Liza Marklund - Red Wolf

Suddenly she felt that she was about to be sick. She dashed into the toilet behind the kitchen and her stomach turned inside out, half-digested pasta from 7-Eleven tore at her throat, making her tears overflow.

Afterwards she hung across the toilet, the stench revolting her. The angels sang at full volume.

‘Shut up!’ she yelled, slamming the toilet lid.

She walked angrily into the kitchen, pulling out all the ingredients for dinner, burned herself on the flame when she put the rice on, cut herself when she sliced the onion and cut up the chicken, shaking as she opened the tins of coconut milk and baby sweetcorn and Asian chestnuts.

Was she wrong? It wasn’t impossible. Thomas looked like a lot of other Swedish men – tall and fair and broad-shouldered, with the beginnings of a stomach, and it had been dark and they were quite a long way away; maybe it wasn’t him standing there with the blonde woman at all.

She gripped the stove, closed her eyes and took four deep breaths.

Maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe she’d seen wrong.

She straightened up, relaxed her shoulders, opened her eyes and heard the door open.

‘Daddy!’

The children’s cries of joy and sturdy welcoming hugs, his deep voice expressing a mixture of happiness and cautious fending-off; she fixed her gaze on the extractor fan and wondered if it showed, if there was something in his face that would give her the answer.

‘Hello,’ he said behind her back, kissing her on the back of her head. ‘How are you feeling? Better?’

She breathed in and out before turning round and setting her eyes on him.

He looked the same as usual. He looked exactly like he usually did. Dark-grey jacket, dark-blue jeans, light-grey shirt, shimmering silk tie. His eyes were the same, they were a bit tired and slightly disillusioned, his hair thick and brush-like above his bushy eyebrows.

She noticed she was holding her breath and took a deep, greedy breath.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘a bit better.’

‘Are you going to work tomorrow?’

She turned round to stir the chicken, hesitating.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ve just been sick.’

‘As long as you don’t give us all this winter vomiting bug,’ Thomas said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

It couldn’t have been him. It must have been someone else.

‘How was work today?’ she said, putting the saucepan on a trivet from Designtorget.

He sighed, holding the morning paper out in front of him, preventing her from seeing his eyes.

‘Cramne at Justice is difficult to deal with. A load of talk and not much action. The girl from the Federation of County Councils and I are having to do most of the work, and he gets the credit.’

Annika stood still, the pan of rice in her hand, and stared at the headline on the front page of the paper, something to do with a leak about the culture proposal that was due next week.

‘The Federation of County Councils,’ she said. ‘What was her name again?’

Thomas inadvertently let one corner of the paper fold back, she met his eyes for an instant before he shook the paper to make it stand up again.

‘Sophia,’ he said. ‘Sophia Grenborg.’

Annika stared at the picture of the Minister of Culture illustrating the article.

‘What’s she like?’

Thomas carried on reading, hesitating a few moments before replying. ‘Ambitious,’ he said, ‘pretty good. Often tries to lobby for the Federation at our expense. She can be bloody annoying.’

He folded the paper, got up and tossed it onto the window sill.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll get the kids. I don’t want to miss tennis this week.’

And he came back into the kitchen with a squealing child under each arm, put them on their chairs, felt the loose tooth and admired the new boots, flicked the pigtails and listened to tales of sweet machines and promises to visit Peter No-Tail in Uppsala.

I’m imagining things , she thought. I must have seen wrong .

She tried to laugh, but couldn’t thaw out the sharp stone in her chest.

It wasn’t him. It was someone else. We’re his family and he loves us. He’d never let the children down .

They ate quickly, didn’t want to miss the cartoons.

‘That was great, thanks,’ Thomas said, giving her a peck on the cheek.

They cleared up together, their hands occasionally touching, their eyes meeting for brief moments.

He would never leave me .

She poured detergent into the dishwasher and switched it on. He took her face in his hands, studying her face with a frown.

‘It’s good you’re going to have another day at home,’ he said. ‘You look really pale.’

She looked down, pushed his hands away.

‘I feel a bit washed out,’ she said, and walked out of the kitchen.

‘Don’t wait up,’ he said to the back of her head. ‘I promised Arnold I’d go for a beer afterwards.’

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.