The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [32]
“One moment,” she said quickly and put the receiver down on the bed, took several steps toward the kitchen but stopped just as quickly and stared at it. Now he was lying there, Charles Morgansson, on her sloppily made bed. He was breathing into the phone. He was waiting for an answer.
She picked it bak up.
“It may work out,” she said.
They decided on a time and place. Morgansson promised to get the tickets. The only thing she had to do was show up on time and buy him popcorn.
She exhaled, stood absolutely still for a few moments with her eyes closed, before she dropped the phone onto the bed, picked it up again, and dialed Görel’s number.
The clock in the kitchen read several minutes past five.
“Spaghetti,” she said.
Erik looked up but kept singing. Ann crouched down.
“I love you,” she said softly and stroked his head.
“Little snail,” he said.
Erik was watching a video. Ann let her clothes fall in a pile on the hall floor.
“Mommie’s going to take a shower,” she yelled.
She closed the door, opened the bathroom cabinet, took out her razor and inserted a fresh blade, stepped into the shower stall, changed her mind, stepped out, and cracked the door. Erik was singing along to the song in the film.
With the razor in her hand, she scrutinized her body in the rectangular mirror. Sometimes she had the impression that it lied, made her look more slender than she really was. She often felt chubby despite the fact that Beatrice—the only one at work who ever commented on her appearance—nagged her about how she should eat more.
“You’re as thin as a goat!” she would say.
Ann thought Bea’s comments came from the fact that she herself was getting increasingly chubby. After her second child she had put on eight, nine kilos, remained there, and now had to struggle in order not to put on more weight.
She was right about Ann having lost some weight. She thought it was due to her changed evening routine. Not as many sandwiches and only one glass of wine a night.
She ran a hand down her breasts and stomach and felt a feeling of joy, a reminder of something long ago. She turned her body. Her thighs were still good. She twitched as if a hand had appeared on her buttock. She closed her eyes and tried to remember the feeling, but it wasn’t the same.
“This is me,” she said aloud, stepped closer to the mirror and looked at herself intensely, let her hand caress down her stomach, find its way lower down, but the feeling wouldn’t come. Her hand was somehow too unrefined, too insensitive. It only signaled a longing for pleasure but someone’s hand on your body meant something else, so much more.
Ann climbed back into the shower, studying herself and her own reactions. She wanted to emerge from the stall not only clean and fresh-smelling with a pleased smile and an attractive bikini line, but also purified, with anticipation. Sure of her own wishes and desires.
She wanted a promise, or rather a contract, regarding life.
She stepped out of the shower with a feeling that the past didn’t have to mean anything. There was only this moment, with these thoughts, this body, this life. She put in a period, wrote a line, turned the page,sprayed deodorant under her arms, dressed in the clothes she had laid out: the completely new and expensive thong from Wolford, bought at Kastrup Airport, the just as new bra, the silky-smooth pantyhose from H&M that promised “to give your derriere a lift.”
She laughed. That’s what I want, she thought: to give my derriere a lift. She put on a black skirt, a red top, clasped the silver necklace and threaded the earrings through her ears, brushed her hair, applied makeup discreetly but with noticeable deliberation, and then went out to Erik who, when he saw her, immediately stopped singing and got stumbling to his feet. At that moment Görel rang the doorbell.
Ann Lindell was ready.
He was only ten or so meters in front of her. She recognized the worn, dark