Tove Alsterdal - The Forgotten Dead - A dark, twisted, unputdownable thriller

The next second I pictured another woman, pretty and chic and elegant, like the girl who played Amélie from Montmartre, or some other big-eyed, dark-haired, petite and secretive Frenchwoman.

I got up and walked through the apartment, pausing in the kitchen to drink a big glass of iced water. From there I looked at his side of the bed, which was neatly made. Mine was chaos, with the covers sagging partway onto the floor.

When I closed my eyes I could almost hear his footsteps as he came into the kitchen and opened the cupboard where we kept the coffee, and then the plop when the vacuum seal released its hold.

We had torn down the walls between the rooms when I moved in, opening up the place to make it into an airy and bright loft space for our life together. At first I was bothered by his presence whenever we sat and worked. The clattering of his keyboard behind me, the faint creaking of rubber against wood as he rolled back his chair, and his footsteps as he paced around the room, trying to come up with the right wording. Later I’d learned to block him out, to focus on my computer screen and not think about sex as soon as he came close enough for me to feel the eddying air when he moved, and the smell of him: wool, olive soap, and a light aftershave. I suppose that’s what people call daily life.

The biggest problem had been to merge our record collections. He arranged everything alphabetically, while I put the most important ones first. In the end we bought two identical bookcases from IKEA in Newark, and I was allowed to keep my Doors albums in peace. ‘ Strange people, strange lyrics, strange drugs ’ was all he had to say about them.

Behind the bed a glass door opened onto a small balcony. Out there, from a certain angle, I was able to see the Empire State Building. I could also see that our three potted plants had withered. Patrick was the one who usually remembered to water them.

I opened the door, letting in air, the faint sounds of the city below, and a chilly streak of reality that passed through me.

Why the hell was I thinking of doubting his love? I’d made him a promise, back when I’d suffered one of my first attacks of jealousy, convinced that he was going to leave me. I was not the sort of person who could hold onto anyone. They always left me.

‘But I love you,’ he’d said. ‘I’m the one who can’t understand why you want to stay with me.’

I took in a deep breath. Crisp and fresh September air. The skies had cleared during the evening, the stars had faded and vanished in the lights of the city.

I couldn’t believe my ears when he proposed to me. I stared at him while all sounds stopped abruptly and a chasm opened up beneath the floor of Little Veselka.

Little Veselka isn’t exactly what most people would call a romantic setting. A smoky, noisy deli in the East Village that has stood on 9th Street since the 1950s. It has an open kitchen, so you can hear the Ukrainian cooks screaming at each other as they grill their steaks in full view of all the customers.

It was there we met for the first time.

I was with a bunch of people from La MaMa, one of the little theatres down on 4th Street, off-off-off-Broadway, where I was working at the time. My whole life took place in that neighbourhood. I ate take-out from the Indian restaurants on 6th Street, and I lived in my mother’s old apartment on the corner of 4th. Rumour had it that the building was due to be torn down soon, to be replaced by twenty storeys of luxury apartments, but those sorts of rumours about old buildings were always rampant in the East Village.

I noticed him as soon as he came in. He was with Arthur Nersesian, an Irish-Armenian writer who knew everybody. They sat down and he introduced Patrick as a freelance journalist who was writing a story about the last Bohemian in the East Village, meaning Arthur. All the others had been driven away by the rising cost of housing. They now lived in Brooklyn.

If Bohemians even existed at all. A heated discussion ensued at the section of the table where I’d ended up with Patrick, and a director who was practically horizontal, his arm around an eighteen-year-old student actress. Wasn’t there a better name for people who loafed about and did no work? Who were incapable of pulling their life together and feared responsibility? Or were the so-called Bohemians the vanguard of the future, the first truly free human beings?

From a purely statistical standpoint, Patrick said, it was possible to ascertain that in the Bohemian belt, which extended straight across Manhattan and eastward into Brooklyn, there were more of those types of people than anywhere else in the world. People who worked freelance and had no permanent jobs, who had chosen to live that particular lifestyle.

He explained that he was actually a reporter of social issues, and he believed that words could change the world. ‘Words are more powerful than most people think,’ he said, and looked me in the eye after we’d finished off the seventh or eighth or God knows how many bottles of wine at the table, while the director was in the process of drowning between the breasts of the student actress.

‘Plenty of people have no idea what a responsibility it is to be a writer. They think it’s all about winning fame and respect, but for me it’s about taking full responsibility for the world we live in.’

I was fascinated by his serious demeanour. He wasn’t trying to show off; he actually believed what he was saying. There was also something so extraordinary about the way he was dressed. He wore chinos and a shirt and a blazer — which was extremely unusual in that district, where everyone worked so hard to present a unique style.

When he walked me home and took my hand, he did that too with the greatest seriousness. ‘Never would I allow you to walk home alone in the middle of the night.’

‘But I’ve walked this same route thousands of times and survived.’

‘I wasn’t here then.’

Outside the shabby entrance on First Avenue he kissed me gently, and after that I simply had to take him upstairs with me and roll around with him in the bedroom that was so small it held nothing but a bed within the four walls. I wanted to penetrate deeper into that alluring seriousness, all the way to its core to find out if it ever ended.

The next morning I didn’t want to get out of bed. I couldn’t remember that ever happening before. On similar mornings with other men, I’d made a point of fleeing as soon as possible. I didn’t want them to start groping for my soul.

But lying next to Patrick, I stayed in bed. I ran my finger over his cheek. ‘Are you always like this?’ I asked.

‘Like what?’

‘So serious. Genuinely serious. Are you like that all the way through, or is that just your way of picking up girls?’

That made him laugh. ‘I had no idea it would work so well.’

A year later he proposed. At Little Veselka.

He must be teasing me, I thought at first. Then: I’m not the sort of person anyone marries. Then: Help. This is really happening. What do people do when this happens?

I said yes. Then I said yes two more times. He leaned across the table and kissed me. ‘Hell,’ he swore as his lips touched mine. He jolted back in his chair.