Red Wolf_ A Novel - Liza Marklund [100]
She turned to ice in the doorway, the razor-sharp stone rotating in her chest. She stood still, feeling her heart thud.
‘Okay,’ she said, regaining control of her muscles again, moving one foot in front of the other, out into the hall, into the bedroom, onto the bed. She heard him take his sports bag and tennis racket out of the hall cupboard, he called goodbye to her and the children, she heard their distracted reply and her own silence.
Had he noticed anything odd about her? Had he reacted in a particular way?
She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.
To be honest, she had been a bit strange this past year. He wasn’t just reacting to this evening.
She got up, walked round the bed to use the phone on her little table.
‘Thomas said you were ill,’ Arnold said, the only one of Thomas’s old friends who had ever really accepted her. ‘Are you feeling any better?’
Annika swallowed and muttered.
‘Well, I can quite see why he can’t play tonight when you’re this bad, but this is the second week in a row.’
Annika fell. The floor beneath her became a black hole and she was sailing off through space.
‘I’ll have to find another partner if he keeps cancelling, I hope you can see that.’
‘Can’t you give it a bit longer?’ Annika said, sinking into the bed. ‘He appreciates your matches so much.’
Arnold sighed, irritated. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘but Thomas is a real bloody pest. He can never make a decision and stick to it. If you book a fixed time on court for the whole autumn, you can’t just decide not to use it.’
Annika put a hand over her eyes, her heart racing.
‘Well, I’ll tell him,’ she said, and hung up.
Some time must have passed, because suddenly the children were with her in bed, one on each side of her, they were singing something she vaguely recognized and she hummed along, and in the background the angels sang a harmony.
These are my children, she thought. He’ll never take my children away from me.
‘Right,’ she said, ‘it’s time for bed.’
And she got them into bed by reading them a story, without any awareness of what she was reading. She tucked them in and kissed them and went round turning out the lights. She huddled into the alcove by the living-room window and rested her temple against the ice-cold glass. She could feel the draught from the ill-fitting frame against her thighs, and listened to the wind as it tried to creep round the hinges. Her insides were mute and calm, weighed down by the rumbling stone.
The apartment lay in darkness behind her. The swinging streetlamp outside cast yellow shadows across the room, from the outside her windows were nothing but black holes.
She listened, trying to hear the children’s breathing but could only hear her own. She held her breath trying to hear more, but her hearing was blocked by her heartbeat, the blood rushing and racing and bubbling in her head.
Unfaithful, she thought. Sven was always unfaithful.
She had refused to see it for all those years, and the only time she protested he had hit her in the head with a pair of pliers. Without realizing it, she fingered the small scar on her forehead, it was almost invisible now, she hardly ever thought about it.
She was used to men being unfaithful.
She could see him in front of her: her first love, her childhood friend, her fiancé, the sports star. Sven Mattsson who loved her more than anything else in the world, Sven who worshipped her so much that no one else could get close to her but him, couldn’t even talk to her, and she wasn’t allowed to think about anyone else but him, actually, nothing else but him. Anything else would be punished, and he punished her, he punished her and punished her until the day he stood before her by the furnace in the Hälleforsnäs works with his hunting knife in his hand.
She turned away from the image, stood up and shook it off, shrugging it off the same way she shrugged off her nightmares, the familiar nightmares that came back after that night in the tunnel, the men from Studio Six who were discussing what to do with her, Sven with his bloody knife,