I tidy the kitchen, wash the wineglasses, and throw away the cheese and the olives which have been left out all night and all day, they look disgusting. Then I take a plastic bag and a roll of kitchen paper into the bedroom and clean up the vomit, I spray the rug with some detergent I found under the sink, then scrub it and open the window so that the chilly evening air pours into the room and takes away the sour stench.
I make the bed, tie up the garbage bag and place it just inside the door, then I sit down on the sofa. The living room is dark, through the window I can see people having dinner in the apartment across the street. A perfectly ordinary dinner for a well-off family in a beautiful apartment in Norrköping. That’s what life is about, all that ordinary, secure stuff, that’s life. Everything I don’t have.
I call Alex, but she doesn’t answer. Then I text Carl, asking him to call me as soon as he can, I sit in the darkness for over half an hour waiting for a reply, but nothing comes through. He is also having dinner with his family.
I feel empty inside as I mechanically close the bedroom window, check that I haven’t left any dark hairs in the sink. I pick up the garbage bag on my way out. I leave no traces.
When he calls the following morning I tell him everything. At first he seems unable to believe it’s true, then he starts shouting and swearing. “How the hell could you do that?” he asks, over and over again.
I know the answer: because he isn’t mine. Because I was angry and upset that he had gone on vacation with his family, but perhaps most of all because I wished his wife harm. Because I wanted to destroy everything that is hers and not mine. For a moment I think I can’t say any of that, how could he possibly want to be with me if I do? But then I hear how hollow my words sound when I say that I was drunk, that he already knows how manipulative Alex can be.
“I wanted to destroy your relationship,” I say. “With Gabriella. I wanted to set things right. Get some kind of payback.”
My voice dies away. How can I be so stupid if I’m so smart? How did I turn into someone who does something like this? He yells that I’m an idiot, his words seem to come from far away. He has never yelled at me before. Then he hangs up, only to call me back a little while later. He has calmed down and seems to have realized that it is better to have me on his side, that otherwise he is completely alone. When he speaks to me kindly I begin to cry, because I am exhausted, because I have ruined everything. Because I feel sorry for myself.
“Sorry,” I sob, it is an egotistical apology, a final attempt to get him to be mine, to make him choose me, it is such a self-effacing apology that I might as well be lying at his feet, even though we are speaking on the phone. He doesn’t respond.
When the call is over I sit and cry. I thought I had known emptiness before, when I felt left out because he always put his wife and children first, but that emptiness is nothing compared to the way I feel now that he has pushed me away because he is disappointed in me, because I have tried to hurt him even though I love him. When I think about that I no longer understand anything about what I have done, I don’t understand how I could have let Alex into what was Carl’s and mine. I thought she and I were alike, but now I know that I was wrong, not even the feeling of having been let down by Carl can unite us, however strong it might be, and at the same time I know that the only thing Carl is going to want is to save whatever can be salvaged of his life, and I cry even harder, until I almost throw up, because I am alone once more.
The dampness has crept in everywhere in town, it is embedded in the walls of the buildings. My bathroom smells damp. First of all I clean the drains in the sink and the shower, removing great clumps of dark hair stuck together with dirt and gray soap, breathing through my mouth as I flush them down the toilet, but the smell doesn’t go away. I am aware of it every time I visit the bathroom, it has even sneaked into the hallway. There are no windows in the bathroom, it is a room full of dampness, impossible to air, just like the utility room at the hospital. I place a scented candle in one corner and light it in the evenings, it spreads a mild perfume of vanilla and sweet peas, seeping out into the hallway, but it is eaten up by the damp smell as soon as I extinguish the candle. I stare at the white walls, the grout between the tiles. The bathroom wasn’t renovated recently, but it wasn’t all that long ago either, I’ve never thought there was anything wrong with it before, but now I am starting to hate going in there. Normal people’s homes don’t smell like this. Perhaps I am the problem. I can’t even have a bathroom. How would I be able to cope with a life if I can’t even cope with a bathroom?
Perhaps it is my imagination, perhaps it is connected to the fact that everything in my life has been destroyed. Perhaps it is my brain’s attempt to give a concrete form to everything that is wrong. In the interpretation of dreams, the home is always a symbol for the ego. I think it is my soul that smells bad. That seems perfectly reasonable.
I air my clothes, scrub myself in the shower. People can’t smell of damp. Their clothes might, but not their bodies. I look on the Internet, but the only information I find is that unwashed towels can smell bad. My towels don’t smell bad, it is coming from somewhere else.
At work the following day, the thoughts return. I have spent all afternoon in the utility room and am on my way down to the main kitchen to clean the huge dishwasher when it occurs to me that the job has seeped into my body, my skin. It has contaminated me. No one will ever want to touch me again, no one who lives the kind of life I want, a life where you don’t have to spend your days in a utility room with staff who are paid by the hour. I have to get out of here. I have never felt it so strongly. If I don’t get out now, I am going to be stuck here forever. My heart is pounding so hard it seems like the sound is bouncing off the walks of the underground corridors beneath the low hum of the fluorescent lights.
There are two white-clad figures farther down the corridor. When I get closer I can see that they are two men in scrubs, bending over a gurney. The contours of the covers reveal that there is a person on it, a man, judging by the size. As I walk past I glance at the pillow, where one of the men is just about to cover the face with a sheet. It is Carl. His face is gray, his eyes are closed, his lips colorless. I stop, feeling my heart beat even harder. Carl is dead. Carl is lying on a hospital bed, dead. Covered with a sheet.
What has she done? I think immediately. Has she come up with some evil plan that has gone wrong, or perhaps it has gone exactly as she hoped? How could she? What’s wrong with her?
The men have started to wheel the gurney toward the point where the corridor branches off to the mortuary. I turn around, hurry to catch up with them.
“Wait!”
They stop, look at me in surprise. I am out of breath by the time I reach them, even though I have run only a few meters. My heart is still pounding.
“I think that’s … I thought it was someone I know.”
They stare at me. I don’t know either of them, they look very similar, both in their forties, slim, fair hair, pale eyes. They look kind of dusty. Their faces are expressionless, maybe it has to be that way if you work with dead bodies. Maybe it is a mask you have to put on.
“Could I have a look?”
One of them shakes his head, clears his throat.
“I’m sorry, that’s not possible.”
The other shakes his head too.
“Patient confidentiality.”
“I think it might be a relative,” I say quietly. “I’m almost certain. Please?”
I am close to tears by now. The two men glance at one another, and one of them nods to his colleague, then to me. I move a step closer, holding my breath as he slowly lifts the white sheet covering Carl’s face.
It’s not him. It doesn’t even look like him. It’s a man his age, but there is very little in his face that reminds me of Carl. I take a deep breath.
“Sorry,” I mumble, stepping back. “I was wrong.”
“Surely that’s a good thing?” one of the men says.
“Abs
olutely. Yes.”
The wheels on the gurney squeak as they move down the corridor, otherwise the only sound is the hum of the lights.
I text Carl when I finish work, I am still badly shaken. He replies right away, tells me he will be going home soon. Would I like a lift?
I wait for him at the kiosk by the main door with a mixture of sadness and nerves. It hasn’t been very long since I was standing here feeling nervous about seeing him, but for completely different reasons; it feels like half a lifetime ago.
When he appears I hardly dare to look at him, then I try to meet his gaze, but he looks away, and when he is standing in front of me I want to give him a hug, hold him tight, I want to cry and tell him I thought you were dead! It was so horrible and I’m so glad you’re alive and I love you, but there is nothing in his body language to suggest that he wants me to touch him. He looks distant, wary. It feels strange, but the strangest thing of all is that there was ever an intimacy between us, an intimacy that was more important to me than anything else, and now it is completely gone. He is wearing jeans and a jacket, he looks good, as he always does, but there is something missing in his eyes, which makes him look old. Perhaps I look old too. I glance at our reflections in the plate glass window. Does it show? Can he see it in my face?
He leads the way to his car, it is parked near the exit and it looks dusty in the spring sunshine, it doesn’t sparkle like a deep blue starry sky as it did back in the fall. We get in, but he doesn’t start the engine, he just looks at me.
“Have you heard from her?” he asks.
I shake my head.
“Me neither,” he says. “I think she’s left town. She usually goes to see her mother when she’s not feeling too good, so she’s probably in Linköping.”
“Do you have any contact with her mother?”
“No. Those two …,” he begins. “They’ve got it into their heads that it was my fault we never made it as a family, but she was the one who left me. I’ve explained this to Alexandra several times, but her mother has told her a completely different story ever since she was a child, so she doesn’t believe me. We were young and we hadn’t planned to have kids, it just happened. We could never have lived together, it was out of the question. I thought she was beautiful and exciting, she wanted to be an actress … We’d already broken up once when she found out she was pregnant, so I stuck around … then it became impossible. We both knew it, but she was the one who left me.”
He sighs.
“How are you doing?” I ask.
“So-so. I haven’t said anything to … to my wife yet.”
“Are you going to?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know which is best, to tell her in advance or to wait until something happens, if something is going to happen. If I tell her and nothing happens, then I’ve destroyed everything for no reason. And if I don’t tell her, it will be worse if … if Alexandra sends those pictures.”
There is nothing left in his eyes when he looks at me, no trace of the desire that I loved, it was totally different from the way any other man had looked at me, a desire that wasn’t only sexual, but now it isn’t there anymore. He is not interested in me, the light has gone out. There are tears in my eyes when I get out of the car outside my apartment. It’s over. It’s all over.
I have used up Norrköping. I often think that I use up people, because that’s definitely what I have done so far in life: I have had relationships that were like a sudden infatuation, even when it came to friendship rather than love, where I have tired of the other person, moved on. Nothing in my life is constant, I haven’t known any of the people in my life for longer than a few years, apart from Emelie, but then I don’t have her anymore, I have nothing left. I have used up an entire town. It seemed to me that this was ideal, not having any ties that were strong enough to bind me to a place, but now it feels tragic. Everything in the town makes me feel sad: the avenues remind me of Emelie, and the café and the area around the university and the student bar and the School of Art, the whole of the town center reminds me of Alex, my job reminds me of Carl, traveling into work and home again reminds me of Carl.
I search out new ways, streets that don’t remind me of anyone, I take a complicated, circuitous route through town, but it just makes me think of the moment when I saw Carl and Alex having coffee, I turn around, take an even more circuitous route home, slink into a café that’s only a stone’s throw from my apartment, a place I don’t usually frequent because only students hang out there. I sit down on a sofa, order a coffee, read a book, try to push away the feeling that everyone is staring at me.
Maybe they’re not staring, I don’t know. I’ve started to believe that they can smell loneliness, that it surrounds me like an aura, that they can see I’m not independent and carefree, having a coffee on my own so that I can read in peace, they can tell I’m here because I’m sad, because I don’t have anyone to have coffee with, because I have nothing better to do.
I try to convince myself they can’t possibly tell, but surrounded by their relaxed conversations and easy self-confidence, I become nothing. They annihilate me without even realizing, they are just sitting there, cheerful, secure, unconsciously excluding me. There is something naive about them, their bodies and the way they behave, their rosy cheeks, I feel old again. Old and lonely and pathetic for thinking that they have any interest in me, they don’t even see me, they are fully occupied with their own lives, rolling along as lives should, full of assignments and parties and relationships. I am an observer, sitting on the shabby 1950s sofa right at the back of the café conducting sociological studies: normality, there it is. It’s like being at the Louvre.
I have started rereading Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and suddenly I realize it’s about me. “I am alone and they are everybody,” the man from underground thinks. I have never read a sentence that I could relate to more.
The sky is light now during my evening walks, I go out every evening because I have nothing else to do. I have nothing left. It is a feeling that is simultaneously a bottomless abyss of horror and as reassuring as an old friend; I am an expert when it comes to being alone. I have always been alone, because no one else is like me.
The pale blue sky deepens to lavender behind the tower of the heating plant as I go over what I have done for the thousandth time. I am listening to music because it is light enough to see muggers and rapists, I am listening to the same playlist as usual, turned up loud to burn away my thoughts. You took my love and left me helpless.
Alone, the bass thuds through the music, alone, alone, alone.
Alex never answers when I call, and I have called many times, left messages, texted. I have been to her apartment and rung the doorbell, but to no avail, I have listened for sounds but heard nothing. I have stood by the door of the apartment block, waiting.
It is like Schrödinger’s cat, but with compromising pictures: perhaps Carl’s marriage is over, perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps Alex has mailed the pictures, perhaps she hasn’t. Perhaps she isn’t going to. As long as I don’t know that she’s actually sent them, there is still a chance that it won’t happen, that she has changed her mind. I want to believe that I could persuade her not to do it, if she would only answer when I call, yet at the same time I know it would only provoke her if I tried. She would feel as if it was me and Carl against her, and that would be the greatest betrayal of all. Now everyone has betrayed everyone else. Somehow there is a sense of balance in that thought, a kind of justice. On the other hand, everyone is alone now.
Norrköping has an attractive skyline, I can see the chimneys of Värmekyrkan in the industrial area rising up above the rooftops, the outline of the Iron, it is all empty and false, leftover scenery from something that was once genuine, yet at the same time full of misery, now it is the opposite, false and cheerful. It is impossible for me to stay here. Whatever happens, this place is tainted. Get away from here, I want to shout to the ships moored at the quaysides, waiting to load or unload, ly
ing dark and silent in the twilight, get away from here before it’s too late, hurry up.
I get up and go to work. Above the baking parchment on my window the mornings are light now, the sky is high just the way a spring sky always is. A spring sky is terrible when you can’t see anything hopeful about it. When the absence of hope is all it brings: here before you lie the gossamer fine days of early summer, the warm days of high summer, and they are empty, that is what the sky is saying to me, for you summer is a series of days that are too hot, too demanding, days when it will become clearer than ever that you are alone, days when other people go away and have new experiences and you are left behind, in a life that is going nowhere, waiting for something that will never come. I think the spring sky is sneering at me. In order to deal with it, I have signed up to work all through the summer. The cafeteria is quiet then, with a relatively small number of customers each day, and not much cleaning up: days when you can leave early if you want to, if you have something else to do, or you can let the afternoon coffee break spread out across the workday like a soft exhalation, until it is time to go home and do nothing in a town where I am alone now.
PROCLAIM CENTURIES OF SORROW, PROCLAIM CENTURIES OF JOY. Maybe I will be able to write over the summer, if I’m not so tired at the end of the day. Maybe it could be a way of making something in my life feel meaningful. When I get back from my walks down by the harbor in the evenings and I lie on my sofa with the TV on low, not caring what’s on, some crime show, some lame sitcom, and I gaze into the semidarkness of the apartment and I haven’t got the strength to do anything, I can’t read a book, I can’t write a single line, and it’s because my mind is weary, not my body, I think that I should at least be angry, that I should write out of rage, out of the desire for revenge, but I don’t feel any of that. I am empty and weary and lonely. I have lost everything.
The Other Woman Page 14