‘Not exactly,’ Harry composed himself enough to say.
‘That’s not how it looks,’ Jim said, watching them in the mirror. ‘Perhaps you just don’t know it yourselves yet, but even though you look a bit weighed down by the gravity of circumstances today, there’s a glow there. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you look like Claudia and I did when we were young and in love, the way we were for the first twenty or thirty years. Ha ha ha. Now we’re just in love. Ha ha ha.’
Claudia looked at her husband with sparkling eyes.
‘I met Claudia at one of the roadshows. She was performing as a contortionist. She can fold herself up like an envelope even today. So I don’t know what I’m doing with this big Buick. Ha ha ha. I wooed her every day for more than a year before she so much as allowed me to kiss her. And afterwards she told me she had fallen in love the first time she saw me. That alone was sensational, bearing in mind that this nose of mine had already taken a lot of beatings. Then she went and played the prude for one whole, long, awful year. Women scare the wits out of me sometimes. What do you say, Harry?’
‘Well,’ Harry said, ‘I know what you mean.’
He looked at Birgitta. She put on a weak smile.
After spending three-quarters of an hour covering a distance that normally takes twenty minutes, they pulled in at the town hall, where Harry and Birgitta thanked him for the lift and jumped out. The wind had picked up in the town as well, and they stood in the gusts palpably not knowing quite what to say.
‘A very unusual couple,’ Harry said.
‘Yes,’ Birgitta said. ‘They’re happy.’
The wind whirled and shook a tree in the park, and Harry imagined he saw a hirsute shadow dart for cover.
‘What do we do now?’ Harry said.
‘You come home with me.’
‘OK.’
45
Payback
BIRGITTA POKED A cigarette into Harry’s mouth and lit it.
‘Well earned,’ she said.
Harry reflected. He didn’t feel too bad. He pulled the sheet over him.
‘Are you embarrassed?’ Birgitta laughed.
‘I just don’t like your lustful eyes on me. You may not want to believe it, but in fact I’m not a machine.’
‘Really?’ Birgitta playfully nibbled his lower lip. ‘You could have fooled me. That piston of—’
‘All right, all right. Do you have to be so vulgar now that life has become so blissful, sweetheart?’
She cuddled up to him, resting her head on his chest.
‘You promised another story,’ she whispered.
‘Indeed.’ Harry took a deep breath. ‘Let me see. So this is the start. I was in the eighth year and a new girl joined the parallel class. Her name was Kristin, and it took only three weeks for her and my best pal, Terje, who had the whitest teeth in the school and played guitar in a band, to become officially declared boyfriend and girlfriend. The problem was she was the girl I had been waiting for all my life.’ He paused.
‘So what did you do?’
‘Nothing. Went on waiting. In the meantime I became Kristin’s pal – she could chat about everything under the sun with me, she felt. She could confide when things between her and Terje weren’t working, without realising that her pal was quietly exultant, waiting for the moment to strike.’
He grinned.
‘Christ, how I hated myself.’
‘I’m shocked,’ mumbled Birgitta, affectionately stroking his hair.
‘A friend invited a gang of us to his grandparents’ unoccupied farmhouse the same weekend that Terje’s band had a gig. We drank home-made wine and Kristin and I sat on the sofa chatting late into the night. After a while we decided to explore the house and went up to the loft. There was a locked door, but Kristin found a key hanging on a hook and unlocked it. We lay side by side on the duvet of a very undersized four-poster. In the hollows of the bedlinen there was a layer of something black, and I jumped when I saw it was dead flies. There must have been thousands of them. I saw her face close to mine, surrounded by dead flies on the white pillow, bathed in a bluish light from the moon, so big and round outside the window, which made her skin seem transparent.’
‘Pah!’ Birgitta said and rolled on top of him. His eyes lingered on hers.
‘We talked about everything and nothing. Lay quite still listening to nothing. In the night a car drove past on the road and the light from the headlamps swept across the ceiling and all kinds of strange shadows stole through the room. Kristin finished with Terje two days later.’
He turned on his side with his back to Birgitta. She snuggled up to him.
‘What happened next, Valentino?’