Åke Edwardson - Sun and Shadow

The wall surface was rough, like the trunk of a tree. Had he found the paintbrush somewhere in the flat? Or had he taken it with him? He was calm enough now to ask questions, but he couldn’t answer them.

There. He’d finished.

They followed his every movement. Him and her. He didn’t approach them. They just had to sit there, and he’d drawn up the blinds so that it wasn’t so dark inside. It wasn’t quiet in there either. It-wasn‘t-quiet-in-there-either. The music was on auto-reverse. The light from outside shone onto the other guy’s head as he kept an eye on everything from the sofa. Nothing moved. He was pleased that nothing moved. It had been harder with her, but now she was still as well, watching him. Nobody was laughing anymore. Who was in charge now? Who was making the decisions now?

He’d shown them.

He’d show him now, make him understand.

He switched off the music, but that was not good. He switched it on again, but lowered the volume and looked around. He could leave now.

Angela woke up before midnight with the feeling that something was about to happen. Something she didn’t want to think about.

In the no-man‘s-land between sleep and waking she had seen the images one after another, like slides projected onto the big, bare bedroom wall.

She got out of bed and put on her robe, her heart pounding. She sat at the kitchen table with a glass of milk. Everything was quiet in the street outside. Somebody flushed a toilet in an apartment upstairs. She considered switching on the radio, but decided not to. Mustn’t get too wide awake. She sat with her hand over her stomach. Mustn’t plan too far ahead.

The swishing noise in the pipes stopped. Still no late-night tram outside, no voices in the darkness, which smelled of snow. She could smell it when she opened the window and breathed in deeply. A premonition of winter, and she closed the window, put the glass in the sink, and went back through the hall. The hiss clattered up, stopped on the landing, and she could hear the door opening and shutting and the sound of gravel scraping against the stone floor. She paused in the hall. Why am I standing here? I want to hear those footsteps go in through a door. Mrs. Malmer’s door.

Good grief.

Some more scraping footsteps. They sounded as if they were outside her door, just outside the door. Angela suddenly found herself incapable of moving. Everything was concentrated on listening for those footsteps.

I shouldn’t sleep here when Erik’s away.

This is ridiculous.

A rasping, grinding sound again. Footsteps again; moving away. She could hear the hundred-year-old elevator rattling its way back up, and the soft clatter as it came to a halt in the corridor outside. The clinking of the sliding steel door followed by a little click and the sound of the cage heading back down again.

Angela stood behind the door. She peered out through the peep-hole and could see the landing in a grotesque wide-angled perspective, but there was no sign of anybody outside. The light was still on. She opened the door, and immediately outside were some grains of black gravel, and a shallow pool of water glittering in the light.

That could be from me, she thought. It takes some time for water to evaporate in the stairwell when there’s a constant cold draft coming from below. Persecution mania. I’ll be wandering around checking for pools of water and grains of gravel all over the building next. She gave a little snort and closed the door.

The alarm clock on the bedside table said twelve-fifteen. She’d have to be up again in six hours, ready for the hospital corridors. The lumps of plaster that had fallen out of the green examination-room walls. Did they always have to be green? Doors with the paint peeling off. Patients must lose hope as they sit waiting and see how the hospital is slowly falling apart. If they couldn’t repair a wall, how the hell could they heal a body that had-

The telephone rang. Angela gave a start. It rang again, seemed to be moving across the table. It’ll be Erik, she thought as she lifted the receiver. It’s happened.

“Yes? Angela here.”

Not a word, just the sound of static.

“Hello? Erik?”

A rustling. Another sound that she couldn’t identify. Was that a voice in the background? Perhaps, very faint. Calls were finding it difficult to make their way across Europe tonight.

“I can’t hear anything. Maybe you should redial? Can you hear me? I can’t hear you.”

Now she could hear the echo of voices, but that was normal: fragments of conversation from anywhere in the world could be picked up by different lines and transformed into a sort of Esperanto. It could be any language at all, a conversation on a mountain peak millions of miles away.

Now she could hear breathing. That wasn’t from a distant mountain peak. It sounded nearby.

“Hello? Is anybody there?”

Breathing again, clear, intentional. It had taken over from the distant babble.

She suddenly felt scared to death. She wanted the babble to return. That had been reassuring. She thought about the images she’d seen in her mind’s eye. The footsteps, the images again, the pool of water…

More breathing.

“Say something! I can hear that there’s somebody there.” She made her voice sound as threatening as she could, but it came over as tiny, frightened. “Who is it?” And then she thought she could hear something else, something more… and she dropped the receiver. It hit the edge of the table and fell to the floor and lay there, the earpiece pointing upward. She stared at it for a few seconds, then lifted it up.

It was silent now. The silence was broken by a click, then came the familiar dial tone.

For Chrissakes, Angela! Keep calm. There are idiots who dial a wrong number but can’t bring themselves to admit it. There are also madmen who ring numbers haphazardly in the hope of somebody answering.

But she wanted to talk to Erik, hear his voice, be reassured.

His mobile was switched off. She left a message. What was going on? He promised he would never switch it off while he was away.

She looked at the receiver in her hand. Should she leave it off for the rest of the night? That would be stupid. Erik might need to phone. No doubt there was some temporary fault affecting his mobile. She dialed his number again.

“Erik here.”

“Why the hell don’t you answer the phone?”

“Eh? What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t been answering. Your phone was switched off.”

He looked at it, as if half-expecting to see some fault or other.

“When was this?”

“Just now. A couple of minutes ago.”

“Really? Well, it’s working okay now.”

“I can hear that, for God’s sake.”

“What’s the matter, Angela?” He looked at his watch. Nearly one. “You seem…”

“Somebody’s trying to phone me here.”

“What do you mean?”

She explained.

“That’s happened to me,” he said. “I expect it happens to everybody at some time or other.”

“That makes me feel a lot better.”

“But I don’t like what you’re saying. Was this the first time?”

“I’ve never experienced anything like this before. Never in my apartment.”

“So you mean that it has to do with my apartment, is that it?”

“No, Erik. For God’s sake, I don’t know what I’m saying. I expect it was just somebody who dialed a wrong number and didn’t want to own up.”

“Hmm.”

“I’m overreacting. I just wanted to hear your voice. Now I can hear a tram outside. I feel calm again now.”

“You can call me whenever you want.”

“How’s your father today?”

“So-so. I’m at the hospital now, but I’ll probably go back to my hotel before long.”