She emerged from the bathroom, stood in front of me and offered me an unexpected helping hand. ‘Do you want to fuck now, or shall we wait a bit?’ she said.
She didn’t explain what we would be waiting for.
‘Now,’ I said, feeling my face go red.
She nodded, walked towards the door of her little bedroom, then turned and raised her eyebrows. I immediately got to my feet and followed her. She pointed to the bathroom.
‘You can use the blue towel.’
I have almost no memory of what happened after that. She had turned off the light, undressed and got into bed; there were soft toys everywhere. I took off my clothes and got in beside her. During a fumbling embrace when I sometimes wasn’t sure whether I was groping teddy bears or her breasts, I pushed inside her and immediately came. She giggled, I cursed my incompetence and angrily tossed several furry creatures on the floor.
‘It’s impossible to fuck among a pile of bears,’ I snapped.
Inger giggled again but said nothing.
I stayed for an hour. We still didn’t talk. Then I got dressed and left.
‘See you,’ I said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You won’t.’
I sat on Lisa Modin’s sofa all these years later, wondering what Inger had meant. Didn’t she want to see me again, or did she realise that I had got what I came for and was no longer interested in her?
I wondered briefly what had happened to Inger, with her brown skirt and her alleged loose morals. Was she still alive? Had she had a good life? I never saw her again.
My reminiscences of that first inept and humiliating experience were pushed aside as Lisa asked me to join her in the kitchen.
Lisa and I ate and chatted about nothing in particular, then she asked me to clear away and wash up while she used the bathroom. I wiped the table, closed the balcony door then sat on the sofa until she came out in her bathrobe and went into the bedroom.
‘There’s a towel on the side of the bath,’ she called out.
I thought about Inger. So different, and yet so similar.
‘Is it blue?’
‘It’s white — why?’
By the time I had showered and dried my hair, she had turned off the bedroom light, leaving only a floor lamp burning in the living room. I walked over to the bed, let the towel fall and crept between the sheets.
We lay in silence in the darkness. I reached for her hand, but it was clenched into a fist. I didn’t try to open it.
She was asleep when I got up at six and left.
It was cold as I walked to the car. The place was deserted. Driving along the road was like passing through a skilfully constructed set on which no film would ever be made. I imagined that everyone who lived there carried a clapperboard around with them all the time, hoping that they would be able to use it one day.
I drove to the water and got out of the car. In spite of the chill I walked up and down the wooden quay trying to make sense of what had happened last night. My only conclusion was that I really didn’t understand Lisa Modin. Why had she travelled to Paris?
There were no answers. I carried on down to the harbour; I met a car en route and had to slam on my brakes. I thought I recognised a marine engineer, who was clearly drunk. Jansson had once hinted that this guy was an alcoholic, but then you could never be sure when it came to Jansson. People he disliked were always alcoholics.
I pulled into my parking space at Oslovski’s house. A light drizzle had begun to fall. I got out my bag and was about to call Jansson to ask him to pick me up when I decided to check whether Oslovski was at home and had already started working on her car in the garage. I knew she was an early riser. The gravel drive was freshly raked, the curtains closed. I listened for any sounds from the garage, but all I could hear was the wind blowing off the sea. I thought I might as well go up to the garage anyway. As I rounded the corner of the house, I saw that the door was ajar. Oslovski must be there; she was always very careful about locking up.
Nordin had told me that Oslovski had once been in his shop, searching for money in her trouser pocket. She had taken out the biggest bunch of keys Nordin had ever seen. He had often wondered how a person who lived in such a small house could possibly need as many keys as a prison guard.
I knocked on the door, simultaneously pushing it open. The light was on.
Oslovski was lying on the cement floor behind the car, which was jacked up. As usual she was wearing her blue overalls, with the company name ALGOTS just visible in faded letters.
I didn’t need to touch her to know that she was dead. She was lying on her back with one leg bent underneath her, as if she had tried to stop herself from falling. She was holding a spanner in one hand, and blood had trickled from her head onto the hard floor. Her eyes were closed. I went over, knelt down and checked her pulse; she was dead but not yet cold. Nor had her skin begun to take on the yellow, waxy pallor that comes after death. She had been dead for an hour at the most. There was nothing to indicate an assault; she had suffered either a stroke or a heart attack. Or perhaps a haemorrhage had sent her to her death with no warning.
I sat down on a grubby stool next to the wall where the tools hung in their designated places. I mourned her. Perhaps not as a friend, but as a person who had brought a certain security with her presence in my life.
First Nordin, now Oslovski. I was increasingly surrounded by dead people. The child growing in my daughter’s belly only partly redressed the balance between the living and the dead.
Afterwards I couldn’t explain why I did what I did, but I got up from the stool, took the bunch of keys out of Oslovski’s pocket and went over to the house. From the harbour I could hear the morning bus into town struggling up the steep hill. I waited until the sound of the engine had died away, then I unlocked the door.
I had never been in there before. The closest I had come was on the odd occasion when Oslovski had appeared and we had chatted on her tiny veranda. I had always felt that she wasn’t just standing there to talk to me; she was acting as a kind of sentry, making sure no unauthorised person crossed the threshold.
I stood there in the dark hallway; I was aware of the bitter smell that always seems to accompany loneliness. Had my own house smelled like that before it burned down?
I switched on the lights and walked slowly through the three rooms. On the steep staircase leading up to the attic were piles of newspapers and countless carrier bags from various grocery shops. I realised that Oslovski, in her isolation, had become a manic hoarder. The whole place was in chaos. Clothes, bundles of fabric, shoes, galoshes, hats, skis, a damaged kick sled, furniture, broken lamps, fishing nets. It was indescribable. Only the room containing her bed was remotely tidy. I paused in the doorway, struck by something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then I realised that in spite of the mess everything in the house was spotless. The piles of newspapers were dust-free, the sheets on the bed were clean. The cluttered kitchen contained a washing machine and a tumble dryer. In a bin bag on the floor next to the sink I could see the packaging from a French fish gratin, which might well have been Oslovski’s last meal. A single red chair with a plastic seat pad stood next to the small dark green Formica table.
It was clear that Oslovski had never expected or wanted dinner guests.
I went through the house one more time. Chaos and pedantic neatness, side by side.
I stopped. I had the feeling I had seen something to which I should have reacted. At first I couldn’t work out what it was, then I realised it was to do with her bedroom.
I went back up the stairs; as soon as I walked in I knew what it was.
The sheets had a sky-blue border adorned with stars. I had seen those same sheets very recently — in the deserted house in Hörum. There was no doubt. The bed in that house was made up with exactly the same sheets as those on Oslovski’s bed.