Frozen Moment (54 page)

    'It's
OK,' he said, waving vaguely in the direction of the door. Like another
Godfather, even if a patriarch was the last thing he felt like, lying there in
his bed. He didn't even understand why he was still in
bed,
as if a washed-out sheet stamped with the county logo could take the sting out
of the sordid reason why he had been brought in.

    What
he remembered after cutting himself was the crap between the floor tiles, the
yellow layers of shed skin smeared right next to his face as he lay in the
corner thinking about the expression
The
life
seeped out of him.
It was like falling asleep: your body grows heavier and
lighter at the same time. He was sucked into a vortex of vivid colours,
spinning faster and faster until he lost all sense of time and space and it
became fascinating and solemn before everything went black and he just had time
to think,
I'm dying now.

    According
to the doctor, the association with sleep was likely to have been correct: he
had presumably fallen asleep there on the floor. Since the blood in the wounds
had coagulated, his life had never been in any danger.

    He
wished there was a way to stop Solveig and Caroline finding out that he hadn't
even managed to create the tiniest risk of dying, despite the fact that that
had been the whole point of the project. Instead he had woken up in an
ambulance with its siren wailing, a male nurse on one side of him and Solveig
on the other.

    Oddly
enough, he couldn't remember what he had been thinking beforehand, whether he
had really wanted to die or not. Therefore he felt neither relief nor
disappointment, just a comprehensive indifference. In order to avoid showing
any form of reaction, he had kept his eyes closed and allowed his hand to be
squeezed by his mother's cold, damp one.

    He
heard a sound from the corridor before the door opened with a sigh.

    
'Hi there.'

    He
had subconsciously focused on the door ever since the nurse told him he had a visitor,
so it wasn't the sound of her voice that surprised him. Nor was it the way she
looked, even though Caroline's appearance had transformed once more over the
past few days. It was the
way
she was looking at him. He noticed that
she was wearing a lot of eye make-up - blue and green and sparkly. Her lipstick
smelled of fat and stickiness, like sweets.

    'I
hardly recognised you,' he said, pointing at her hair, which tumbled over her
shoulders in chocolate-brown ringlets. 'Is it a wig?'

    'No.'
She smiled and bent her head so that he could see the half- centimetre plastic
solders fixing the mass of extensions to her own short hair. 'It's still
cheating, but it looks better.'

    It
was as if the smile had got stuck on her face. It made him feel embarrassed.
Caroline was his mother's ally. Even if she had been a natural, if not
necessarily pleasant, part of his everyday life for some time now, there was no
affinity between them. On the contrary: he had clearly felt himself to be
outside the little group with his dead sister at its centre. None of them
mentioned the reason for this, despite the fact that it was living and
breathing under their roof. Solveig had always believed he could have prevented
Maya's death. The only reason she chose not to articulate her accusations was
because she knew it was unnecessary. He had not been slow to accuse himself.

    He
didn't respond to Caroline's smile - the
rules of adolescence
still applied as far as he was concerned, and sullenness was
the
expression he adopted when nothing else came naturally.

    She
moved her chair closer to the bed and leaned forward. He caught a glimpse of
her breasts beneath the low neckline of her blouse. To his surprise he felt the
same mixture of excitement, distaste and embarrassment he had felt on the few
occasions he had caught sight of Maya's naked body. He didn't need to think for
too long before he recognised the scent: she was wearing Maya's perfume.

    Caroline
frightened him, but he couldn't stop the rage that came bubbling up inside him.

    'You're
wearing Maya's perfume.'

    He
stared at her, even though the look she gave him in return made the room spin.
Instead of replying she spread her arms over the bedcover with a slight but
unmistakable pressure that made his thighs tingle. He gasped for breath but
refused to look away.

    Slowly,
emphasising every syllable, Caroline spoke his name.

    'Did
you know that on the other side of the world there's an extremely religious
tribe who live in complete isolation. Their teenage boys undergo a special
ritual in order to become men: they cut their arms and legs and smear
themselves with the blood. It has something to do with confessing their sins,
like the Christian martyrs. Then the boy has to lie in a cave, which the older
women have prepared by burning a particular kind of wood. I can't remember what
it's called but I think it's like our juniper and it has a powerful smell. The
boy has to lie on a bed of leaves for three days and three nights. Sometimes
the boy has cut too deep, and he bleeds to death. This means that the gods have
seen his courage and called him to them - they want him straight away. But
usually the boy survives and returns to his village after the three days, and
the wounds become scars - long dark snakes on his body. The more striking the
network of scars, the higher the status the man will have. They are proof of
his bravery.
And of the fact that he has gained insight into
something important.
That he has understood and shouldered the burden of
his guilt and is ready to devote the rest of his life to atoning for it.'

    She
leaned towards his face. Sweat broke out on his brow and under his arms. His
nostrils caught a whiff of her breath. It smelled sweet and acrid and made him
want to pull back and lean closer.

    'There's
no such tribe, is there?' he said in a thin voice, and her moist lower lip
glistened as a smile passed over her face.

    He
wanted to stand up for himself and tell her what his social studies teacher had
said - that revelling in guilt and martyrdom is exclusive to Western religions
- but he was unable to get enough air into his lungs; she was too heavy,
leaning on his body, and her gaze was too much like fire burning into his eyes,
frightening him into silence. Just when he thought he was going to pass out
from lack of oxygen, she pulled back, but only after allowing her hands to roam
across the sheet. She leaned in again. Her moist lips closed over his thin dry
ones, and she sucked his lower lip into her mouth. The pain shot along his
spine like a bolt of lightning as she bit him. He exploded in convulsions, his
knees drawn
up,
forming a protective wall around
himself and his body with his hands and arms.

    Caroline
took a step back, her face expressing sympathy and contempt, a kind of
tenderness that his tears of embarrassment had evidently aroused within her.

    She
caressed his wet cheek with her fingertips.

    'When
you come home you can move back into your own room.'

    2007

    The
dog had been winding itself around his
legs,
making a
high- pitched whimpering sound that didn't seem appropriate for the huge
Newfoundland. After Sven had fallen over him several times, a well- aimed kick
saw to it that the dog quickly put some distance between himself and his
irritable master. Sven pushed a pang of guilt to one side. He had other things
on his mind.

    Under
normal circumstances they both enjoyed the slow ritual of feeding the mink.
Albert was his third Newfoundland. They didn't usually live into old age, which
was the disadvantage of large dogs: their hip joints gave way. Twice he had had
to take his dog and his gun round the back of the house. It wasn't much fun,
but it was more humane than letting the dog suffer.

    Through
the window slits he could see from the tops of the fir trees that the wind had
died down.

    Two
figures in identical red padded jackets, both too large, with matching red and
blue backpacks, appeared in front of the house. They were waving at something
over by the road. Eriksson's ageing Saab pulled up beside them. The next moment
they were gone.

    Every
third day Sven picked up Eriksson's and Kajsa's kids in the morning. He dropped
the whole shower of them at the school gate, and picked them up at the same
place at three o'clock. Car pooling, it was called. He was rarely in a good
mood when it was his turn to play school bus. Usually he just grunted briefly
when the kids jumped in the back of the car. The kids were also strangely
silent during the journey. Sven's only experience of children was the two he
had been landed with as a result of his marriage to Lee, but he still had the
idea that kids usually made a racket. Anyway, it didn't matter. He was just
glad they were quiet.

    It
annoyed him that Lee hadn't managed to learn to drive. He had explained to her
many, many times, with varying degrees of irritation, that you needed a driving
licence when you lived as far from town and the public transport system as they
did.

    Lee.
Food and housework had been the main things on his mind when he realised a few
years ago that he needed a woman in his life. Love, of course - he wasn't made
of wood, after all - but above all he wanted to be spared the worry about all
those jobs at home that were not a man's responsibility. The alternative -
employing some kind of home help - cost money he didn't have. And the house had
never been so clean. He couldn't take that away from her. She was never difficult
about her duties the way Swedish women sometimes were, particularly those who
turned to feminism to find the answer to why they were unhappy with themselves
and their lives. He'd met their sort. The fact that he had previously chosen to
live alone didn't mean he lacked experience of the opposite sex.

    No,
it wasn't because of social ineptitude that he had contacted the organisation
that had found him Lee - after all the forms had been filled in and matched up
- nor because he couldn't manage to get himself a Swedish woman. He was not
unsavoury in any way. In fact, as the owner of a working business, he was
attractive - even if the mink farm mostly ran on subsidies these days, thanks
to the bloody animal rights fanatics. It wouldn't have been all that difficult
to get some woman from town to paint herself a romantic picture of a country
kitchen and
a
herb garden, working herself up until
she would have married the devil himself. But to get hold of a woman who would
roll up her sleeves and throw herself into her work without going on about
equality and self-fulfilment, that was tricky.

    The
idea had been maturing for a couple of years, after he had made a fresh start
and bought the farm. He had gone for a Thai mostly by chance. And he also went
for Lee mostly by chance, if he was completely truthful. The catalogues
contained thousands of hopeful women of all ages. He had concentrated on the
younger ones, but not the youngest of all: he suspected their eyes were still
full of dreams. The slightly older ones, he reasoned, had hopefully already
realised in the hard school of life that reality rarely lives up to those
dreams. Because what he wanted was a helping hand in the everyday running of
the place, not constant discussion from someone who felt sorry for herself or
told him what he ought to be doing.

    So,
in many ways, he was happy with Lee. This was despite the fact that she had
kept her children hidden from him right up to the moment the wedding was
booked, and they had arranged passports and the trip home. Then, once she had
him in her grasp, she had dropped the bombshell about the two fatherless
children out in the country, living with her old grandmother.

    'Well,
they can stay there,' he had said at first, seething with rage, 'or we forget
the whole bloody thing.' If there was one thing he couldn't stand it was being
deceived or exploited.

    She
had wept, there in the hotel room. Hurled
herself
on
the threadbare carpet, clung to his legs like a madwoman, screaming so loudly
that the hotel owner had come knocking on the door, afraid that someone was
being murdered.

    He
had spent a whole afternoon and evening wandering around in the disgusting
tumult and stench of Bangkok. Up and down the
streets until
the black cloud in front of his eyes slowly faded and was
replaced by
sober reasoning. He had put a lot of money into this project. Under no
circumstances was he going home empty-handed. To start again from the beginning
would mean spending another fortune. There was no guarantee he would find another
woman who matched his requirements as well in every other respect. Nor could he
stand the thought of another round of artificial parties and eternal dates in
slightly seedy restaurants. Particularly as one woman was bewilderingly like
another in his eyes and the language barrier precluded any form of real
communication.