My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love (54 page)

‘Lie still, will you. Do you understand?’ I said, and for a moment it was as though she did understand, because she was lying quite still and staring at me with her round eyes. With one hand I lifted her legs into the air while releasing the tabs with the other and removing her nappy. Then she tried to wriggle free, squirmed round and because I had a tight grip on her, she contorted like some epileptic.

‘No, no, no,’ I said, throwing her back onto the bed. She laughed, I pulled some wipes from the packet as fast as I could, she swung round again, I pressed her down and wiped her clean while breathing through my nose and trying not to react to the irritation I could feel was brewing inside me now. I had forgotten to put the full nappy away, she had her whole foot in it, I nudged it to the side and wiped her foot, somewhat half-heartedly, because I knew wipes were no longer up to the job. I lifted her and carried her to the bathroom, where with Vanja kicking and struggling under my arm I took the showerhead from the holder, turned on the water, adjusted it until it was warm on the back of my hand and began to spray the lower half of her body carefully while she gripped the ends of the yellow shower curtain. Once this was done I dried her with a towel and got her into a new nappy, after thwarting another bid for freedom. All that was left to do was to dispose of the used one, put it in a plastic bag, tie a knot and chuck it outside the front door.

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.

Outside, it was still snowing, quieter now though. It struck me that in two days I would be back in the office and a frisson of pleasure ran through me. Perhaps Ingrid would even be able to have Vanja three times a week and not just twice? I desired no more of life, in fact. I wanted to have some peace, and I wanted to write.

Of Linda’s friends, Fredrik was the one she had known longest. They had met when they were working on costumes at the Royal Dramatic Theatre as sixteen-year-olds and had maintained contact ever since. He was a film director working mostly on commercials while waiting to make his first feature film. His clients were big names, the adverts were constantly on TV, so I assumed he was good at what he did and earned a packet. He had made three shorts, for which Linda had written the scripts, and a slightly longer film. He had close-set blue eyes and blond hair. His head was big, his body thin and there was something evasive about his character, also vague perhaps, which made it difficult for you to know where you were with him. He giggled rather than laughed and had a cheery disposition, both of which could lead you to draw hasty conclusions about him. His cheery nature didn’t necessarily hide greater depths or gravity, rather it functioned in ways that were not readily apparent. There was something latent in Fredrik, what, I didn’t know, but the fact that there was, which one day would metamorphose into a brilliant film perhaps, perhaps not, intrigued me. He was astute and fearless, and must have discovered many years ago that he didn’t have much to lose. At least that was how I read his character. Linda said that his greatest strength as a director was that he was so good at dealing with actors, giving them exactly what they needed to achieve optimal performances, and when I saw him I could see that, for he was a friendly soul who flattered everyone he met, and his innocuous appearance allowed you to feel strong while the calculating side of his nature knew how to exploit the benefits this accrued. The actors were welcome to discuss their characters and attempt to find what made them tick, but they were not allowed to see the entirety, where the meaning lay, no one knew that apart from him.

I liked him, but couldn’t talk to him and I tried to avoid any situations where we were left in each other’s company. As far as I could gather, he did the same.

I didn’t know Karin, his partner, so well. She was at the same college as Linda, at DI, but on a screenplay-writing course. Since I also wrote I ought to have been able to relate to her work, but the craft side was so prominent in writing a screenplay, where it was about all manner of ebbs and flows of tension, character development, plots and subplots, intros and turning points, I assumed I would have little to contribute in that respect and never mobilised more than polite interest. She had black hair, narrow brown eyes and her face, also narrow, was white. She radiated a business-like manner which went well with Fredrik’s more flippant and childlike character. They had one child and were expecting another. Unlike us, they had everything under control, there was order in the home, they went out with their child and organised interesting activities. After we had been to theirs, or they had been to ours, that was often what Linda and I discussed: how on earth what appeared to be so simple for them could be so utterly beyond our capability.

There was a lot to suggest we could make friends with them as a couple: we were the same age, we worked in the same areas, belonged to the same culture and we both had children. But there was always a piece missing, it was always as though we were standing on opposite sides of a small chasm, the conversation was always tentative, we never really found the right tone. But the few times we did it was to everyone’s relief and pleasure. Much of the reason it did not really work was me: my great expanses of silence and the slight discomfort that came over me when I did say something. This evening proceeded by and large as always. They arrived at a few minutes after six, we exchanged polite pleasantries, Fredrik and I each had a gin and tonic, we sat down and ate, asked one other about various matters, how this and that were going, and it was, as always, clear how much more adept they were at this than we were, or at least than I was. Taking the initiative – suddenly talking about something I had experienced or thought in an attempt to get the conversation going – was beyond me. Linda didn’t do this very often either, her strategy was rather to home in on them, ask about something and play it by ear from there, unless she felt so secure and good in herself that she held the floor with the same ease that I did not. If she did, it was a great evening; there would be three players who didn’t give the game a single thought.

They praised the food, I cleared the table, put on some coffee and set the table for dessert while Karin and Frederik settled their child down in the bedroom beside where Vanja was already asleep in her cot.

‘By the way, your flat was on Norwegian TV just before Christmas,’ I said when their son had fallen asleep and they had both sat down again and helped themselves to hot blackberries and ice cream.