The ICA store in Rimmersdal was open on Sundays, just as he had hoped. Only for a few hours, but it was eight minutes to closing time as he pulled up on the gravelled area outside, so they wouldn’t have to stay late on his account. He was only buying a few bits today.
Yolanda wouldn’t have to stay. It was funny: he hadn’t been in her shop for several days now, and in that time he had barely spared her a thought. That’s the way it is, he thought. When you get a grip on your life, it fills up with substance and meaning.
Never better than this.
He hadn’t told Alice he was going out for a couple of hours, but he didn’t need to, either. The opportunity simply presented itself: Alice had a meeting of her women’s network Nymphs Unbound that afternoon, and Wilma and Signe still weren’t back from their Stockholm jaunt.
A couple of buns and a litre of milk for their coffee, a bit of fruit and an evening paper, that was all, but when he got to the till he saw it was a different checkout operator. A rather pale young woman, who couldn’t be much older than Anna or Signe. But of course, he thought, of course Yolanda has to have her days off, too.
Like everyone else.
He paid, packed his purchases in a plastic bag and left the shop. He got into the car and was just closing the door when his mobile phone bleeped. A text message had come in, something that seldom happened to Valdemar, and it was even more of a rarity for him to send one.
He thought he could still remember how to do it, though. He put the key in the ignition but didn’t start the engine, fished the phone out of his breast pocket and brought up the message.
Why are you hiding from me? You’re mine and I shall be with you very soon. S
He stared at it, not understanding a word. Who was S? Who was he supposed to have been hiding from?
You’re mine? It sounded like . . . like a message of love. A woman writing to him and saying she would be with him. Good grief, thought Ante Valdemar Roos, surely it’s not possible that . . .?
No, he decided. Absolutely not. However much you had taken your life in your own hands, there were limits to what could happen. He was still in so-called reality; the notion that a woman with a name beginning with S was secretly in love with him – had been yearning for him for a long time, and was now going to be with him in some way or other – no, that was simply too much.
Or any woman beginning with any other letter, for that matter.
One has to understand life’s possibilities, thought Ante Valdemar Roos, but also appreciate its limitations. Draw a clear boundary line between them, that was the trick.
So it had reached the wrong recipient. As simple as that. The sender had put in the wrong number, which he had quite often done himself, mainly because the pads of his fingers covered three or four keys simultaneously.
He reset his phone to its home screen, started the car and pulled out of the parking area. He was aware of a faint thrum in his temples; perhaps he’d had a few glasses too many last night with the Faringers, but if so, he was in good company. They hadn’t gone home until after one, and even though the menu was only mussels, with fruit and ice cream for dessert, it was still quarter past two before he and Alice finished the washing-up and got to bed.
All these blessed glasses, Valdemar had found himself thinking. Why couldn’t people just carry on drinking out of the same glass, maybe rinsing it out between times if they felt the need?
But he had downed at least a litre of water in the course of the morning, so hopefully his temples would stop throbbing once he was out in the fresh air at Lograna.
Imagine if I could simply stay over, he suddenly thought. Say to hell with going back tonight. We could both squeeze into that bed, the girl and me, couldn’t we?
He cast a glance at his reflection in the rear-view mirror and reminded himself what he had just been thinking about boundary lines. Between possibilities and limitations.
I’ll have to make do with coffee and a pipe of tobacco, he decided.
And an inspection of the paint job, of course.
‘You’ve finished already?’
‘Yes, I think I have.’
‘What a difference it makes. You ought . . .’
‘What?’
‘You ought to be an interior designer or something.’
She laughed. ‘Interior designer? Oh Valdemar, I only painted the walls. It takes a bit more than that to be a designer.’
‘Maybe so,’ nodded Valdemar. ‘You made a bloody fine job of it, all the same. But what sort of career were you thinking of? Even if things have veered a bit off course for you lately, you must have plans?’
Anna stuck her hands in the pockets of her jeans and thought. ‘Um, well, I don’t really know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I ought to carry on studying. Finish upper secondary, at least. I’m not very good at deciding, it’s difficult.’
‘It isn’t easy,’ said Valdemar. ‘It was simpler in my day.’
‘Oh?’ said Anna. ‘In what way?’
He sighed. ‘You ended up in some line of work. However you approached it. I happened to study economics, but was I interested in it? Like hell I was. Money’s nice to have, but sitting there counting it day in and day out? No, stuff that.’
‘So what would you have liked to do instead?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’m just like so many people, getting grumpy and less satisfied as the years go by.’
‘How do you mean?’
He did not reply, and after a while she prompted him. ‘What are you actually trying to say, Valdemar?’
He gave another sigh. ‘Well I expect you’ve noticed. I find it hard to make contact with people, hard to make contact with life, you could say. I suppose that’s the big question, really . . .’
‘What is?’
‘What the hell the meaning of my life is.’
She sat down at the kitchen table and he joined her. She was watching him, her eyes looking restless and a bit uneasy, and he wondered why on earth he had said that to her. She was at least fifteen years younger than his son.
‘Are you unhappy, Valdemar?’
‘Oh no.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Hmm, I suppose there are plenty who feel better. I hope so, anyway. It doesn’t bloody well bear thinking about, otherwise.’
‘So what would you like to do?’
‘To do?’
‘Yes.’
There was a long silence. He looked round the freshly painted walls, scratched the back of his neck and eventually his face broke into a cautious smile.
‘It’s really nice, Anna.’
‘Yes,’ said Anna. ‘But you haven’t answered my question.’
‘About what I’d like to do?’
‘Mm.’
He cleared his throat. ‘Maybe that’s the problem,’ he said, and looked out of the window. ‘If I really felt some real urge, it probably wouldn’t be all that hard to set about it. But when you don’t know, when you just feel out of place but haven’t got a clue where you really want to be . . . well, then it seems a bit gloomier, somehow.’
‘But you’ve got this.’ She threw her arms wide. ‘You bought this, didn’t you? Wasn’t this what you were longing for?’
Valdemar leant back. ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, damn it, it is. But you get greedy, don’t you? You want more.’
‘I don’t follow.’
He thought some more. ‘I don’t want to leave here, Anna. That’s the trouble. Only being here on weekdays just doesn’t feel enough.’
A few seconds passed in silence.
‘How are things with you and your family?’
‘Not good,’ said Valdemar with a shake of the head. ‘I expect you’d already worked that out. The girls couldn’t care less about me. Alice is tired of me and I can completely understand that, but . . .’
‘But?’
He gave a laugh. ‘Little Anna, I really have no idea why I’m sitting here complaining to you. I’m almost forty years older than you, but you’re the one who started it. It’s as if . . . well, as if you’re the one drawing it out of me.’
She gave a smile. ‘Maybe I ought to be a psychologist or something.’
‘Why not? You seem to have the knack.’
She considered this. ‘Well, it does tend to be other people coming to me with their problems. Not the other way round, though it probably oughtn’t to be that way.’
‘Oh?’
‘I feel as if I’ve spent so much time listening to friends who were unhappy.’
‘Is that so?’ said Valdemar. ‘Well it’s important not to mislay your instruction manual to life, that’s what my grandad always used to say. Do you know what happened to me on the way here?’ He brought out his mobile and glared at it. ‘What do you think of this?’
It took him a while to locate the message but once he had, he passed it over. She took it and read the words on the screen. First with expectant curiosity on her face, but then her smile evaporated. She clapped her hand to her mouth and stared at him.
‘What is it?’ said Valdemar.
She shook her head and looked at the display again. ‘This . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘This isn’t to you, Valdemar. I think . . .’
‘Isn’t to me?’
‘No, but I don’t understand, how . . .?’ She stood up and began pacing the floor. ‘I don’t see how he can have got . . .? Wait a minute, there must be a sender number.’
She grabbed the mobile phone and pressed a few keys, staring at the screen. ‘Yes, there it is! Fuck, it’s him. How the hell . . .?’
She trailed off and stood there, mouth half open, a mixture of bewilderment and concentration in her eyes. Tiny pupils trying to bore their way to some kind of coherent whole. Valdemar, watching her, saw that she was holding her breath.
‘That must be it,’ she said in the end.
‘Would you mind telling me what the heck is going on?’ said Valdemar.
‘Soon,’ said Anna. ‘Soon, I promise. Is it all right if I just ring my mother first?’
‘Yes of course, give it a try. But remember how patchy it is. I’m not sure how you got through last time.’
She started tapping in the number and Valdemar got to his feet. ‘I’ll go in the other room while you ring.’
She nodded and put the phone to her ear. ‘Shit! No reception.’
Valdemar turned in the doorway. ‘Damn.’
She bit her lip and he suddenly realized she was close to tears – for some reason which he didn’t understand, but which he hoped she would explain to him in due course. What he would have liked most of all was to give her a hug, to simply hold her for a little while – that was his first impulse, but he realized it didn’t lie in the realm of possibility.
That boundary line again.
‘You can try going a little way up the hill,’ he said. ‘You know, back along the road a hundred metres or so, and then left at the timber piles. I’ve rung from up there a few times.’
She nodded again. ‘I’ll just call her, and then she’ll call me back.’
‘No need to do that,’ said Valdemar, and then she was out of the door and gone.
It was almost half an hour before she got back. He spent the time stretched out on the bed, looking at the walls and trying to enjoy the fact that they were newly painted. With scant success, but it was nothing to do with the paint colour or the workmanship. Of course not.
What’s happened? he wondered. What in God’s name did that message mean?
She’d said it was sent to her. It was Anna who had been hiding from someone called S, and she was the one who could expect a visit. She had known it instantly.
But it wasn’t a source of pleasure to her. Quite the opposite; her reaction had made that abundantly clear. The text message had scared her, there was no doubt about it. She had no wish to see this S.
The good days are over now, thought Valdemar Roos, and he wondered why that particular phrase had decided to lodge in his brain. The good days are over now.
Not even a week had gone by.
But that was typical, of course. One hadn’t the right to expect much.
‘His name’s Steffo,’ she said as she came into the living room.
He sat up and swivelled his legs over the edge of the bed. ‘Steffo?’
‘Yes. He was my boyfriend.’
‘I see.’
‘He got the number from my dopey mum.’
‘My mobile number? How did that happen?’
She sank down at the table and put her head in her hands.
‘I called her from your mobile before, didn’t I? Then he called her and asked where he could get hold of me. And my idiot mother gave him the number.’
‘And you didn’t want—’
‘No way!’ said Anna. ‘He’s crazy. I’m scared stiff of him. He thinks . . . no.’
‘Go on.’
‘He thinks he owns me, just cos we were together for a few months.’
‘But you broke it off with him.’
She sighed and bit her lip. ‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Yes, I did, of course. When I went into that residential centre I broke off all contact with him, he must realize it’s over. But . . .’
‘But what?’
‘But he’s so fucking evil. I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. But getting together with Steffo was the worst one ever.’
She clasped her hands on her lap and for a moment he thought she was praying.
‘Well, you’ll just have to tell him.’
‘Tell him what?’
‘Tell him you don’t want anything more to do with him.’
She shook her head. ‘You don’t understand,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ said Valdemar.
‘Steffo thinks you can own people the way you own things. And his message said he’s coming here.’
Valdemar gave a laugh. ‘Here? But how on earth would he find his way here?’
Anna looked at him doubtfully, chewing her knuckle. ‘I don’t know if he’d really be able to,’ she said, ‘but my mother gave him the name, too.’
‘What name?’
‘The name of this place. Lograna. I’d told her I was somewhere called Lograna – I don’t know why I did that. Because she asked and I wanted to reassure her, I suppose. She was really shaken when I told her I’d run away. But basically it means Steffo knows I’m at a place called Lograna.’
Valdemar pondered this for a moment. ‘Hang on though,’ he said. ‘I don’t think the name Lograna would be on any maps, would it?’
‘That’s what I’m not sure about,’ said Anna. ‘Have you ever tried doing an internet search for it?’
‘No,’ said Valdemar.
‘It might come up,’ said Anna. ‘And then he’d be able to find his way here. I’ve got to get away, Valdemar.’
‘Now just you wait a minute,’ said Valdemar. ‘Let’s put the coffee on and talk this over.’
‘What is there to talk about?’
‘Plenty. You can’t carry on running away from this Steffo, surely you can see that?’ He paused and reflected. ‘I mean, what sort of life is that for you? He’s just got to get it into his head that you don’t want any more to do with him.’
‘I wish it was as simple as that,’ said Anna. ‘If all I had to do was tell him.’
‘Have you tried?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Not in so many words. Do you think we should answer his text?’
Valdemar suddenly felt a sort of warm glow inside him, and he realized what had prompted it. She had used that little word we. Shall we answer his text?
‘We’ll put the coffee on and talk it over,’ he said again. ‘And I don’t really think he could find his way here. This place has been hidden from the world for a good few years. And I’ve no intention of letting you run off in a panic.’
Anna nodded and they both went into the kitchen. ‘I’m so grateful that you exist,’ she said.
Her eyes were glistening as she said it. He looked at the clock. It was already half past five; he wondered how long that women’s network meeting could be expected to last.