said Sanna.
Rebecka nodded absently.
I’ll talk to Patrik Mattsson, she thought.
She was jerked back to the present by Sanna running her hand quickly over Rebecka’s hair.
“I love you, Rebecka,” she said softly. “My dearest, dearest sister.”
It’s just amazing how everybody loves me, thought Rebecka. They lie, deceive and eat you up for breakfast, all out of love.
Rebecka and Sanna are sitting at the kitchen table. Sara is lying on a beanbag in the living room listening to Jojje Wadenius. It’s her morning routine. Porridge and Jojje on the beanbag. In the kitchen the radio is turned to P1. The orange Advent star is still hanging in the window, although it’s February. But you need to hang on to a little bit of Christmas, its decorations and its light, just to keep you going until the spring arrives. Sanna is standing by the stove making sandwiches. The coffee percolator gurgles one last time, then falls silent. She pours two mugs and places them on the kitchen table.
Nausea floods through Rebecka like an enormous wave. She jumps up from the table and rushes into the bathroom. She doesn’t even manage to lift the lid properly. Most of the vomit ends up all over the lid and the floor.
Sanna follows her. She stands in the doorway in her tatty green fluffy dressing gown, looking at Rebecka with anxious eyes. Rebecka wipes away a strand of mucus and vomit from her mouth with the back of her hand. When she turns her face up toward Sanna, she can see that Sanna has realized.
“Who?” asks Sanna. “Is it Viktor?”
“He has the right to know,” says Sanna.
They are sitting at the kitchen table again. The coffee has been thrown away.
“Why?” says Rebecka harshly.
She feels as if she is trapped inside thick glass. It’s been like this for a while now. Her body wakes long before she does in the mornings. Her mouth opens for the toothbrush. Her hands make the bed. Her legs make their way to the Hjalmar Lundbohm school. Sometimes she stops dead in the middle of the street, wondering whether it’s Saturday. If she has to go to school at all. But it’s remarkable. Her legs are always right. She arrives in the right room on the right day at the right time. Her body can manage perfectly well without her. She’s avoided going to church. Blamed schoolwork and the flu and gone to visit her grandmother in Kurravaara. And Thomas Söderberg hasn’t asked about her, or phoned.
“Because it’s his child,” says Sanna. “He’s bound to realize, in any case. I mean, it’ll show in a few months.”
“No,” says Rebecka tonelessly. “It won’t.”
She sees how the meaning of what she has just said sinks in.
“No, Rebecka,” says Sanna, shaking her head.
Tears well up in her eyes and she reaches for Rebecka’s hand, but Rebecka gets up and puts on her shoes and padded jacket.
“I love you, Rebecka,” pleads Sanna. “Don’t you understand that it’s a gift? I’ll help you to…”
She stops speaking as Rebecka looks at her with contempt.
“I know,” she says quietly. “You don’t think I’m even capable of looking after myself and Sara.”
Sanna buries her head in her hands and begins to weep inconsolably.
Rebecka leaves the flat. Rage is pounding through her body. Her fists are clenched inside her gloves. It feels as if she could kill someone. Anyone.
When Rebecka has gone, Sanna picks up the telephone and dials. It is Thomas Söderberg’s wife, Maja, who answers.
Patrik Mattsson was woken at quarter past eleven in the morning by the sound of a key being turned in the outside door of his flat. Then his mother’s voice. Fragile as ice in the autumn. Full of anxiety. She called his name, and he heard her go through the hall and past the bathroom where he was lying. She stopped at the door of the living room and called again. After a while she knocked on the bathroom door.
“Hello! Patrik!”
I ought to answer, he thought.
He moved slightly, and the tiles on the floor laid their coolness against his face. He must have fallen asleep in the end. On the bathroom floor. Curled up like a fetus. He still had his clothes on.
His mother’s voice again. Determined hammering on the door.
“Hello, Patrik, open the door, there’s a good boy. Are you all right?”
No, I’m not all right, he thought. I’ll never be all right again.
His lips formed the name. But no sound was allowed to pass his lips.
Viktor. Viktor. Viktor.
Now she was rattling the door handle.
“Patrik,