‘Look,’ she said. ‘Can you see the cloud?’
I lay down beside her. The sky was perfectly blue, there were no clouds apart from the one which was drifting slowly closer. It was shaped like a heart.
‘Yes,’ I said, squeezing her hand.
She laughed.
‘Everything’s perfect,’ she said. ‘I’ve never ever been like this. I’m so happy with you. I’m so happy!’
‘Me too,’ I said.
We took a boat to the skerries. Rented a cabin in the forest outside a youth hostel. We walked round the island for hours, delved deep into the forest, everything smelt of pine and heather, suddenly we encountered a steep rock face: beneath us was the sea. We went on, came to a meadow, stopped and watched the cows, they watched us, we laughed, took pictures of each other, climbed up a tree, sat in it chattering like two children.
‘Once,’ I said, ‘I had to buy cigarettes for my father at a petrol station. It was a couple of kilometres from home. I must have been about seven or eight years old. The path there went through a forest. I knew it like the palm of my hand. I still know it like the palm of my hand. Suddenly I heard a rustling in the bushes. I stopped and looked over. There I saw an absolutely fantastic bird, you know, big and multicoloured. I had never seen anything like it before, it was more like a visitor from some distant exotic continent. Africa or Asia. It scampered off and then flew away and disappeared. I’ve never seen that kind of bird since and I’ve never found out what it might have been.’
‘Is that true?’ Linda asked. ‘I had exactly the same experience once. At a girlfriend’s summer house. I was sitting in a tree, yes, like now, waiting for my friends to return. I got impatient and jumped down. Strolled around aimlessly and suddenly saw a fantastic multicoloured bird. I’ve never seen it since either.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Yes.’
That was how it was, everything gave meaning and our lives were interwoven. On the way home from the island we discussed the name of our first child.
‘If it’s a boy,’ I said, ‘I would prefer a simple name. Ola, I’ve always liked that. What do you think?’
‘It’s good,’ she said. ‘Very Norwegian. I like that.’
‘Yes,’ I said, looking out of the window.
A little boat bobbed up and down on its way across. The registration plate on the side said OLA.
‘Look there,’ I said.
Linda leaned forward.
‘Then it’s decided,’ she said. ‘Ola it is!’
Late one evening we had been walking up the hill towards my flat, still in the first, feverish phase of the relationship and, after quite a silence, she had said, ‘Karl Ove, there’s something I have to tell you.’
‘Oh yes?’ I said.
‘I tried to take my life once.’
‘What did you say?’ I said.
She didn’t answer and looked down at the ground in front of her.
‘Was that a long time ago?’ I asked.
‘Two years ago maybe. It was when I was in the clinic.’
I looked at her, she didn’t want to meet my eyes, I went up to her and hugged her. We stood like that for a long time. Then we went up the stairs and into the lift, I unlocked the flat, she sat down on the bed, I opened the window and the sounds of a late summer night rose to meet us.
‘Would you like some tea?’ I asked.
‘Please,’ she said.
I went to the kitchenette, switched on the kettle, took out two cups and put a teabag in each. After I had passed her one and stationed myself by the open window, sipping at the other cup, she began to tell me what had happened. Her mother had collected her from the hospital, they were on their way to her flat to pick something up. As they got closer Linda set off at a run. Her mother ran after her. Linda ran as fast as she could, through the door, up the stairs, into the flat, to the window. By the time her mother arrived, a few seconds later, Linda had opened the window and clambered up onto the ledge. Her mother sprinted to the window as Linda was about to jump, grabbed her and pulled her back in.
‘I went ballistic,’ she said. ‘I think I wanted to kill her. I pummelled away at her. We fought for maybe ten minutes. I tipped the fridge over her. But she was stronger. Of course she was stronger. In the end she sat astride my chest and I gave up. She rang the police and they came to take me back to hospital.’
There was a pause. I looked at her, she met my gaze, quickly, like a bird.
‘I’m ashamed about this,’ she said. ‘But I thought you should know at some point.’
I didn’t know what to say. There was an abyss between the place she had been then and where we were now. At least that was how it felt. Perhaps not for her though?
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. I don’t think it was clear in my mind then, either. But I remember the process. I had been manic for several weeks at the end of the summer. One evening Mikaela came to my place, I was crouching on the worktop reciting numbers. She and Öllegård took me to the acute psychiatry clinic. They gave me some sleeping tablets and asked me if Mikaela would have me at home for a few days. Afterwards, over the autumn, one phase alternated with another. And then I hit the buffers in a depression that was so vast I didn’t know if there was a way out. I avoided everyone I knew because I didn’t want anyone to be the last person to see me alive. The therapist who attended me asked if I had suicidal thoughts, I just burst into tears and she said she couldn’t be responsible for me between therapy sessions and so I was admitted to the clinic. I’ve seen the papers of the admission meeting. Several minutes pass between my being asked a question and my answering, it says, and I can remember that. It was almost impossible for me to speak, impossible to say anything, the words were so far away. Everything was so far away. My face was a stiff mask. There was no expression in it.’
She looked up at me. I sat down on the bed. She put the cup down on the table and lay back. I lay beside her. There was a heaviness in the darkness outside, a kind of body to it that was alien to a midsummer night. A train rattled across the bridge by Ridderfjärden.
‘I was dead,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t that I wanted to leave my life. I had already left it. When the therapist said I was going to be admitted to the clinic I felt relief that someone wanted to take care of me. But when I got there it was all totally impossible. I couldn’t stay. And that was when I began to hatch a plan. My sole chance of getting out was a day permit to fetch clothes and so on from my flat. Someone had to be with me, the only person I could think of was my mother.’
She fell silent.
‘But if I’d really wanted it I would have succeeded. That’s what I think now. I wouldn’t have needed to open the window; I could have thrown myself through it. It wouldn’t exactly have made much of a difference. But the care I took… Yes, if I had really wanted to, with all my heart, it would have worked.’
‘I’m happy it didn’t,’ I said, running my hand through her hair. ‘But are you afraid it will happen again?’
‘Yes.’
There was a silence.
The woman I rented the bedsit from was making a noise on the other side of the door. Someone coughed on the roof terrace above us.
‘I’m not,’ I said.
She turned her face to me.
‘Aren’t you?’
‘No. I know you.’
‘Not all of me.’
‘Of course not,’ I said, and kissed her. ‘But it will never happen again, I’m sure of that.’
‘Then I’m sure too,’ she said with a smile, and put her arms around me.
The endless summer nights, so light and open, with us drifting between a selection of bars and cafés in various parts of town in black taxis, alone or with others, the drinking not menacing, not destructive, but a wave raising us higher and higher, it started slowly and darkened imperceptibly, it was as though the sky was attached to the earth, and the light airiness had less and less room, something filled it and held it firm, until at last the night was still, a wall of darkness descended in the evening and rose in the morning, and the light eddying summer night was no longer imaginable, like a dream you try in vain to recapture on waking.