Linda was skimming through the newspaper in the living room. Vanja banged one of the building bricks she had been given as an autumn present by Öllegård on the floor. I lay back on the bed with my arms behind my head. The next moment there was a thunderous knocking on the pipes.
‘Don’t take any notice of her,’ Linda said. ‘Let Vanja play as she likes.’
But I couldn’t. I got up, went over to Vanja and took the brick from her. And handed her a cloth lamb instead. She threw it away. Even when I put on a silly voice and bounced the lamb back and forth she still wasn’t interested. It was the brick she wanted; she was attracted by the sound of it banging on the floor. Well, she can have it then. She took two from the box and began to bang them on the floor. The very next second the pipes thundered again. What was this? Was she standing there and waiting? I took one of the bricks from the box and hammered it with all my strength against the radiator. Vanja watched me and laughed. The next second I heard the door below slam again. I went through the living room into the hallway. When the bell rang I snatched open the door. The Russian was looking at me with a furious expression on her face. I stepped out so that I was only a few centimetres from her.
‘What the HELL do you want?’ I shouted. ‘What do you BLOODY mean by coming up here? I don’t want you here. Don’t you UNDERSTAND?’
She hadn’t expected that. She recoiled, tried to say something, but as the first word escaped her lips I went on the attack again.
‘NOW PISS OFF!’ I shouted. ‘IF YOU COME HERE AGAIN I’LL CALL THE POLICE.’
At that moment a woman in her fifties came up the stairs. She was one of the people who lived on the floor above. She looked down at the floor as she passed. Nevertheless, a witness. Perhaps that gave the Russian courage because she didn’t go.
‘DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT I SAID? OR ARE YOU A RETARD? GO AWAY, I SAID. GO, GO, GO!’
After saying this I took another step towards her. She turned and set off down the stairs. After a couple of steps she turned back to me.
‘This will have consequences,’ she said.
‘I don’t give a shit,’ I said. ‘Who do you think they’ll believe? A lonely alcoholic Russian or an established couple with a small child?’
Then I closed the door and went back in. Linda stood looking at me from the living-room doorway. I walked past without a glance.
‘That wasn’t perhaps the wisest move,’ I said. ‘But it felt good.’
‘I can imagine,’ she said.
I went into the bedroom and took the bricks from Vanja, put them in the box, which I put on top of the dresser so that she couldn’t reach them. To distract her from the despondency she felt I lifted her and put her on the windowsill. We watched cars for a while. But I was too angry to be able to stand still for long, so I sat her back on the floor and went into the bathroom, where I washed my hands — they were always so cold in winter — in warm water, dried them, studied my reflection, which did not betray a single one of the thoughts or feelings stirring inside me. Perhaps my clearest childhood legacy was that loud voices and aggression frightened me. I hated rows and scenes. And for a long time I had managed to avoid them in my adult life. There hadn’t been any slanging matches in any of the relationships I’d had; any disagreements had proceeded according to my method, which was irony, sarcasm, unfriendliness, sulking and silence. It was only when Linda came into my life that this changed. And how it changed. As for me, I was afraid. It wasn’t a rational fear, physically I was stronger than she was, of course, and as far as the balance of the relationship was concerned she needed me more than I needed her, in the sense that I had no problem being alone, being alone was not only an option for me, it was also an enticement, whereas she feared being alone more than anything; however, despite the fact that I was in a stronger position, I was afraid when she had a go at me. Afraid in the way I was afraid when I was a boy. Oh, I was not proud of this, but so what? It wasn’t something I could control by thought or will, it was something quite different, which was released in me, anchored deeper, down in what was perhaps the very foundation of my personality. All of this, though, was unknown to Linda. You couldn’t see that I was frightened. When I defended myself my voice would break because I was on the verge of tears, but to her that could easily have been caused by my anger, for all I knew. No, now that I came to think about it, somewhere inside her she must have known. But perhaps not the precise extent of how awful the experience was for me.
I suppose I must have learned from it. To shout at someone, the way I had done with the Russian, would have been inconceivable only a year ago. In this case, however, there would never be any reconciliation. From now on further escalation was the only possible outcome.
And so?
I took the four blue Ikea bags full of dirty laundry, which I had completely forgotten, and carried them into the hall. Put on my shoes and said aloud that I was going down to the basement to do the washing. Linda came to the door.
‘Do you have to do it now?’ she asked. ‘They’ll be coming soon. And we haven’t started cooking yet…’
‘It’s only half past four,’ I said. ‘And we don’t have another washing slot until Thursday.’
‘OK,’ she said. ‘Are we friends?’
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘Of course.’
She came to me and we kissed.
‘I love you, you know,’ she said.
Vanja crawled in from the living room. She grabbed hold of Linda’s trouser leg and pulled herself up.
‘Hello, do you want to join us?’ I said, lifting her up. She put her head between ours. Linda laughed.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll go and get a machine started.’
With two bags in each hand I staggered down the stairs. I put out of my mind the unease I felt at thoughts of the neighbour, the fact that she was totally unpredictable and now, in addition, deeply hurt. What was the worst that could happen? She wasn’t exactly going to launch herself at me with a knife. Revenge behind closed doors, that was her forte.
The staircase was empty, the hallway was empty, the laundry room was empty. I switched on the light, sorted the clothes into four heaps, coloureds forty, coloureds sixty, whites forty, whites sixty, and shoved two of the piles into the two big machines, poured powder into the detachable drawer on the control panel and switched them on.
When I went back up Linda had put some music on, one of the Tom Waits CDs that had come out after I lost interest in him and with which I therefore had no associations other than that they were Tom Waits-like. Once Linda had reworked some Waits texts for a performance in Stockholm, which she said was among the most entertaining and satisfying stuff she had done, and she still had an intense, indeed intimate, relationship with his music.
She had fetched glasses, cutlery and plates from the kitchen and put them on the table. A cloth was there too, still folded, and a pile of creased serviettes.
‘Think we’ll have to iron them, don’t you?’ she said.
‘Yes, if we’re going to have a tablecloth. Could you iron it and I’ll make a start on the cooking?’
‘OK.’
She fetched the ironing board from the cupboard while I went to the kitchen and took out the ingredients. Put a cast-iron pot on the stove, switched on the hotplate, poured in some oil, peeled and chopped garlic, then Linda came in for the spray in the cupboard under the sink. She shook it a little to see if there was any water in it.
‘Are you cooking without a recipe?’ she asked.
‘I know it off by heart now,’ I answered. ‘How many times have we made this meal now? Twenty?’
‘But they haven’t had it before,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said, holding the chopping board over the pot and letting the tiny cubes of garlic fall into it while she went back to the living room.