The Glitter Scene (17 page)

“Everything can happen here,” Maj-Gun finishes. “Just that … that … do you think, Susette, that anything happens here at all?

“You can say anything here. That’s how it is, at the newsstand. In general.”

•

“It’s late.” Susette clears her throat, now she wants to get home right away.

Maj-Gun sighs, gets up as well, is going to start closing up.

Counts the register first, opens the cash drawer,
PLING
.

“Wait, Susette,” Maj-Gun calls when Susette is already at the door. “I think. About your mother. I understand, Susette. More than you know.”

“What do you mean?” Susette asks quickly, almost spitefully.

“What I’m saying,” Maj-Gun calmly replies, “your mother. She was for real. Not like my aunt or … like someone else. Your mother, Susette. Was as healthy as could be. In some way healthier than everyone else in the world who is healthy. Does that sound like a cliché? But still, what I want to say. It was just a logic. To go along with.”

“Maj-Gun. Don’t bother—” Susette says, but still, she cannot pull herself away, in some way wants to hear more.

“Life like a room, Susette. That’s what she said, maybe to you too, there at the rag-cutting bucket in the kitchen—a special mood that never leaves you once you’ve been there. Room after room after room that you enter and leave and then go on to the next one. That house, what it looks like on the inside, you don’t feel but you know … suddenly you’ve just ended up there … Not in a basement or in some dusty attic.

“But maybe just somewhere where it is … empty.

“Brown. Nasty. She spoke like that. Cut up her office clothes, they were like that shade you know, you remember. Worn woolen fabric. We cut. For the most part she cut and I listened. I really
listened
, Susette, because it was touching for real. Listened like I had never listened before and maybe will never listen again either because it hurt, and continues to hurt too.

“Is that death?
It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God
. Is that it? Maj-Gun? Susette? Questions like those. The most terrible or the most comforting, because that is where life and death cancel each other out, laughter grief same thing, there is no answer of course.

“But she remained sitting there cutting, didn’t give in.

“She remains sitting there, doesn’t give in.

“It demanded respect. But on the other hand I understand that you can’t live in it.”

“Maj-Gun. CAN we stop talking about this now?”

“Yes, Susette. But you don’t need to be jealous. It was, it IS, your mother. My occasional affinity with your mother, Susette. Originates from there and only there.

“She didn’t pretend. You could see it in her. A logic. I mean, also in the most absurd of contexts, at the rug rag bucket and among all of the rags.”

“Be quiet now!”

“Sorry, Susette,” Maj-Gun says again, one of the last things she says that night but then Susette is already outside. “I mean something else.

“When you don’t pretend. It isn’t like it is at the newsstand. That you can say anything. But it isn’t like that.

“You can’t say just anything and yet, even though you think so, it is so beautiful and right when someone says so—so you still keep going, the words pour out of you.

“I want …” But Susette is already halfway home on the pedestrian and bicycle path, when she really takes it in, the normal, fresh air, the autumn night. “I want something real.

“A love for example. Which is greater than death. Which overcomes death. It is … if nothing else … then my … readiness.

“The Boy in the woods. Someone who loves despite everything, Susette. That’s me.”

And Maj-Gun who calls out after her: “Sometimes I have the feeling that
we
are the Angels of Death. The two of us. In the same timelessness.

•

But otherwise, Susette in the everyday, ten thousand miles away from that. Cleaning with Solveig, traveling with Solveig in the company car to different places, joint cleaning projects and individuals ones, where they clean, each on her own. They have a good collaboration, get on well together, even if they are not friends in that way.
Solveig is Susette’s employer, has her own life as well; has a five-year-old daughter, Irene, lives somewhere in the Outer Marsh. In a room on the top floor of an old house, not a single-family home exactly, Solveig laughs sometimes when she is in a good mood, but a shack with “room for many generations” that flow freely over all of the floors, small fry, cousins, sisters-in-law and in the midst of it all the mother of the clan, Viola Torpeson, with a can of beer and Benson & Hedges cigarettes and the apple of her eye Gossip Queen Allison, certainly full grown by now, who comes and goes, on “beauty trips,” as she says to the kids, they worship her and several kids crawl across the floor when she comes home.

At some point Solveig says she would like to move away with her girl: her husband, Torpe, who comes from that house, has traveled to Germany with his brother Järpe and some cousins, is doing construction work there. Move, not to Germany but to someplace that is just hers, and the girl’s, Irene’s, of course. Should not be impossible, business is booming, this year in particular has been great, with the assignment in Rosengården 2.

On the other hand, the Outer Marsh, it is okay: the girl gets on well there and does not need to be on her own very often, there are, as said, other kids to play with and always someone acting as babysitter: Gossip Queen, the sisters-in-law, Viola Torpeson.

Besides, Solveig can also say when she is in one of those moods: the Outer Marsh, an interesting environment. The marshiness, stinging sand in the air, fires on opposite beaches at night. Often someone is burning something there: at night when you cannot sleep, stand at the window on the second floor that faces the marsh,
look at the fires, something a bit magical about it all, so to speak, comes close. And then sometimes, when Solveig talks like that, in passing, it whizzes through Susette’s head too: a rug weaver in a small cottage next to a body of water filled with reeds, she was there once. She, Susette, with her mother and the rug rags in sacks, loads of them, which they had cut up at home, brought them by taxi from the town center. Thousands of cats, the stink of urine, and a massive loom in one single room. Solveig shakes her head, no, did not know that woman, knows nothing about it. On the other hand, she is not originally from there. Has, as mentioned, grown up next to the First and Second capes, the cousin’s property, closer to the sea, which she also says as if it is in some way nicer. Still, without having gone into detail, you understand there is a lot of shit in that life: orphaned early on, a twin sister, Rita, who left the District several years ago and has broken all ties with her sister completely.

Rita,
Sister Red
. And Solveig, her twin sister, once upon a time they were inseparable, she was Sister Blue. In the swimming school for the District’s children on the Second Cape, a long time ago, where they were the teacher’s assistants for Tobias the swim instructor, who is still a good friend of Solveig’s, because they were skilled swimmers even from an early age. Were going to become swimmers, trained hard: there, at the Second Cape, and later, for a while, when the public beach was moved from the sea bay out to the woods, to Bule Marsh. Sister Blue, Sister Red, they were called that based on their bathing suits because otherwise it was quite impossible to tell who was who, especially in just their bathing suits and with their hair wet. But sometimes at the swimming
school they changed bathing suits on purpose in order to confuse everyone and especially Tobias who stubbornly insisted on calling them by their first names, claimed that he definitely saw the difference, which was not true of course, he mixed them up all of the time too.

But “I was the one who was Sister Blue.” Solveig has been able to carry on with Susette in the company car sometimes, these hundred years later. Because an episode that Solveig remembers very well but that Susette has almost completely forgotten belongs to the time in the swimming school when Susette was also a student once when she was really little. That one time at swimming school she, Susette, had ended up too far out at sea and almost drowned, but then, in other words, it was Solveig who had been the attentive one and thrown herself into the water and crawled out to Susette who was sinking already then, Solveig and no one else got hold of her and pulled her to land and gave her CPR there on the cliffs. And later, that same fall, Solveig was awarded the Lifeguard’s Medal, at the Lifeguards’ Club’s yearly banquet even though she had not been able to be there herself. Was at home in bed with the mumps, but got the medal by post.

“I was the one who was Sister …” with Susette in other words, in the company car, she insisted on it and could sometimes get really agitated too. If Susette, for example, in order to tease her tossed out the idea that what IF the one who had saved her had been her sister Rita who happened to have Solveig’s blue bathing suit on that day.

“I mean. I don’t
know
, of course. You two looked so much alike.” Though in reality, it
is
just for fun, because
Susette really does not imagine for a second that Solveig could be wrong.

Not because she has any real memory of it, just something blue flickering before her eyes, she was so little after all, long before Majjunn, the Pastor’s Crown Princess, the loom, the rug rags, that is how it feels anyway. Apart from in general, what it had felt like to sink, lose her breath,
blubb blubb
 … she can certainly recall that in her consciousness but mostly in situations when she is not thinking about it, it rises up, a discomfort and then of course the fact that she
hates
the sea so vehemently that it is almost a secret, at least it is not something she discusses with anyone. Besides, she has her job to do. The Glass House, the Second Cape, she cleans there in the summer after all, one of her cleaning projects, the individual ones. Is being rented by a French diplomatic family during these years: they play music on the glass veranda in the evenings, the whole family, mother father children, in floor-length polyester shirts, it becomes a complete tiny chamber orchestra, freshly squeezed orange juice in icy frosted pitchers on a small glass table for refreshment when they take their breaks. Looking in through the crack in the door, on the way to the second floor with the ammonia bucket—the music, the orange juice, and the sea in the background, in protest. High rolling gray waves, white foam,
a hellish roar from the sea
, which is thrown up against the windows.

And becomes stuck there. And you, if you are Susette, the following day, alone on an A-ladder wedged in between the rocks on the beach right next to the bay where she once swam out and almost drowned. The Frenchman’s white summer cat meowing on the cliffs,
hating the sea, but high up on the ladder, not thinking, scrubbing, polishing the windowpane clean, not looking back—or down.

But otherwise, Solveig, Rita: it is obvious that it was Solveig and not Rita who came to the rescue in the swimming school, no doubt about it, seriously.

Back then she had not needed more than a few seconds in Rita’s company to realize it. Businesswoman of the Year’s two-window ice cream stand on the square where Susette and Rita had worked together for a few days before Susette was transferred to the strawberry fields in the middle region of the country by her employer.

Rita Rat with higher prospects: would never have lifted a finger to help anyone without thinking about what was in it for her. Could clearly be seen on her face. Rita’s sullen silence, a mute rage in the air, tangible like an approaching thunderstorm. A trembling point of power, collected energy. Certainly
fascinating
but it had not interested Susette any further, she was preoccupied with her own problems. Some pangs of conscience for having quit her job at the private nursing home for the elderly and infirm where she had a full-time position. “They will be so sad, the old sick men and women, they are so attached to you,” the manager’s farewell words echoing in her ears and a certain disappointment, which she had had her hands full trying to hide. The ice cream stand, was this it? The J.L. kerchief and Rita Rat grumbling beside her: is this what she had longed for in the quiet hospital corridors where she had stood in front of the window and looked out over the square on warm spring days, scoops of ice cream on cones, sweet tastes, wild strawberries, pears, and chocolate?

Had not really made heads or tails of those thoughts either, so what she had done at the ice cream stand with Rita Rat was what she had already been good at, at the time: making it look like she was sleeping. But she was
not
sleeping, was as alert as could be, conscious of everything going on around her. A peculiarity she in other words still has, and Solveig in the company car can sometimes get annoyed about it. Some mornings in the car for example when they are heading into the city by the sea and need to get an early start and Solveig picks her up at the first bus stop by the main country road outside the town center, where Susette has walked all the way from her apartment in the complex on the hills on the north side; how she then sits there and dozes next to Solveig who is driving and playing the radio or one of her old cassette tapes. As they approach the city, how Solveig turns the volume up to an insufferable level in order to
wake the bear who is sleeping
, as she says. But completely unnecessary, which is proved by Susette who, several hours later in the middle of the working day, suddenly just starts rambling loudly about the high water level from the weather forecast or singing some song,
and the girl she moves in the dance with red, golden ribbons
, which Solveig was playing in the car that morning.

But in the car Susette is startled by an unpleasant surprise, the sound buzzing through the front of the car, she straightens her back, says grouchily, “Thanks for saving my life Sister Blue. I am so damned grateful.”

“And with these words I give you Susette Packlén,” Solveig says in turn and then you are supposed to remember what no one remembers, what “these words” were, that is to say what Jeanette Lindström had said
when she and Susette got into an argument while catering and Jeanette pushed her employee up to Solveig in the middle of her wedding.