Anders strolled along the track down to the jetties, looking at the abandoned traces of summer, the covered garden furniture. In one garden he saw a half-finished game of Jenga just standing there, as if the owners had suddenly realised they had to set off for the city immediately, and had simply dropped what they were doing.
There was a light on in one of the houses closest to the jetties. Anders had been inside that house many times. Elin’s house. It must be ten years since he had actually seen Elin, almost twenty since they had stopped hanging out together. Until a few years ago he had seen her frequently on television and in the press, as had half the population of Sweden. Since then, nothing.
The house was one of the better ones in the area, with its own well and its own jetty. Unlike most of the others it had been built on-site, and Anders remembered how the hollow sound present in all the other houses was missing from Elin’s. The door he was knocking on now was quite solid, with a doorknocker and everything.
He waited. When nothing happened he knocked again. He heard footsteps inside, and a voice said, ‘Who is it?’
It could hardly be Elin’s voice, this one belonged to an older person, so Anders said, ‘My name is Anders. I was looking for Elin. Elin Grönwall.’
It was only when he said her name out loud that he remembered. Why they had stopped hanging out. Why they had all stopped hanging out, why the summers and their childhood had ended.
Elin. Joel.
He had managed to forget. An impulse had made him knock on the door, but now he was grateful that Elin wasn’t at home, that he didn’t have to see her. He was just about to leave when the door opened. Anders attempted a smile, but it died away the moment he saw the person who opened the door.
If it hadn’t been for the more recent magazine covers and the pictures on the gossip pages, he would never have recognised the woman who had been his friend long ago, and if he hadn’t known her since she was a child, he would never have recognised the woman from the magazine covers.
What have they done to her?
He didn’t know who ‘they’ were, but it was impossible to imagine that anyone would have done this to their appearance voluntarily. Anders managed to hitch up the corners of his mouth a fraction.
‘Hi.’
‘Hi.’
Even Elin’s voice had changed. When she was seventeen she had adopted a babyish voice that had appealed to certain boys at the time, and which had later been ridiculed in the press. Now her voice sounded deeper and rougher. The voice of an older person, and that particular change was actually an improvement.
Anders couldn’t say what he was thinking, so he said, ‘I was just passing and I saw the light was on, and I thought…’
‘Come in.’
The house smelled almost exactly the same as it had done when he was young. It didn’t feel as if there was anyone else there. Anders had expected the person who had Elin under their thumb would be around.
‘Can I get you anything?’ she asked. ‘Coffee? Wine?’
‘Wine would be nice, thank you.’
Anders looked up as he answered, but immediately looked down again. It was difficult to look at her. He concentrated on undoing his shoelaces and Elin disappeared into the kitchen.
What has she done?
She had been pretty when she was young, she’d had her pick of the boys. In between Big Brother and the centrefolds, she had had surgery on her breasts and her lips, turning herself into a classic bimbo. One of those individuals who circulate between photo opportunities and parties and scandals. A night on the town followed by the full story; another relationship break-up followed by the full story. Slap the make-up on a bit thicker each time it all goes south.
It’s easy to see how it takes its toll, how the person behind the mask slowly becomes hardened—the smile grows rigid, the skin grows stiff and numb—until all that remains is a shining, fossilised shell surrounding an empty space. How glamour loses out to gravity.
But this still didn’t explain Elin’s transformation. She hadn’t just aged, she had remodelled herself into something far worse than anything time could create. In some way, for some reason she had made herself ugly.
The picture window in the kitchen looked out over Kattholmen, and despite the cloud both the tiles and stainless steel worktops were bathed in light from the sky and the sea. Everything was as clear as in a photograph. Anders sat down with his back to the window while Elin filled his glass with Gato Negro from a cask. They raised their glasses to each other and drank. Anders made an effort not to gulp.
‘How are you?’ he asked.
Elin ran her finger over the cat on the wine cask. ‘We used to spend whole evenings sitting here, didn’t we? When Mum and Dad were out.’
‘Yes. And nights too. Later on.’
Elin nodded, still following the contours of the cat with her finger. As she wasn’t looking at him, Anders plucked up the courage to study her face.
Her nose, which had been slender and straight, was now twice as big and flattened. Her chin, which had been firm, quite prominent and somewhat square, was now pointed and receding, so that it became part of her throat. Her high cheekbones and dimples had disappeared, and her lips…
Those lips that had pouted in so many close-ups, topless glamour shots and full-length shots, and which had been desirable even before the silicon implants, had now been compressed into two narrow lines that did no more than mark where her mouth began and ended, if that.
She had bags under her eyes that would have looked unnatural on a woman twenty years older, and the baffling thing was that in the clinical brightness of the kitchen Anders could see the marks of badly healed scars beneath her eyes. As if she had had surgery on the bags. As if they had been worse at some point.
He took a large gulp of his wine, almost half the glass, and when he realised what he was doing it was too late, he could hardly spit it out, so he swallowed it. Elin was looking at him, and he couldn’t interpret her expression. It was impossible to read her, just as it would be impossible to read a book that had been torn to pieces.
Time for small talk.
Time for him to pick up the thread and chat about all the times they had sat here, everything they had done all those years ago, and he wouldn’t mention her face or the boathouse on Kattholmen where everything had come to an end.
What did we actually do?
He searched for some amusing memory. Something they could laugh at, something that might dispel the strange atmosphere between them. He couldn’t think of anything. All he could remember was that they used to drink tea, lots of tea, with honey, that sometimes they ran out of honey and…The words came tumbling out of his mouth, ‘What have you done to your face?’
The groove between Elin’s lips widened and the corners moved up towards her cheeks; it could be interpreted as a smile. ‘It’s not just my face.’
She walked into the middle of the kitchen floor and ran her hands over her body. Anders looked down, and Elin said, ‘Look.’
He looked. The heavy breasts that had given the caption writers at Slitz an excuse to write Bouncing beauties! had shrunk and been flattened until they were hardly noticeable. Elin pulled up her sweatshirt. Her stomach was hanging over the waistband of her jeans. The lips pretended to smile again.
‘It was actually possible to use the breast implants and put them in here.’ She grabbed hold of the bulge above her right hip and squeezed it. ‘Then I had to have quite a lot cut away, of course. They were quite big to start with, beforehand.’
She pulled up the sweatshirt a little further, so that the lower part of her breasts was visible. Anders saw the badly healed scar, and looked down at the floor again. ‘Why?’
She straightened her sweatshirt and sat down at the opposite side of the table again, took a sip of her wine and topped up his glass.
‘I just wanted to.’
Her voice was breaking slightly. Someone with serious injuries or deformities might behave this way, showin
g them off as a challenge to the other person—to say something, to dare to question. But now her voice was breaking.
‘I haven’t finished yet.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I haven’t finished yet. I’m going to have more work done. More surgery.’
Anders searched her altered face, her eyes, for signs of insanity, but found none. He thought she ought to be radiating something other than sorrowful resignation. Some kind of fanaticism, at least.
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Neither do I,’ said Elin. ‘But that’s the way it is.’
‘But what…what are you aiming for, so to speak?’
‘I don’t know. I just know I haven’t finished.’
‘But what doctor would agree to…’
Elin interrupted him. ‘If you’ve got money, there’s always someone. And I do have money.’
Anders turned and looked out of the window. The wind was blowing among the few random fir trees still standing upright on Kattholmen. A storm a few years earlier had brought down most of the trees, and the island became one huge game of pick-up sticks, almost impossible to find a way through. The boathouse might have been smashed to pieces. He hoped it had.
‘Are you thinking about the same thing as me?’ asked Elin.
‘Probably.’
‘Everything disappears. In the end.’
‘Yes.’
They avoided the topic and started talking about things that had disappeared, what had become of old friends. Anders told her about Maja, making a huge effort not to fall down the shaft that always opened up beneath him when he relived the story by retelling it. He managed to balance on the brink.
The afternoon had drawn a veil of darker grey across the sea, and the wine cask was all but empty when Anders got to his feet, steadied himself on the table and announced he was going home. ‘I live here now. I think.’
He had to concentrate hard in order to tie his shoelaces in the dark hallway. Elin stood watching him, her head on one side.
‘Why did you come back?’
Anders closed his eyes so that he could manage the laces without being distracted by the way the room was moving. Why had he come back? He tried to find the right words, and eventually said, ‘I wanted to be close to something that has some meaning.’
He hauled himself to his feet with the help of the door handle. The door opened and he almost fell out on to the porch, but straightened up and regained his balance. ‘What about you?’
‘I just wanted to get away. From all the eyes.’
Anders nodded tipsily and for a long time. Completely understandable. All the eyes. Away from all the eyes. He remembered something, something to do with eyes, but he couldn’t quite get hold of it. He waved goodbye and closed the door behind him.
The afternoon was rapidly darkening into evening as Anders made his way towards the forest. The wind was picking up; a few particularly playful gusts made him wobble to one side. He was thinking about Elin.
I haven’t finished yet. I’m going to have more work done.
He laughed. If you looked at it as a project it was odd, but not incomprehensible. You have to have projects, and destroying your own body is just one of many options. He certainly knew that, if nothing else. Throwing away your money by going under the knife and getting uglier every time, that was grandiose in its way, a real cultural commentary.
Or an atonement.
A big paper bag full of food stood outside his door. He sent grateful thanks across the inlet, hauled the bag into the kitchen and put everything away in the fridge and the larder. When he had finished he drank almost a litre of water to dilute his alcohol-laden blood, then he sat down at the kitchen table and started fiddling with the beads. He added a few blue ones at random around the edge of the tile.
The kitchen curtains were billowing out slightly in the draught from the ill-fitting window, and he lit a fire in the kitchen stove to drive out the dampness that had gathered since the morning. Then he went back to the beads.
Ten blue dots around the edge of big white pattern, like a little patch of sky behind a cloud. He added a few more.
Suspicions
They didn’t make love so often these days, but when they did, they did it properly.
That first summer Simon and Anna-Greta hadn’t been able to keep their hands off one another. Out of consideration for Johan it had been mostly the nights that had been at their disposal, but it did happen that lust would suddenly strike them like a boiling shoal of herring in the middle of the day as well. Then they would lock themselves in the boathouse and fall on each other on top of the nets, satisfying their hunger and paying for it with various abrasions.
They didn’t do that any more. Just as well, really.
Weeks could go by before the circumstances were right. Since they didn’t sleep in the same bed or even the same house, lovemaking wasn’t something that just happened, unplanned, as an afterthought before they fell asleep. Nor had they got to the point where they could just come straight out with the question. They never would get there, because they both regarded sexuality as a mystery and a secret—not body parts seeking connection.
And so it was a matter of a web of unspoken questions and answers, small movements sounding out the terrain. A hand on an arm, a glance held for just a fraction too long, a smile hinting at mischief. It could go on for days, until they no longer knew who was asking and who was responding, but the certainty grew between them in silence: it was time.
Then they would go to the bedroom together, to Anna-Greta’s bedroom as she had a bigger bed. They would light a candle and get undressed. Anna-Greta could still manage to get undressed standing up, but Simon had to sit on the edge of the bed to take off his underwear and socks.
It was increasingly rare that things went well from the start. Perhaps as some kind of preparation for death, Simon’s spirit and flesh had begun to take their leave of each other. When Anna-Greta lay down beside him, it didn’t matter how much his will wrapped itself around her beloved body, his lips caressing her hip. It just didn’t work.
His failing erection was a problem that had been played down for many years, and nowadays it was an expected part of the proceedings. But it still bothered him; every time he thought: Right—now. Just this once. He had even thought about Viagra, if only so that, just once, he could surprise her with a really splendid hard-on right from the start, like a gift.
But for the time being, it just had to take as long as it took. They would caress each other, licking and nibbling. From time to time Anna-Greta would suck tentatively, just to see if the erectile tissues had decided to wake up yet. If there was any sign of a response, she would carry on until he was ready, but usually it was like talking to the wall.
Simon had thought that this was the irony of old age: the only part of him that wasn’t rigid and stiff was the part he wanted to be. The years of escapology had ruined his joints, and his skeleton felt like a beach monster, cobbled together from driftwood and rusty nails. He could feel, in fact he could almost hear, the creaking as he moved alongside Anna-Greta’s more supple body.
It took longer every year, but gradually the miracle would begin to work. He would feel a warmth between his shoulder blades which slowly spread across his shoulder and down his back, until he could move his arms in a way that was never possible in his everyday life: gently. Anna-Greta smiled when his caresses became more flexible, his touch lighter.
He was at home in his body once again, and when Anna-Greta lowered her head over his midriff the response came like a tingle, and the dead rose. Even at that stage Simon was drifting in the pleasure that is the absence of pain, and he could easily have stopped there, satisfied with being soft and forgetful and close. But when Anna-Greta moved on top of him and guided him inside her, another slumbering feeling awoke. The preparations were over and his body was ready for action. He could release the lust.
When they had finally reached that point, their desire was per
fectly matched. A burning sphere in the chest, sending red threads up into the head. He grabbed hold of her hips and they followed each other’s movements or thrust against each other, doing whatever felt right, and only he and she existed in the whole world.
Once Simon got under way, he could go on for a long time. So they went on for a long time. It would have been stupid not to. Their bodies, weighed down by age, were never as light as they were then, and time and sorrows had never been of so little significance. They were swaying outside time and the years fell away; sometimes Simon was even able to use his stiff fingers, and he took the opportunity to do so.
They no longer dared to change position, since Simon had broken a rib two years earlier throwing himself around. So they stayed where they were, moved in the same place and murmured quiet words of love until everything exploded and became one.
Anna-Greta was asleep. Simon lay next to her, watching her. Her lips were sunken because she had taken out her false teeth after making love. Even with the most supreme effort he could not claim that her mouth was beautiful without teeth, so he didn’t look at her mouth.
Her eyelids were thin, almost transparent in the glow of the half-burnt candle, and under the skin he could see her eyeballs moving. Perhaps she was dreaming. The deep lines between her nose and mouth moved up a fraction, as if in her dream she had become aware of a smell she didn’t like.
Who are you?
The wind was blowing hard outside the window, and the candle flickered. A shadow passed across Anna-Greta’s face, and her expression altered for half a second, became something he had never seen before. Then she was back.
Who are you?
Fifty years together, and he knew everything about her. Except who she was. She had told him stories of the time before they met, he had been with her for almost two-thirds of her life and knew how she would react in virtually any situation. And yet he couldn’t get away from that feeling: he didn’t know who she was.
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