by Håkan Nesser
He opted for a compromise. A walk through Pampas to the sports ground and the railway, to be precise, keeping her at a slight distance. If he had not changed his mind in the ten minutes this would take him, he could call her – and if she actually answered and asked him to come, he still had ten minutes to think the better of it as he went back to Fabriksgatan.
Simple plan, thought Robert, lighting another cigarette as he gave a shiver. Smart. The cold air was raw and he was grateful at least that he had enough alcohol in his blood not to freeze. That was always something.
He threw back his shoulders and started to walk.
A stream of automatic and pretty divergent thoughts went through her head. She drank a little wine and made a conscious effort not to let any reaction show. Something told her it was important not to react the wrong way, and that same something informed her simultaneously that there were at least a hundred different wrong reactions to choose between. It surprised her that she could not find anything spontaneous to say. That no emotion presented itself which she could clothe in pure and truthful words. It was so obvious that Henrik was tormented. By both his sexual orientation and the fact that he had revealed it; she couldn’t decide which of those two things weighed heaviest in his tense silence. He had leant back in the sofa, clasped his hands behind his neck and fixed his eyes on the ceiling. He evidently didn’t want to look at her. She rapidly summoned – and discarded – the whole arsenal of politically correct platitudes: ‘Why should that make you unhappy?’ ‘Everybody has a certain tendency in that direction.’ ‘Your sexuality isn’t fully developed yet.’ ‘So what?’ Instead, she tried to identify what she really felt and thought and believed; it really couldn’t be that damned hard, if she only relaxed a bit . . .
Finally it came.
‘You’re really not,’ she said.
‘What?’ he said.
‘I said you’re really not.’
He unclasped his hands from behind his neck and leant forward, elbows on knees.
‘I heard. What kind of crap is that? Don’t you think I know myself whether I’m—’
‘No,’ said Kristina. ‘I don’t think you actually do know.’
‘And what makes you think you can claim that? I must admit, I’d expected a different reaction.’
A sudden sharpness in his tone. She looked him straight in the eye for a second before she answered.
‘What sort?’
‘Eh?’
‘What sort of reaction did you expect?’
‘I don’t know. But not this one.’
‘Does my reaction matter all that much?’
He shrugged and relaxed a little. ‘I don’t know. Yes . . . no, of course not. What the hell, now you know I’m gay, at any rate.’
She shook her head and smiled at him. Moved a bit closer on the sofa and ran her hand down his arm.
‘Henrik, you listen to me. I’ve got at least half a dozen gay people in my circle of acquaintances. I know there are different kinds and that people turn out gay for different reasons. But I’m very sure that you don’t fit into that gang. I’m sure you’ve had homoerotic experiences, but that doesn’t automatically make you gay. I’ve had—’ Here she stopped herself for a moment, but realized there was scope for being in two minds. ‘I’ve been with women a couple of times in my life, and enjoyed it, but I realized pretty soon that I belonged in the other camp.’
‘You were a lesbian?’
His amazement was wide-eyed and absolute.
‘What I said was that I’ve had a couple of experiences of lesbian love. Just as you, I assume, have had experience of what it’s like to be with a man.’
‘My God,’ said Henrik, and drank some of his wine. ‘I’d never have thought it.’
‘Didn’t you have a girlfriend when you were at upper secondary, for example? Hanna, or whatever her name was.’
‘I had two, actually,’ Henrik admitted. ‘But it never worked very well.’
‘Did you sleep with them?’
‘Yeah. Or something like that.’
He gave a laugh, self-mocking but somehow good-natured, too. She leant a little closer to him.
‘And because it worked better with this guy who you presumably met in Uppsala, you conclude that you’re homosexual?’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘Plenty of people are a bit bisexual, you know. They eventually choose one or the other, it really is no harder than that. It’s like choosing a career . . . or a car, you simply don’t need a Bugatti and a Rolls-Royce.’
‘A Bugatti and a Rolls . . . ?’
He laughed again but it stuck in his throat, the sadness catching up with him again. He looked at her with a faintly wavering gaze, his face quite close to hers.
‘Kristina, I am gay. Thanks for trying to pour balm into my wound, but it doesn’t change the basic starting point.’
She held his eyes. Five seconds passed. Five dizzying seconds when something started to happen; it felt so strange to be gazing into her nephew’s blue eyes like this, and at such close range. A few more seconds passed, the room around them somehow seemed to lose form and content, slowly arching into a glass bell jar, an incubator enclosing them, and suddenly all prior assumptions no longer applied.
No, she thought, this is just me, trying to gild this drunken state I’m in. Then she said:
‘Put your hand on my breast, Henrik.’
He hesitated, not moving.
‘Now, now, I’m not wearing a bra, you can see that. Go on.’
He did as she said. First outside her blouse, then under it. His hand was warm and careful. Her nipple instantly hardened.
‘What are you feeling?’
He didn’t answer. His hand trembled a little. Or perhaps it was her. Why should I put the brakes on now? she thought. Why make do with half measures? She put her hand on his crotch. Held it there and felt him swelling. What am I doing? a voice screamed inside her. What the hell am I playing at?
But she ignored it. ‘I’ve got two breasts,’ she whispered. ‘Go on.’
He obeyed her again. She undid his jeans and put in her hand. Took hold of him.
‘What are you feeling?’
He swallowed. His eyes did not leave hers. As if that were the illusory thread the whole thing depended on. He was caressing her breasts now. She got his underpants down under his balls and took a firmer hold. Cautiously moved him up and down a few times. He opened his mouth, breathing heavily.
‘Christ Almighty,’ he said, closing his eyes.
‘Yes,’ whispered Kristina. ‘Christ Almighty indeed.’
Robert decided to do a whole circuit of the pitch-black sports ground before he got out his phone. One last circuit to give him time to opt out. Thin, diffuse drizzle had begun to fall; frosty precipitation that settled like a cold skin on his face and hair, but he still wasn’t feeling chilled through. He hadn’t seen a single person for the past fifteen minutes, just two passing cars and a stray cat that leapt out of a dark alley off Johannes Kyrkogata, right at his feet.
‘It doesn’t get much lonelier than this,’ he mumbled to himself as he came back round to the main entrance – and that felt comforting, somehow. As if he had finally reached rock bottom. On a solitary amble round Kymlinge sports ground on a December night. He got out his phone. When he opened it, he saw the time had reached 01.51.
He stopped, took a deep breath and lit a cigarette. Felt with his fingers that there were only two more left in the packet and rang the number.
She answered after three rings.
‘Yes, it’s me.’
‘Jeanette?’
‘Yes.’
She didn’t sound like someone just waking up, but he knew you couldn’t always tell. Some people could virtually talk in their sleep and still sound sober and alert. Her voice had a certain rough quality with a slight sibilance to it. But it was warm, he liked it – and for one idiotic second a line ran through his head.
I’m your long-lost lover and there’s
snow in my hair.
He fought it back, having no time to ponder where on earth it had come from. ‘Sorry,’ he said instead. ‘This is Robert, Robert Hermansson. I know it’s the middle of the night, but I’m having trouble sleeping, and if you still . . . ?’
‘Come round,’ she said simply. ‘I’m waiting for you.’
‘I didn’t mean to—’
‘Just come,’ she said. ‘I invited you, after all, and I wasn’t asleep. You know where I live?’
‘Yes,’ said Robert. ‘You told me. Twenty-six Fabriksgatan . . . is there a door code?’
‘Nineteen fifty-eight,’ she said. ‘Where are you now?’
‘The sports ground.’
‘The sports ground? What are you doing at the sports ground in the middle of the night?’
‘I went for a walk. And found myself thinking of you.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘You’ll be here in ten minutes. I’ll make some tea. Or would you rather have a glass of wine?’
‘Tea’ll be fine . . . I think.’
‘All right. We can have both. I look forward to seeing you, Robert. Nineteen fifty-eight.’
She hung up. Her voice stayed in him, and he suddenly felt there was something vaguely familiar about it. He put his phone in his pocket, threw away his half-smoked cigarette and set off towards Fabriksgatan.
She was only wearing a dress and panties and could hardly have been more accessible, but once he had felt his way to her most erogenous spot, she interrupted proceedings.
‘We’ve got to think, Henrik,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘We don’t want other people to get hurt.’
‘Mhm,’ said Henrik.
‘But if you want, I’m happy to go the whole way. You’re duly noting that I’m a woman, I hope?’
‘You are a woman,’ he said huskily. ‘You’ve got to let me carry on.’
She took her hands off him and pushed him away. Straightened her clothes. The wall clock struck two, its fragile chimes hanging in the room like an unmistakable reminder of external existence. The world did not consist of just this sofa and these two people. There was altogether, thought Kristina, an infinite number of paralysing relationships and circumstances to be taken into account. If one chose to.
‘Tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘Jakob’s going back to Stockholm in the late evening. If you want, I’ll wait for you at the hotel.’
‘But?’ said Henrik. ‘Is it really OK to . . . ?’
‘Kelvin always sleeps like a log,’ Kristina assured him. ‘Yes, it really is OK. You needn’t worry . . . and I’d very much like to teach you a bit about love before I’m done with you. About the very best bit.’
‘God Almighty,’ he repeated, staring at her. ‘I can’t take in . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I can’t take in the fact that you and I are sitting here like this, Kristina. What do you mean by the best bit?’
‘The art of making it last,’ she said. ‘The sweet passion of deferred gratification. But we must go our separate ways now, I’ve a husband and kid to get home to.’
‘Kristina, I . . .’
She put a finger to her lips and he stopped. She kissed him lightly on the palms of his hands and got to her feet. Swayed a little as the blood left her head, but recovered.
‘No, don’t come with me. See you tomorrow.’
The rain felt strange and dense, like a kind of soft, liquid moss, she thought, and it accompanied her for the whole dreary length of Järnvägsgatan. She was glad of it. Of its chill and persistence. Amongst the thousand thoughts and feelings tearing at her, there were two making their voices heard more loudly than all the rest.
We really are going to go the whole way tomorrow night.
It won’t end well.
And as she crept along the corridor on the way to her first-floor room at Kymlinge Hotel – a third voice that was her own: My nephew turns me on so much that I shall have to wake my husband and make love with him.
It was twenty past two, but it didn’t matter.
10
Karl-Erik Hermansson was woken at twenty to four by a distinct click inside his head.
That had never happened before. Neither thing. He didn’t get clicks inside his skull, and he always slept like a log until quarter to seven. Be it a workday or a day of rest.
But, of course, now there weren’t any more workdays. Only days of rest. That was a so-called indisputable fact. A condition of life one must learn to accept.
Never again to take his three-geared Crescent bicycle out of the garage and pedal the one thousand, one hundred and fifty metres to Kymlingevik School. Never again that single, elegant flourish as he fished his bunch of keys out of his jacket pocket, put the key in the lock and invited the sluggish horde to enter room 112. Never again to quote from memory Marcus Antonius’s speech to the people on 15 March, 44 BC.
Nothing but days of rest. An eternity of mornings when he could stay in bed for as long as he chose and then devote his days to whatever took his fancy. His reward. The halcyon days after a whole life’s moil and toil and new curricula. But why had he woken at twenty to four? Why had there been a click inside his head? There was also a faint background murmur he didn’t think he recognized. Though that was probably just the radiator under the window on Rosemarie’s side. She had probably turned it up on the sly, as usual.
But discounting that, something had still happened, it really felt that way, and there was a kind of anxiety hanging in his chest, something fluttering and slightly strained, wasn’t there? He lay still and tried to focus on how he felt. And wasn’t it . . . wasn’t it at just this time – between three and four in the morning – that the majority of people died? The hour when life’s candle was snuffed out while it was burning lowest. He was sure he had read that somewhere. Surely it couldn’t be . . . ?
Karl-Erik Hermansson sat bolt upright in bed. His head swam for a few seconds before the blood was able to oxygenate his brain, but with that process complete, he was able to observe, thank goodness, that he felt as fit as a fiddle. Well, relatively fit, at any rate.
And it was only then, only then as he nimbly and vigorously swivelled his legs over the side of the bed and his feet found the fluffy softness of the bedside rug, that he remembered what day it was.
Their hundred-and-fifth birthday.
Sixty-five for him, forty for Ebba.
And that thought brought ten thousand other things whirling along in its slipstream. Estepona. Rosemarie. The cracking of his left heel. But to hell with all that, there were no cracked heels in Andalusia. Muy bien. Whisky. Whisky? Yes, that smoky show-off whisky Kristina’s chap had brought along, he could still taste it on the roof of his mouth now. Lundgren at the bank, he popped up too, and that was all part of it. Part of the list of things he had to think about. The papers that had to be signed on Wednesday afternoon, tomorrow in fact, and the stuck-up family that was moving in here, he could swear neither the man nor the woman could name as many as three government ministers or two Swedish inventors of significance for industrial progress in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Cretins. It would be a relief to leave this history-less land. A real relief; though for the moment he couldn’t remember the Stuck-Ups’ real name. No matter, what else?
Robert.
Robert. No, begone.
Rosemarie, then. No comment. All right, back to the new crack that had opened up on his left foot, which would disappear as soon as he set it on the red earth of Spain . . . not the foot, that is, but the crack. Karl-Erik Hermansson had always been scrupulous about attributions, even in his thoughts . . . and then a jump back to Robert.
Gone. My thoughts have a different kind of structure at this hour of the day, Karl-Erik registered with slight surprise, and found himself unable to get beyond sitting there on the edge of the bed, looking at the painting of Örebro Castle that he had won in a crossword competition in 1977. Rosemarie hadn’t wanted to hang it up, but once he had duly explained to her the important role the ca
stle had played in Swedish history, she had naturally given way.
Robert again. Oh, very well. The prodigal son; he had decided to have the all-important conversation with him the previous evening – to get it over and done with – but it hadn’t happened. Too many people and too many other factors, to put it simply. And whisky. Have to make sure he got round to it today, then. Preferably as early as possible. Before they sat down to the birthday dinner, at any event. There were some things that couldn’t be sidestepped.
The conversation between the Father and the son. A large ‘F’ but a small ‘s’, that was precisely how he saw it in front of him, clearly written in his head in block letters. Strange, but it certainly made the point. Conversation was the wrong word, however; a conversation was exactly what it would not be. To be precise, it was a matter of clarifying a position. The fact that – his thoughts skidded and idled for a few moments and then found purchase – that they had reached absolute zero.
Things could not be worse. That was exactly what he would say. Absolute zero was good. He hated the idea of even talking about the subject. The disgrace Robert had brought on the family was a life sentence . . . No, he didn’t want to hear any apologies or explanations. What Robert had done was not open to any kind of relativization, and no again, we most certainly did not have any plans to leave the country, Mum and I, but the way things have turned out we have no other option. We see no alternative.
Shame, Robert, you’ve pushed us down into the swamp of shame, and we have to live with that, and now I don’t want to say another word about the matter.
About this business? Should he say this business? No, matter was better. Business sounded too . . . well, he wasn’t quite sure what.
He got up and went to the bathroom. Sat down on the toilet for a pee. For more than ten years now he had always taken his morning pee sitting down, he couldn’t deny it. But only first thing in the morning. The dribble was even slower than usual today – maybe because of the unusual timing it hadn’t had a chance to build up in its usual way – and he had time to go through his whole speech to Robert once more as he sat there.