Penelope stands at the helm. An airy blue sarong is wrapped around her hips and there’s a peace sign on the right breast of her white bikini top. Spring sunlight pours through the windscreen as she carefully rounds Kungshamn lighthouse and manoeuvres the large motorboat into the narrow sound.
Her younger sister, Viola, gets up from the pink recliner on the afterdeck. For the past hour, she’s been lying back in Björn’s cowboy hat and enormous sunglasses, languidly smoking a joint.
Five times she tries to pick up a matchbox from the floor with her toes. Penelope can’t help smiling. Viola walks into the cockpit and offers to take the wheel for a while. “Otherwise, I’ll go downstairs and make myself a margarita,” she says, as she continues down the stairs.
Björn is lying on the foredeck, a paperback copy of Ovid’s Metamorphoses put to use as his pillow. Penelope notices that the railing near his feet is rusting. The boat was a present from his father for his twentieth birthday, but Björn hasn’t had the money to maintain it. It was the only gift his father ever gave him, except once when his father paid for a trip. When Björn’s father turned fifty, he invited Björn and Penelope to one of his finest properties, a five-star hotel called Kamaya Resort on the east coast of Kenya. Penelope endured the resort for two days before she took off to join Action Contre la Faim at the refugee camp in Kubbum, Darfur.
Penelope reduces speed from eight to five knots as they reach the bridge at Skuru Sound. They’ve just glided into the shadows when Penelope notices the black rubber boat. Pressed against the concrete foundation, it’s the same kind the military uses for their coastal rangers: an RIB with a fibreglass hull and extremely powerful engines. Penelope has almost passed beneath the bridge when she notices a man hunched in the darkness, his back turned. She doesn’t know why her pulse starts to race at the sight of him; something about his neck and the black clothes he wears bothers her. She feels he’s watching her even though he sits turned away.
Back into sunshine, she starts to shiver; goose bumps cover her arms. She guns the boat to fifteen knots. The two inboard engines drone powerfully, and the wake streams white behind them as the boat takes off over the smooth surface of the water.
Penelope’s phone rings. It’s her mother. For a moment Penelope fantasises that she’s calling to tell Penelope how wonderful she’d been on TV earlier, but she snaps back to reality.
“Hi, Mamma.”
“Ay, ay.”
“What’s wrong?”
“My back. I’ll have to go to the chiropractor,” Claudia says, loudly filling a glass with tap water. “I just wanted to know if you’ve talked to your sister.”
“She’s on the boat with us,” Penelope replies, listening to her mother gulp the water down.
“She’s with you … how nice. I thought it would be good for her to get out.”
“I’m sure it is,” Penelope says quietly.
“What do you have to eat?”
“Pickled herring and potatoes, eggs—”
“Viola doesn’t like herring. What else do you have?”
“I’ve made a few meatballs,” Penelope says patiently.
“Enough for everyone?”
Penelope falls silent as she looks out over the water. “I can always skip them myself,” she says, collecting herself.
“Only if there aren’t enough …” her mother says. “That’s all I’m trying to say.”
“I understand.”
“Am I supposed to be feeling sorry for you now?” her mother demands with irritation.
“It’s just that … Viola is not a child—”
“I remember all the years I made you meatballs for Christmas and Midsummer and—”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten them.”
“All right then,” her mother says sharply. “If that’s the way you want it.”
“I’m just trying to say—”
“You don’t have to come for Midsummer,” Claudia snaps.
“Oh, Mamma, why do you have to—”
Her mother has hung up. Penelope shakes with frustration.
The stairs from the galley creak and a moment later Viola appears, a margarita in hand. “Was that Mamma?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Worried I wouldn’t get enough to eat?” Viola can’t hide a smile.
“Believe me, we have food on board,” Penelope says.
“Mamma doesn’t believe I can take care of myself.”
“She worries about you.”
“She never worries about you,” Viola points out.
“I can take care of myself.”
Viola takes a sip of her drink and looks out through the windscreen.
“I saw you on TV,” she says.
“This morning? When I met Pontus Salman?”
“No, it was … last week,” Viola replies. “You were talking to that arrogant man with the aristocratic name—”
“Palmcrona,” Penelope says.
“Palmcrona, right.”
“You can’t believe how angry he made me! I could feel my face turning bright red, and the tears started coming and I couldn’t stop them. I felt like jumping up and reciting Bob Dylan’s ‘Masters of War’ to his face, or like running out and slamming the studio door behind me.”
Viola’s only half listening. She watches Penelope stretch as she opens the roof window. “I didn’t realise you’ve started to shave your armpits,” she says.
“Well, these days I’ve been in the media so much that—”
“Vanity, pure vanity!” Viola says with a laugh.
“I didn’t want people to dismiss me as a dogmatist just because I have some pit hair.”
“What about your bikini line, then?”
“Well, that’s not going so well …”
Penelope pulls aside her sarong and Viola laughs out loud.
“Björn likes it,” Penelope says with a little smile.
“He can’t talk, not with those dreads of his.”
“I imagine you shave everywhere you have to,” Penelope says sharply. “Just to please your married men and your big-muscled idiots and—”
“I know I have bad taste in men.”
“You have good taste in most other areas.”
“I’ve never amounted to much, though.”
“If you’d just finished school, got good grades …”
Viola shrugs. “I actually got my equivalency.”
The boat ploughs gently through the water, green now, reflecting the surrounding hillsides. Seagulls follow overhead.
“So, how did it go?”
“I thought the exam was easy,” Viola says, licking salt from the edge of her glass.
“So it went well?”
Viola nods and puts her glass down.
“How well?” Penelope nudges her sister in her side.
“One hundred percent.” Viola looks down modestly.
Penelope laughs with happiness and hugs her sister hard.
“Do you realise what this means? Now you can be anything you want! You can go to whichever university you want and study anything you like! You can pick anything at all! Business, medicine, journalism!”
The sisters laugh and their cheeks flush. Penelope hugs her sister so hard that the cowboy hat falls off. She smoothes Viola’s hair and pats it into place just as she used to do when they were small. She removes the clip with the peace dove from her hair and slides it into her sister’s, smiling contentedly.