Sun and Shadow (12 page)

“The girl who worked in the cloakroom at the Park Hotel died yesterday. Did you know that?”

“Eh? No. I knew she was in a bad way.”

“Her boyfriend seems to be about to follow her.”

“Really?”

“Do you think she took it herself?”

“The GHB, you mean? I wouldn’t like to say.”

“She wasn’t the type.”

“None of them ever is.”

“She was pretty.”

 

Winter said good-bye when they emerged into the Calle Tetuan.

“Perhaps we’ll meet again,” Alicia said. “You know where I am ... if you feel hungry again and need some advice.” She looked at him. “Or if you run into any more trouble.” She gave him her business card. Winter put it in his pocket.

“Can I give you a lift if you’re heading east? I have a car down by the bank.”

“No thanks, I have a few things to see to and then I’ll take a bus. I hope everything turns out okay with your father.”

Winter nodded and they went their separate ways. He walked back to the
avenida.
The car was hot inside and out, and he could feel the sweat trickling down his back even before he’d sat down. His mobile rang.

“I can’t make it,” said his sister. He could hear her coughing again. “Tomorrow, though. For sure.”

“I’m on my way to the hospital again.”

“Is he still awake? Is he with it, I mean?”

“We had a little chat last night, in any case.”

“That’s good,” she croaked.

“I don’t know. He was trying to make a sort of farewell speech, but I wouldn’t let him.”

 

The wall surface was rough, like the trunk of a tree. Had he found the paintbrush somewhere in the flat? Or had he taken it with him? He was calm enough now to ask questions, but he couldn’t answer them.

There. He’d finished.

They followed his every movement. Him and her. He didn’t approach them. They just had to sit there, and he’d drawn up the blinds so that it wasn’t so dark inside. It wasn’t quiet in there either. It-wasn‘t-quiet-in-there-either. The music was on auto-reverse. The light from outside shone onto the other guy’s head as he kept an eye on everything from the sofa. Nothing moved. He was pleased that nothing moved. It had been harder with her, but now she was still as well, watching him. Nobody was laughing anymore. Who was in charge now? Who was making the decisions now?

He’d shown them.

He’d show
him
now, make him understand.

He switched off the music, but that was not good. He switched it on again, but lowered the volume and looked around. He could leave now.

Angela woke up before midnight with the feeling that something was about to happen. Something she didn’t want to think about.

In the no-man‘s-land between sleep and waking she had seen the images one after another, like slides projected onto the big, bare bedroom wall.

She got out of bed and put on her robe, her heart pounding. She sat at the kitchen table with a glass of milk. Everything was quiet in the street outside. Somebody flushed a toilet in an apartment upstairs. She considered switching on the radio, but decided not to. Mustn’t get too wide awake. She sat with her hand over her stomach. Mustn’t plan too far ahead.

The swishing noise in the pipes stopped. Still no late-night tram outside, no voices in the darkness, which smelled of snow. She could smell it when she opened the window and breathed in deeply. A premonition of winter, and she closed the window, put the glass in the sink, and went back through the hall. The hiss clattered up, stopped on the landing, and she could hear the door opening and shutting and the sound of gravel scraping against the stone floor. She paused in the hall. Why am I standing here? I want to hear those footsteps go in through a door. Mrs. Malmer’s door.

Good grief.

Some more scraping footsteps. They sounded as if they were outside her door, just outside the door. Angela suddenly found herself incapable of moving. Everything was concentrated on listening for those footsteps.

I shouldn’t sleep here when Erik’s away.

This is ridiculous.

A rasping, grinding sound again. Footsteps again; moving away. She could hear the hundred-year-old elevator rattling its way back up, and the soft clatter as it came to a halt in the corridor outside. The clinking of the sliding steel door followed by a little click and the sound of the cage heading back down again.

Angela stood behind the door. She peered out through the peep-hole and could see the landing in a grotesque wide-angled perspective, but there was no sign of anybody outside. The light was still on. She opened the door, and immediately outside were some grains of black gravel, and a shallow pool of water glittering in the light.

That could be from me, she thought. It takes some time for water to evaporate in the stairwell when there’s a constant cold draft coming from below. Persecution mania. I’ll be wandering around checking for pools of water and grains of gravel all over the building next. She gave a little snort and closed the door.

The alarm clock on the bedside table said twelve-fifteen. She’d have to be up again in six hours, ready for the hospital corridors. The lumps of plaster that had fallen out of the green examination-room walls. Did they always have to be green? Doors with the paint peeling off. Patients must lose hope as they sit waiting and see how the hospital is slowly falling apart. If they couldn’t repair a wall, how the hell could they heal a body that had—

The telephone rang. Angela gave a start. It rang again, seemed to be moving across the table. It’ll be Erik, she thought as she lifted the receiver. It’s happened.

“Yes? Angela here.”

Not a word, just the sound of static.

“Hello? Erik?”

A rustling. Another sound that she couldn’t identify. Was that a voice in the background? Perhaps, very faint. Calls were finding it difficult to make their way across Europe tonight.

“I can’t hear anything. Maybe you should redial? Can you hear me? I can’t hear you.”

Now she could hear the echo of voices, but that was normal: fragments of conversation from anywhere in the world could be picked up by different lines and transformed into a sort of Esperanto. It could be any language at all, a conversation on a mountain peak millions of miles away.

Now she could hear breathing. That wasn’t from a distant mountain peak. It sounded nearby.

“Hello? Is anybody there?”

Breathing again, clear, intentional. It had taken over from the distant babble.

She suddenly felt scared to death. She wanted the babble to return. That had been reassuring. She thought about the images she’d seen in her mind’s eye. The footsteps, the images again, the pool of water ...

More breathing.

“Say something! I can hear that there’s somebody there.” She made her voice sound as threatening as she could, but it came over as tiny, frightened. “Who is it?” And then she thought she could hear something else, something more ... and she dropped the receiver. It hit the edge of the table and fell to the floor and lay there, the earpiece pointing upward. She stared at it for a few seconds, then lifted it up.

It was silent now. The silence was broken by a click, then came the familiar dial tone.

For Chrissakes, Angela! Keep calm. There are idiots who dial a wrong number but can’t bring themselves to admit it. There are also madmen who ring numbers haphazardly in the hope of somebody answering.

But she wanted to talk to Erik, hear his voice, be reassured.

His mobile was switched off. She left a message. What was going on? He promised he would never switch it off while he was away.

She looked at the receiver in her hand. Should she leave it off for the rest of the night? That would be stupid. Erik might need to phone. No doubt there was some temporary fault affecting his mobile. She dialed his number again.

 

“Erik here.”

“Why the hell don’t you answer the phone?”

“Eh? What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t been answering. Your phone was switched off.”

He looked at it, as if half-expecting to see some fault or other.

“When was this?”

“Just now. A couple of minutes ago.”

“Really? Well, it’s working okay now.”

“I can hear that, for God’s sake.”

“What’s the matter, Angela?” He looked at his watch. Nearly one. “You seem ...”

“Somebody’s trying to phone me here.”

“What do you mean?”

She explained.

“That’s happened to me,” he said. “I expect it happens to everybody at some time or other.”

“That makes me feel a lot better.”

“But I don’t like what you’re saying. Was this the first time?”

“I’ve never experienced anything like this before. Never in
my
apartment.”

“So you mean that it has to do with my apartment, is that it?”

“No, Erik. For God’s sake, I don’t know what I’m saying. I expect it was just somebody who dialed a wrong number and didn’t want to own up.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m overreacting. I just wanted to hear your voice. Now I can hear a tram outside. I feel calm again now.”

“You can call me whenever you want.”

“How’s your father today?”

“So-so. I’m at the hospital now, but I’ll probably go back to my hotel before long.”

“Have you spoken to your dad’s doctor yet? Al—Whatever his name is?”

“Alcorta. Of course not. He’s a ghost. In a white coat.”

 

He slept badly for a few hours. The refrigerator in his basic room was noisier than it had been before. No, no, it was the same as ever. All the noises were the same. The woman in one of the next-door houses bawled her husband into life before six, and a quarter of an hour later Winter heard muffled hammer blows. So, it was the carpenter.

He had emptied his pockets onto the table next to the wardrobe.

Her business card was illuminated by the morning light shining in from the patio.

Winter shook his head and went for a shower.

 

The table next to his at Gaspar’s was empty. Winter missed his breakfast companion with the hacking cough. The waiter arrived with coffee and
tostadas
even though Winter hadn’t ordered. He saw how Winter was looking at the neighboring table and made the sign of the cross. Winter lit a Corps after breakfast and watched the smoke drifting up into the sky. The sun was clawing its way up behind the mountain.

 

Lotta Winter arrived by taxi just as he was getting out of his rented car in the hospital car park. She looked pale and had a hacking cough, though it was nothing compared with that of his former breakfast companion.

‘A decent flight, I hope?“

“No. I was sitting next to a drunk.”

“That’s a charter flight for you.”

“I see you haven’t been in the sun much.”

“Let’s go in,” he proposed.

“If we dare.”

“He’s awake. Mom called not long ago.”

“She phoned me as well. In the taxi.”

“He’s back in the nursing ward.”

“How many times is this?”

“Does it matter?”

“I think I’ll cross my fingers,” she said as they climbed the steps and entered the cool gloom of the entrance hall.

Their mother was waiting for them in the corridor. A short man in a white coat came up to them and held out his hand. Lotta shook it and looked at her brother.

“
Soy Pablo Alcorta. Médico
.”

“
Soy Lotta Winter. Médico también, pero ahora hija de Bengt Winter
.”

“Ah.”

She’s been here for three whole minutes and has already met Alcorta, thought Winter, holding out his hand. Maybe I’m the ghost around here.

 

Bergenhem collected Ada from nursery school and walked around the block with her. She was fascinated by everything. He tried to settle her into the car, but all she did was scream.

It had been impossible yesterday to get her into the child seat in the car, and he’d driven home from the Co-op with her on his knee, behind the steering wheel. Luckily none of his colleagues had stopped the car.

Martina had been quiet all morning, almost as quiet as he had.

She’d gone to work now, and he’d felt as if he’d been liberated when he came back to the empty house. Ada was laughing at something in her own private world. He looked at her, and felt ashamed of what he was thinking. It started to snow.

He prepared a bowl of mashed apricots for her and made coffee for himself. He scanned the front page of the newspaper and tried to read while Ada was eating. He adjusted her bib, and let her splash milk and mashed apricot all over the table.

He put the paper to one side, without remembering anything of what he’d read. He felt stiff all over after an uneventful night spent in the car outside a building in Hisingen. Waiting and waiting, then going home. Martina had already delivered Ada to nursery school by then. An empty house, a feeling of liberation. What a stupid expression! Liberation from what?

 

He was driving his own car. It wasn’t yet noon. He’d tried to get a good night’s sleep, but that was ages ago. He stopped to make a few purchases. He’d no idea what when he went into the shop. The owner nodded to him, as if he were a regular.

There was something lying on the counter. Had he bought it? Should he buy it? He turned away and left the shop. He had it in his hand. Nobody shouted after him. He looked back, and the owner waved to him. Of course. He knew where he was now.

Of course. It was here.

He looked around as he came out. Nobody there.

He went back and waited outside the shop, looking in another direction.

When evening came, the family was assembled in the intensive care ward. Dr. Alcorta had decided to move his Swedish patient there an hour ago. The umpteenth move, Winter thought.