Yesterday's News

by Kajsa Ingemarsson

  They were to start at a newly opened bar in the old town, Lussan announced. And then she thought they might head on down to one of the clubs in the city. Was that OK? Agnes nodded. The thought of tea and chips at home on the sofa was drifting ever further downwind.

  Finally, they were ready to leave. It was almost nine thirty and they took a taxi down to the old town. Lussan paid. “Tonight’s on me,” she insisted, and silenced Agnes’s protests. “I’m earning, quite a lot, too. You’re unemployed. There’s no more to be said.”

  As soon as they entered the smoky bar, Agnes’s courage plummeted. It was full of people, all crammed together, talking loudly and laughing. They all seemed to know what they were doing there. Agnes felt like an alien. Almost instinctively she scanned the bar to see if she could spot Tobias somewhere. But he wasn’t there. He wouldn’t be there. She was out on her own. Single. Free as a bird. And lonely, lonely, lonely.

  Lussan grabbed her arm. “You wait, things’ll be fine.” She smiled at Agnes. “Practice makes perfect. Come on, let’s go and buy a drink. What’s yours?”

  “A cosmopolitan.”

  “Coming up.” Lussan disappeared and Agnes stood a little awkwardly just by the door. She then removed her duffle coat and hung it up in the coatroom. Now that she was here, she thought, she might as well make the best of it. She tried to smile at a few guys who squeezed by her on their way to the restroom. They didn’t notice her. Then Lussan appeared again with a glass in each hand. “Come on, this is nowhere to stand.” She cleared a way for them so that they ended up standing in the middle of the room. Agnes looked around her. It was a nice place, if with a little too much 90s austerity. Apart from the bouquets of flowers in the window left behind from the opening night, there was no ornamentation at all. The walls were white. No paintings, no splashes of color. Small spotlights were embedded in the ceiling. The bar and barstools were wooden, pure, simple. Too simple, to Agnes’s taste. She had a hard time with Scandinavian minimalism. It felt so timid, as if everything personal had been banished. But the crowd seemed to be having fun and Lussan definitely looked like she’d ended up at the right place. The bar was teeming with guys in suits, despite it being a Saturday and not after work. Lussan leaned into her.

  “Have you seen the guy in the pinstripe?” she whispered with a discreet nod toward one of the window tables. Agnes turned to look. A black guy with a shaved head and a nonchalantly unbuttoned shirt under his jacket sat laughing into a cell phone so that his teeth shone in the gloom. She nodded back.

  “Nice.”

  “And taken,” sighed Lussan when his companion came trotting back on her red stilettos with a bowl of peanuts in her hand. “Pity.” They looked round for a while longer. “What about him, there?” nodded Lussan. “He’s more to your taste, isn’t he?” Agnes followed Lussan’s gaze and caught sight of a guy at the bar. He was on his own and trying to order. Without much success, it seemed.

  “Hard to say, I can just see his back.” Just then he turned. For a moment Agnes was convinced she’d seen him before. There was something familiar about him. He was dark, but not in a Swedish way. More southern European. Straight dark eyebrows, slightly tousled hair, too long to be called groomed. He was wearing baggy trousers with enormous pockets down the side and a red shirt, untucked, with the sleeves rolled up. Yes, well Lussan had been right – her type. Spot on.

  “Boys,” grinned Lussan. “When are you going to learn to go for men?”

  “What’s the definition? A suit?”

  “And a bulging credit card. Want another?”

  “I haven’t finished this one.”

  “You will have by the time I’m back.” Lussan strode off to the bar again. She was noticeable in the crowd even though she wasn’t that tall, not even with her heels on. Agnes looked a little guardedly at the guy, and became confused when she met his gaze. He smiled. Agnes looked away. Her heart was thumping. She wanted to go home and watch TV. And drink tea and eat chips. Lussan returned just when Agnes had decided she’d had enough of nightlife for now. It was probably best to acclimatize yourself in small steps. Next time she might be able to stay for a whole hour.

  “What’s got into you? Why are you looking so strange?” Lussan pushed a fresh glass into her hand.

  Agnes downed the last drops from her old glass and placed it on the table in front of her. “I guess I should be going.”

  “Should be what?”

  “Going home.”

  “You’re not going home. Come on, just relax, Agnes. Now let’s drink our drinks and stand here talking to each other. That’s all there is to it. Cheers!” Lussan raised her glass, smiling at someone behind Agnes’s back. Agnes took a few more sips and gradually calmed down again. She was starting to feel tipsy. This would have to be her last. She didn’t want to get drunk. Lussan chatted on about her job, about the price per square foot in the more classy parts of town, and about apartments with pizzeria vaulting and plastic parquet flooring. Agnes tried to have fun. As Lussan went off to buy a third drink she declined, but stayed anyway to keep Lussan company.

  Suddenly she heard a voice beside her. The guy in the red shirt was standing almost pressed up against her. He was a little shorter than she was, his voice soft and slightly hoarse.

  “Hi. Haven’t I seen you before somewhere?”

  “I don’t know.” Agnes paused doubtfully. “But I recognize you, too.”

  “I’m Paolo,” he said, holding out his hand.

  “Agnes.” They looked at each other for a second or two without saying anything else, until Paolo broke into a smile.

  “Now I remember. Agnes.… Peter’s Parsley, wasn’t it? You started just as I was leaving.”

  “Peter’s Parsley.…” Agnes smiled back. So that’s what it was. They’d worked together. She on the tables and he in the kitchen. That was why she’d recognized him. That was why he’d looked at her.

  “Yes, of course! Three or four years back, wasn’t it?”

  “Four, I think. It was just before I went off to Peru. I think we only worked together there for a day or two.”

  “That’s right, yes.” There was a moment of silence. Agnes cast a look toward the bar. Lussan had started chatting with a man in glasses and a tie. And a suit. She laughed and ran a hand through her short dark hair. Was she trying to be tactical given Agnes’s new companion, or was it just a coincidence? Probably the former. It was normally like that with Lussan. “So.…” Agnes turned back to Paolo. “How was it in Peru?”

  “Yeah, it was cool.” He smiled. “I came back a while ago. But to be honest I just got home and turned straight around, I guess you could say.”

  “Really?” Before she could say any more, Lussan slipped by and exchanged her empty glass for a new one; not a cosmopolitan this time, something transparent with lime. Agnes tried to protest, but Lussan had already vanished back toward the bar and the waiting man in the suit. Paolo chuckled at the maneuver.

  “What service!”

  “I know. I’ve tried to stop her, but I think she thinks I need it.”

  Paolo raised his eyebrows. “Why’s that, if I may ask?”

  “It’s.… It doesn’t matter. You were saying you went home and turned straight around.”

  “Oh, yes. I went straight down to Sicily to work in my uncle’s restaurant.”

  “Are you from Italy?”

  “No, I’m not but my dad is. I was born here, but I’ve been to Sicily a lot visiting family. My uncle runs a fish restaurant in Palermo. I was there working for just over a year. Came back just before the New Year.”

  “Why? I mean, why did you come back home?”

  “Working there for a bit was a laugh and I learned a lot, but I wouldn’t want to live there. No matter how nice it is. The weather, the food, the laid-back thing. I really like it. But it’s here where I belong.” He looked out through the window onto the tiny narrow alley.

  “With all its slush and boiled sausages!” He laughed again. It seemed to come ea
sy to him. Laughing. “What about you?”

  Agnes sighed. She was in no mood to tell him. “Plowing through,” was all she said. “Tell me more about Sicily instead,” she added quickly to disguise her own reluctance to talk. Paolo didn’t seem to mind. He was droll, and his tales from Uncle Sergio’s fish restaurant were highly entertaining. They talked about other jobs they’d had, gossiped a little about some distant common acquaintance. Agnes described Gullan’s Grill and they compared what it was like to work for family.

  When Lussan turned up again and asked Agnes if she wanted to go downtown with her, she declined. And in the same natural way she accepted when Paolo asked her if she wanted to go back to his place for some microwaved homemade gnocchi. Afterwards she couldn’t really explain why. Sure, he was charming and sweet, even her kind, as Lussan had pointed out, but that was not why she’d said yes. It was more because she was feeling secure. Because she felt she knew him in some way. Because they’d worked at the same restaurant, because they’d worked in kitchens since leaving school. Because he was kind and quick to laughter. There were a thousand reasons. And no doubt even more for saying no, it was just that she couldn’t think of any just then.

  Two hours later, as she was lying rigidly still staring up at the unfamiliar ceiling, she thought of them. Every single one.

  Paolo was lying beside her, his breaths heavy. She was convinced he’d fallen asleep. He’d twitched a few times as his muscles relaxed. His breathing was deep and regular.

  Furtively, she climbed out of the bed and picked up her clothes that were lying scattered over the floor. She hardly dared to breathe as she tiptoed as quietly as she could out to the hall and hastily dressed herself. Gingerly, gingerly she took hold of the door handle and turned it until it clicked. She hurriedly opened the door, which she closed behind her with another click, and ran as fast as she could down the stairs and onto the street.

  It had started to rain, and the snow was sploshing around her feet when she finally managed to hail a taxi. She was shivering all over, her mouth tasted of stale booze and strange kisses.

  Once back in her apartment, she just stood in the hall for a long time trying to gather her wits. Lussan had said that this was how she’d get Tobias out of her system. She was wrong. Never had Tobias been so present. Never had she missed him so much.

  CHAPTER 9

  ON THE MONDAY, she sat down resolutely at the kitchen table with the paper, the telephone and a pen. She’d circled in three ads she could call. Two for a waitress, one for a head waitress. She’d also taken out the piece of paper with the ad from Taverna Stavros. She started with a restaurant called Papyrus; it was on Rörstrandsgatan and sounded promising. Rörstrandsgatan was a street that guaranteed a degree of quality, the worst of the eateries could hardly afford to set up there.

  A woman answered and said that, yes, the job hadn’t been filled, but they’d stopped taking applicants. Since the ad had been published online last week, they’d received over four hundred letters of application. They hadn’t even had time to go through a tenth of them. So she thanked her for calling and hung up.

  It wouldn’t have been like that a few years ago, thought Agnes crossing out the ad in the paper. When she’d arrived in Stockholm, there had been jobs galore. Despite not having any restaurant training, just her references from Gullan’s Grill, she’d had no problem finding work as a waitress. The fact was that she’d scored the first job she’d applied for, at a lunch restaurant on Kungsholmen. If anyone had told her that she’d still be working in restaurants almost a decade later she would probably have laughed. Waitressing jobs were only temporary, a means of supporting herself while she got to know Stockholm and thought about her future. But the years had passed. And if she were honest, she would have to admit that she enjoyed it.

  She liked the bustle, the guests, the food, and all the oddballs she worked with. But when she told her friends and acquaintances what she did, they always ended up wondering what she was going to do, afterward. What were her plans? It was questions like that that had made her go to college to study twenty credits of English, but after six months there her self-confidence had been totally squashed. She’d thought she was good at languages, but the teachers just went on about her American pronunciation and made her read books she wouldn’t even have managed to plow through in Swedish. After half a year she returned to the security of the restaurant world. It might not have presented much of a challenge, but at least she felt at home there. It possibly wasn’t something she wanted to do for the rest of her life, but for a little while longer. If she actually got a job this time, that was. Four hundred applicants per vacancy was maybe a little over the top, but she still wasn’t surprised. The good times were over.

  Agnes looked at her remaining options. She would go for the head waitress job. It was a classy restaurant, one of the few not owned by Gérard. She swallowed a nervous lump in her throat and then dialed. The girl who answered put her through to the boss, who listened politely as she introduced herself. And then he wondered how much experience she had as a head waitress. Despite Agnes’s having prepared herself for the question, she didn’t know what to reply. Lie and say none? If she said that, she’d definitely be dismissed out of hand as uninteresting. Or tell it like it was, that she’d worked for over six months at Le Bateau Bleu? After all, she needn’t say why she’d quit, if he didn’t ask, that is. She opted for the latter alternative and seemed to be in luck, for he didn’t ask anything. But then the reason for that perhaps wasn’t so good.

  “Really, Le Bateau Bleu? Sounds good. But then I can give Gérard a call and ask him for a reference. He’s an old mate of mine, and we usually help each other out as best we can. There’s nothing like personal references! This business is crawling with dodgy people. Not the kind you want in your staff, if you get my drift.” He laughed cheerfully. “What did you say your name was?” Agnes gave him her name and phone number, a totally futile gesture. She’d never get the job, that she knew. So she said thank you and put the phone down.

  Two calls to go. One to Taverna Stavros, the other to a pasta restaurant in Skärholmen, not exactly the classiest of districts. She didn’t want to call either of them. They weren’t the kind of places she wanted to work at. She’d moved on from that, she didn’t want to slave away as a waitress at some suburban two-bit diner with no ambitions. But she had to work. Her money was quickly running out. Sighing, she dialed the number to Taverna Stavros. It was a brief call. The job had been filled. Oh, stupid, stupid Agnes! Why had she put it off for so long? She’d had the ad for days.

  That left Pasta King in Skärholmen. The man who answered sounded stressed; it was getting close to lunch, she should have thought of that. He asked if she could go for an interview later in the day, around three was usually calm. Sure. She was to ask after Micke.

  Even though Pasta King hadn’t been her first choice, or even been on the list of conceivable workplaces if she was to be honest, she was happy that she’d got an interview. She couldn’t afford to be unemployed any more, or to be fussy either. She needed to get going again, get back on her feet. With a little luck, her problems would be solved then and there.

  She had always worked, apart from a year as an au pair and a term’s failed attempt at studying. These weeks of unemployment hadn’t whetted her appetite either. She didn’t like being idle, didn’t know what to do with herself. It was one thing to be free, to have a long weekend or a holiday, but just pottering around with nothing better to do was torture.

  That was one of the things where she and Tobias had differed. He’d had no problem with idleness. Sometimes when she came home, she’d come across Tobias half naked on the sofa with his guitar, unconcerned that the apartment looked like a pigsty and that he hadn’t cleared away his breakfast even though it was late in the evening. That would make her cranky and she’d shout at him. And he’d either go all sweet-talking on her until she gave up, or get in a mood and walk out. At times he could be away for days. Whatever happe
ned, the outcome was always the same. She was the one who cleaned up. As was the case now. So what had she actually fought with him about? These days, the little two-room apartment was always tidy, the sink shone, the cushions were plumped up, but it was no more pleasant a place for that. Just cleaner.

  At half past two she took the subway out of town to Skärholmen. The restaurant was in the glazed mall. It was rather murky inside, and what windows there were had been painted straight onto the wall, depicting sea views with distant blue mountains. On the left of the entrance was a little outside seating area. The tables were draped with red check cloths and beside the obligatory salt and pepper pots stood candles stuffed in bottles covered with thick clumps of wax. The décor had apparently been inspired by Lady and the Tramp. The chef, whom she glimpsed through the door, was even wearing one of those ridiculous chef’s hats.

  A guy in a leather jacket was standing by one of the registers. Agnes walked up to him and introduced herself. The guy, who turned out to be Micke, asked her to wait by one of the tables while he finished what he was doing. The brown fitted carpet smelled of old ashtrays, and the tablecloth was dotted with small burn holes, through which the dark tabletop underneath glistened. In one corner of the room sat two haggard old men drinking beer. Micke approached the table and apologized. He looked around forty, had an earring and slicked back, slightly greasy hair, tipped with old peroxide. He looked her over as he sat down.

  “OK, when can you start?” was the first thing he said. Agnes let go of the lid of her case; she’d just been about to pull out her résumé. “Yes, well, I guess in theory I could start tomorrow.”

  “Good. We do lunches between eleven and ten, and then the evenings start around five or six. The kitchen’s open until two. We shut at eleven. I’m here most of the time, but I’ve got a restaurant on the other side of town in Farsta, too, so sometimes I’m there.” Agnes nodded.