintances had families and children, and, presumably, little time to go hanging around cafés. It didn’t really bother Agnes that much. There was no one she directly socialized with here any more and she hadn’t gone down the center for ages.
Whenever she went home, she usually stayed with her parents in their two-story detached house on the outskirts of town. Sometimes she made little detours to see an old school friend or two, but that was becoming increasingly rare. It wasn’t easy keeping in touch. Besides Agnes, there was just one girl from her class who hadn’t had a baby. And that girl was considered a little strange, a lesbian or something, as some of her classmates had insinuated when she met them just before Christmas. Agnes had nothing against children, she wanted her own, too. In due course. She’d talked about it with Tobias a few times, mostly in jest, and realized that neither of them seemed to be in any hurry to settle down. First they were going to enjoy life, Tobias had said, travel and have fun. Agnes couldn’t argue with that – after all, they’d had each other. The other thing would happen when they were good and ready, there was no hurry. Or so she had thought. Now things were different.
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