‘Mummy,’ he said, ‘where’s Uppsala?’
‘Just north of Stockholm,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘Can we go and see Peter and the other cats one day?’
‘Definitely,’ Annika said, remembering that there were special cat walks where you could follow in the author Gösta Knutsson’s footsteps around the churches, castle and university.
‘I think she’s prettiest,’ Kalle said, pointing to a white cat and slowly spelling out ‘Ma-ry Cream-nose’.
Annika blinked. ‘Can you read?’ she said, astonished. ‘Who taught you to do that?’
He shrugged. ‘On the computer,’ he said. ‘Otherwise you can’t play.’
He stood up, closed the book and put it back on the shelf. Then looked sternly down at her sitting on the red cushion.
‘Boots,’ he said. ‘You promised. My old ones have got a hole in.’
She smiled, caught hold of one trouser leg and pulled him to her, he laughed and struggled, and she blew on his neck.
‘We’ll get the bus to the shops,’ she said. ‘Go and get your clothes on. Ellen’s waiting for us.’
The number one pulled up just as they reached the bus-stop, and the three of them found seats right at the back.
‘Army green,’ Kalle said. ‘I don’t want blue again, only babies have blue boots.’
‘I’m not a baby,’ Ellen said.
‘Of course you can have green,’ Annika said. ‘As long as they’ve got some.’
They got off at Kungsträdgården and hurried across the street between the showers of slush thrown up by the cars driving past. They tugged off their hats and gloves and scarves when they were inside the shopping centre, stuffing them into Annika’s roomy bag. In a shoe shop on the upper floor they found a pair of army-green, lined rubber boots in the right size, tall enough and with reflective patches. Kalle refused to take them off. Annika paid and they took the old ones home in a bag.
They got out in the nick of time, Ellen had got too hot and was starting to whine, but she fell silent again once they were out in the cold and darkness of Hamngatan, quietly walking along with her hand in Annika’s. Annika took Kalle’s hand as well as they went to cross the road by the department store, concentrating on fending off the cascades of dirty water from the cars, when the silhouette of a person on his way out of the shop across the street caught her eye.
That’s Thomas
, she thought without realizing she was thinking it.
What’s he doing here?
No
, she thought,
it isn’t him
.
The man took a couple of steps forward, his breath lit up by a streetlamp, yes, it was him!
Her face broke into a broad smile, the warm joy that melted things came back. He was out buying Christmas presents! Already!
She laughed; he was such a Christmas freak. Last year he started buying presents in September – she remembered how angry he got when she found them at the bottom of his wardrobe and had wondered what those parcels were and what they were doing there.
A violent spray of slush hit them and Ellen screamed. Annika pulled the children back from the kerb and yelled angrily at the taxi. When she looked up again Thomas was gone, she searched the crowd for him, and saw him again, he was turning to face someone, a woman with blond hair and a long coat went up to him and he put his arm round her. Thomas pulled the other woman to him and kissed her. There was complete silence and everyone else vanished. Annika was staring down a long tunnel and at the other end her husband was kissing a blonde woman with a passion that made her insides freeze and shatter.
‘Mummy, it’s green!’
But she didn’t move. People jostled her, she saw their faces talking to her but their voices were mute. She saw Thomas go off, vanishing with his arm round the blonde woman’s shoulders, the woman’s hand round his waist, they walked slowly away with their backs to her, enclosed in their coupledom, swallowed up by the sea of people.
‘Why aren’t we going, Mummy? Now it’s red again.’
She looked down at her children, their faces looking up at her, eyes clear and questioning, and realized that her mouth was wide open. She swallowed a scream, snapped her mouth shut, looked at the traffic.
‘Soon,’ she said, in a voice that came from deep within her. ‘We’ll go next time.’
And the lights went green and the bus came and they had to stand all the way to Kungsholmstorg.
The children started singing as they climbed the stairs, the tune was familiar but she couldn’t place it, she couldn’t find the right door-key and had to try several times.
She went into the kitchen and picked up the phone, dialled his mobile number but got the message service. He had turned it off. He was walking with his arm
round a blonde woman somewhere in Stockholm, not answering when she called.
So she called his office, and Arnold, his tennis partner, and no one anywhere answered.
‘What are we having for tea?’
Kalle was standing in the door in his shiny new boots.
‘Coconut chicken with rice.’
‘With broccoli?’
She shook her head, feeling a panic attack bubbling up. She clutched the sink, looking into her son’s eyes and decided not to drown.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Water chestnuts and bamboo shoots and baby sweetcorn.’
His face relaxed, he smiled and came a step closer.
‘Do you know what, Mummy?’ he said. ‘I’ve got a wobbly tooth. Feel!’
And she reached out her hand, saw that it was trembling, she felt his left front tooth and, yes, it was definitely loose.
‘That’ll come out soon.’
‘Then I get a gold coin from the tooth fairy,’ Kalle said.
‘Then you get a gold coin from the tooth fairy,’ Annika said, turning away; she had to sit down.
Her insides had turned into razorblades and shards of ice, cutting her when she breathed. The kitchen table was swaying.
There’s no point
, it sang,
there’s no point
. And the angels tuned up in the background.
Suddenly she felt that she was about to be sick. She dashed into the toilet behind the kitchen and her stomach turned inside out, half-digested pasta from 7-Eleven tore at her throat, making her tears overflow.
Afterwards she hung across the toilet, the stench revolting her. The angels sang at full volume.
‘Shut up!’ she yelled, slamming the toilet lid.
She walked angrily into the kitchen, pulling out all the ingredients for dinner, burned herself on the flame when she put the rice on, cut herself when she sliced the onion and cut up the chicken, shaking as she opened the tins of coconut milk and baby sweetcorn and Asian chestnuts.
Was she wrong?
It wasn’t impossible. Thomas looked like a lot of other Swedish men – tall and fair and broad-shouldered, with the beginnings of a stomach, and it had been dark and they were quite a long way away; maybe it wasn’t him standing there with the blonde woman at all.
She gripped the stove, closed her eyes and took four deep breaths.
Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe she’d seen wrong.
She straightened up, relaxed her shoulders, opened her eyes and heard the door open.
‘Daddy!’
The children’s cries of joy and sturdy welcoming hugs, his deep voice expressing a mixture of happiness and cautious fending-off; she fixed her gaze on the extractor fan and wondered if it showed, if there was something in his face that would give her the answer.
‘Hello,’ he said behind her back, kissing her on the back of her head. ‘How are you feeling? Better?’
She breathed in and out before turning round and setting her eyes on him.
He looked the same as usual. He looked exactly like he usually did. Dark-grey jacket, dark-blue jeans, light-grey shirt, shimmering silk tie. His eyes were the same, they were a bit tired and slightly disillusioned, his hair thick and brush-like above his bushy eyebrows.
She noticed she was holding her breath and took a deep, greedy breath.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘a bit better.’
‘Are you going to work tomorrow?’
She turned round to stir the chicken, hesitating.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been sick.’
‘As long as you don’t give us all this winter vomiting bug,’ Thomas said, sitting down at the kitchen table.
It couldn’t have been him. It must have been someone else.
‘How was work today?’ she said, putting the saucepan on a trivet from Designtorget.
He sighed, holding the morning paper out in front of him, preventing her from seeing his eyes.
‘Cramne at Justice is difficult to deal with. A load of talk and not much action. The girl from the Federation of County Councils and I are having to do most of the work, and he gets the credit.’
Annika stood still, the pan of rice in her hand, and stared at the headline on the front page of the paper, something to do with a leak about the culture proposal that was due next week.
‘The Federation of County Councils,’ she said. ‘What was her name again?’
Thomas inadvertently let one corner of the paper fold back, she met his eyes for an instant before he shook the paper to make it stand up again.
‘Sophia,’ he said. ‘Sophia Grenborg.’
Annika stared at the picture of the Minister of Culture illustrating the article.
‘What’s she like?’
Thomas carried on reading, hesitating a few moments before replying. ‘Ambitious,’ he said, ‘pretty good. Often tries to lobby for the Federation at our expense. She can be bloody annoying.’
He folded the paper, got up and tossed it onto the window sill.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the kids. I don’t want to miss tennis this week.’
And he came back into the kitchen with a squealing child under each arm, put them on their chairs, felt the loose tooth and admired the new boots, flicked the pigtails and listened to tales of sweet machines and promises to visit Peter No-Tail in Uppsala.
I’m imagining things
, she thought.
I must have seen wrong
.
She tried to laugh, but couldn’t thaw out the sharp stone in her chest.
It wasn’t him. It was someone else. We’re his family and he loves us. He’d never let the children down
.
They ate quickly, didn’t want to miss the cartoons.
‘That was great, thanks,’ Thomas said, giving her a peck on the cheek.
They cleared up together, their hands occasionally touching, their eyes meeting for brief moments.
He would never leave me
.
She poured detergent into the dishwasher and switched it on. He took her face in his hands, studying her face with a frown.
‘It’s good you’re going to have another day at home,’ he said. ‘You look really pale.’
She looked down, pushed his hands away.
‘I feel a bit washed out,’ she said, and walked out of the kitchen.
‘Don’t wait up,’ he said to the back of her head. ‘I promised Arnold I’d go for a beer afterwards.’
She turned to ice in the doorway, the razor-sharp stone rotating in her chest. She stood still, feeling her heart thud.
‘Okay,’ she said, regaining control of her muscles again, moving one foot in front of the other, out into
the hall, into the bedroom, onto the bed. She heard him take his sports bag and tennis racket out of the hall cupboard, he called goodbye to her and the children, she heard their distracted reply and her own silence.
Had he noticed anything odd about her? Had he reacted in a particular way?
She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.
To be honest, she had been a bit strange this past year. He wasn’t just reacting to this evening.
She got up, walked round the bed to use the phone on her little table.
‘Thomas said you were ill,’ Arnold said, the only one of Thomas’s old friends who had ever really accepted her. ‘Are you feeling any better?’
Annika swallowed and muttered.
‘Well, I can quite see why he can’t play tonight when you’re this bad, but this is the second week in a row.’
Annika fell. The floor beneath her became a black hole and she was sailing off through space.
‘I’ll have to find another partner if he keeps cancelling, I hope you can see that.’
‘Can’t you give it a bit longer?’ Annika said, sinking into the bed. ‘He appreciates your matches so much.’
Arnold sighed, irritated. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but Thomas is a real bloody pest. He can never make a decision and stick to it. If you book a fixed time on court for the whole autumn, you can’t just decide not to use it.’
Annika put a hand over her eyes, her heart racing.
‘Well, I’ll tell him,’ she said, and hung up.
Some time must have passed, because suddenly the children were with her in bed, one on each side of her, they were singing something she vaguely recognized and she hummed along, and in the background the angels sang a harmony.
These are my children
, she thought.
He’ll never take my children away from me
.
‘Right,’ she said, ‘it’s time for bed.’
And she got them into bed by reading them a story, without any awareness of what she was reading. She tucked them in and kissed them and went round turning out the lights. She huddled into the alcove by the living-room window and rested her temple against the ice-cold glass. She could feel the draught from the ill-fitting frame against her thighs, and listened to the wind as it tried to creep round the hinges. Her insides were mute and calm, weighed down by the rumbling stone.
The apartment lay in darkness behind her. The swinging streetlamp outside cast yellow shadows across the room, from the outside her windows were nothing but black holes.
She listened, trying to hear the children’s breathing but could only hear her own. She held her breath trying to hear more, but her hearing was blocked by her heartbeat, the blood rushing and racing and bubbling in her head.
Unfaithful
, she thought.
Sven was always unfaithful
.
She had refused to see it for all those years, and the only time she protested he had hit her in the head with a pair of pliers. Without realizing it, she fingered the small scar on her forehead, it was almost invisible now, she hardly ever thought about it.
She was used to men being unfaithful.