The Princess of Burundi - Kjell Eriksson [36]
He got off at the bus terminal and walked up Bangårdsgatan to the bingo hall. He always looked around before going in. Once he was inside, some of the tension lifted.
Twelve
The headlines in the morning paper screamed: MURDER. Her first impulse once she had finished reading was to call Ottosson. The morning fatigue vanished. This was her job.
Some got a kick out of the sports pages and the latest results, some preferred the massive texts in the arts-and-culture section, and others read the cartoons or the home-and-garden inserts. None of this interested Ann Lindell, but a murder in her hometown made her heart beat faster. She was excited not by the violence itself or the fact that a person had been brutally slaughtered, but by the fact that it meant she had work to do.
She studied the text carefully and tried to read between the lines. Haver’s and Ryde’s brief comments didn’t yield much, but she knew enough to assume they didn’t have much to work with at this point.
She pushed the paper away. She had been home for nine months now. The baby, Erik, was growing incredibly slowly. She often called him “my poor boy.” She didn’t mean anything by this other than that she felt sorry for him because he had been born to a single parent, and a police officer at that.
She thought she was not a particularly good mother. Not that the little one was suffering—he got all the care and attention he could want—but Ann continually felt impatient over the time it was taking. Why couldn’t he hurry up and grow so that she could go back to work?
She had mentioned it to Beatrice, saying that she felt like she was being disloyal to him, but Bea had just laughed.
“I’ve felt the same thing,” she said. “We all love our kids, but we want so much. The kids are everything to us, and yet they aren’t our life, so to speak. Some women love to putter around at home but I almost went crazy that first year. Sitting around the playground shooting the breeze with other moms was not my thing.”
Ann was only partly comforted by her colleague’s words. Guilt gnawed at her. She felt as if she were copying other mothers, especially her own, in almost everything she did. It was as if she weren’t a mother for real.
She had never lived this close to another human being, never poured almost all her strength into caring for another. It was tiring but also filled her with a sense of power and pride. She was continually surprised at the direction her life had taken, over the change in herself.
She lived in two worlds, one where she pretended to be a good mother while the dual feelings of impatience and guilt coursed through her, and another where she proudly pushed her stroller through the streets of Uppsala, filled with a gentle happiness.
She didn’t think much about Erik’s father. That was a surprise. During her pregnancy, especially in the last few months, she had toyed with the idea of looking him up. Not to get him to leave his family—she had already found out that he was married and had two children—and not to extract any kind of allowance, not even to get him to admit paternity. Then why? she asked herself. She couldn’t give herself an answer, and now that the baby was here she didn’t care about him any longer.
Ann’s parents had pressed her for information, but she had resisted their attempts to extract the name of the father. It was of no significance to her or her parents, after all, as she would never live with him.
She would have to reconsider the matter when her boy was older. As a matter of principle she had always thought every child had a right to know his father. But now she was no longer so sure. He wasn’t needed. What she denied in herself was the slumbering half-hope that there would one day be a man who would take on the role of a stand-in.
She often hated herself for her somewhat dismissive attitude but used rationalizations to deny the needs she had felt the past few years when her thoughts of Edvard had confused and weakened her.
Things are as they are. Be a good mom just as you’ve been a good cop.