The American Girl (13 page)

Bombshell Pinky Pink with her harsh but soft teenage girl’s voice, a bit drawling as if some chewing gum had been forgotten in her mouth, sort of an eternal chewing gum that reminded you of another time (and that was the point), a younger, happier, and more innocent one. Quite as if it were an occurrence as said. The Islander had pretended to be surprised but politely invited her to sit down. This obvious spectacle performed for Sandra had not mattered to the girl. She would have enjoyed it in any case. And everyone had enjoyed it. Pinky had sat down at the table and the Islander had been in an excellent mood again.
A man has to do what he has to do
the Islander had been saying over and over again between the verses in the so-called conversation, which was about water and wind and the latest complications in an adult TV series called
Peyton Place
, nothing more than that, but the evening had been a complete success anyway, the first successful evening in ages and Sandra had also been cheerful and in some way eternally grateful to Pinky. Then the Islander had gotten drunk so it was Bombshell Pinky Pink who had to be the chauffeur in the car the whole way from the city by the sea to the house in the darker part.

Bombshell Pinky Pink on the large stairs in the house in the darker part of the woods. How she had run up the many steps like a happy child, up and down, up and down, taken striptease-dancing steps and the like so that you rolled your eyes and of course it had been silly and stupid but in some way like a, forgetting about everything else, sudden great delightful and silly laugh in the middle of the horrible, depressing world.

All of it had also had an effect on the Islander, he was satisfied and had quickly pulled the bombshell into the house with him.

But the fractured face of a harelip is truly dreadful
.

Though Sandra had time to make a fool of herself again, at morning tea. She said something, sort of in passing, and almost managed to get the Bombshell to cry. Tears had gathered in Pinky’s eyes and Pinky had nervously scraped the tabletop with her inch-long pink nails.

“I’m not a whore,” the Bombshell said to her. “My profession is that of a striptease dancer.”

And Sandra, she regretted it later of course.

But now, this novembersaturdaymorning a few weeks after the day at the shooting range, Sandra was standing on the beige wall-to-wall carpet in the upper corridor in the house in the darker part of the woods in her bloodred kimono with white butterflies and high-heeled morning slippers, listening. Yes. Then she slowly slowly crept toward the drab opening to the basement stairs. Carefully stepped out onto the spiral staircase, as soundlessly as she possibly could, pressed herself against the white plastered wall like a terrified woman on the cover of an old detective novel, and shuffled downward. The adrenaline continued to rush to her head, like at the shooting range in the moment before you fired your shot. There was something down there. Or someone.

Because Sandra had already heard something similar before. Quite simply the sound of someone lying and sleeping. Someone’s deep, heavy breaths, but in such a high decibel that it sounded as though it could have been a giant or something of the like. A giant who snored, driving his hogs to the market.

Sandra had never heard anything like it. It was absolutely clear it was no one in the family. Only the Islander’s brother, the Black Sheep, could snore like that. The Black Sheep (despite the fact that he had never finished his architect studies, had designed the house in the darker part of the woods, though that hardly had anything to do with the situation at hand) could snore so that
the walls literally vibrated. Once when she and Lorelei Lindberg had come to Little Bombay, also a Saturday, he had been lying on the sofa in the back room of the boutique, snoring.

But that had, which was also very obvious now, been more adult noises. Sandra had immediately understood that the sound coming from the pool was not an adult sound but that of a child. A child of some sort, possibly a giant giantchild.
A mammoth child
flew through Sandra’s head and oh how Doris Flinkenberg would laugh when Sandra described it to her afterward.

And sure enough. The strangest of the strange. A person was lying down there on the bottom of the pool, sleeping. A small person, though not so small in size, but a child. The child had spread out her sleeping bag among all of the paper, newspapers, and fabrics in which she was now curled up and sleeping, and she was sleeping deeply. Snoring with her mouth open and as said it could definitely be heard. Though the sound level was also amplified by the fact that the sound was bouncing against the empty walls and echoed farther out into the emptiness of the whole pool area.

Who the child was. She was not hard to identify. No one other than the strange, persistent kid, Doris Flinkenberg.

Earlier Sandra had run away from her, but now, now it was something else, Sandra understood that right away. That it was time, the right time for the first meeting, one of the most important of all meetings in Sandra’s entire life. Because now it was the most obvious thing in the world that Doris Flinkenberg should be there.

And a laughter bubbled forth in Sandra with a speed that almost surprised her. It was an exhilaration without equal, a happy mood of a kind she had never felt before, not in ages anyway. So, instead of calling her father at work or the police to complain or to call for help or just climbing down into the pool and waking the intruder—because it was clear that Doris Flinkenberg had
broken into the house—Sandra Wärn remained standing at the side of the pool, so quiet, so quiet, and watched Doris Flinkenberg with devotion and curiosity, at the same time as she tried to figure out how she was going to wake Doris Flinkenberg in the most unforgettable way possible. And suddenly it was important. Not explicitly the part about making an impression but to sort of show who you were, like the opening of a game, and with emphasis. Mainly so that all the possibilities that existed in the game would be obvious. Not only who you were but also who you could be.

Sandra took a few steps forward so she was standing right in front of the sleeping Doris in the pool, the still wildly snoring Doris. She stretched out her index finger like a pistol and said with a loud and authoritative voice:

“Pang!
You’re dead! Time to wake up now!” In other words, she did not yell, just spoke a bit louder than normal. But still, she had barely uttered the words before Doris Flinkenberg sat straight up in her sleeping bag with a jerk and drowsy and frightened, she looked around with the gaze of a terrified animal. It was a look Sandra would never forget. In the future Sandra would often think about how Doris slept, it said so much about everything about Doris Flinkenberg.

Like a cat on tenterhooks even when deep in the deepest sleep. Which of course went together with what she was and which she gradually, mostly at the beginning of their acquaintance (what a word for the ever revolutionary!), would explain in detail upon detail: a child who early in life—before she was taken in at the cousin’s house—had learned in some respects the world is, to put it bluntly, a hellish place, that adults cannot be depended on and they do not mind hurting you even though you are a small child who cannot defend yourself, that if you want to survive and live on in a somewhat acceptable way you have to be on your guard and protect yourself as best you can. There is no absolute security anywhere.

Doris Flinkenberg, the mistreated child. And she would pull down the waistband of her pants to prove it: disgusting red-brown
marks on the side. “This is where she grilled me. Her, my marsh mama. Or. She tried.”

But so, in the pool, Doris caught sight of Sandra and quickly recovered. Let out a bemused laugh with no trace of fear in it, almost the opposite: a big and daring laugh dazed with sleep, no excuses here and no explanations either.

“Do you think I look dead? Then you have a problem with your pistol.”

And there would have been and should have been a lot of amusing responses for that. But suddenly Sandra could not come up with a single one; she had suddenly been overpowered again by both the joy over the fact that Doris Flinkenberg was really there but also by her own shyness, which had the habit of playing tricks on her in situations, so she was careful not to drag out the show but at the same time say what she felt was necessary to say now so that Doris would not disappear off somewhere.

“Get up now,” she said. “You’re probably hungry. Should we eat breakfast first?”

And then you could see how Doris Flinkenberg relaxed, and a big, daring smile appropriate for the situation had spread across her entire round face.

“I am extremely hungry,” she said then in the cleanest and most articulate Swedish, as if she were reading a verse out loud at the end of school ceremonies, “terribly
Dorisly
hungry. I could eat a house.”

“Come on then,” Sandra said nonchalantly and started walking back up the stairs. And then for the sake of appearance Doris simply had to hurry to crawl out of her sleeping bag just as nonchalantly but with an eagerness that was difficult to conceal. But it did not matter. Because this was how it was supposed to be, both of them knew that.

And up in the kitchen it began in record time, it did not take more than maybe twenty minutes, the process through which Doris and Sandra got to know each other better and became best friends, inseparable. The one AND the other, everything.

And so it would be during the years that followed up until the point that Doris Flinkenberg, on a dark November day a lot like this November day when they met for the first time, walked up onto Lore Cliff, had the pistol (the real one) with her, held it up against her temple and pulled the trigger.

They did not drink Lapsang souchong for breakfast that first morning in the house in the darker part of the woods, the tea with the smoky taste that Sandra usually always had—she had also been very particular about that. If the right kind of tea was not in the house, if Dad—or Mom, while she was still living there—had for example forgotten to buy any, Sandra had stubbornly refused to eat breakfast at all.

“What’s this?” Doris Flinkenberg shouted with horror when she took her first gulp from the mug Sandra had handed her. “Perfume? I said COFFEE!” Doris resolutely spit the mouthful of tea into the sink. “We always drink coffee in the cousin’s house! Bencku wins pounds of it for us. At the lottery, in other words, he has such
screamingly funny
luck,” Doris added, as if she had been reading out loud from her crossword puzzle book. “Though in games,” she continued lightheartedly and did not notice Sandra flinch. Before Sandra met Doris Flinkenberg she did not know very much about the District and the people there except for a few things and one of them was, of course, that the boy in the woods and Bencku were one and the same. “You know of course who Bencku is? You’ve seen him haven’t you? The idiot in the woods? We come from the same house if that’s not clear already. The cousin’s house. He’s an adopted son there and me, I’m a foster daughter. Oh boy, Sandra, if you only knew: my real roots, they’re definitely nothing to brag about.” And when Doris said that she rolled her eyes in the way that Sandra
would gradually also learn was Doris-specific, and of course Doris mentioned a lot of things as she babbled along, things you wanted to stop at and ask more about (for example, the idiot in the woods, whose name was Bengt) but at the same time in just that moment, the first minutes when they were getting to know each other, it was unnecessary. “Now you have to tell everything about yourself,” Doris Flinkenberg continued resolutely. “What are your hobbies? Mine are”—and here Doris paused before she continued, reached for another sourdough sandwich with a Balkan sausage, which Sandra had set on the table on a plate between them, and kicked the leg of the kitchen table as if to provide rhythm and an expression to her words—“listening to music. Solving crossword puzzles.
True Crimes.”

So Doris just talked and in the beginning it had been rather difficult to get a word in edgewise. But, Sandra realized when she was listening to Doris, it did not matter. She did not have a problem with it. And more than that, she understood again in this strange predestined way that this is what she had been waiting for for so long: Doris’s talk, Doris being there, Doris—everything with Doris. That in some way this is what she had been going around waiting for most of her life.

“Hellooo! I asked a question! Is anyone home?”

“Hm,” Sandra carefully answered. “I don’t know but maybe fabrics. Certain kinds. Not all. And then I also quite like shooting with a pistol. Though I’m not terribly good at it.”

And she had said that and then she did not even dare to look at Doris, instead she was busy listening to her own crazy sentences echoing craziness in the air between them. And she just had to change the topic, fast.

“But now it’s my turn to ask some questions. How did you get in the house? And what are you doing here now anyway?”

Doris Flinkenberg left the first question hanging, but on the other hand she spent a lot of time answering the other one in great detail. The evening before, she had suddenly gotten the
idea that she could not stand one more moment in the cousin’s house, that it was time to run away from there. That purpose hit her like a bolt of lightning, she explained: to just leave and never come back. So Doris had packed her backpack and left the cousin’s house with her sleeping bag under her arm. Then she walked far away, along the road and on different paths. But while she had been walking there in her thin outdoor coat against the wind, in the cold, the irritability slowly disappeared and she had rather quickly started thinking about other things as well, like, for example, had she really taken everything she needed for the rest of her life, for example, she had forgotten the radio cassette player and all of the cassettes. So after not such a long time there on the road she had come to her senses again and turned back. But it had been about time for her to regret it because she had gotten quite a way away from the cousin’s house, far too far, actually, to be able to make it the whole way back.