Anna-Lena wiped some wine from her chin.
“So what happened?”
Julia blinked, first quickly, then slowly.
“My fiancée was still in Australia. And Ro came into the shop. I’d spoken to Mom on the phone that morning, and she just laughed when I said I didn’t know how Ro felt, or even if she felt anything at all. Mom just said: ‘Listen, no one likes tulips that much, Jules!’ I suppose I tried to deny it, but Mom said I was practically being unfaithful already because I was spending so much time thinking about her. She said Ro was my ‘flower shop.’ And I cried. So I was standing there in the shop and Ro came in, and I… well, I laughed so hard at something she said that I accidentally spat on her face. She was laughing, too. So I guess she plucked up the courage, because I couldn’t do it, and asked if I’d like to go for a drink with her. I said yes, but I was so nervous when we got there that I got really drunk. I went outside to smoke, got into a row with a security guard, and wasn’t let back in. So I pointed through the window at Ro, who was standing at the bar, and said she was my girlfriend. The guard went in and told her that, and then she came out, and then she was. I called my fiancée and broke off the engagement. She’s probably been having loads of fun ever since. And I… damn, I love being boring with Ro. Does that sound mad? I love arguing with her about sofas and pets. She’s my everyday. The whole… world.”
“I like the everyday,” Anna-Lena admitted.
“Your mom was right, the ones who make you laugh last a lifetime,” Estelle repeated, thinking of a British author who had written that nothing in the world is so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good humor. Then she thought about an American author who had written that loneliness is like starvation, you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
* * *
Julia was thinking about how her mom, when she told her she was pregnant, looked first at Julia’s stomach, then at Ro’s, then asked: “How did you decide which of you was going to… get knocked up?” Julia got annoyed, of course, and replied sarcastically: “We played rock-paper-scissors, Mom!” Her mom looked at them both again with deadly seriousness and asked: “So who won?”
That still made Julia laugh. She said to the women in the closet: “Ro’s going to be a brilliant mom. She can make any child laugh, just like my mom, because their sense of humor hasn’t developed at all since they were nine.”
“You’re going to be a brilliant mom, too,” Estelle assured her.
The bags under Julia’s eyes moved softly as she blinked.
“I don’t know. Everything feels such a big deal, and other parents all seem so… funny the whole time. They laugh and joke and everyone says you should play with children, and I don’t like playing, I didn’t like it even when I was a child. So I’m worried the child’s going to be disappointed. Everyone said it would be different when I got pregnant, but I don’t actually like all children. I thought that would change, but I meet my friends’ children now and I still think they’re annoying and have a lousy sense of humor.”
Anna-Lena spoke up, briefly and to the point:
“You don’t have to like all children. Just one. And children don’t need the world’s best parents, just their own parents. To be perfectly honest with you, what they need most of the time is a chauffeur.”
“Thanks for saying that,” Julia replied honestly. “I’m just worried my child isn’t going to be happy. That it’s going to inherit all my anxiety and uncertainty.”
Estelle gently patted Julia’s hair.
“Your child’s going to be absolutely fine, you’ll see. And absolutely fine can cover any number of peculiarities.”
“That’s encouraging,” Julia smiled.
Estelle went on patting her hair softly.
“Are you going to do all you can, Julia? Are you going to protect the child with your life? Are you going to sing to it and read it stories and promise that everything will feel better tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to raise it so that it doesn’t grow up to be one of those idiots who don’t take their backpack off when they’re on public transport?”
“I’ll do what I can,” Julia promised.
Estelle was thinking about another author now, one who almost a hundred years ago wrote that your children aren’t your children, they’re the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself.
“You’re going to be fine. You don’t have to love being a mother, not all the time.”
Anna-Lena interjected: “I didn’t like the poo, I really didn’t. At first it was okay, but when children are around a year old they’re like Labradors. Fully grown ones, I mean, not puppies, but—”
“Okay,” Julia nodded, to get her to stop.
“There’s something about the consistency at a certain age, it gets like glue, sticks under your fingernails, and if you rub your face on the way to work…”
“Thanks! That’s enough!” Julia assured her, but Anna-Lena couldn’t stop herself.
“The worst thing is when they bring friends home, and suddenly there’s a five-year-old stranger sitting on your toilet demanding to be cleaned up. I mean, you can put up with your own kids’ poo, but other people’s…”
“Thanks!” Julia said emphatically.
Anna-Lena pursed her lips. Estelle giggled.
“You’re going to be a good mom. And you’re a good wife,” Estelle added, even though Julia hadn’t even mentioned that last anxiety. Julia was holding the palms of her hands around her stomach, and stared down at her fingernails.
“Do you think? Sometimes it feels like all I ever do is nag Ro. Even though I love her.”
Estelle smiled.
“She knows. Believe me. Does she still make you laugh?”
“Yes. God, yes.”
“Then she knows.”
“You have no idea, I mean, wow, she makes me laugh all the time. The first time Ro and I were about to… you know…,” Julia smiled, but stopped when she couldn’t think of a word for what she was sure neither of the two older women would actually be horrified to hear.
“What?” Anna-Lena wondered, uncomprehendingly.
Estelle nudged her in the side and winked.
“You know. The first time they were going to go to Stockholm.”
“Oh!” Anna-Lena exclaimed, and blushed from her head to her feet.
But Julia didn’t quite seem to hear. Her eyes lost their footing; there was a joke there somewhere in her memory, one Ro had made in the taxi that first time that Julia had intended to talk about. But instead she found herself stumbling over the words.
“I… it’s so silly, I’d forgotten this. I’d done some laundry, and there were some white sheets hanging over the bedroom door to dry. And when Ro opened the door and they hit her in the face, she started. She tried not to let it show, but I felt her flinch, so I asked what the matter was, and at first she didn’t want to say. Because she didn’t want to burden me with anything, not as early as that, she was worried I’d break up with her before we’d even got together. But I kept on nagging, of course, because I’m good at nagging, and in the end we sat up all night and Ro told me about how her family got to Sweden. They fled across the mountains, in the middle of winter, and the children each had to carry a sheet, and if they heard the sound of helicopters they were supposed to lie down in the snow with the sheet over them, so they couldn’t be seen. And their parents would run in different directions, so that if the men in the helicopter started firing, they’d fire at the moving targets. And not at… and I didn’t know what to…”
She cracked, like thin ice on a puddle of water, first just some hairline wrinkles around her eyes, then the rest, all at once. The collar of her top turned a darker color. She was thinking about everything Ro had told her that night, the incomprehensible cruelties that terrible people are capable of inflicting on each other, and the utter insanity of war. Then she thought of how Ro, after all that, had somehow managed to grow up to be the sor
t of person who made other people laugh. Because her parents had taught her during their flight through the mountains that humor is the soul’s last line of defense, and as long as we’re laughing we’re alive, so bad puns and fart jokes were their way of expressing their defiance against despair. Ro told Julia all this that first night, and after that Julia got to spend all of the world’s everydays with her.
* * *
Something like that can make you put up with living with birds.
* * *
“An affair that started in a flower shop,” Estelle nodded slowly. “I like that.” She sat silent for several minutes. Then it burst out of her: “I had an affair once! Knut never knew.”
“Dear Lord!” Anna-Lena exclaimed, now sensing that this was starting to get out of hand after all.
“Yes, it wasn’t all that long ago, you know,” Estelle grinned.
“Who was it?” Julia asked.
“A neighbor in our building. He read a lot, like me. Knut never read. He used to say authors were like musicians who never get to the point. But this other man, the neighbor, he always had a book tucked under his arm when we met in the elevator. So did I. One day he offered me his book, saying: ‘I’ve finished this one, I think you should read it.’ And so we started to swap books. He read such wonderful things. I don’t have the words to describe it, but it was like going on a journey with someone. Where didn’t matter. To outer space. It went on for a long time. I started to fold down the corners of pages when there was a bit I really liked, and he started to write little comments in the margins. Just the odd word. ‘Beautiful.’ ‘True.’ That’s the power of literature, you know, it can act like little love letters between people who can only explain their feelings by pointing at other people’s. One summer I opened a book and sand trickled out of it, and I knew he’d liked it so much he hadn’t been able to put it down. Every now and then I would get a book where some of the pages were crumpled, and I knew he’d been crying. One day I told him that, in the elevator, and he replied that I was the only person who knew that about him.”
“And that was when you…,” Julia nodded with a naughty smile.
“Oh, no, no, no…,” Estelle squeaked, and looked like she might have liked to finish the sentence by saying that she might possibly have wished it had happened, but of course that didn’t change anything. “We were never, it never, I could never…”
“Why not?” Julia asked.
Estelle smiled, proud and full of longing at the same time. It takes a certain age for that, a certain life.
“Because you dance with the person you went to the party with. And I went with Knut.”
“So… what happened?” Anna-Lena wondered.
Estelle’s breathing didn’t show any sign of speeding up, she didn’t have many big secrets left. After this one, possibly none at all.
“One day in the elevator he gave me a book, and inside it was a key to his apartment. He said he didn’t have any family living nearby, and that he wanted someone in the building to have a spare key ‘in case anything happened.’ I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t do anything, but I got the sense that maybe… maybe he would have liked it. If something had happened.”
She smiled. So did Julia.
“So in all that time, you never…?”
“No, no, no. We exchanged books. Until he died a few years later. Something to do with his heart. His siblings put the apartment up for sale, but his furniture was still there at the viewing. So I went along, pretending to be interested in buying it. I walked around in his home, ran my hands over his kitchen counter, the hangers in his closet. In the end I found myself standing in front of his bookcase. It’s such an odd thing, the way you can know someone so perfectly through what they read. We liked the same voices, in the same way. So I let myself have a few minutes to think about what we could have been for each other, if everything had been different, somewhere else in our lives.”
“And then?” Julia whispered.
Estelle smiled. Defiantly. Happily.
“Then I went home. But I kept the key to his apartment. I never told Knut. It was my affair.”
* * *
Silence settled in the closet for a while. In the end Anna-Lena plucked up the courage to say: “I’ve never had an affair. But once I changed hairdressers, and I didn’t dare walk past the old one for several years.”
It wasn’t the strongest anecdote, but she wanted to feel that she was participating. She had never had time for an affair, how on earth does anyone find the time? All that stress, Anna-Lena thought, and a whole new man to deal with. She had spent her life working and rushing home, working and rushing home, and always felt guilty for not being good enough in either place. In those circumstances it’s easy to feel sympathy for other people who aren’t quite good enough. That’s probably why, out of all the people in the apartment who had already had the thought, it was Anna-Lena who was the first to say out loud: “I think we should try to help the bank robber.”
Julia looked up, and their eyes met with a whole new sense of respect.
“Yes, so do I! I was just thinking that. I don’t think any of this was the intention,” Julia nodded.
“I just don’t know how we could go about helping her,” Anna-Lena admitted.
“No, the police must have the building surrounded, so I don’t think there’s any way she can escape, sadly,” Julia sighed.
Estelle drank more wine. She turned the packet of cigarettes over in her hand, because of course you’re not allowed to smoke in front of pregnant women, you really aren’t, at least not until you’re so drunk that you can claim with a clear conscience that you were too drunk to notice that there was one nearby.
“Maybe she could just wear a disguise?” she suddenly said, with just a hint of a slur on the s in “disguise.”
Julia shook her head uncomprehendingly.
“What? Who could wear a disguise?”
“The bank robber,” Estelle said, taking another swig.
“What sort of disguise?”
Estelle shrugged.
“The real estate agent.”
“The real estate agent?”
Estelle nodded.
“Have you seen any sign of a real estate agent in this apartment since the bank robber arrived?”
“No… no, now that you come to mention it…”
Estelle drank more wine, then nodded again.
“I’m fairly certain that all the police outside will take it for granted that there’s a real estate agent present at an apartment viewing. So if…”
Julia stared at her. Then started to laugh.
“So if the bank robber pretends to give herself up and let all the hostages go, she can pretend to be the real estate agent and walk out with the rest of us! Estelle, you’re a genius!”
“Thanks,” Estelle said, and peered down into the bottle with one eye closed to see how much was left before she could start smoking.
Julia struggled to her feet as quickly as she could and hurried over to the door to call to Ro and explain the new plan, but just as she was about to open the door there was a knock on it. Not hard, but hard enough to make the three women jump as if a load of puppies and sparklers had been thrown into the closet. Julia opened the door a crack. The rabbit was standing outside looking awkward, insofar as it was possible to tell.
“Sorry, I don’t want to disturb you. But I’ve been told to put some pants on.”
“Your pants are in here?” Julia wondered.
The rabbit scratched his neck.
“No, I had them in the bathroom, before the viewing started. But I washed my hands and managed to splash water on them, then I saw the scented candles on the washbasin, and thought I might be able to dry my pants by warming them up. And then… well… I managed to set my pants on fire. So then I had to pour even more water over them to put the flames out. So my pants ended up soaking wet. And then the viewing started and I heard you all out in the apartment, and then the bank robber starte
d shouting, and there wasn’t really time… well, to cut a long story short, my pants are still wet. So I was thinking…”
The rabbit’s head swayed in the direction of the suits hanging in the closet, which he was hoping he might be able to borrow instead. His ears accidentally hit Julia’s forehead and she backed away, but the rabbit evidently interpreted this as an invitation to step inside.
“Yes, well, come in, why don’t you…,” Julia grunted.
The rabbit looked around with interest.
“Isn’t this lovely!” he said.
Anna-Lena disappeared beneath the suits and wiped her eyes. Estelle lit a cigarette, because she didn’t think it mattered anymore, and when Anna-Lena aimed a disapproving glance in her direction Estelle said defensively: “Oh, it’ll blow out through the air vent!”
The rabbit tilted his head slightly, then he asked: “What air vent?”
Estelle coughed, it was unclear if that was because of the cigarette or the question: “I mean… there seems to be some sort of ventilation in here, but it was only a guess. There’s a breeze from up in the ceiling, though!”
“What are you talking about?” Julia asked.
Estelle coughed again. Then she stopped coughing. But there was still someone coughing, up in the ceiling.
* * *
They stared at each other, the rabbit and the three women, a diverse group of individuals, to put it mildly, huddled inside a closet at an apartment viewing that had been disrupted by the arrival of a bank robber. Stranger things had probably happened to people in the town, but not much stranger. Estelle had time to think that if Knut had opened the closet door just then he would have laughed out loud, there would have been breakfast everywhere, and she would have loved that. The coughing up in the ceiling continued, like when you try to stifle it and it just gets worse. A cinema cough.
Julia dragged the stepladder to the back of the closet, Estelle got off the chest, Anna-Lena helped the rabbit up. He pressed his hands against the ceiling until it gave way. There was a hatch, and above it a very cramped little space.
Anxious People Page 24