Karin Alvtegen - Shame

‘If Bosse doesn’t come and Vanja doesn’t either, what do you think we should do?’

Maj-Britt had no idea. What do you do on a Tuesday evening when you’re eighteen and have just realised that your secret love is no longer secret, and that he is standing on the other side of the bicycle stand and has also just been revealed? At that precise moment it began to rain, and neither of them really wanted to leave. It wasn’t a little drizzle, it was a cloudburst that came out of nowhere. The kiosk owner had started to close and was winding in the awning that would have protected them.

It was Göran who first started to laugh. He tried to hold it back, but then the rain came down so hard that there was no resisting it any longer. Maj-Britt began to laugh too. Liberated, she let him take her hand and they ran off together under the cover of his jacket.

‘We could go over to my house for a while if you want.’

‘Can we do that?’

They had stopped on the other side of the road where they normally would have parted. He seemed surprised by the question.

‘Why not?’

She didn’t answer, only smiled uncertainly. Some things were so simple for other people.

‘I have my own entrance so you don’t even have to meet my mother and father if you don’t want to.’

She hesitated a tiny, tiny bit, but then nodded and let herself be drawn into all the wondrous things that were about to happen.

As he had described, he had his own entrance. A door at the end of the house and behind it a stairway to the second floor. He even had a little cooker with two burners and an oven, almost like his own flat. And why shouldn’t he? He was twenty years old, after all, and could have moved away if he’d wanted to. She could have moved out too, for that matter. Yet, the idea was inconceivable.

He opened a cupboard in the hallway and gave her a fluffy towel to dry off the worst of the rain. He hung her soaked jacket on the back of a chair and moved it in front of the heater. He had only a small hallway and one room with a dark-brown bookcase, an unmade bed and a desk with a chair. The sound of a TV in his parents’ part of the house revealed that you could hear every sound in the house.

‘I wasn’t sure if you would come.’

He went over to the unmade bed and tossed the spread over it.

‘Would you like some tea?’

‘Yes, please.’

He picked up a saucepan from the cooker, which stood on the low bookshelf.

‘Sit down if you like.’

He disappeared into the hall, going to what she assumed was a bathroom, as she heard water running and the clink of china. She looked around to find somewhere to sit. It was either the chair with the wet jacket on it by the heater, or the unmade bed. She stood where she was. But after he had made tea and she held one of the mismatched cups in her hands and he asked whether she wouldn’t like to sit next to him, she complied. They drank their tea and he did most of the talking. He told her about his future plans. He wanted to move away and maybe apply to the music college in Stockholm or Gothenburg. He was tired of this provincial town. Hadn’t she, who sang so well, ever thought about doing something with her voice? She let herself be swept along by his dreams, amazed at all the possibilities he suddenly conjured up. Even though she was eighteen and an adult, the thought had never entered her mind that there were alternatives to those the Congregation regarded as acceptable. She had never realised that being an adult meant that she was a grown-up with the right to make her own decisions about her life. There was only one thing she knew for sure at that moment: she didn’t want to be anywhere else than where she was right now. In Göran’s room with an empty teacup in her hand. Everything else was unimportant.

And after that evening everything was as it should be. Months went by and outwardly everything looked the same. But inside a change was stirring. A reckless curiosity was emerging which began to question all limitations.

No God in the world could have anything against what she finally was able to experience. Not even her parents’ God.

But for safety’s sake it was best that her parents didn’t find out a thing.

Seven days after the accident Åse called. The only time Monika had left her flat was when she drove her mother to the cemetery and then stopped by the book-shop to buy more books. She was almost up to the nineteenth century, and no detail of Swedish history had been too insignificant to memorise. Learning facts had never been a problem for Monika.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t called before now, but I haven’t really felt like doing anything. I just wanted to thank you for coming, Monika. I didn’t dare call Börje at home because he’s already had a minor heart attack and I didn’t know whether he could handle a phone call like that.’

Åse’s voice sounded tired and flat. It was hard to believe it was the same person.

‘I was happy to do it.’

There was a pause. Monika kept reading about the crop failures of 1771.

‘I drove out there yesterday.’

‘To the scene of the accident?’

She turned a page.

‘No, to see her. Pernilla.’

Monika stopped reading and sat up on the sofa.

‘You drove out there?’

‘I just had to, I never could have lived with myself otherwise. I had to look her in the eye and tell her how sorry I am.’

Monika put down her book.

‘So how was she?’

There was a long sigh.

‘It’s all so ghastly.’

Monika wanted to know more. Get every detail out of Åse that might be useful.

‘But how was she?’

‘Well, what can I say? Sad. But composed, more or less. I think she’s been taking sedatives to get through the first few days. But that little girl…’

Her voice broke.

‘She was crawling around on the floor and laughing and it was so… it’s so awful what I’ve done.’

‘It wasn’t your fault, Åse. When an elk appears like that you don’t have a chance.’

‘But I shouldn’t have been driving so fast. I knew that there weren’t any wildlife fences on that part of the road.’

Monika hesitated. None of it was Åse’s fault. It had all been fate. Except that the wrong person was sitting in the passenger seat.

There was a silence and Åse collected herself. She sniffled a few times but stopped crying.

‘Mattias’s parents were there for a couple of days, but they live in Spain so now they’ve gone back. Pernilla’s father is alive but apparently suffers from dementia and is in some home somewhere, and her mother died ten years ago, but she was getting help from the Council. Some volunteer crisis group that comes over and takes care of her daughter so she can get some sleep.’

Monika listened with interest. A volunteer crisis group?

‘Which crisis group was it, do you know?’

‘No.’

She wrote down crisis group???? under her notes about Jacob Magnus Sprengporten and underlined the words several times.

‘I was so afraid that she’d be angry or something but she wasn’t. She even thanked me for being brave enough to come over. Börje and Ellinor came along, I didn’t dare go alone. She was so grateful to find out all the details about how it happened; she said it helped to know.’

Monika could feel her body stiffen.

‘What sort of details?’

‘About the accident itself. How it was at the accident site. And how he had been during the course. I said that he had talked a lot about her and Daniella.’

Monika needed to know more about those details that Pernilla had been told, but it was a hard question to ask. Åse left her no choice. She did her best to try to make the question sound natural.