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‘I’ll ring you tomorrow.’

Monika didn’t reply, just opened the front door. She had to go now. Pernilla had asked her to stay but she had to go. She could come back some other day, because Pernilla was her friend and was grateful for their friendship. For everything Monika had done for her. She hadn’t told her to go to hell the way she wanted to do with Åse. No, the two of them were real friends now, and you could count on real friends. They never lied to each other. They were there in good times and bad and were always willing to help out.

Pernilla had one friend left, and that was the honourable Monika Lundvall.

If she somehow betrayed her too, Pernilla would be utterly alone.

M
aj-Britt was standing by the balcony door waiting for Saba to come back inside. The dog had just squeezed out through the gap in the balcony railing and vanished from view down on the lawn.

Maj-Britt had shoved the easy chair over next to the window and had spent most of the past two days sitting there, but nothing very exciting had happened outside. The doctor had visited the widow once. The same day she had seen Maj-Britt and done her disgusting examination, she had shown up again towards evening, but after that she had not put in an appearance. She hadn’t called about the test results either, but that didn’t make much difference. Ellinor was the one who was waiting impatiently.

Maj-Britt herself experienced the respite as mostly pleasant. The tablets that Ellinor had picked up relieved the pain, and as long as she didn’t hear any news there were really no decisions to be made. She stayed right there in the flat doing what she always did, sitting from one silence to the next. The only thing that was different was that the pain in her back was better, and she wasn’t eating so much anymore. It wasn’t merely the nausea that stopped her. The urge to stuff something in her mouth had been checked, and it was suddenly easy to refrain although she didn’t really understand
why. Something had retreated when she dared follow all her thoughts to their conclusion. When she approached all the intolerable memories and recognised their repulsiveness, she no longer had to hide from them. Didn’t have to flee. They still hurt just as much as she had always known they did, deep inside, and now that she acknowledged it, they couldn’t scare her anymore. They were losing their power.

She saw Ellinor coming along the walkway down below. It looked cold outside. Her midriff was bare between her jersey and trousers, and Maj-Britt shook her head. That thin denim jacket wasn’t enough for this time of year. But it was apparent that all those little self-assured plastic buttons that decorated it might have stopped the worst of the cold from penetrating. She saw Saba lumber across the lawn to meet her, and Ellinor looked up at the balcony door and waved. Maj-Britt waved back. And she felt something warm inside.

‘She’s going to come by at two. She said nothing about test results or anything else, but wanted to talk to you in person.’

Ellinor was squatting and untying her boots as she talked. Maj-Britt felt a momentary loathing at the thought of letting that doctor in her flat again, but then she remembered her hold on her and it felt a little better. If you knew where you had each other, everything was so much easier. As long as neither person had the upper hand. That doctor might hold the answers to the mysteries of her body, and she could easily make use of that, but if she did, Maj-Britt had made sure she possessed adequate countermeasures.

No one would ever be allowed to do anything to her again unless she gave her express permission.

It was only a few minutes until two o’clock. Maj-Britt took her place in the easy chair with a view of the parking area, but she hadn’t seen anything of the car when the doorbell rang, strangely enough. This was a little miscalculation that she didn’t care for, the fact that she hadn’t sufficiently prepared herself.

Ellinor went and opened the door.

‘Hello, how nice of you to come by.’

The doctor replied briefly, and a minute later Maj-Britt had both of them in the living room. She noticed that the doctor had something in her hand that looked like a small grey briefcase with a cord and some knobs on it.

‘Hello, Maj-Britt.’

Maj-Britt gave the apparatus in her hand a suspicious glance.

‘What’s that?’

‘Could I sit down for a moment?’

Maj-Britt nodded and the doctor – no way was she going to call her Monika – sat down on the sofa, placing the strange object on the table in front of her. She took some papers out of her handbag. Maj-Britt didn’t take her eyes off her, registering every little movement. She observed with interest that the papers in her hand were shaking a bit.

‘So, here it is.’

The doctor unfolded the papers. Ellinor was watching her attentively. Maj-Britt turned and looked towards the window instead. She really did not feel particularly interested.

‘Your sedimentation rate is abnormally high, and your blood count is quite low. The sample showed no bacteria in the urine, and I found none after culturing either, so we can definitely rule out any infection in the urinary tract. A kidney stone was another thought I had, but then the pain would have come more suddenly, and besides it wouldn’t affect the sedimentation rate.’

She paused and Maj-Britt kept her eyes on the swings outside. What she did
not
suffer from was even less interesting to her.

‘So I’m healthy then?’

‘No, you’re not.’

There was a brief pause when everything was still safe.

‘I need to do an ultrasound.’

Still on her guard, Maj-Britt turned her head and met the doctor’s gaze.

‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘No, we can do it here.’

The doctor placed her hand on the apparatus on the table. Maj-Britt felt trapped. She had made up her mind not to go through any more examinations. Her refusal to leave the flat should have taken care of that, but now this doctor had dragged in equipment that would make it possible. What bad luck.

‘And what if I refuse?’

‘Maj-Britt!’

It was Ellinor. The boundary between entreaty and exasperation was gone.

Maj-Britt looked out the window again.

‘What do you think you might find with this ultrasound?’

It was Ellinor asking about the details that Maj-Britt herself had absolutely no interest in, and the two women began to discuss her possible ailment.

‘I’m not sure, of course, but I need to take a look at her kidneys.’

‘What do you think it might be?’

Again there was a pause, but all sense of calm was now gone. It was as if the word already lay quivering in the room, before it had even been uttered. Floating in one last moment of innocence.

‘It might be a tumour. But as I said,’ she added quickly, ‘I’m not one hundred percent certain.’

A tumour. Cancer. That was a word she had heard on TV many times and it had never passed by entirely unnoticed. But at that moment she realised that when something was mentioned that might possibly exist in her own body, then it felt considerably different. Then the word came alive, transformed into an image of something black and evil inside. It was almost possible to imagine a monster living inside her that swallowed everything in its path and kept growing bigger.

And yet she was not particularly afraid. It was more as if yet another thought she had not dared follow to its conclusion had finally been confirmed. Because why shouldn’t her body have cancer? It would be its last triumph over her futile, lifelong resistance. Lying in ambush and nourishing a growth in order to take its revenge once and for all, to conquer her.

And she realised that she had to know.

‘How is such a procedure done?’

Because in some way she did feel the need to have it confirmed.

The room was utterly silent. Maj-Britt was back in the easy chair. Ellinor leant forward in the sofa with her head in her hands. And in the middle of the room the doctor stood packing up her fancy apparatus which had just reinforced the suspicions that they all clearly shared. Maj-Britt was pleased to confirm that the doctor’s hands were still trembling. For some reason it made her feel better to see that.

‘As far as I could tell the tumour is still contained within the surface of the kidney, but of course we have to do a contrast X-ray to know for sure. From what I saw there were no signs of metastasis, but that also has to be checked. But it was large, so it’s high time to have it removed.’

Maj-Britt felt strangely calm. She looked towards the window again. At the swings that she had looked at for more than thirty years but had never seen up close.

‘And if it’s not removed?’

No one answered, but after a while she heard a little puffing sound from Ellinor.

‘Well, what if it’s not removed?’

Now it was Maj-Britt’s turn to be silent. She had said everything that needed to be said.

‘Maj-Britt, what do you mean by that? You must realise that you have to get rid of it! Isn’t that right, Monika? How long can someone live with that sort of tumour if it isn’t treated?’

‘That’s impossible to answer. I have no idea how long it’s been growing in there.’

‘Well, approximately?’

Ellinor, as usual, was meticulous about details.

‘Six months perhaps. Maybe more, maybe less, it
depends on how fast it’s growing. As a doctor I must strongly recommend an operation.’

As a doctor. Maj-Britt snorted to herself.

Ellinor’s mobile rang and she went out into the hall.

Maj-Britt watched the woman who was very carefully packing up her fancy apparatus.

Six months.

Maybe.

It was hard to tell, she had said.

‘You doctors, it’s your job to do everything you can to save other people’s lives.’

She didn’t really know why she said that, but she couldn’t help herself. Maybe it was to strip off a little of the officiousness that the doctor radiated. Like goodness personified she stood there pretending to be at the service of all humanity. But she was careful to conceal her own dark secrets; underneath that impeccable surface brooded the same dirty mistakes and shortcomings that all mortals possessed.

Maj-Britt read her reaction at once and it made her want to hammer in the spike a little deeper.

‘To make people live as long as possible, remain here on earth with their families and get to see their children grow up. That’s probably what you doctors are here for. There’s probably nothing that could be more important to you.’

Ellinor was standing in the doorway again.

The doctor bent down and snapped her bag shut, and Maj-Britt saw that she had to brace herself on the arm of the sofa when she stood up. A quick motion with her hand so she wouldn’t lose her balance. Without looking in Maj-Britt’s direction she went out into the hall. Maj-Britt could just make out a terse conversation.

‘Unfortunately there’s nothing more I can do until you contact her care centre and go through the required process. They’ll arrange the referrals to the hospital for further investigation.’

The front door was opened and Ellinor’s last words echoed between the stone walls in the stairwell.

‘Thanks for all your help.’

And then the door was closed.

Ellinor stayed on an extra hour even though she had several clients waiting. Maj-Britt didn’t say much, but Ellinor’s gift of the gab reached new heights in a desperate attempt to convince Maj-Britt to give her permission to ring the care centre. But Maj-Britt didn’t want to. She didn’t intend to suffer through any more examinations, not to mention any operations.

Why should she?

Why should she co-operate at all?

No matter how painful it was to admit, she couldn’t for the life of her come up with anything that was even close to resembling a reason.

T
he woman was a monstrosity. As if she had stepped right out of a horror film. It must be to punish her that fate had set this repulsive woman in Monika’s path. It was as though her sharp eyes could see straight through her, see right into her, and for some reason that Monika did not understand, the woman was intent on doing her harm.

She had driven the shortest way home and gone straight into the bathroom without even taking off her coat or boots. There she had swallowed two Zopax tablets. She had written herself a prescription for them at the same time as the sleeping pills but hadn’t taken any before.

But she could no longer stand it.

She went into the living room and wandered about, waiting for the pills to take effect. Each second, each instant. It was no longer possible to escape. It was as if there was no room in her body, and at any moment her skin might start to shatter. A feeling that she was about to burst.

And then there was her phone. It kept ringing and ringing, and the noise drove her crazy, but she didn’t dare turn it off. It was proof that there was a functioning reality somewhere, and if she completely cut
off contact with it she didn’t know where she might end up. She just couldn’t understand how everything had come to this or what she had to do to put it all right again.

At last.

At last she felt the anxiety loosen its grip, pull in its barbs and dissolve. Letting her breathe. Gratefully she stood in the middle of the room and welcomed the sense of liberation. Stockholm white. That was the colour of the living-room walls. It was odd that in this town it was all right to have Stockholm white on the walls. Almost reassuring in some way. That anything was possible. Just breathe. Breathe calmly and quietly. Nothing else is important. She just had to go and lie down for a bit on the sofa and take time to breathe.

Red brick walls. A cellar. She was in a cellar, but she didn’t know whose. She couldn’t see a door anywhere. She felt with her hands across the rough wall to find a crack or some sign of an opening, but there was none. Suddenly she knew that there was a dead body sealed up inside the wall, she didn’t know who it was but she knew she was the one who had walled it in there. She heard a sound and turned round. Her mother was kneeling and planting an orchid. She had a piece of bread in her hand, which she crumbled up and threw across the floor.
Columba livia. They’re
best with chanterelles
. And then a train was coming. Pernilla stood in the middle of the tracks and the train whistle grew louder. Monika ran as fast as she could but she never got any closer; she wouldn’t be able to save her. She had to make the ringing stop, had to make it stop. Make it stop.

‘Hello?’

She had her mobile in her hand. She was standing in her hallway with her coat and boots on but still wasn’t quite sure.

‘Yes, hi, it’s Pernilla.’

The voice convinced her that she was back in reality, but she was still pleasantly high. She was a safe distance from everything that might hurt her or threaten her and not even her body reacted. Her heart was beating with a calm, regular rhythm.

‘Hi.’

‘I just wanted to hear how you’re doing. Your last visit was a bit brief and I thought maybe you’d taken ill.’

Taken ill. Pernilla’s words were repeated like an echo. Taken ill. Maybe she had. If she was ill then she would certainly be entitled to a few days’ respite from her task, and hadn’t she actually earned it? Only a few days? She was so incredibly tired. If only she could get enough sleep then everything would be better. She’d be able to think clearly again, make a plan for how to proceed, how to solve everything for the best. Right now she was too tired. Her brain had taken on a life of its own and no longer obeyed her. If only she could sleep, everything would be better.

‘Yes, I’ve been ill. I’m in bed with a fever.’

‘Oh no, maybe you caught it from Daniella, she’s not feeling well either.’

Monika didn’t reply. If Daniella was sick she ought to be there. It was part of the agreement, but she just couldn’t. She had to get some sleep.

‘Well, I won’t bother you if you’re not feeling well. Give me a ring when you’re on your feet again. If
there’s anything you need, just call, if you need help shopping or anything.’

Monika closed her eyes.

‘Thanks.’

She couldn’t say anymore, and clicked off her phone. With her back pressed against the front door she slid down to the floor. She propped her elbows on her bent knees and hid her face in her hands. The stupor from the pills spared her from fully taking in the thoughts that flashed past. What a fragile line there was between cruelty and care. But what was evil? Who set the rules? Who assumed the right to define a truth that would apply to everyone under any circumstance? All she wanted was to help, fix things, make the unreasonable ‘Never again’ less ruthless. Because everything
could
be set right if only you made the proper effort. It had to be true! Had to!

She would continue to stand by Pernilla’s side; anything else was unthinkable. She would continue to subordinate herself, be on hand as long as Pernilla needed her, put her own life aside as long as necessary. And yet she knew that in the long run it wouldn’t be enough. It was Pernilla’s husband and her daughter’s father that Monika had stolen, not her best friend. She straightened up and she stared sightlessly at the wall opposite. She hadn’t realised it before, but that was the solution. Pernilla had to meet a new man. A man who could fill Mattias’s place in a completely different way than she herself could ever do. Become a new father to Daniella, take over the burden of supporting them, give Pernilla the love that Mattias’s death had robbed her of.

Monika got to her feet and let her coat drop to the
floor. Filled with this new insight she felt everything grow lighter. If she saw to it that Pernilla met a new man, her task would be complete, then she would have fulfilled her obligation. They could still see each other as friends and Pernilla would never know the truth.

Monika’s debt to Mattias would be absolved.

She went into the bedroom and squeezed a sleeping pill out of the foil pack. First of all she had to get some sleep. A good night’s sleep so that her brain would obey her again. Then she would be ready to start to implement her new plan. Coax Pernilla out of her corner, invite her along on a trip abroad, put classified ads in her name on the Internet and in the papers.

She would fix things.

Everything would be put right again.

She let her clothes drop where she stood. The instant her head hit the pillow she was sleeping soundly, convinced that she had finally regained control.