The Circle (Hammer) - By Elfgren, Sara B.,Strandberg, Mats Page 0,137

his eyebrows so that he’ll think she’s looking him in the eyes, like a normal human being with nothing to hide. ‘I thought maybe we could do something this weekend,’ she says, hoping he won’t interpret this as a invitation to go out on a date with him. Her ears are so hot that they might shrivel, like two sun-dried tomatoes.

‘I’d love to! What do you want to do?’ he asks.

‘Just hang out. We’ve got relatives visiting,’ she lies, ‘so maybe we could be at your place.’ Yeah, that had sounded totally spontaneous.

‘Okay. I’ve got football practice, but you could come over around four.’

‘Are you going to be alone?’ She hears immediately how that sounded and the tomato colour spreads across her entire face. ‘I just mean if we want to be undisturbed … to talk about Rebecka or something. Not that we have to talk about her. But you know …’

‘I know.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Minoo says.

Gustaf lunges forward and gives her a hug. She has to stop herself recoiling. She remembers how he pulled her to him in the darkness by the viaduct. This feels completely different.

‘I’m so happy you want to meet up,’ he says, and lets her go. ‘I thought you were avoiding me.’

Minoo focuses on the bridge of his nose again. ‘Not at all!’ she says. ‘Why would I do that?’

49

THE ROUGH WALLS of the waiting room are a depressing mint green. Someone has painted a waist-high border of happy ducks pecking at the ground. Somehow they make the atmosphere a thousand times worse.

Anna-Karin is sitting on the sofa staring vacantly ahead. Outside the room, hospital staff are running to and fro. A few are talking far too loudly to each other, as if this is any old job, not one where people are ill and dying. Alarm signals buzz and beep.

Anna-Karin looks at the ducks again. They’re smiling at each other with their blunt bills, apparently moving along in time with a gay little melody. She realises why she finds them so awful: no one wants to be in this room. You’re only here if your worst nightmares have come true. But someone had thought that the ducks’ perkiness would rub off on whoever was sitting here.

A male nurse with tribal tattoos down both arms pops into the room and asks Anna-Karin to come with him. They’ve finished today’s tests on Grandpa.

Anna-Karin feels as if everyone is looking at her askance as she follows him down the corridor. There goes that girl who hasn’t even been once to see her poor grandfather. She ought to be ashamed of herself.

The nurse stands outside Grandpa’s room and gestures for Anna-Karin to go inside.

She looks at the open door. More than anything she’d like to bolt down the long corridor and escape into the fresh air, away from the smell of hospital and sick bodies. Away from Grandpa.

Grandpa.

She walks past the nurse. Washes her hands thoroughly at the little sink inside the door, then rubs them with alcohol from the pump bottle attached to the wall.

The room is ghostly in the dim afternoon light. An old man lies in the nearest bed, with fingers as crooked as claws. His eyes are squeezed shut and his toothless mouth gasps air. Anna-Karin’s insides go cold before she realises that he isn’t Grandpa. She hurries past him.

A light-grey curtain is drawn halfway around the other bed.

At first she sees only his legs delineated beneath the light blue hospital blanket. When she’s closer she can see his arms resting outside the blanket. Needles attached to long tubes have been inserted into the back of his hands and secured there with papery tape. Another tube feeds out from beneath the blanket. Anna-Karin follows it with her eyes to a bag of pee hanging from the bed near the floor.

She takes a few more steps and there is Grandpa’s face. It’s almost transparent in the pale light from the window. Yet another tube feeds into his nose. An IV stand has been placed next to the bed. A beeping sound comes from a machine with wires that disappear under the collar of his nightshirt. He’s like a machine into which fluids are pumped in and out.

Anna-Karin takes her last steps to the edge of his bed. ‘Grandpa,’ she says.

He turns towards her. His features have sort of collapsed. The skin looks smoother. It’s Grandpa lying there, yet not. All the qualities she identifies with him, the strength, the alertness, the vitality and intelligence,