by Paddy Kelly
Damien was happily playing on the jeep and Eoin found his gaze wandering again to the young mothers standing nearby. They were all classic early-thirties Swedish mums from the Södermalm district, with trained limbs and swishy hair and way too many teeth. He gazed at them longingly as he chewed his sandwich and was only brought back to reality when Alice prodded him with a mug of coffee, freshly extracted from her thermos. He mumbled his thanks.
”And how is it having Damien by yourself?”
He shrugged. “It's only four days every two weeks at the moment. So it’s basically day-care, parks, home, food, you know the drill. Not many babysitters though, she kept the friends and the family as well as the house.”
“The house? She's still there? But you bought the house together, right?”
“Not really. Her family fronted us most of the deposit since I didn't have a good job when we bought it. We agreed to sell it, but it kind of hasn't happened yet. I suspect her parents are helping her with the payments.”
A few small cinnamon buns made an appearance, and Eoin took one of those too. “Plus she guilts me out for even bringing up the idea of her leaving it—”
“Oh don't give me that! You paid for the loan every month and you fixed the place up. Now you're living in a one-room and paying through the nose for it. That's your house as much as hers! You have to be tough with her Eoin!”
He gave a lukewarm nod. Sure, being tough was a great idea in theory, but when it came to Jenny it never seemed to stick. It was never a case of just Eoin versus Jenny in any discussion. It always seemed to turn into Eoin the family-smasher against Jenny and Innocent Child. And constantly trying to squirm out of that position in every discussion was more exhausting that anything else he knew.
He flipped up his sunglasses as a cloud slid across the sun. He realised they had just been talking about him and nothing else all morning.
“So how are things with you?”
Alice paused in her chewing and thought for a moment. Her face lit up. “Oh, I was on a date! Here, wait, I'll show you.”
She shoved her coffee mug at Eoin, reached for her bag and pulled out a big notebook. She flipped to a page somewhere in the middle and spread it open on the bench between them.
“This one.”
Eoin leaned closer, not really sure what he was looking at. On the page was pasted a couple of printed-out photos of a man along with a long text.
“Nice to look at,” Alice said. “Just one fatal problem—complete asshole. Plus his photo was five years out of date and in those five years he had expanded, in all the wrong directions.”
Eoin shook his head. “I thought you were on a dating site? So what’s all the paper for?”
“Just for my records.” She flicked the pages of the notebook and Eoin saw that there were several dozen men in there, all with photographs and texts and her own handwritten notes in red ink.
“Okay, fine,” Eoin said. “But why keep them all in a book like that? It's a bit, you know, stalkerish.”
“Well forgive me for making the whole nasty process as efficient as I can. I need to remember who's who, for a start. It also removes the danger that I meet the same guy twice and not realise it. People have profiles on many sites, you know. And some days, when there's not much to choose from, I can go back and maybe give one of this lot a second chance. Assuming they weren't total morons.”
Eoin slid a little closer on the bench (ignoring her fruity perfume as best he could) and paid careful attention as she turned the pages of her intriguing notebook.
“There's a lot of men in there, Alice. How many dates do you go on?”
“A few, but never more than two or three a week.”
“What?” Eoin said, almost choking on half a cinnamon bun. “Two or three a week?”
Alice gave him a stern look. “Eoin, it's the twenty-first century. This is how people meet these days. There's nothing weird about dating a lot of rubbish to find the few good ones. Plus I need a good system to keep tabs on them because of my particular … tastes.”
Eoin couldn't let that go. “What tastes?”
She gave a sly grin. “Well, I like English speakers. It's my thing. Those accents get me horizontal pretty easy. And there's not that many of you guys in Stockholm, so I have to keep track of who I've seen and when. It's embarrassing to meet the same guy twice and not remember. Or his friend. Or his uncle.”
“Right,” Eoin said, trying not to blush. She patted his arm.
“Oh you're so cute when you get flustered. But don't worry, you're off the menu. Oh look, I think you're needed over there.”
Eoin looked up. Little Damien was clinging to the rail of the jeep and crying. A trio of cute mums were looking around with quizzical concern. Eoin jumped to his feet, brushed off a few crumbs and sauntered on over. Damien, seeing him coming, reached out a little hand and gave a plaintive “Pappa!”
Nice job kid, Eoin thought as he hurried up. Couldn't look cuter if I had trained you specially.
“Oh no, what's happened?” He pulled Damien from the jeep and wiped the tears away. Damien gave him a blubbery hug, giving Eoin the chance to look around. His gaze alighted, quite by accident, on the three mums.
Go on, came Alice’s voice in his mind. Say something!
“I'm sorry,” he managed, slowly, and in English. “But did you see what happened?”
Left Mum exchanged a few whispered words with Middle Mum, who then took a step forward. Eoin's chest fluttered ridiculously. Middle Mum had deep brown eyes and her dark hair was cut in a severe and sexy bob. She wore a flimsy green summer dress that showed off her cappuccino skin and carved limbs to perfection. He tried not to stare and felt himself failing quite dramatically.
“I think he banged his head on … the side,” she said, in a light and bouncy voice. “On that thing, there.”
“Oh, you mean on the rail?” Middle Mum nodded and Eoin nodded back, aware that he was grinning just a little too much.
She smiled and turned towards Damien. “He's a cute one.”
“Um, yeah, I suppose he is.” Eoin stared at the woman for a few seconds, wondering what he should say next. It quickly became too many seconds and he felt his moment slide away.
Middle Mum saved them by nodding before the swelling discomfort became unbearable. “Well, goodbye then,” she said and returned to the clutches of her sisters.
Eoin spun around as if his heels were on fire and legged it back to Alice, who was watching the whole thing with naked amazement. She shook her head.
“So those were your best moves? Because they weren't very good ones. She called you cute for God's sake, and you didn't do anything!”
“No she didn't,” he snapped, “she called Damien cute—”
“Can you be any dumber? Of course she couldn't call you cute directly, but when your kid is cute, then so are you, obviously!”
“Ahh,” he said slowly. He looked around and saw the three mums were now packing up their things and inserting small children into a fleet of hi-tech child carriers. Middle Mum was leaning over and the sunlight shimmered around her contours in a way that made Eoin stare far too intently. He sat down heavily, with still-blubbering Damien on his knee.
“Okay, you're right. I'm just out of practise.”
“What practise? Just open your mouth and talk! You have one of the sexiest accents on earth, so use it. Just don’t speak Swedish and you’ll be fine.”
“Sexy?” Eoin said, looking up. “Really?” This was news to him, as he'd never considered his accent particularly sexy. It was just a fairly standard Irish accent, nothing as exotic as a Cork or even a Dublin accent. It had never been notable in Ireland, naturally, and he'd not been single long enough in Sweden to think much about it. Perhaps this was just a quirk of Alice's. Maybe she thought Irish accents were the hottest thing ever, but maybe other women didn't notice or care?
He went through quite a few seconds of internal dialogue until he picked up on the rest of what Alice had sai
d. He glowered at her.
“Wait, you're saying my Swedish is bad?”
Alice matched his glower and added some stern. “Yes Eoin, I am. Not bad for having only been here four years, but still fairly awful. You should always use English, and keep the Swedish locked away, to be used in case of emergency. And if you do the ladies will pay attention, I promise you.”
Damien was quiet now, his head pressed against Eoin’s chest. The little boy’s hair, despite hours of frantic running around, was still sweet-smelling. Damien ruffled it gently and watched as the three mums passed on their way out of the park. They were walking three abreast with their buggies in a line before them. Then Middle Mum threw a casual glance in Eoin's direction. Her eyes lingered, for only a second, but linger they undoubtedly did. He could only watch as they exited the park, turned the corner up Skånegatan and disappeared from view.
Alice gave him a fierce look and Eoin sighed.
“I know, I know! But they're probably not even single.”
“What? Eoin, you throw a rock in this park, you'll hit a dozen single mothers. Stockholm is the world capital of separated parents. They probably have it on a little brass plate somewhere for the tourists. You could not be single in a better place!”
“I suppose,” Eoin said, still thinking of the luscious silhouette of Middle Mum. “But how am I supposed to meet anyone? When I don't have Damien I work extra, and when I do, I'm stuck at home. Not much time for socialising, is there?”
Alice shoved her notebook at him. “Exactly! So this is perfect for you! You find women online, you chat them up when you have Damien, and when you’re free you go out and meet them. In fact, how have you not done this up to now? You have Facebook, right? And what is Facebook for if not for massive flirting? Come on Eoin, you need to get out there and get yourself some dates!”
Eoin shivered. He'd never been one for dates, even back before he'd met Jenny. All the game-playing, and trying to pick up on what the other person meant, and the hysterical charm and effort … no thanks. He didn't have that kind of energy any more, and probably never did.
The clouds covering the sun were becoming grey and threatening. Alice stood and made her way over to Nils, who was still amusing himself inside the jeep. His big sister Rosa was busy with a bucket and a large water puddle close by. Eoin held Damien’s hand and headed that way too to help pick up their scattered things.
Alice manoeuvred Nils into the buggy and installed Rosa on the little skateboard device behind. The sky was growing darker but few of the other park visitors seemed in the mood to leave. Eoin studied them as they walked by. They were mostly in their teens and early twenties, and he felt a burst of longing for the kind of life they had. They were young, attractive and privileged, and all they had on their minds was how to fix their hair, and where they would be going on Saturday night, and which bed they might wake up in on Sunday morning.
He wondered if they appreciated what they had now, and if they really understood how fast it would all disappear.
“Long walk?” said Alice.
“Long walk,” Eoin agreed. “Then I'll fix you all some home-made pizza, if you're interested.”
“Pizza!” Rosa said and turned a beaming smile in Eoin's direction.
“Great,” Alice said. “We'll rent an annoying kid's movie. And then plan how to advertise your presence on the Internet and get you the girl of your dreams.”
She leaned closer and added, in a conspiratorial whisper: “Before you explode from your obvious lack of sex and I get stuck with the mess.”
Eoin gave a meek grin. He followed after Alice's nicely toned bottom, trying to imagine all of the other nicely toned bottoms that might be lying in wait in some distant and poorly-lit corner of the Internet. Bottoms with his name on them.
In a very odd and slightly pervy manner of speaking.
Chapter 4
Rob had booked a washing time for fifteen-zero-zero. This required that he stay indoors the whole morning planning his laundry. He had to separate his whites from his colours, his sixties from his forties, his wool from his other stuff. He’d also have to hunt under the bed and locate every fragment of errant underwear, even the ones that clearly weren't his.
Sure, it wasn't much to fill a whole day with, but after two weeks of not working Rob's threshold for activity of any kind was rather low. And to be honest he wasn't really trying that hard for a new job either. He didn't need to, as he would be paid eighty percent of his old wages to keep him going. Not to mention the fantastic Internet idea he would be filling all of his spare time with. That and Guinness.
So the temptation to take it easy was pretty strong and Rob was a big fan of temptation of any kind, generally giving it the full benefit of the doubt.
He slouched from his living room to his kitchen in his usual stay-at-home outfit of boxers and a ragged t-shirt. His flat wasn't large and consisted of a single living room/bedroom and a separate small kitchen with a table capable of seating four rather slim and unfussy guests. But the size of the place was not really a problem because, apart from the occasional lady invited home from one of Stockholm's many bars in the wee hours of the morning, there was usually just him in it.
He fixed a mug of instant coffee then collected the newspaper from where it had been shoved through the front door. He made his way back to the living room and sat down on the bed with a contented sigh, averting his gaze from the pile of clothes lying in a state of sad semi-organisation.
With a happy smile he sipped at his coffee, and blew on it, and watched the blobs dissolve, and then sipped again.
Just as he was entering that state of perfect distraction brought on by idleness, caffeine and sitting cross-legged on something soft, the phone rang. Rob stared at it accusingly, wondering once again why he still had a home telephone. He allowed it four rings before he carefully transferred the coffee mug to a pile of old newspapers and snatched up the receiver.
“Yeah?”
“Hello?” said a confused voice, as if the owner of that voice was worried that it had called the Royal Castle by mistake, and not an apartment where only one person lived. And where that person was the only one who would ever answer that particular telephone, ever.
Rob slapped a hand silently to his face and took a deep breath.
“Oh hi mom.”
Without further preamble, Rob's mother started to talk and Rob did his best to listen. This wasn't easy, as the news from home generally consisted of people Rob vaguely knew who'd contracted cancer, produced an offspring, mangled a limb, left the country, or died in any number of horrible ways. A wedding or two might occasionally be mentioned but usually it was all fairly grim stuff.
“Mmm,” Rob said, reading his paper and doing his best to keep the volume of the page-turning low. His mother pressed on, and after the last baby-with-a-deadly-illness had been catalogued she turned to the next phase of the conversation, the one that Rob looked forward to the least. The How-to-fix-Rob's-life phase.
This generally required a bit more than an occasional grunt from Rob as he didn’t want to inadvertently mutter “yeah” to some maternal suggestion he hadn't really heard. So he did his absolute best to pay attention.
“No really mum, there's lots of jobs. Loads. No I won't be back in the bar. No, it's not a crash, more like a cleaning out, ye know? And I don't work in a bank, do I? Yeah, they do have the dole over here. It's better actually. No mom, I shouldn’t have stayed in school. No, I shouldn't, and I don't care how good Cousin Mike is doing. He's a tit anyway, shure you complain about him all the time!”
Rob, although he would have loved to cut the conversation short, felt it was his sacred duty to allow his mother the occasional rummage through his life, just to give her the impression that she could sort things out for him. In fact, by his second day of unemployment, he had already formulated his first rule of losing your job—don't tell your mother because she will bug you to distraction and send you every clipping she finds with any mention of work on
it, even ones for which you are hilariously unsuited and unqualified.
Rob, still making the occasional affirmative noise, shifted his gaze from the bed to the window. It was a nice May day outside, a bit cloudy but bright enough. Later on he might head on down to the Old Town and grab something to eat, and see if anything was happening at Malone’s. Of course there was always something happening at Malone’s, so there was little risk he'd stick his nose in the door, find it insufferably boring and head back home again. That was one of the true joys of being unemployed—the right to hang out in Irish bars on a weekday.
“—and then she really wants a job, so we decided she might go over and visit you for a while and see what's there—”
Rob's attention was suddenly jerked back to the here and now. He pressed the receiver to his ear. What had she just said?
“And I told her to go to university but she said no, it's better to get into work as soon as—”
“Wait, hang on there mum,” he said. “Just a second. Who's maybe coming over to visit me?”
“Your sister Karen! Who else would I be talking about?”
Rob sat up. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and planted his feet firmly on the floor. He passed the receiver to his right hand.
“Karen? Karen wants to come here? But”—he threw a glance around his small and messy flat—“it's feckin' tiny here, there's no way I've room for someone else!”
“Well she's not that big, and it won't be for long, just until she gets a job and finds her own place.”
“Her own place? Mom, this is Stockholm, not Bally Go Backwards! You don't just buy the paper and call the ads, it's not like that here! It's really hard to—”
