Kristina Sandberg

A lonely place

Original title: EN ENSAM PLATS Norstedts, May 2021, 385 pages Sample translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death Pp. 7–73

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‘I THINK MUM has cancer.’ It’s August, 1997, Utö island. The warm days, evenings, nights. Three weeks, every day the hot, dry wind – twenty-eight degrees, thirty, thirty-two. Twenty-five degrees in the waters of the Baltic Sea, at Storsand, Ålö. We cycle through the dragonflies, butterflies, thistles, thickets of wild raspberries. No rain arrives, no thunder. In the evenings in the playhouse – as Mats calls the decrepit fibre-cement cabin built on solid rock, with so many knick-knacks that there’s barely room for us to put our things, a minimal kitchen with a hob and a fridge, both running on bottled gas – we play Dusty Springfield’s Love Songs. Maybe Dusty in Memphis, too. That first summer. We write in the morn- ings, cycle to Ålö in the afternoons. All the days so much alike. It’s paradise. But then the premonition hits me again – there’s a tumour growing inside Mum. No, I don’t think so, says Mats – or does he reckon I should ring her? I don’t know where the assertive voice is coming from. A day or two later, we are passing the telephone kiosk in Kyrkviken – or at the harbour, I ring Mum, she answers. Says: ‘They found a lump in my breast and gave me an appointment with the surgeon straight away.’

2

YOU CAN WRITE everything, and nothing. Do I really want to take myself back to just under three years ago? Or would it be better merely to blot it out?

3

MAY 2016. OUTWARDLY I’m not tired. Outwardly I’m carrying on. As usual. This will soon be over. I have created a monster out of myself, a work machine. I never rest. I have spent the past two years travelling around, talking about Maj, the character in my novel, about the housewife as concept and social order. Maybe three hundred appearances. Paid, unpaid. I agreed to visit book groups for nothing, but mostly spoke at public libraries up and down the country. I told myself: this will never happen again. This number of enquir- ies. I am not expecting to write anything else that will touch such a nerve with both readers and critics, on a subject whose time in the spotlight has come. As turned out to be the case with the Maj trilogy. An era that scholars in women’s studies and gender studies have already written about – the knowledge ex- isted but it probably needed a work of fiction to reach a wider audience. That was what made me think I’ll take the chance to meet my readers now. And from virtually every event I remember a conversation, a question, a meeting with readers that strikes a chord, an addendum to the history of how women’s lives in the era of the ‘people’s home’ could have looked. So many stories of variants of Maj in the past, but also the way Maj can exist in a reader today. But I have also encountered anger, sharp criticism. Received, and had to deal with, powerful reactions to Maj. To me. I come across an opinion piece, the writer is not simply irritated by Maj, but contemptuous of her. I write this because one can doubt one’s perception of others’ aversion, wonder

4 how a fictional creation, a character in a novel, can generate such fury, such incomprehension of the entirely different circumstances of another age. Ja- maica Kincaid sniffed and told her critics: ‘Read another book, then. Am I supposed to make allowances for what a particular critic or reader finds sym- pathetic or unsympathetic when I write? Am I supposed to ask their permis- sion before I write?’ I answer. More often than not. I take pains to explain why it is feminist to make Maj complicated, anxious, critical – when the demand placed on housewives was to ensure happiness and harmony in the family and continu- ally sweep under the carpet any anger, sorrow, dissatisfaction, improper de- sire, euphoria. The fact that abortion rights were limited, and housework was time-consuming and arduous. The lack of state childcare. And that it’s taken for granted that male characters in a novel can be unlikeable without being called into question. Time after time after time I explain. By spring 2016, I sense I’m reaching my limit. If I don’t slow down soon, something is going to give. Yet I hear myself accepting one offer after another. Things that sound more stimulating than giving yet another talk about Maj. A discussion about Persona in Bergman Week, commissions to write for anthologies, prefaces, reviews. I enjoy it, after all. But I’m so tired.

5

STOP! A SURGE OF PAIN, radiating out along my arm, numbing the fingers of my right hand. Mats snatches his hand away from my breast, saying: What was that? There’s something there, I felt it! I turn away, huddle up, pull the quilt over me. We have just made love. I missed my last mammogram. Had an appointment for it in October 2015. Forgot, was out of Stockholm. Now it’s May. I haven’t been able to find a day on the calendar with the space to rebook it. I’ve been perpetually on the go. Delivering. Railway stations, delays, provincial hotels. Oh my God how lovely to stay in hotels, it sounds so plush. Wish I had a job like that! Hotels can be nice on holiday. Alone, for work, it’s a differ- ent matter. Day after day. More hotel rooms. More beds, pillows, humming ventilation systems, thin walls, gaggles of noisy conference-goers in the cor- ridor outside. Radiators ice-cold or boiling hot. Like an unfamiliar workplace and being perpetually brand new in the job. Every day another library, an- other organiser, another audience and another hotel room, or back to Stock- holm central station at midnight. The dead time, the intervening time. Try- ing to arrange the travel between all those places for the times of day when you need to have checked out, but aren’t yet allowed to check in. Between 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. Waiting at desolate railway stations, bus stops. In rain, wind, snow, cold, darkness. Sunshine. A travelling salesman in literature. Little wonder so many of those salesmen took a drink in the evening. Maybe they still do. But the restaurants in these little places are often closed by the time my events are over. The best I can hope for is an open Co-op or Ica. Peanuts,

6 fruit, yogurt, sweets and chocolate. The excess adrenaline afterwards. Hard to get to sleep. Was it all right? Did I seem rude when I answered that question about whether Maj is ever happy? Did I forget to tell them about the ‘Housewives’ films’? Did she feel I saw her properly, that woman who was so nervous when she thanked me for the books and asked me to sign her copy, or was I too rushed and dismissive? It all goes round and round. Like it does in Maj’s head. And then a feeling of shame as I suddenly stop, remind myself I can scarcely be so important in my readers’ lives that every little thing I do is crucial. And yet not really being able to bear the thought of doing a bad job. Phone calls to Mats and the girls, with the TV in my hotel room playing lazily in the background – missing them, long- ing for them, knowing that everyday life is more of a slog for them when I’m away, the difficulty of compensating for my absence by late-night phone calls. Estrid always asks if she and Daddy can come and get me in the car. How long does it take to drive from Haninge to Gothenburg, Dalby, Åsele, Boden? She keeps a note of my nights away in a diary and crosses them off. And ultimately, I hear that shortness creep into my voice, the desire to hang up, get some sleep, try to wind down, that feeling of emptiness and exhaustion. I can’t come home until the next day in any case. And then I’ve got to go away again… But we have to complete what we have agreed to do. Just think of all the hassle for the organisers if I cancelled at the last minute. They’ve advertised, booked a hotel, perhaps sold pricey tickets. Soon the requests will stop coming. Other authors will win the August Prize and be in demand. Soon I shall be able to rest. Soon I’ll have a whole run of empty days at home. Soon. Home to do the laundry, clean the house, pay the bills and plough through all the admin generated by speaking engagements and travel. Invoic- ing, keeping track of train tickets I’ve paid for. Answering organisers about my jobs for the next six months. Does David Lagercrantz deal with all the admin for his speaking tours? Karl-Ove Knausgaard? Or is it only Good Girls who do that?

7 Bring their own books with them, set up a book stall. Answer hundreds of emails. In the end it makes me want to scream out loud. Especially when I get emails in that demanding, irritatable tone: ‘Send me by return the title of your talk and an introduction to yourself, your background and your topic. The leaflet goes to print at 11 a.m. tomorrow. Please let me know as soon as possible when you will get to the library and whether you have any allergies.’ The talk in question isn’t for nine months! I shall be there on time, do my job, and no, I don’t have any allergies – it will be very nice to have some- thing to eat if you are offering. I haven’t got a particularly exciting title, or a Powerpoint, I just give my talk about the housewife of the people’s home. My only request is a seat in the quiet carriage on the train. And some sort of mi- crophone. I can always sense the hosts’ anxiety that the arrangements will go wrong. Of course I understand that everyone wants to do their job. And they can’t know that I’m faced with hundreds of emails just like this from other event organisers, and there’s simply no chance of my responding to them all by return.

So how can I worry about a shooting pain, radiating out from my breast? Not all the time, only if I press it just there, hard. And there’s no reason for me to do that, after all. We’re off to England shortly. When I’ve given my last lec- ture of term, in Pargas in Finland. When verdant June wraps even our ne- glected garden in beauty. I write my lists. Packing, cleaning. And all just around the time of the girls’ end of term activities. If I go for a mammogram now and something needs investigating, we’ll have to cancel England. Cornwall. Mats has been longing to go there. We’ve rented a house in the village where folk singer Sandy Denny, who he’s writing a novel about, used to spend her holidays. He’s mainly writing about her father Neil, who outlived his wife and both his children. I’ll make an appointment later in the summer. I feel

8 fine! Overworked and worn out maybe, but who isn’t when you start looking around you? And soon. Soon I shall rest.

I don’t want to write this. To hear the lament, the whine of the privileged. But when I can’t write about anything else? When the link to fiction has been severed, when the language that takes me to other worlds has fallen silent. How can I explain… my gratitude and joy at the success of the Maj trilogy. The conversations and responses my readers provide me with. My identifica- tion with grateful readers, I write, it’s true, but I am also always a reader. I know how texts can engender a powerful need to be allowed to answer. Or just to give something back, a word of thanks. A few times in my life, my heart rate rising a little, I have dared to approach a favourite writer and say something appreciative. And of course I remember my shame on the occa- sions they barely nodded, said word or two of thanks, just seemed to find me a nuisance. What I want, as far as I am able, is to see the reader who is giving me their thanks. I want them to know that I am taking in their appreciation. That we share experiences of what reading does to us. And because it makes me so happy when one of my texts has come alive in someone else. But I still have a pile of reader letters lying unanswered. Because I imagine I shall find time to answer them properly, thoughtfully, later.

In June I am working on my preface to the Swedish edition of Jamaica Kin- caid’s The Autobiography of My Mother and my contribution to the anthology on education. Challenging, stimulating, enjoyable. So hard to turn down that sort of offer. Unthinkable to make a poor job of it. Good enough – Mats and I often say that to each other. Donald Winnicott’s ‘good enough mothering’ (which ought to be good enough parenting, of course) – that sort of good enough can be applied to almost everything. But it’s hard to carry through.

9 Just being good enough… but good enough transforms itself imperceptibly into ‘doing your very best’.

The laundry, the cleaning, the piles of paper, the much-loved, sadly neglected garden, the house with all its defects, a shoddy piece of building work in need of attention, an abortive little extension and a roof badly renovated at some earlier point, trapping moisture in the wood panels below. It hounds me, breathing down my neck. But most of all the children. Being there for them, now I’m actually at home. Am I doing it? Or am I permanently tired, preoccupied, irritable… It’s such a contrast to their early childhood, when I almost always worked from home, sitting in bed to write while they were at nursery. And was usually at home in the eve- nings.

In England, everything will be fine. We’ll all be together then. Mum is com- ing, too. We’re going to rent the same semi-detached house in Eastbourne that we had a couple of summers ago, plus this year for the first time we’re renting a house in Cornwall, and then moving on to a B&B in Wiltshire. Am I looking forward to it? I feel so empty inside. Mats is wondering which books to take with him to read, the girls have got their films, games, computers, phones. I don’t know what I want to read. I have to take Persona with me, books by and about Ingmar Bergman. But in the end, Hanne Ørstavik There’s A Big Open Square in Bordeaux has to come as well.

It’s a wetter than average summer on the south coast of England. And windy. No breakfasts out on the terrace of the semi-detached house in the long, nar- row, well-kept back garden. I suppress an image of myself relaxing in a deck- chair under a parasol by the side of the pool in Provence. It’s never happened

10 in real life, me lying in the deckchair in Provence, but the image of a cool stone house and the lavender heat outside… of not doing anything practical, not washing up, shopping, planning, tidying, laundering, folding, getting meals, not even any excursions – that image is seductive. Just a week or two. Even more seductive is the image of being at home. In the house. I dream of having time to clean. Not tidying up and sorting things out in rented houses and cottages, not that, but organising and cleaning at home. Can orderly in- dividuals grasp how quickly chaos descends and how demanding it is trying to restore apparent order? What’s more, if you work from home and have no study, work ends up in the bedroom, where there are also those hundreds of rail tickets waiting to be recorded in my accounts, newspapers to be read later, the books, piles of books… and two people working from home means twice as much mess. Then. I’ll do it all then. After England. After Fårö: Clear out the garage Weed through the books Organise newspapers and magazines, chuck away unwanted ones Clear out the girls’ wardrobes Clear out my wardrobe. Go through newspapers (I’ve saved a crazy number to read later) Sort through all the cupboards, drawers and cardboard boxes (where we stuffed all the things that would need going through later) Throw out the typescripts of all the draft versions of the trilogy Sort all the other trilogy-related material Sort the toys, drawings Clear out the linen cupboard Sew new tapes on the towels so they can be hung up and not left in soggy heaps on the floor (that’s never going to happen – me sewing on the tapes, that is)

11 Sort out all the flowerpots and garden tools (I have thousands of un- washed plastic pots from the time when I was a manic gardener who sowed everything) Contact workmen and ask for quotes to rectify the shoddy building work Weed and tidy the garden, make it look nice again

12

Enjoy your bloody holiday. We don’t say it out loud, but it lingers in the air. The fact that we’re just not enjoying it. Except Estrid when she gets an ice cream. LEAVE flashes up at us whichever bit of countryside we drive through. So many gardens have ‘Vote LEAVE’ signs. Brexit. Class-based British society – my ambivalence. It’sso tangible, so evident. Class differences, injustices. But as a gardener I’m seduced by English garden culture. From huge, lavishly laid- out parks tended by a whole staff of gardeners plus groups of volunteers to the little gardens of urban terraced houses, a front garden facing the street and a more secret, private back garden. Vita Sackville-West’s orchard with its flowering meadow and wild roses at Sissinghurst. The tall, red-brick tow- ers, the climbing roses, clematis, borders of perennials and of course the white twilight garden is ravishing, but the fruit trees and wild roses on the margins are magical. Playful Great Dixter, the castle ruins at Scotney Castle wrapped in a haze of blue rain, the house at Standen with the William Morris-inspired Arts and Crafts interiors and my favourite: Monk’s House, the house and garden of Virginia and Leonard Woolf in the village of Rodmell, near Lewes.

Waiting at home is the churned-up gravel drive, where lupins, cow parsley, oregano, aquilegia, stinging nettles and golden rod have taken over. The lu- pins, cow parsley and aquilegias are so pretty together in the early summer. But once they finish flowering, the plants collapse and turn brown, I sting myself on the nettles, and golden rod… I can never really make my peace

13 with the golden rod. The oregano and wild marjoram have taken over all the borders, anyway. The ones I originally grew from seed. It keeps the butterflies and bumblebees happy. And that’s good. But it would be nice if I could find a little happiness out there, too. Unsightly plastic netting round the roses to stop the worst incursions of the deer. Half-made paths, piles of planks, lefto- ver lengths of wood, now rotting away. Torn tarpaulins, the abandoned tram- poline, its safety nets hanging like cobwebs. Plastic chairs, dirty white. A strawberry patch where raspberries and wood ferns have taken hold. Some- where in the tangled mess a mulberry pants for breath, a rhubarb crown lan- guishes and the sharp-thorned blackberries thrash for space.

In damp Eastbourne, in the evening when we’re back from the day’s wet and windy excursion. Ørstavik’s novel is good, but its blackness runs into me like ink. Love that is mute, and cruel. They are so lonely. Unable to take what they are given. Read Bergman. Prepare Persona. Write the demon text. Why the hell do I never learn? With looming deadlines my holiday is no holiday. My brain an exhausted cry for help. What can I write about the boredom demon, say about Persona? However much I enjoy it… it’s performance. Something that will be judged and evaluated by others. Exposed to critical eyes. When I’m such a solitary person. Really. I revel in solitude, need solitude. Idling away time in the garden. If someone were to ask me what I really want to be doing right now, the most honest answer is: ‘To be at home, cleaning.’ Can you even say that, as a feminist? Such a deep and thorough clear-out that I can sit down on the sofa afterwards and think: now there are no more piles of stuff, nothing left festering, no must-dos. The pace of my work since 2014 has been incompatible with everyday life. That is, I do the everyday on a never-ending daily basis, but nothing beyond that. The carrier bags of hand-me-down chil- dren’s clothes that sit there untouched until the clothes are outgrown. Post,

14 bits of paper, newspapers, it all piles up. Beautiful Homes asks to do an ‘At home with’ feature in spring 2016 and maybe it would have been a good idea. To show another kind of home in an interior design magazine. A run-down, owner-occupied house, renovated in the 1990s, with the detritus of small chil- dren’s lives, mostly IKEA furniture and inherited items of no design value, only the sentimental kind. Grease spots on the wallpaper, marks left by a cat sharpening its claws. Books, clothes, records, drawings, flowers, possessions – everywhere. And on the street side, the abortive extension with the giant balcony and no sense of proportion and, what’s worse, no load-bearing ca- pacity. I turn down the magazine’s request.

I think I should try to… explain. The situation. In June 2016. A kind of madness born of exhaustion. While at the same time I keep repeating the mantra – but this isn’t burnout. I get out of bed, after all, I take brisk walks, I work, eat, sleep, crave sleep, crave sleep, crave sleep, will catch up on it later. After Fårö. I will have three weeks off then. A visit to Dad up in Ångerman- land, but time at home as well. Cleaning. Then another trip to England, a week in Norwich at the end of July, a translation summer school at the Uni- versity of East Anglia: the participants are going to translate the introduction to Life at Any Cost into English and I will be available to answer their ques- tions. But you can get a lot of cleaning done in two weeks.

I walk through the English gardens in the loveliest flowering of June with… a kind of impatient haste. Or simply a lack of focused attention. Perhaps be- cause they are not new for me any more. The layouts of the magnificent Na- tional Trust gardens all tend to be similar and are looked after by a head gar- dener and seasonally employed staff. Volunteers. Perennials, roses, kitchen gardens and orchards. Shady woodlands and sunlit herb gardens. But the

15 haste and impatience mean I’m not remembering plant combinations or memorising the fine detail.

The return visit to Monk’s House, for instance. Where we happen across a reading from Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway in the garden. The slightly older guide we talked to on our first visit to Monk’s House is reading. Right beside the busts of Virginia and Leonard. I get the feeling he is a trained actor. Such clear diction as he reads, and he has told us in his introduction that he will read with the pronunciation of the time the book was written, British English as it was spoken in Woolf’s circles. He is terribly easy to warm to. He defies the gale to read about Clarissa, making himself heard above the wind. Shifting first onto one foot, then the other.

The first time we come to Monk’s House in the summer of 2013, I am in the middle of writing Life at Any Cost. When the opportunity came up for us to rent the semi-detached house in Eastbourne, we knew it was conveniently located for walks along the Channel coast by the white cliffs and reasonably close to a lot of famous gardens, but we didn’t know that Virginia Woolf’s Monk’s House and Vanessa Bell’s Charleston were actually right nearby. That year, I am in an intensive Woolf period, and have recently reread a lot of her work and a great many books about her. I had just finished Deceived with Kindness, the autobiography of Angelica Garnett, Vanessa’s daughter with Duncan Grant. It makes me sad, uncomfortable. The child who pays the price for her parents’ battle for a freer family life. And the elderly Angelica on the cover of the Swedish edition is so like my grandmother. At Charleston, the artist Vanessa Bell lived with Duncan Grant and her children, but was married to Clive Bell. Their friend Bunny, with his desire for them all, in- cluding little Angelica, turns up, too; it is all so complicated, so tangled, as if

16 the painted walls and furniture are sighing with anguish, still home to the despair at Vanessa’s son Julian’s death in the Spanish Civil War… Our daughters are bored stiff and fighting over which of them gets to sit on the single visitor chair provided in the room. But the only way you can see the house is on a guided tour. We’ve bribed them with promises of ice cream and a dip in the sea afterwards. They are kicking and glaring at each other and the guide gives them a sharp rebuke. Bloody woman. They keep quiet when you’re talk- ing, in case you hadn’t noticed. Would you have treated kicking boys the same way? The visit to Monk’s House another day is completely different. The friendly guide and I talk for quite a while about Angelica. Well, and about other things too, but he actually met Angelica quite recently, just before she died, and says of her life: Poor Angelica. He thinks it’s nice that we are from Sweden and so interested in Woolf, would like us to come to evening events in the village, lectures every summer Wednesday on topics with a Virginia Woolf connnecgion – what a shame we weren’t around last week when Cecil Woolf was here! When his colleague comes into Virginia and Leonard’s low, green sitting room with its almost sunken feel, he gaily says to her: Look who’s here, it’s Virginia and Vanessa’s younger sister! And points to me.

The vanity of imagining that will recognise me this year. How childish. And the pleasure I took in that comment of his. A lot of women with literary in- terests feel a connection to Virginia Woolf. Some men, too. Because she is so good, of course. But because she is also one of few women who has a self- evident place in a male-dominated literary canon. For her essay A Room of One’s Own. For Orlando, To the Lighthouse. The diaries. Bloomsbury. To some she is probably most familiar from Michael Cunningham’s The Hours. The more I read, by and about Woolf, the less convincing I find the portrait of Virginia in the film based on that book. Virginia was undoubtedly brittle

17 when she was ill, but also sharp, humorous, witty, intense. As I round off the Maj trilogy, I am toying with the idea of writing something about Vita Sack- ville-West and Virginia Woolf. I want to write about gardens and about work of the intellect, combining my writing with my passion for gardens. The guide’s comments that first summer at Monk’s House gave me hope that I would be able to write about them, that I was somehow being given permis- sion to do it – entirely irrational, but so full of promise in my imagination. My delight at standing in their sitting room, knowing where Vita slept when she drove down in her car to visit, seeing the book covers Virginia would paint in the built-on bedroom when she wasn’t well and couldn’t write. And having a chance to experience the modest but comfortable writer’s hut at the end of the orchard, where Virginia wrote so many of her works. Maybe this is about my need to express gratitude toward those who went before and made it possible for me to write today. To rest for a moment in the good fortune of living a writing life.

And now the guide is reading from Mrs Dalloway in the wind. There are about ten of us, listening intently. A high school class– Italian? – is having a picnic in the garden and fooling about, making quite a lot of noise. I am sitting on a bench. Feeling so tired. But not physically. I am tired of performing. He doesn’t recognise me. Of course not. And he hurries off, right after his won- derful reading. I don’t get a chance to say anything, it’s a pleasure to hear his old-world diction and Woolf’s prose, with the garden so lovely in June. It’s been a cold spring and everything is still in crisp blossom. A woman asks us to take her photograph outside Virginia’s built-on bedroom, which is only accessible from outside, saying that as a solo traveller, you never really get any decent shots of yourself, and she would like to remember that spot by the rose, just outside the bedroom window. Mats takes the pictures, we exchange

18 a few words with her and then go for a final stroll down to the writing hut, sit in the shade on the terrace outside it for a while.

I’m sure I would have been intimidated by Virginia Woolf if we had ever met in real life. The keen, appraising eye. The sensibility. The brilliant mind. The elitism. But in her garden and through her works, a state of pleasurable play- fulness can arise.

Later, in Cornwall. St Ives, the lighthouse. Talland House. We feel our spirits rising. Although no one seems able to point out Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell’s childhood summer home. It is divided into several flats now and is not a museum. The sea, the beach, fish’n’chips by the harbour. We carry on hunt- ing and in the end we find the right address, take pictures. One of the tenants, a woman with dark hair, is hanging out washing on a clothes line. We can see the lighthouse in the distance. The fingers of my right hand – are they going numb again? My arm sort of catches on the lump on the right side. I will! I will book a mammogram. When I get home. Or after Fårö. At the end of May I told my friend Annika, we met up for a quick coffee, she says it probably isn’t anything, but I ought to get it checked out anyway, I’m sure I nod at that point, yes I will, as soon as things calm down, as soon as I’m finished, as soon as the job’s done.

How much energy does it take to stop the constant physical reminders of the lump penetrating my consciousness? Every time I take off or put on a bra. Every time one of the girls leans on me when we are lounging on the sofa or propped up in bed and she happens to touch my breast. But it’s all right, be- cause it hurts. Whatever it is in my breast, it hurts. A muscle inflammation. Tension after the stress of the spring. Tumours don’t hurt. Do they? I have work I need to get

19 on with, you know. Persona and the boredom demon. Writing about that par- ticular demon is quite dispiriting, actually.

In Cornwall, we follow the final campaigning spurt of the Brexit referendum. Everyone we talk to is Remain, yet the LEAVE posters still shout out at us from so many gardens. On midsummer’s eve, the sun is shining in Mullion. From the terrace, you can see the Atlantic. The meadows are flowering, the heaths. Wild carrot, poppy. I ring Dad. Mum said he got in a huff because she was coming with us to England again, claimed I hadn’t told him, is she so scared of me, he said to her, or was it me he said it to? It upsets me. In a way he’s right. I may have been reluctant to tell Dad, there’s this long-standing conflict around the fact that I talk to Mum more often than to him, in short, that I have closer contact with Mum. He says it doesn’t bother him, he real- ises Mum needs that contact more than he does, with his active social life. I also think it’s been better these last few years. The amount of contact between Dad and me. I try to call fairly regularly, we have our topics for discussion. Sowing seeds, the garden, health, he wonders how Mum is, how Greta is, and he tells me what he has found on the net when he’s googled my name. He is so proud about the success of the trilogy. Grumbles about the local paper’s lack of interest and coverage. It’s all ice hockey with them, he says, they’re obsessed with Modo, the Örnsköldsvik team. And you’ve got to watch you don’t work yourself into the ground, I can see on the internet what a demand- ing schedule you’ve got. You know, work trips wear people out, it takes its toll, being on the road and spending nights away from home… If I shy away from writing, the story will be incomprehensible. If I write, I shall leave things out. Perhaps sometimes you have to write what you know, think you know. Or simply carry it, shelter it, protect, understand. When Mum tells me about Dad’s reaction, I convert the stab of guilt into anger. It was a last-minute decision

20 for Mum to come, I had so little time for long phone calls this spring and early summer. And there’s no such thing as a short chat with Dad. But how often did he ring when he was working so hard in the years after the divorce, up to the time he retired? When he disappeared? When he was depressed, going through a crisis? Other offspring would have broken off contact. The alcohol. Because of that. The rows it caused. But in spite of everything I can’t bring myself to say to Dad: I shall never ring you after six in the evening because you’re drunk then. Inebriated. And you don’t remember the day after that we talked to each other. You tell me things I’ve heard many times before. I can hear it in your voice straight away when you’ve been drinking. An alcohol addiction I don’t deal with very well. It turns me into a little child. I have told him. Before. How worried I am. I him I think he’s drinking too much. But then he got offended. Leapt to his own defence. His outburst frightened me. He yelled that Mats and I had a damn cheek saying anything when our cupboards were full of spirits. And he is right, our cupboards are full of bottles of spirits, it’s just that they are the same bottles year after year. Cognac for the prawn sauce. Rum to go in desserts. And no, I’m not a teetotaller, but not an alco- holic, either. Occasionally Dad says he’s a heavy drinker and is coping with it just fine. I can delete this later. But first I shall write it like it was, for me. Dad’s need to be acknowledged. To take up space. His difficulty listening, being part of any real mutual exchange. His yearning for love. His extremes. His kindness. His thoughtfulness. His jealousy. His chaos. His anger. The years he called to talk about his various women. When I moved to Stockholm and was in my twenties. I didn’t want to know. I wasn’t the right person for confidences of that kind. The funny, adventurous Dad. Who travelled. With Classe, with Har- riet, with Anita, with Uncle Erik, with Els-Marie, with Hasse. Mum. South- ern Germany, Budapest, Crete, Rome, Denmark, Mallorca, France, Russia,

21 Istanbul, the Canaries, Scotland. Travelled for work. UN soldier in the Congo as a young man. Loved Stockholm. Jazz, music, dancing. His projects! Good food. Butter and flatbread. The mountains. Mum. He loved Mum.

It creates an imbalance. The fact that I have paid for Mum’s trips to England. I can afford it for the first time in my life, thanks to sales of the trilogy. She worked part-time as a library assistant when we were small, went full-time later, but it was a low-paid job, and after the divorce she had custody of me and my elder sister Greta. We were ten and thirteen. We never go abroad. We don’t have a car. We live in a rented flat, Mum sleeps on a bed settee in the living room. Money is always an issue. What everything costs. The price of food. I go out and find paid work earlier than I might have done. Dad pays maintenance, of course, but probably isn’t fully aware of how much teenage daughters cost. On the other hand, he saves money for us in an investment fund, he cares about us, always makes a fuss of us on our birthdays and at Christmas. While we’re still going riding, he gives us a lift to the stables whenever he can, and maybe he pays for our riding lessons, too. We give up riding when we reach secondary-school age. But Dad is the one who has been able to afford to travel. Not Mum. She had this dream of driving round the English countryside, watched a lot of British TV programmes. And when I develop my own interest in planting and growing, I too dream of seeing those English gardens in real life. Dad would have liked to see them as well. But now he’s in bad physical shape, finds it hard to walk, seriously overweight, strug- gles to stop smoking, gets diabetes, COPD. You didn’t want Dad to come with you in England. No, I couldn’t have coped. Mainly because of the alcohol. The constant parrying and policing. And then the pungent smell of urine.

22 I pay for Mum’s trip. She only has a small pension, but still thinks she lives comfortably enough. Compares herself with Russian pensioners. After all, she has a nice rented flat in a 50s-built block in Sundsvall. Housing benefit means she can afford a decent-sized place. The one we lived in as teenagers. Central location, you can see GIF Sundsvall’s home matches from her balcony on the fourth floor, although when they are playing, Mum makes sure to shut the balcony door. When I was growing up, she suffered recurring periods of severe de- pression. Not just having the blues or feeling a bit low, but clinical depression requiring long hospital stays. I know this isn’t correct but, in my mind, she was always in hospital those years when I was between three and eleven. For months at a time. And it certainly is correct that every depression needs months of hospital treatment. Electric shocks. Psychoactive drugs. The dan- ger with profound depression is suicide. That was why she was usually in closed psychiatric wards. There is still this idea that severe anxiety and de- pressions are something that people choose to have, and can consequently ‘choose’ to escape, of their own volition. That they should be able to buck up, pull themselves together. Today we know that moderate anxiety and less se- vere depression can be helped by physical activity, but those were not the types of depression my mother suffered. They pulled her down into lifeless darkness. For her, the hospital was a refuge, a salvation. A place where she could be herself. Where she could heal, could return to life.

There is a great deal more to our story. The divorce from Dad, the mess of my teenage years when I was more like the parent and she a late-blooming teenager. Alcohol, tablets. With sobriety and SSRI antidepressants, a lot of things improved between me and Mum. Maybe it was my elder daughter, her first grandchild, who helped with her unreserved love. When the birth was

23 coming up, Mum said she wouldn’t be any good as a grandmother – I’m ter- rible at sitting on the floor and playing! Yet over the years, she has been the one who played best and most with Elsa, they came up with all kinds of schemes together. With hair curlers, her make-up bag, household cleaning things, with Elsa on a chair beside her at the sink. I feel I have my reasons for taking my mum to England with me. For her sake, for my children’s and for my own. And I have my compelling reasons for not bringing my dad on the same trip. But guilt is pressing in on me, hounding me. I live in a good, loving marriage, have two wonderful daughters, academic qualifications, a house and garden, and I write. Most of all that. I write. How much do I owe? What will I have to pay? My decision to be a psychologist is something I only seriously question when I am doing my practical placement to get my accreditation. It’s just at the time my third novel Taking Things On is published and two male psychoanalysts where I work ask if I’m actually an author, when it comes to it. If I am really going to work as a psychologist. Perhaps they have nurtured dreams of writing, too. But it dawns on me that the psychologist job is part of my guilt and the set of problems that goes with it – if I am allowed to do what I love, writing and reading, and if I am not prey to severe depression and addiction like my par- ents, isn’t it right for me to pay something back in the form of helping others? I pretty soon register that I don’t write when I have patients/clients. I find it almost as rewarding to be in their narratives, to try to understand their story in the therapeutic relationship we share, but there is no space left for my own writing. It doubtless has something to do with my own inexperience, but my colleagues’ questions open up something inside me. Do I have the right to be simply a writer? Apart from the fact that it isn’t financially workable, could I give my writing more space? Because really

24 – what weird sort of zero-sum game am I grappling with here – who is going to thank me if I stop writing?

But I am also keen to maintain normality. I want to be financially secure enough to keep my family from experiencing poverty and have a reasonable sense of stability. I don’t see a bohemian artist’s existence in a romantic glow but, at the same time, Mats and I have chosen to prioritise the writing life and when the children are small, we live on very modest means. We have enough to get by, though we don’t take any foreign holidays or go in for any top-to-bottom renovations. We rarely buy clothes or anything new for our home. But we have a car, and an old house we inherited in Haninge, on the edge of Stockholm. Joyce Carol Oates lives an orderly life and immerses her- self in the maelstrom of her writing, fetches things from the past, comes up for air and then plunges back down. That would be the ideal.

Dad has had a better salary, better pension, and travelled a lot in his life. That’s how I justify myself. What obligations does one have as an adult child? I remember my psychology supervisor saying in the early 2000s, about one of my clients: ‘He clearly doesn’t realise that you don’t have to love your parents.’ And the way I processed that statement afterwards. The child’s bur- den of carrying their parents with gratitude and unconditional love. No mat- ter what. Isn’t that an obligation?

Dad and I don’t have the kind of relationship that would let me say: you know what Dad, you should change your clothes more often, maybe wear some kind of incontinence protection. I think I could say it to my mum. Dad, living alone as he does, might not be aware it’s a problem? But there’s also a form of aggression in not being more careful about your personal hygiene,

25 perhaps most of all a self-contempt. I see it as linked to the alcohol, clouding his judgment, what difference does it make… if I take a shower and wash my clothes. Clean the house. Wipe up the red wine spills. Empty the cigarette butts out of the over- flowing ashtrays.

But I ring on Midsummer Eve. From Cornwall. We chat away. Something has happened, something to do with the dentist. A chip out of his tooth, but has he missed his dental appointment? He sounds a bit hassled, worried. We talk about plants, too. There are so many seedlings he’s been bringing on, and he needs to get them into the soil, into pots and into planters for the balcony. I say we’ll come up to see him the first week in July, oh, I’d better weed the strawberry patch then, I’m behind with that, he says. I don’t know whether I tell him I can help with the weeding when I come up to Moliden. Perhaps I’m too tired event to think the thought.

Mats is looking for traces of Sandy Denny and her parents in preparation for the novel he’s writing, they rented a house here in the Cornish village of Mul- lion in the seventies. We’re on holiday but working. In Sussex, we were trying to find Len Howard’s house, Bird Cottage, in Ditchling. And naturally we want to make these nice weeks for the girls. But none of us is really in the mood. The lump. The long walks in Mullion and the surrounding area. En- chanting despite the rain, wind and generally foul weather. All I want to do is walk. I know the children don’t just want to walk all day, and Mum can’t keep up the same pace. Mats and I go out in the evenings while the girls and Mum take it easy in the house. Sunset over Mullion Harbour when we make our way there along the green paths, the cliffs plummeting down to the sea. There’s been so much rain, but when the sun breaks through , we and other walkers gather on the slope down to Mullion Cove and watch the sun sink

26 into the Atlantic. As the dusk spreads its darkness across the steep rock we stand up, nod and smile to each other, how lucky we were to have this sunset… it was worth all the rain and the wet.

I try to remember the weeks in England in 2016. There’s the impatience and rush. The irritability. Elsa just wants to be in her room under her headphones. Mats is worried the car hire firm is going to charge us a lot in compensation for a scratch on the paintwork that we didn’t notice in the dark, when we picked up the car and had to sign a load of forms. He thinks, looking back, that there was something dodgy about them and the way they were so keen for us to upgrade to this particular car and rushed us into signing right away. We were so tired, it was late, past midnight at Gatwick airport and we still had some way to drive, in the dark and on the wrong side of the road. The rain. I remember the rain. East Sussex drenched by a cloudburst, just as we are leaving that part of the county and setting off for Cornwall, but even there, the moisture and mist are unrelenting. Now of course nobody counts on a sunshine holiday in England, but this permanently wet weather… Our clothes never dry. The temperature barely gets above four- teen. And five people need so much food. We’re always shopping. Tesco in Eastbourne, Sainsbury’s outside Mullion. Normally I would enjoy it. Daily life, but in a new setting. Now all I can think about is the simplest thing pos- sible. Not having to wash up or use things up another day. Fish’n’chips, pizza, ready-made tomato sauce and fresh pasta. Cream tea with scones, preserves and clotted cream, are the scones usually this dry and crumbly, this sweet? And they never bring you enough tea, we always empty the pot, everybody wanting the last, strong drops. But Estrid enjoys her ice cream. Rich, creamy ice cream from cows that have grazed on the Cornish meadows.

27 Is it Brexit? The murder of the female Labour politician, the general atmosphere. Are the English generally more suspicious, if not downright un- pleasant? To everyone who isn’t an Ancient Briton? A lot of the people work- ing in tourism are worried, and keen to take care of us. The sunny day at Lizard Point is the day of the referendum. The waitress shuttles between the tables in the tiny café, here they bring you so much tea that there’s some left over in the pot, our daughters’ home-made doughnuts with jam and cream are big enough to feed several platoons and she asks if we want to take what they couldn’t finish home with us. She is going to vote when she finishes work and is convinced it will be Remain, anything else is simply unthinkable, she says, and when I point out a little uneasily that the majority of the many signs in gardens are for LEAVE… then she gives me a conspiratorial look and says, yes but you know what, Remainers are people with better things to do than put up signs in their gardens. We laugh at this together.

And we go riding in Cornwall. Only Mum stays at home, the rest of us each get our own dependable horse at the local riding stables and off we trot in single file behind the riding instructor, through the countryside. Down to Polurrian Cove, the sandy beach slipped in between the steep cliffs. We get to gallop, one at a time, along the sea’s edge. The scenery is so lovely it hurts.

But Leave wins. The silence afterwards, a peculiar sense of dejection. We pack our things and drive to Wiltshire, where we are going to stay at a B&B before the journey home. Visit Stonehenge. Jackie and James who run the place are so thin. We have to put crosses in the boxes on a slightly baffling breakfast order slip: how many sausages, eggs, tomatoes, mushrooms, beans, bacon and toast do we want? We don’t know, this is the first time we have ever had a proper Full English Breakfast, and as they serve us, they say we’ll never get

28 through it all! But the homemade sausages are as thin as little fingers, we eat up most of it, joking that we Scandinavians really like our food…. They are so sweet, so pleasant and obliging, their son gives us a lift in his truck to show us the farm that has been passed down through the generations, the beautiful rooms, but I can’t relax. James knocks on our door at bedtime to get the breakfast orders straight and check whether we really do want two sausages again the next morning, yes, we nod, he must think we’re greedy, I’m worried we might spill something on the fitted carpet, make a mess, and it isn’t just a random thought – on the bureau in our bedroom there’s a sign: ‘Uncle’s chest of drawers has survived 200 years without any rings from coffee mugs and water glasses, you surely don’t want to be the first person to leave one? Jackie is a piano teacher and she and Mats talk about music, they tell us about their elderly parents on the farm, and the party of her life Jackie had after her surgery, did she have cancer, the lovely retired couple who want to exchange excursion tips with us over breakfast in the mornings… I can’t be bothered to be nice any more. I want to be left in peace. Let me be. Leave me undisturbed in the double bed…. But they prefer you not to stay in your room, either, so I read in the guests’ information folder. Between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. the room has to be available for cleaning and bedmaking.

The holiday dreams of the time we live in. Getting away, seeing new things, having new experiences, enjoying the facilities, the luxury. Yet I still miss that basic little hut on Åland, just thirty metres square and with an outdoor toilet, which we used to rent cheaply when the children were little. In a way, Jackie and James are like our hosts Ulla and Magnus on Åland. A safe and stable couple who seem anchored in their surroundings, rooted. But curious about the people they meet through their tourist-related business. Right now, I have no interest in meeting anyone else. A large part of me is introverted. I

29 need seclusion and solitude at home. All the encounters of the last few years… I feel as though it’s all jostling for space inside me. Those who find their way in are not leaving, and there simply isn’t an unlimited amount of space. And now I barely have the energy for my closest circle. These last few years I have seldom had time to meet my friends, or my sister Greta and her children. My few hours at home between the trips for work are so crammed with the everyday tasks of life. Laundry, washing up, cleaning, parents’ eve- nings at school, the girls’ activities and the logistics that only just work.

30

THE LITHUANIAN WOMAN who runs the village pub with her South African husband. They are wondering whether to move to France after the Leave vote. She mutters that the British will have to see how they manage with only domestic raw ingredients to call on. They’ll just have to make their own wine, she says, and see how well that turns out. Her husband is a good chef. Salmon trout, we promise to book a table for a Sunday roast the following day. The next day she rings to ask what time we are coming, they are short of space. We break off our excursion and go straight there, but we arrive to find the place strangely empty. Are we the only customers for Sunday lunch? It’s de- licious, anyway. Yorkshire pudding, gravy, roasted root vegetables and pota- toes. More and more country pubs are being forced to close.

31

My dreams in England.

The first one: I have gone to the doctor and am anxious as I undergo an examination in a glaringly lit room. The doctor says there’s no need to worry, it isn’t cancer of the stomach, but I am pregnant.

The second one: A surgeon is cutting into my breast. Removing it from my body. It is gone.

32

THE START OF THE JOURNEY home is a nightmare, even though the scratch on the car proves to be no problem. Armed police with sub-machine-guns in the departure hall and chaos at security. Mum and Mats are stopped, curtly. Eventually the security officer finds an aerosol can of hairspray in Mum’s bag, shouts at her, I’m cross with her too, I kept telling them all to be careful what they put in their hand luggage, nothing sharp, no liquids, all electronic items visible. On the way over, Elsa was stopped with all her bottles of nail varnish in her hand luggage, and now Mats has forgotten to take his phone out of his pocket. The fear of being taken away, accused – and that it could happen to the girls, the security staff sounding off in their own language, not caring that the girls had no English at the time, and all because of the height of the heel on Elsa’s virtually flat sandal. It’s irrational of me and I know there are others they come down on much harder, and of course it’s good to have checks to stop potential terrorist attacks, but once we are through security, we say we will never fly to England again, we’re cross with each other, on the verge of tears, hot and sweaty, hungry.

On the plane home I think – Fårö in two days’ time. But Elsa and I also see the film The Fault in Our Stars, I cry and cry, Elsa says I can’t start crying right at the beginning, nothing sad has happened yet. But I can see that she has tears in her eyes, too. Maybe it isn’t exactly then that we watch it. Maybe it just fits in perfectly here. Elsa and me, crying to the film.

33

I unpack, put the washing on, cut the grass, recharge, dive deep into Persona. The Persona bit is mostly fun, there will be two of us discussing the subject, and Jonas Mosskin has at least as much responsibility for it, if not more, it isn’t all up to me, but then there’s the demon piece, with its looming deadline. It will get done, I’m sure. It’s going to be fine. Then sleep. But first Dad in Ångermanland. Then home to sleep. And clean! The hut on Åland. Swimming out into the sunset. The blue clay of the seabed, the water staying shallow, but always slightly warm, never the icy chill of the open sea. The apple orchard, the bilberries. The red granite gravel of the roads. But we can’t rent that place any more because the daughter has taken over the contract, owns it jointly with her husband, and they don’t want to carry on her parents’ rental business. Perhaps Ulla and Magnus will also finally get a bit of time off, now they won’t be busy with their summer visitors every Saturday changeover day all through the summer.

Ring Dad and tell him you are back. Before Fårö. But I don’t get round to it. I shall take the suburban train to Nynäshamn and meet Jonas there, we’ll need to spend the crossing preparing for our event. This is nice, the Persona discus- sion, going to Gotland, being part of Bergman Week. Willem Dafoe is sitting in the foyer of the Bergman Centre, his girlfriend has made a film about Ma- rina Abramović, the girlfriend is there too, showing her film. A bunch of male dancers from New York have a slot on the programme and a young Brazilian psychoanalyst loves Bergman so much that he falls asleep when the films start and he only eats meat, so he has a hard time of it at the vegetarian buffet in the evening. The demon piece has to be delivered by midnight, we’re staying at the Ängen house, Jonas, Janne Göransson and I, Linn Ullman’s house when she’s on Fårö. The headache comes creeping first, please let it not be a

34 migraine, it’s 10.30 p.m. and the text has to be submitted in an hour and a half, plus Jonas and I want to try out a few more ideas on each other before tomorrow’s seminar, possibly watch Persona again, oh no, now my head is throbbing, I took some tablets but not in time, that queasy feeling, I don’t want to throw up here, I don’t know Jonas and Janne all that well, don’t want to have to lock myself into the bathroom and retch into the toilet, if I can just get the text sent off and put the light out, shut my eyes, try to sleep away the pain. Please let me sleep, please let me feel better in the morning.

I am better. I feel fine. It emerges that Jonas and I are both counting our steps, so we take a walk across the island. To the heritage museum, where we have our seminar, which goes very smoothly, and then we get a lift to the raukar, the sea stacks, and walk from there. My step-count that day is 24,000. And Fårö enchants me. The flowers along the verges, the pastureland, the sea, the houses. Bergman quiz at Kuten and a Texan scholar proves invaluable to our team, he has published work on queer Bergman. Lots of laughter and silliness, Janne is the ringleader, so nice that it isn’t all just polite admiration, it’s smiles of a summer night, it’s playing games. If I let go, will I ever come back up? We stay up late at Ängen that night and talk. Drink wine. Tell anecdotes, get the giggles. I relax. Tomorrow Mats and the girls are coming over, we’re going to visit some friends who are renting a house in Vamlingbo. It’s great to have the chance to show the girls Gotland. Maybe we can stop off at Närsholmen on the way, now I’ve had a chance to see The Sacrifice again at the festival. Before Jonas takes the ferry back to Nynäshamn we decide to make some- thing out of our Persona discussion. A piece for publication, a dialogue. We’ve already done the work, in a sense, silly not to make full use of our seminar material.

35

Helen and Per are there to welcome us to Vamlingbo. We found time for a swim at Närsholmen on our drive through a Gotland red with poppies. It feels pretty good now, doesn’t it? I got both my jobs done, the Persona discussion was rewarding and enjoyable, Bergman Week was wonderful, just to have the sun shining was a treat! The lovely white house in Vamlingbo, I leave my handbag in the hall, in the glassed-in verandah, a glass of rosé is put into my hand, it is a long and glorious summer evening, even though I only had four hours’ sleep I stay awake, it’s so enticing to dream of houses on islands. In the warmth of the evening, the rainy days in England seem arduous, perhaps it’s as simple as needing some warm sun on your skin, the light. The roses are in bloom, we are served delicious food, make plans for our excursion the next day. We stay there at the table, the children wander off, watch a film, fall asleep? By half past eleven my eyes are smarting, I go to fetch the contact lens case and glasses from my handbag.

My phone. Five missed calls from Greta. Five? Two from Mum. Some voicemail messages as well My heart. My throat dry. I ring the number to hear my messages.

Dad is dead!

My sister’s voice. She is crying. I don’t cry. Not right away. I enter into… what can I say. How could I leave my phone in my handbag in the hall? Elsa is al- ready asleep, upstairs in the house. Estrid is going to sleep with us in the guest hut. I ring Greta. Dad’s beekeeping neighbour Inger, who has her hives on Dad’s meadow, realised something was wrong when he didn’t come out to say hello as she tended her bees. Wondered why the terrace door was locked

36 in the afternoon, when the car was parked nearby. And then she saw him, lying on the sitting room floor. She ran to the nearest neighbour, Naima in the house next door, who has a key. I don’t know how reliable this account is at that point, but I hear that the doctor and the undertaker have arrived, that Dad’s younger brother is there too. They think it was a heart attack or a stroke. It seems to have been quick.

Dad is dead. Am I shocked, surprised? Hadn’t I been afraid… smoking, ex- cess weight, alcohol. Diabetes, COPD. Problems getting out for a walk, his hips wearing out. Worries about stroke risk. But dead?

I don’t want to be at someone else’s house when Dad dies. Wrong. I don’t want to be a visitor. Turning up with luggage, happy and cheerful, with un- derlying claims on being looked after, taken care of. And now death has in- truded into this first summer night of July. Do I talk to Uncle Erik in the middle of the night? I think Greta tells me she has spoken to Erik, Inger and Naima. To Mum. She tells me Dad once said about me that he no longer has a daughter. That I don’t count for him? That she and Dad were in close touch towards the end, talked a lot. I don’t say that in our phone conversations he would wonder why she didn’t answer, or didn’t ring back when he left messages. Well try her again, it’s just that she’s busy, Disa and Ivan are only little, she’s got her hands full, she’ll answer if she has time to talk. Yes, he said, I will, I’ll ring tomorrow.

Now Dad is dead.

37

HELEN AND PER pack refreshments for our planned trip to the beach, in the white kitchen in the white house. I can’t remember if we woke Elsa in the middle of the night to tell her, she was sleeping in the big house, Estrid, Mats and I in the guest hut. I sit outside at the back of the hut, ring Greta, Uncle Erik, Uncle Lars, Mum. Mats rings the Gotland ferry company to change our tickets, we’ll travel home late this evening. The girls study my face as they pass, pat me, hug me. Our friends will carry on with their holiday, of course – if you haven’t suffered a personal loss, you always have the freedom to rest in your own life, however sympathetic you are. Maybe they are thinking about the deaths of their own parents, or worrying about the parents’ health – but life goes on, as usual.

And I know, on that long sandy beach, with coffee and food and glittering sun, that the summer is swerving now. There will be no rest now. Dad is dead. And he has only just died, yet here I am, exposing him. Leaking, hearing my- self say that his parents’ old house, in which he lives – there’s so much that needs throwing out. Perhaps as far removed from a white Gotland house with a glass verandah as you could possibly get. Here, everything is tasteful, ex- quisite, the roses in bloom, nothing superfluous, nothing quirky, crazy, ugly. I tell them that basically nothing has been thrown out at Moliden since the

38 beginning. The beginning is turn of the twentieth century, Grandfather’s fos- ter parents. The farm buildings full of clutter, the outbuildings, the bakehouse falling into disrepair. Dad’s perpetual sorting and clearing project. But get- ting round to it… Finding time… The scrap value of everything in the ve- hicle shed. The ancient tractor, the circular saw, the sawmill, the oil tank, the combine harvester, the trailer, the boat, the dismantled scooter, the ride-on mower that doesn’t work, rusty bikes, chains, machines, tools, hoses, tyres, rusty nails, tacks and screws stored in about fifty Gevalia coffee tins, timber, furniture covered in mouse droppings, birdlime-spattered kick sleds, fishing tackle, mouldy life jackets, cowshed equipment, milk churns – and all the rest. Was it expected, asks Per, who is a doctor, was it expected, I’ve been expecting, waiting for his body to go on strike, yet at the same time his ability to survive – thirty kilos overweight, heavy smoker, heavy drinker, increas- ingly immobile, diabetic – I’ve probably been more afraid of a stroke, of his being paralysed, robbed of speech, dependent on care. I didn’t expect him to die. Not just now. I have a thousand recollections, chaotic, Mum and Dad in the house, Dad’s loud voice downstairs, Dad drunk, Dad driving too fast, 140 kilometres an hour with me in the front passenger seat in a 90 limit, he is crushed by yet another disappointment in love, he is oblivious to me, the nee- dle on the speedometer rising, on the E4 at Docksta, me not daring to tell him he’s got to slow down, I hate the way he’s putting us at risk, I’m with him in the car and he’s putting me at risk, I remember the help he gave us in renovating our house, after he left his job, which had meant so much to him all through his life, selling stainless steel, all those stories about his work- mates, work trips, Uddeholm, Värmland, manufacturing industry all over Norrland, then it was Uddeholm being bought up by the Edstrand brothers and, at such a late stage in his working life, more and more computerisation and rationalisation, the row with the management, his suicide attempt, Greta

39 finds him with the rifle, he’s readmitted to the hospital, a stay of many months, but the drugs make him manic, it creeps over him gradually, he talks non-stop, rings up, maybe he’s manic without us realising it the whole sum- mer he’s helping us with the house, manic and broken by the crisis at work, there are a lot of botched jobs done on our house that summer, he devises with his own solutions, makes wooden shelves and puts them up crookedly all over the brick walls of the cellar, applies coats of paint without rubbing down the old paint on the shabby windows or priming the surfaces, and by the very next summer the paint is peeling again, he paints the inside of the cellar walls, and the ceiling, with bitumen paint to prevent damp, but when I read up on it, the bitumen should go on the outside of the foundation wall, so now the humid storage spaces are shiny black and damp-proofed from the inside, if I try to stop him, he snaps at me, you think I don’t know how it’s done, I bloody well renovated the old house from top to bottom, you think I’m not up to it, there’s one thing you’ve got to learn and that’s to trust other people to do their job, for fuck’s sake, you can’t creep around spying on them and rubbishing what they do. Mats and I provide Dad with the materials and he claims he can fix almost everything, but almost everything turns out bun- gled, lopsided, unsightly. He’s in a dreadful state. My irritation at providing a constant supply of coffee, food, snacks, I wash up, clean, do laundry, organ- ise – it’s a huge thing, such a huge thing for me to have him here and give him free rein in the house, but the rotten balcony we pull down, the replace- ment Dad puts up is lovely, not the tongue and groove panels with a capping rail that I want, but a seventies-style facade, nothing crooked or crazy. Not like the bit of cellar floor he says he can concrete – his handiwork is still visible today, in a different grade of concrete from the rest of the floor, not matching, not fitting in, the sewage pipe dug up, we had no money, and we were glad of the help, I felt mean and grudging for not appreciating Dad’s work. But at

40 the same time, I thought – I’m letting him live here while he goes through this crisis. His anxiety, his restlessness. I cook his meals, do his washing, change his bed, make his coffee, empty the ashtrays, I listen to his stories over and over again, Mats gives him lifts to dances at Skansen, Mosebacke and Mälarsalen and picks him up later when he is drunk and the hour is late. Can’t Dad say thank you to me as well?

Dad’s brothers help their children. My cousins. It all happens in such an or- dered, proper, first-rate way. Dad is having a crisis, Dad isn’t answerable. But I’m the one left here with all these things, unfinished, half-done and faulty. And yet I keep on asking him. Send him the plans for a garden hut. Am I so acutely aware of his need to show me what he can do? For me to give him my approval? And that’s how we get to – but Dad, aren’t you going to scrape the old paint off the window casings first, rub them down? I think they say not to start painting straight onto the…

And I hear myself telling Per that Dad has been leading quite an unhealthy life and he says well maybe it was for the best then, and this confuses me – for the best, that wasn’t what I meant, I was trying to say that Dad was so ambivalent, the protracted self-harming behaviour, the alcohol, smoking and too much fatty food – always on the sly – with us he always took small help- ings, teased Mats about his appetite, but in the mornings there were always traces of his nocturnal snacks, the sandwiches, the cheese, the thickly spread butter, the craving as the alcohol goes out of your body, I remember myself the hunger that would follow late nights out when I was young, or just letting go for a change, eating as much as you want… Or he would break off small chunks of bread to go with his morning coffee, instead of two substantial cheese sandwiches, ten little bits. But he was so afraid of dying. He couldn’t

41 bring himself to go to his friends’ funerals. So often there would be that note of surprise and fear in his voice as he said – you know he was only sixty-eight, he got cancer. You know he was only… it happened so fast. He knew about it, but he didn’t let on... to us… And how Dad tried! Lose weight, quit smok- ing, take exercise. He didn’t want to die. But he couldn’t keep it up. Lose weight, quit smoking, take exercise, stop drinking. Even though he kept try- ing. Accepted medical help. Took courses. He had the house and land and his seedlings and the tractor, and he ran driving courses for retirees through the National Pensioners’ Association. And a study circle, ‘I remember my 1950s’. He stopped all his talk of selling Moliden and moving to a flat. He had lots of projects on the go. He worked like a horse to get the garden looking nice for when we came up to see him in July.

42

I DON’T REMEMBER if it is me or Greta who gets there first. I love Moliden. In my heart, it’s Grandma’s’s house. Although it was Grandpa who bought it from his foster parents in the 1930s. The main building burned to the ground in 1946, in April. The house that stands there now was built to a somewhat different design, and is in every respect a good, solid, comfortable house of the 1940s. Big hall, bathroom, the former office, later used as a TV room, now Dad’s bedroom. A spacious kitchen with a proper larder, and adjoining it a living room with a fireplace, perhaps we called it the best room – or the big room? Built-in wardrobes and linen cupboards. The upstairs just as roomy, bathroom, three bedrooms and a big living area, a dressing room that these days we would probably call a walk-in closet. In 1978 my youngest uncle, Gunnar, bought the whole farm with a guarantee that Grandma and Grandpa would be able to stay there. He carried on living at home and, my goodness, he was only twenty-eight when he renovated the house with the help of his elder brothers and his dad, who was such a clever hobby carpenter. Grandpa made stools and storage chests for us all, doing his carpentry in the cellar, the doll’s house he made us was phenomenal, on wheels, two floors with walls forming a cross in the middle so all the rooms were open to the outside and the house could be spun round on its wheels – the usual problem with doll’s houses is that the back wall is rather a hindrance to play. And the stable for my plastic horse, which he gave me when I was in my second year at school. Made of veneer, and simply the best thing ever. With a stall, hooks, a roof.

43 He was so careful and thorough. The little settee with the lift-up lid for my room. It’s in our garage at home now, waiting for somewhere it can be more visible again.

Grandpa comes to the farm as a foster child, is he even two years old at the time? He is the only one of the children who has to move away, leave his mother in Stockholm. He misses her and his siblings, writes letters. Keeps on asking them to come and visit him. His schoolteacher is not at all nice, he tells them about it in the letters. He has four older foster sisters here in Ånger- manland, they all look pretty in the photographs. I don’t know whether his mother ever came. It was a long journey, from Stockholm, to Mo. He be- comes a man of his district, taking on responsibilities, involved in local sport- ing activities and the temperance movement, perhaps life back home in Stockholm was not so sober, with his father away at sea, my grandpa becomes a shoemaker, small farmer, beekeeper – wins prizes for his honey – has an orchard in hardiness zone 5 – they keep cows, pigs, hens, but Grandma looks after those, they grow potatoes, vegetables, soft fruit, other crops and then he trains as a policeman, in Stockholm. His mother is still alive then, he never seeks her out. He becomes a parish constable, he sits on the Child Custody Board, along with the vicar, at Grandpa’s funeral people say that he was too soft-hearted, he found it hard to call in debts in his role as bailiff. He is prone to melancholy, I think he suffered recurring bouts of depression, Grandpa is having a rest in the office, he loved Mitzy, the Newfoundland dog, when we came up as children he would say Mitzy’s been on her feet in the yard waiting for you all morning, it was always the same when our car made its way down the hill, along the short avenue of birches, there was Mitzy, wagging her tail so furiously that her back half wagged too, and as soon as we had opened the door she would rest her head in our laps and want us to waggle her ears.

44

And yet it is still Grandma’s house. Grandma, who comes to the next lease- hold farm along, by the bridge over the River Mo, closer to the village. To her grandfather the smith and her Aunt Kristina. She is nine, maybe ten, has TB in her hip, her mother is dead. Her father Frans has sent her away, at his freehold farm in Ångersjö the children died, one after another, and now their mother Anna, too, his wife, how desperate Frans must have felt through those years in the 1910s and 20s – funeral after funeral. Word had it that the lease- hold place he had so proudly been able to buy after putting in extra work at the ferry between the sawmill at Norrbyskär and Hörnefors had not been fumigated after a TB infection. His wife Anna gives birth to fifteen children. It is hard to imagine such a life. Perpetually pregnant, breastfeeding – with so many little ones to take care of. And so many little ones to bury. Of those fifteen, three survive into old age. Grandma has her brothers, Otto and Bertil. In Västmanland and Jämtland. Her sister Sigrid and brother Olle, who come with her to Moliden, die in childhood. And her father Frans dies before she reaches her twelfth birthday.

One can’t help thinking of them as two wounded children on neighbouring farms, who start going out together, get married. Both of them with brains. The books from FiB’s culture club. Grandma reads the local paper from start to finish, right to the end of her life. As a child, I am afraid of her. Always busy, not dramatic and funny like Granny, my mum’s mum, who likes play- ing, dressing up, doing beautiful table settings, performing magic tricks. Grandma works. Cooks meals, bakes, does the dishes, tends the garden, there are always people coming for coffee. She leaves us cousins to our own devices, outdoors or up in the big guest room. It’s only at the time of my leg-length- ening operation in year 7 that we truly find one another. Grandma, who has

45 had a limp all her life, pushes me around on the kick sled, my leg in plaster. And the speed we go, it’s incredible! On the shiny, packed-down snow, the blades glide easily. She is seventy-three. And she makes toffee – oh yes she does, brown beans, Shrove Tuesday buns and toffee. It’s her tradition in the school winter sports holiday. After that, there’s a special tie between us.

Anita, who Dad was with at that time, in the 80s, after his divorce from Mum, after his separation from Pirkko, we talk on the phone after Dad’s funeral. Sven was so kind, we had such a good time, I really did like him, she says, and tells me she came up in the car with us to Uncle Gunnar’s funeral in 1986, when I was fourteen. She remembers me running into the kitchen, hugging Grandma and telling her I was madly in love. I have no recollection of that. But Anita thought it was lovely that I was so close to my grandmother. I only remember it as a very strange time, I was properly in love for the first time, my first love, and we were there for a funeral – no, a memorial service for Gunnar, who had drowned in the river in April but never been found. They think that Bonnie, the new young dog, ran out on the frozen river, slipped through a hole in the ice, and Gunnar went after her to rescue her, rescue his dog, and was swept away. I think I have a sense of the horror Grandma and Grandpa are going through. After all the losses in their lives. And there’s me, so utterly and childishly in love. At the memorial service I can hardly hold things together. Such deep sorrow and such deep happiness, they’re simply incompatible.

46

WE HAVE TO START with the kitchen. Uncle Erik and Naima, Dad’s neighbour, cleared up quite a lot of stuff the evening they found Dad dead, but since then Erik has put time into changing the downstairs WC. The kitchen is a filthy mess. I don’t know, but I imagine it must be hard for Erik to come into his childhood home and find it such a tip. Erik and Inga keep things in good order. They’re not pedants – it’s just that they keep up, renovate, repair, stay organised. I feel ambivalent about Dad’s decision to move back to Moliden as a pensioner. He retires several years early. Claims some kind of unemployment benefit to make his redundancy payment stretch. Grandmother’s house has always had a special kind of calm. It was no idyll. But never chaotic, not in my eyes, when I was growing up. Sober, only low-alcohol beer, lemonade, raspberry soda, lingonberry drink, milk. Mum’s constant refrain – they fill you up at Moliden, the fizzy drinks with meals, I’m not used to it. The crates of soft-drink bottles in the cellar. And even when Grandmother is nearly ninety, she doesn’t let things slide. When Dad arrives with all his goods and chattels… he messes everything up. He keeps his furniture upstairs. Grandma and Grandpa’s old bedroom – it is such a small room – becomes a junk room, a place for discarded computers, cardboard boxes, plastic bags of clothes. But above all it’s the smoking and the alcohol. My entire being is in protest at the house being filled with nicotine, tar. Just after Grandma’s death it is in a dreadful state. Grimy. Tumble-dried sheets thrown carelessly into

47 the linen cupboard. The ashtrays, the cigarette ends. The piles of paper, the newspapers, the tools. The oil, the cans of paint. That sticky black film over everything. Dad’s washing up is done at speed. Egg dried onto the plates and cutlery when I come to lay the table. Mats soon starts washing up before we eat anything there – preferably when Dad isn’t looking – plunging smeary glasses and plates from the cupboard and cutlery from the crumb-strewn drawer into hot, clean suds.

I am glad that Moliden is still there and that my children can experience the place, but I still nearly always feel sad when I come up. China that has got broken, a lack of care, the sticky fridge, things in different places in the cup- boards, the furniture moved around. That’s the way it has to be. But in the many years Dad was away, absorbed by his job, his love life – Grandma and I had a relationship of our own. In the house. I cooked meals for her, cleaned the place, changed the dressings on her painful leg ulcers, did the washing and ironing. The house had its own mild, benign smell.

Mats starts with the fridge. Something long forgotten has oozed, run into the salad drawers. It stinks. And the ash – even though we empty all the ashtrays, the smell of tobacco is so strong. It catches in our throats. The ash has col- lected under the offcut of cork-o-plast matting in the cupboard under the sink where Dad emptied his ashtrays, maybe finding it hard to bend right in over the rubbish bin, growing accustomed to the smell, not noticing it any longer. The dirty sheets, the stale smell of urine. Red wine stains. Empty the fridge. Clean the fridge. But preserve the traces.

48

GRETA AND I make the funeral arrangements, go to the Fonus funeral direc- tors in Örnsköldsvik. Which casket shall we pick, what sort of flowers? Which poem for the death announcement? It has to be one that fits Dad. We’ll have to put the announcement in both Örnsköldsvik Allehanda and Sundsvalls Tid- ning. We both want it to be done properly. Nicely. A real farewell. We gently defer to each other – what do you think? Will this be all right? What would Dad want? The awkwardness of all the financial proceedings involved – how much to spend on the casket, how large the flower arrangement should be. We decide on some lines from a Stig Dagerman poem. ‘To die is to travel a little’. Perhaps Dad’s life was a wobbly branch. Perhaps that’s what existence is like for most people. It wobbles and shakes. Then we come floating down, to solid ground. Our meeting with the vicar, Birgitta. Who knew Dad. The desire to be held in that moment, embrace it, remember Dad, anchor Dad to life, in my life. What shall we tell her about Dad’s life? And then all the rush. We can’t put the funeral off for too long. Coffee in the parish hall afterwards – how many will be coming and what shall we give them?

We wonder, Greta and I, how it was that Dad’s heart problem had not been treated more effectively. No coronary bypass operation? Was it because he smoked? Was so overweight? Because they wouldn’t consider an operation until he stopped smoking? His lungs were so wheezy those last years.

49 Greta’s boyfriend Adam is there to help us clean up Moliden. He’s been very ill for a number of years, he had cancer and a liver transplant, he’s a lot better now but still suffers recurrent high temperatures and bad stomach pain. Greta met Adam after her separation from the children’s father, Andreas, when Adam was in hospital, they started an online relationship when he was undergoing treatment. They make music together, he plays in a band and she is its singer and their relationship is passionate, they keep breaking up and getting together again. It’s hard to keep up sometimes but I know how all- consuming a relationship like that is, how much of life is concentrated into how things are between the two of you at that particular time. It’s all the more intense in the proximity of severe illness, as well, with Adam often re- quiring emergency hospital treatment, and Greta is with him then, at the hospital. Greta is diagnosed with ADHD around the same time and is suffer- ing from burn-out, those are turbulent years. The years when I am busiest with work, travelling, running from one commission to the next. I come home and know how much the children have missed me, want me to be there with them more often.

Those July days at Moliden I am up at eight, get to sleep at one. In between we are cleaning, washing and sorting, my sister and Adam, Mats and me. The girls and their cousins Disa and Ivan want something to do, of course, it is their summer holidays. I cook meals, wash up. There are a lot of us to be fed, eight people, several times a day. The interruptions! Just when you’ve wiped everything down, left everything clean and shiny, someone is hungry, getting out the bread and butter and cheese and spooning more coffee into the per- colator. I spend virtually all day washing up. We have no dishwasher here. Then it’s all the greasy stuff in the cupboards, after all those meals. The others are sorting, cleaning and washing in other places. We try to find a working

50 lawn mower. There is no lump. Stop feeling for it. This is my dad’s funeral. We want to make sure our father has a beautiful, dignified funeral. How can I do that, if I turn out to be ill?

No – I simply can’t write this. The effort we put into cleaning, cleaning. Maybe it is the nicotine that has left this sticky coating on everything. We scrub the table and the wooden settle in the kitchen. Several times over. Dirt that is slowly worn down by the powerful spray cleaners, the choking, chemical smell. The cupboards, inside and out. It takes several applications, the dirt is so ingrained. The greasy deposits left by cooking. The stove, oven, hotplates, saucepans.

The others go to get the shopping and I come across the jars of Christmas sweets in the big larder. Melting ice chocolate cups, home-made Mozartku- geln. His last Christmas. He wasn’t able to come down to stay, he felt off colour, thought the coach trip would be too much. And the fact that I was both relieved and worried that Christmas, 2015, but still kept telling him he would be very welcome. I’d had so much work on, that December, but we were going to be a crowd at our place on Christmas Eve, Mats’s sister and her family, my parents-in-law, Mum, my sister and her family – but my shame now at my shame at Dad’s incontinence problems – the relief that he wasn’t coming. The smell of urine. So pungent it was hard to sit still. The marks on the sofa, my surreptitious use of waterproof terry towelling and other protec- tors. Thinking of him busy in the kitchen at Moliden, making the Christmas sweets and the oat cookies. I can’t hold back the tears in my eyes, my nose runs. And most of all I am crying about how many sweets are left. All that work he put in – and the homemade chocolates are still in their jars in July. How doggedly he must have restrained himself.

51

IN JULY – IN THAT GAP before Dad’s funeral, maybe even before we go up to Mo for the first time after his death, I meet up with my old best friends, Ellen is on a short trip to Stockholm and we haven’t seen each other for many years, Ellen lives in the USA and Sofie and I have just got back in touch, we meet at Hotel Rival on Mariatorget in Stockholm, at their outdoor cafe looking out over the square. We talk about our mutual friend Lisa, who lives in Germany, a year or two back she had an aggressive breast cancer, her youngest son can only have been six months old? I suddenly remember that Lisa’s and Ellen’s mothers were firm believers in health foods, always ate so healthily, read that health magazine, and at home they served raw fruit and vegetables, bean sprouts, whole grains, herb tea. And now Lisa has been afflicted with this, right in the middle of life. There are no guarantees. She’s had treatment, it was tough but it went well, says Ellen. I should get in touch with Lisa, I’ll do it right after Dad’s funeral. Sofie and I have talked about ageing before, how young we still feel, that negative image of ageing women we’ve been marinated in for decades, why doesn’t anyone ever say that being just past forty is really not bad, you have energy, a bit of wisdom, a bit of experience, the children don’t need constant help and supervision, your parents are getting older but are still rea- sonably active in mind and body, and there’s no way you’ve lost your looks all of a sudden… I rarely think about serious illness. Lisa and I get to know each other in year 4 at school, when our two classes are amalgamated. After

52 the divorce that year, when Mum, Greta and I move to the rented flat out in Alliero, we are almost neighbours – though Lisa lives with her family in one of the big houses a bit nearer town. They own another little place, too, by the sea. In year 9, I cycle out there, it’s thirty kilometres, and then back home in the evening. Those years in middle school when I cycle to the stables, I time myself because it’s so tedious riding the same route all the time – I experiment to see if I can get there and back more quickly by constantly upping my pace. It’s seven kilometres to the stables, lots of hills, traffic. Push, step it up, you can do it!

Lisa and I draw, knit, sew and bake. And go to the school disco and are in love with two boys we know, who do street dance in Södermalm – on the other side of town. Lisa plays the cello, does jazz ballet and sings. Bakes sticky chocolate muffins and vanilla rock cakes and the whole family has its eyes fixed on America. Lisa, Mia and I are a little gang at middle school, then in secondary – sometimes all three of us, friends together, sometimes in other constellations.

And now Lisa’s been so ill. What are the chances of me…? Two of us in the same class, before we reach forty-five? You can breathe out. The lump you can feel is some- thing else.

If you take off your top, we’ll have a look – hold your arms out from your sides – yes, there it is. Dr Monica Hedman nods. I memorise her name. The relief of being able to see a woman doctor – Dr Monica is semi-retired, works one day a week at the Handen health centre and largely with patients over seventy-five – but why can’t she just say she can’t feel anything? That I’ve imagined it.

53 First we talked about Dad. Who died, just like that. They’re the worst, she says, the sudden deaths, when you don’t get a chance to say goodbye. I don’t cry, but tell her I didn’t have time to get the lump looked at, I was so busy with work and then we had the trip to England all booked and planned…. And then Dad dying. A huge heart attack. Monica nods. She sits in front of her computer but maintains contact with me throughout – not letting me go. Am I falling? She tells me I must have an immediate mammo- gram. Usually, you get to choose your own time, she says, but I’ll book it for you, right away. At the Breast Centre, opposite Butterick’s, you know where that is, don’t you? On Drottninggatan? No, I don’t know, I’ve never been to Butterick’s party and joke shop. A daft image pops up in my mind, Dr Monica in Butterick’s – I can hear the phone ringing, but the Breast Centre has closed. In the summer they aren’t open on Fridays, and now it’s after 4pm, on a Thursday. Her eyes grab hold of me again – you’re to say you can do any time at all, if they tell you they have no appointments you must insist, say you can take a cancellation if they get one. You must call them first thing on Monday. And go on at them until they give you an appointment. And then she says she heard me speak on the Vi magazine book cruise and read about me in the latest issue, about the sadness of saying goodbye to Maj. I’m surprised that she recognised me. We’re almost neighbours, well, that is, we live in adjoining areas of housing. In the morning rush hour, I generally take a short cut through Norrby, she says. And it could be a water- filled cyst. But it needs investigation. She tells me what is in the letter of re- ferral, says I must read it, her mother was once given a referral letter to take with her but the doctors didn’t tell her what it said, I never write anything I haven’t told the patient, says Monica. She wants to know what made me come now. She’s interested in what finally prompts patients to come forward.

54 I answer that I could feel the lump so obviously in my armpit, maybe I don’t mention that Mats rang the number so I was forced to make an appointment, not just for a mammogram but with a G.P. at the health centre, too. But Ven- delsö, which I ring first, won’t give me an appointment right away. The tele- phone triage nurse says a lump can be anything, so it isn’t an emergency. At Handen they will see me, though, and what’s more the nurse says I’ll book you in with our experienced doctor, a woman. You’d prefer to see a woman, wouldn’t you? Oh thank you, I reply, and maybe I am crying as I hang up. Before I leave, Dr Monica says this is what I want you to do over the weekend. She shows me a gesture with her arms, as if she were throwing something over her head, behind her. She repeats it several times, and I copy her mutely. We repeat the movement, facing each other, throwing our arms into the air. She says: And then ring the Breast Centre at eight o’clock on Monday. I’ve seen the fear in her eyes.

55

THE MAMMOGRAPHY UNIT at Söder Hospital isn’t closed on Fridays. I mustn’t duck out of ringing. However scared I am. How many times did Dr Monica tell me I had to make sure to get an appointment? I ring the number. The nurse answers. The thudding of my heart. I’ve got a referral to the Breast Centre but they’re closed on Fridays… She interrupts me. But they’ll be open on Monday. Yes, but my G.P told me I had to insist on an appoint- ment… We have no appointments. We have a queue here and a lot of urgent cases and long waiting times. What makes you think that it will be quicker here? That you can get an appointment here? I try to tell her that the doctor felt the lump very distinctly. That I missed my mammogram last year. Or perhaps I simply hang up. I don’t cry. My heart is hammering. What if I don’t manage to get an appointment on Monday either? How quickly does a tumour spread? Grow?

We take Estrid to Skansen. It’s Saturday. Elsa is staying the weekend at a friend’s in Blidö. The idea of just doing nothing at home, waiting… Estrid is close beside me the whole time. We get ice creams at the mean ice-cream lady kiosk, the one that looks like Olof Landström’s illustrations, listen to music at the open-air Solliden stage, see wolves, lynxes, seals. Then all at once, in front of us – two slightly older women – they stop, we stop, look at each other without saying anything. I recognise you, I finally say in the silence that has descended – and I you, comes the quick response. It’s Dr Monica Hedman

56 with a female friend. Here. At Skansen. You know what you need to do on Monday, she says. Nag them. Cancellations. It’ll be fine. You’ll get an ap- pointment. But I shall write you a better and even clearer referral letter.

Why is Dr Monica so adamant about me being seen quickly? Is there something she knows, but can’t say?

57

SUNDAY ON NÅTTARÖ ISLAND. Another Storsand. A stone’s throw from Ålö, Utö. Fine, smooth sand. Clear air, open sky. Eighteen degrees, nineteen at most – the water so cold that my legs instantly start to ache – fourteen de- grees? Or sixteen. I’m freezing. Thinking non-stop about the lump. About death. Stay calm for these last days of the school holidays. Estrid is so sorry it will soon be over. The summer that never happened. Turned into rain in Eng- land. Turned into irritability and stress. Turned into Grandfather’s death. Turned into my lump. I have to be here for them. Go for a swim, eat ice cream, sit on the sofa watching films. Not cry. Not crumple lumpenly. Not be reduced to the hard thing in my right breast. Which hurts. Malign breast cancer tumours definitely aren’t supposed to hurt. Dr Monica said you can feel whether the lumps are loosely or firmly attached. She didn’t have to feel for very long to find mine. Just said – yes, there it is. So damn big. In my little breast. How stupid can anyone be? Out of their tiny mind. Estrid is swimming. Looking at me. Elsa is still at her friend’s on Blidö. It could be a water-filled cyst. That summer on Utö. With the strange premonition that Mum had can- cer although we hadn’t discussed it. Mats tried to calm me down, said he was sure I was just imagining it, and then the news of her big tumour, there in that telephone kiosk, the fact that she was booked in with the surgeon for an operation, how anxious I was, afraid. But I’m only forty-five, Mum was fifty-eight. From the beach here in Nåttarö I can almost see Ålö where we bathed in the unusually warm water every day. I was doing my psychologist’s training, had

58 met Mats. Was grown up. Twenty-five. My girls aren’t grown up. Estrid has just turned ten. Elsa twelve. The sandwiches we have brought with us are hard for me to get down. I chew, I swallow. Estrid says disappointedly that the Oreo ice cream wasn’t as nice as she thought it would be.

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THE SOFT NORRBOTTEN ACCENT on the other end of the phone. Yes, we can fit you in for a mammogram on 23 August. Dad’s birthday. When he would have been seventy-seven. But that’s ages, I whisper. The doctor said I ought to keep on at you for an appointment right away, a cancellation, anything… I rang Söder hospital and they just … The silence. The intake of breath. Can you come tomorrow, before we open? Quarter to eight?

My grey T-shirt. My hospital T-shirt. Easy to take off. No awkward blouse or shirt buttons, no tight tops that ride up and stick to you. Always be sure to have clean underwear, in case you end up in hospital. It was one of the Maj readers who declared it was the only advice she could remember her mother ever giving her. Always be sure to have clean underwear, in case you end up in hospital.

It’s a calm place. Shades of green. Magazines. A water dispenser. Subdued lighting. Untroubled morning atmosphere. Nurses, perhaps doctors, going past. Only women? There’s some kind of consolation in that. The fact that women handle this, they are the professionals. Mats beside me. We aren’t talking about it. Though we generally talk so much. Is he thinking - why the hell didn’t you go in May? I’m thinking it. Constantly. Knowing time can never be put into reverse. It’s August. July

60 went by in Dad’s house. Grandma and Grandpa’s home. The funeral. I know what it’s like to arrange a funeral. I know that the death of a parent triggers a sense of existential abandonment. It has nothing to do with reality and eve- ryday life, but hurls you into loneliness. I have never really written about my Dad. In July, the desperate memories and the beautiful ones all collapsed in on each other. That angry urge to write about everything. But after the fu- neral. Like a stream of light. What’s the point? I whisper by the coffin that almost everyone has come. Or sent a message, a gift in his memory. Bosse and Åke, Ellinor, Göran, PRO, his brothers Lars and Erik, his niece Anna-Karin, sister-in-law Inger, cousins, second cousins, neighbours, friends, Bengt and Monika. Naima and Inger and Lars. Anna and Sven-Erik. All those people who appreciated a chat on the phone, a talk, an exchange of views over a cup of coffee. My sister Greta and I arranged it. Mats too. We chose the music. Uncle Lars likes the funeral music so much. Freddie Wadling’s ‘Just one day’, Lars Gullin’s ‘Danny’s Dream’, Jan Johansson’s ‘Bandura’. Dad liked Russia. St Petersburg. There are always other stories too. But sometimes the darkness has to give way to the light. When darkness has flung us round and sucked us down. Then light has to have its turn. Lightness. Joy. Alcohol does a load of shit to people. The empty bottles in the cellar. The wine stains. The receipts with the dates of his purchases at the off-licence. No, there’s no need for me to make accusations. Is that a terrible denial?

The last conversation. His last conversation is with Mum. His former wife. His great love. They have been divorced for thirty-five years. Mum tells him about the holiday in England. About the old man in Devon, a volunteer guide at the National Trust property there – he loves talking. To Mum, to us. He jokes, thunders, Mum jokes back. His younger colleague is hovering impa- tiently in the background, trying to interrupt. When the old one hears we are

61 from Sweden he gives us an appraising look, especially Mum, he furrows his bushy brows and asks us why we left them with all the ugly Vikings and kept the good-looking ones for ourselves. Dad laughs so hard at this that he nearly chokes, and tells her about the Scots and their bad teeth. Our distant relation in Scotland saying it isn’t only about money, they don’t care very much about teeth. Dad has another bad tooth that is going to cost seven thousand kronor to fix. And the old tractor caught fire. Dad, weighing in at over 100 kilos, hurried up the slope from the meadow to fetch the fire extinguisher. With his hip replacement and his COPD. And then all the plants and seedlings. The ones he and I have been talking about this spring. We’re alike in that. I know the delight and the torture. Of little plants grown from seed. The way you can bring them on and suddenly find you have a thousand. All needing bigger pots, more compost. Gradual hardening off to prepare them for life outside. The seedlings proved too much for him. His neighbour Naima and his younger brother Erik both say the same thing. Perhaps it was true. After his chat to Mum, he must have repotted a few more tagetes and chilli peppers. Then locked the door from the terrace against the light June night.

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MUM SAYS THEY talked about her cousin’s husband, who had just died. Dad also knew him through work, and Mum had known him since she was young. I knew him too, they would join us at Grandmother’s for Christmas when I was little, when she still lived in the big flat, renting out a couple of rooms to nursing students. They were always cheerful, Kerstin and Lage. They had mastered the art of sociability. Maybe the rest of us couldn’t really match them in that, except for Grandmother, of course. But there were Mum and Dad talking about Lage’s funeral and Kerstin’s dementia, and Dad said well we know, don’t we, that it’s our generation’s turn now? Then he said: Look after yourself, Britt-Marie. And they hung up.

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BUT WHEN INGER finds him. When she arrives to see to her bees, whose hives are at the far end of the meadow, she herself lives up in Backe – Sven always comes out onto the terrace when I turn off the road, down towards the farm- house, she says. Not this Friday. The first of July. And when she peers in through the closed terrace door, she sees him. On the living-room floor. She rings for an ambulance, goes to fetch Naima, who has a key, rings Erik. Greta. They can’t get hold of me. Can’t find my number on the internet.

Because I’m on Gotland, of course. With rosé wine on the stone steps. But at the time he must have died, on the Wednesday evening around 10 p.m., that was when I got the really bad migraine. And the next day, Jonas and I walked from the raukar across the island. It suddenly comes back to me - the first holiday Dad and I had together after the divorce. I was twelve, we went camp- ing on Gotland. By bike. The first time we’d been there. Most of all I remem- ber Sudersand. When we moved on to Fårö from sunny Tofta, we must have had ridden forty or fifty kilometres in the mild evening light. Sunny, warm. On Fårö the weather takes a turn for the worse. It’s blowing a gale. We have to wheel our bikes through the grazing pastures on Fårö, there’s a photograph of me in a shiny, pale blue tracksuit top, shorts, we’ve come across some Got- land ponies who want to say hello. It’s heavy work cycling, too hard when the wind is against you. At the campsite at Sudersand, we get a pitch next to a group of teenage boys. Perhaps I look older. I’ve just finished year 6. I wear

64 pastel-coloured clothes. Plastic clip earrings, Nivea on my lips, making them white and sticky. The fear every time I have to go to the toilet block, where there are showers and places to do the washing up. I pass their tent. They call out to me. Dad fries eggs and bacon on the camping stove for dinner. They taste great. Am I ashamed of Dad? Probably. I shall be a teenager by the next winter. And he has a word with the boys. Do they carry on calling out to me? What’s your name? Come here. Don’t be shy – we only want to talk to you! Where are you from? Do you like washing up? Are you any good at it? The laughter that follows me into the damp-smelling tent where Dad has stowed away the camping stove.

It pours with rain the next day, the tent is wet through, we pack up our things and head for home. That autumn I shall start year 7 and have a leg-lengthen- ing operation at the Akademiska hospital in Uppsala. I shall enter a strange, painful, illness-induced darkness that will persist for a whole year. I don’t know it yet. My legs are still their usual selves, although I always have to take into account that one is just under five centimetres shorter than the other.

65

THE MAMMOGRAPHY NURSE is cheerful. Tanned, blonde, with a curly ponytail. She asks questions, my ID number, when I last had a mammogram, which breast did I feel a lump in? Yes, it’s there I think, she says as I stand there semi-clothed. Is it that obvious to the eye? The scan, the compression of the breasts, my skin in the machine, I’ve lost more weight, there isn’t much to compress, but even if it hurts, it’s soon over, she doesn’t look scared, if it was a sign of advanced-stage cancer, she surely wouldn’t be so unconcerned? Leave it two years until your next mammogram, she says as I put on my bra, T-shirt, because you missed one, they’ll call you in again next year. There, see, she thinks I will calmly continue the routine breast screening programme, not die, is she thinking water-filled cyst, does she even say whether she can see anything in the pictures?

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WAITING. IT IS A TIME of waiting. In the soft green waiting room again. Leaf- ing through a magazine without taking in what I read. A doctor is going to look at the X-rays and decide if any further tests are needed for confirmation. Biopsy? Or do they already know? I can’t remember. The quiet doctor and the nurse from Norrbotten. First an ultrasound scan. So different from last time. When you see your baby on the screen, its heart, the sound of galloping horses. Expectation, happiness, tears. Now, I have instinctively turned my head away from the screen. It doesn’t hurt, but even so I feel extremely un- comfortable as she presses her instrument on the lump, investigates the whole breast. The cold, sticky jelly. Yes, you have some obvious cell changes, she says. She scans the other breast as well. Finds nothing there. There is a silence in the room, the underworld, we are there, in the gloom. We’ll take all the samples we need, says the nurse. And send them to the lab for analysis. Anaesthetic, then the prick in my breast, in the lump, in the water-filled cyst, say that’s what you think, say something, the breathing, their focus on the instruments, how I need to hold my arm so they can get to the right place, I do as they say, move my arm, my body, breathe. Then the doctor goes out. Perhaps we shake hands. The nurse finishes preparing the samples, I’m allowed to get up, say with embarrassment that maybe I should have asked the doctor if I ought to be worried, the nurse says quietly that they send so many samples for analysis,

67 but there’ll be some forms to fill in and we’re going to book another appoint- ment. In two weeks, with a breast surgeon.

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