More Bitter Than Death Read online

  “No, it doesn’t bother me.”

  The mood in the extremely cluttered office changes so suddenly that it’s impossible to ignore it. A calm wave of relief seems to spread through Vijay and Aina, and I realize that they must have discussed this together in advance but that Aina hadn’t wanted to sway my decision. She just wanted to give me a way to bow out of Vijay’s offer without losing face. Vijay leans over and strokes my cheek in an unexpectedly tender gesture.

  “Siri, my good friend. I’m so glad you’re here.”

  I am surprised at this sudden sentimental turn but touched by his sincerity all the same. There’s no doubt that he means what he’s saying. Aina looks me in the eye, raises her eyebrow almost imperceptibly, and I’m forced to look away because I know I’m going to start laughing and I don’t want to hurt Vijay’s feelings. Instead, I turn toward him and cock my head to the side.

  “Enough said. Can we talk money now?”

  Rain that never ends, that refuses to let in sun or cold. It falls quietly over the waterlogged fields around my cottage, slowly dissolving the contours of what was once my lawn, which is now under water. A few isolated tufts of grass stick up here and there, like wisps of unkempt yellow hair. The path between my house and the little outbuilding, which contains a bathroom and storage room, is full of gaping holes where the black mud sucked hold of my rubber boots.

  Inside my house it’s warm and dry and whenever I glance at the front door, I’m filled with that strong, primitive sense of joy at returning to a home that is actually mine, that keeps me—and sometimes also Markus and my friends—warm on these stormy autumn nights, a simple but sturdy wood construction.

  Markus doesn’t live with me. I don’t want us to move in together, I’m not there yet. Maybe I value having my own space too much, maybe I don’t think we could handle all the compromises that a truly shared life would require.

  Who am I trying to kid?

  The truth—which hurts so much I only take it out occasionally to inspect it in the light—is that I’m incapable of loving him for real. Asking me to love him is like asking a man with no arms to tie his shoelaces; it doesn’t matter how much I want to. I can’t.

  I fear there’s no room in my soul for him.

  Not yet.

  Stefan.

  Still present, by my side night and day, when I work and sleep, when I’m making love to Markus.

  Am I being unfaithful?

  Most people would call that thought absurd. I mean, you can’t be unfaithful to someone who’s dead. And, heaven knows, if anyone would have wanted me to be happy, it was Stefan. He would have wanted that for me.

  No.

  It’s about my own inability to connect.

  There you have it.

  The only things that reveal Markus’s existence on the days when I’m on my own out here are an extra toothbrush in the bathroom, a drawer of briefs and XL-sized T-shirts in my dresser, and an ultraslim laptop, which he claims he needs for work, although if truth be told I’ve never seen him do anything besides play video games and surf the web on it.

  Even though we’ve been seeing each other for almost a year, I still haven’t gotten over the fact that we’re so different. If anyone had asked me way back when, a long time ago, what I was looking for in a man—my ideal man—I could have gone on at length on the topic. He would be intellectual, read books, be interested in social issues.

  Now I can coolly observe that I have found a man who is as far from my romantic ideal as you can get: policeman, athletic, doesn’t share any of my interests, not interested in reading, mostly likes to sit in front of the computer when he’s not working out. I think he votes liberal even though he’s from northern Sweden, but I don’t actually know. We never talk about stuff like that. Actually, we don’t really talk that much. We just . . . are. We share this cottage and those rocks along the shore. We share life, which moves leisurely along this long, drawn-out, dark fall. We share each other’s bodies with an intensity that is sometimes frightening, and which stands in glaring contrast to our more tepid, impartial everyday conversations and practical undertakings.

  Sometimes I think that he serves the same purpose in my life as a pet—it’s nice to have someone else around. Maybe that sounds awful? But the opposite is also dreadful: requiring of life that a man—any man—should live up to a romanticized ideal, that he should share all my interests. It would be arrogant to demand something like that from life, from another person.

  He’s also way too young for me, ten years too young to be precise. I decided a long time ago to ignore this fact, to convince myself that age is relative. And if I’m being honest, I enjoy it: the idea that someone—who is so young—actually wants me.

  * * *

  It’s early in the morning and the cove outside is still shrouded in darkness. Markus and I squeeze into the tiny bathroom in the outbuilding. He runs the razor over his face and studies me in the mirror. Slowly and perhaps a little provokingly, I rub oil over my naked, freshly showered body, glancing at him furtively as he stands there leaning over the sink.

  “Why all the Bowie pictures?” Markus asks, pointing at the collage that covers one of the walls in the bathroom. “Isn’t that a little immature, hanging pictures of your idols on the walls?”

  I laugh and pull on my panties. “I’m in love with him, always have been.”

  “Isn’t he a little old for you?” Markus asks, grinning as he puts little bits of paper onto a pimple or a nick from shaving. I can see the blood suffusing the thin paper and growing into a little rose on his cheek.

  “No, not Bowie as he is today,” I protest. “I love the seventies version of him, you know, the androgynous, wiry, punk guy, the one who wrote cool lyrics and loaned Mick Jagger his women. Or was it the other way around? No, they had sex, Bowie and Mick. That’s how it was, right?”

  “You’re insane, you know that, right?”

  “I’ve never claimed otherwise.”

  We’re having a referral meeting at the practice.

  Elin, our receptionist, browses skeptically through the stack of papers sitting on our elliptical birch table. She scratches her tangled black hair a little.

  “Well, where could they be? They were right here a minute ago. This is totally nuts.”

  Suddenly Elin looks confused and much younger than her actual age of twenty-five. In spite of her extensive makeup and the piercings in her nose and lips, she looks uncannily young and fragile.

  She looks unspoiled.

  Maybe even innocent.

  As if she were trying to prove the opposite, she chooses clothes that make people think about anything but innocence: short, tight-fitting black clothes, fishnet stockings, ragged sweaters, chunky boots, chains and rivets. Every once in a while she seems to get tired of all that black and comes in wearing pink-and-red-striped leggings and a sweatshirt. On occasion, patients have complained, although most of them don’t react to Elin’s appearance.

  Sven clears his throat impatiently. As usual, his patience with Elin is very limited. It seems as though her very presence puts him on edge. And in a way maybe that’s as it should be because Elin is charged with an almost impossible task: to fill the space left behind by Marianne, our former—profoundly missed—multitalented receptionist.

  So far Elin is still just in training; she was sent to us as a rehabilitation measure. We got her from the employment agency. None of us, not even Elin herself, knows how long she is going to stay, which I imagine must be stressful for her.

  Aina and I like Elin for instinctive and perhaps somewhat vague reasons, although even we have to concede that she is not particularly effective. I am eternally amazed at how long it can take her to send appointment reminders to patients, locate patients’ files, or just run down to the bakery on Götgatan and buy cinnamon rolls. Plus she’s in a perpetual state of confusion—not a good quality in a receptionist who’s supposed to manage all the administrative tasks for the whole practice. She misplaces notes, forgets co
nfidential documents like patient records in the waiting room, loses keys, and forgets to listen to the messages on the answering machine so no one has any idea if our patients have canceled or not.

  But she’s just incredibly nice and she so desperately wants to please us that we overlook her shortcomings when it comes to organization and especially appearance.

  “Isn’t that it in your other hand?” Sven asks, pointing at the paper Elin is holding in her left hand as she flips through the stack of papers with her right.

  “Oh,” Elin says, blushing under her makeup and pushing the paper toward the middle of the table. “Sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. Anyway, here it is. It’s from Fruängen Health Center. Okay, okay, female, born 1975, they write ‘post-traumatic stress disorder—question mark—following car accident in which her sister and mother died.’ Let’s see, it must be three years ago. Trouble sleeping. Hmm, who’ll take her? Sven, aren’t you really good at PTSD?”

  Sven takes off his glasses and rubs his wrinkled but still-attractive face with his hand. His wavy hair, almost totally gray now, falls like a curtain across his forehead.

  Sven Widelius is definitely the most experienced therapist in our practice and over the years that we’ve worked together he has always generously shared his knowledge.

  “My dear Elin,” Sven says, “I thought I told you Monday, and last week as well for that matter, that I just can’t take on any new patients right now. I just don’t have the time for it. Things are incredibly busy right now with this eating disorder study.”

  Sven’s voice is hoarse and there’s a hint of irritation in his words that none of us miss despite the fact that he is trying hard to look concerned.

  “Oh, sorry. I didn’t know . . .” Elin mumbles, looking confused. She is tugging at her lip piercing, which makes her look like she has a gigantic wad of chewing tobacco stuffed under her upper lip. I get mad at Sven because he’s picking on Elin as usual. We all know he’s busy. His wife of more than thirty years, Birgitta, left him and their big house in Bromma to live by herself in a studio apartment in Södermalm. “She must really hate me to camp out in that rat hole,” was all Sven would say about the matter.

  But anyone who knows Sven knows why Birgitta moved out. Sven has been, at least for as long as I’ve known him, notoriously unfaithful. The fact is that everyone wonders how Birgitta put up with him as long as she did. She isn’t exactly a downtrodden woman. She’s a professor of gender studies at Uppsala University—internationally acclaimed, interviewed on TV fairly regularly.

  Aina shoots me a rather worried look.

  Aina is my best friend and near-constant companion. It’s not an exaggeration to say we share almost everything. We have a sort of intuitive connection and as usual I have an idea of what she’s planning to say before she starts speaking.

  “Seriously, Sven,” Aina says, “we all have a lot to do. You know I billed almost two hundred hours last month. And Siri . . . well, Sven, you have to do your part, too.”

  Aina, who is wearing her long, blond hair in a braid, tugs at it irritably as she narrows her eyes at him.

  “I’ll take her!” I say.

  The room is quiet as Sven, Aina, and Elin all turn to look at me at the same time. It’s obvious that they all think I work way too much. Elin nervously runs her hands over her black jeans as she looks to Aina for guidance.

  I chuckle and say, “Come on, take me up on it. I’m volunteering my services.”

  Aina gets up from her chair without answering, brushes the crumbs off her jeans, and pulls her frayed wool cardigan more tightly around her body. She walks over to the kitchen to get another cup of coffee and says, as if in passing, “And you think that’s a good idea?”

  “No worse than listening to you guys argue about the division of labor every time we have a referral meeting.”

  Aina is back now, standing in front of the table with a determined, serious look that almost makes me laugh. She says, “Okay, I’m going to say what I think about that. Siri, you don’t do anything but work. You need to get yourself a hobby or something. I simply can’t allow you to take on even more patients while, Sven, you were hardly even here last week. That just isn’t what I call teamwork.”

  “And since when does the responsibility for new patients rest solely with me?” Sven asks. “I took both of the patients from the Maria Outpatient Clinic last week. And that guy the Construction Occupational Health Committee sent to us. You cannot seriously think that . . .”

  Suddenly Sven throws his crooked, wire-framed eyeglasses onto the table, jumps out of his chair, grabs his brown corduroy blazer, and storms out of the room, muttering.

  Aina stifles a snort. “We are so ridiculously dysfunctional!”

  Elin laughs a little now, too. Timidly.

  “Anyway,” Aina says, “you’re not taking on any more patients, Siri. Sven can take this one.”

  Elin suddenly looks confused again and stammers, “Well, how am I going to . . . Are you going to tell him, or . . . ? Because I can’t . . . He would just get . . .”

  “You can just leave that to me. It won’t be any trouble,” Aina says, rubbing her hands together and grinning.

  And I don’t doubt for a moment that she’s right.

  I don’t usually do couples counseling. On some level I doubt my ability to help people with troubled love lives, maybe because I can never seem to get my own romantic life in order, but at the moment I do have a couple in counseling. They’ve been having trouble in their relationship for a long time, and for the last six months Mia—that’s the woman’s name—has also been on disability leave from her job as a copywriter at a small advertising agency. Her family doctor recommended that Mia contact us: we cooperate to some extent with a number of family practice physicians here in Södermalm.

  Patrik is tall with limp, straw-colored hair and a rough complexion. He reminds me vaguely of a pop musician from the eighties in his skintight jeans, striped T-shirt, and horn-rimmed glasses. He reveals his nicotine-stained teeth when he smiles and shakes my hand, after which he folds himself up like an accordion and sits on the edge of my sheepskin-covered armchair in an improbable position, curled over forward, like a giant insect.

  A gigantic grasshopper in skintight jeans.

  He has a firm handshake. In some ways it’s like Patrik himself: straightforward, dominant, self-assured, decent handshake, one that knows what it wants.

  Mia stands behind him. Expectantly she brushes a light-brown strand of hair from her sweaty face and tugs at her faded cardigan as if she wanted to hide her large breasts.

  “Come on in,” I say. “How are you guys doing today?”

  Mia glances quickly at Patrik, as if to check her answer with him before she speaks. “Fine, I guess,” she says slowly, still looking at him, but she sounds unsure. As if she were asking me a question, or maybe Patrik.

  “Would you like to start, Patrik? What happened since last week?”

  “Well, I don’t really know where to start.” He says, crossing one leg over the other, revealing a well-worn shoe sole.

  “Has there been a lot of conflict?”

  Neither of them answers. Mia glances down at her ample thighs and Patrik clenches his jaws, hard, staring off into space.

  “Well, has there been any conflict?”

  Patrik clears his throat and stares blankly at me. He says, “You know, I think it’s exactly the same as always. Even though we’ve been over this a hundred times. It’s like it never gets any better. And it’s just so typically Mia—”

  “Wait a sec,” I interrupt him. “What never gets any better?”

  “You know,” Patrik explains. “We’ve talked about all this. Mia is so unbelievably . . . passive. She just lies around the house watching soap operas all day, doesn’t have any energy to watch the kids. It looks like . . . things look atrocious when I get home. And little Gunnel was eating the dog food again yesterday, hadn’t had her diaper changed in God knows how long. Awful diap
er rash. And Lennart bit the daycare lady again. Twice.”

  I see how Mia stiffens sitting on the upright chair; Patrik claimed the armchair first as usual. Mia rubs her hands together as if she were cold and were trying to warm herself up.

  “Patrik, honey,” her voice is a hoarse whisper, “you know it isn’t my fault that Lennart bites the daycare lady.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s exactly my point, isn’t it? You never take responsibility for anything. And now that I have a job, a, uh . . . career, it certainly makes sense for you to help out with some stuff at home, not just sit there like a cow in front of the TV all day.”

  Patrik runs a small specialty music business that produces a few Swedish rock bands. I’m guessing that he doesn’t make very much money at it, but his work seems terribly important to him, almost like a natural extension of his identity.

  Mia brushes invisible wisps of hair out of her face and gives me a dejected look. And when she speaks it’s to me, not to Patrik.

  “I know, I ought to help out more, be a . . . better mother, but I don’t know . . . I just don’t have the energy. I know, I need to . . . get it together.”

  “You always say that,” Patrik laments. “I don’t believe you anymore. You know, I’m just so tired of you.”

  “I know. I need to,” Mia repeats in a monotone, her eyes still trained on me as if she wants something from me, like she’s demanding that I promise to repair the mortal wound between them. Because that’s what they’re paying me for.

  “Wait a sec,” I interrupt them. “Have you been following the responsibility chart we made last week?”

  Patrik scoffs, swinging his worn black boot. “Mia was supposed to take care of—”

  “But I did!” Mia says, dejectedly. “Three times—”

  “Mia didn’t buy bread,” Patrik complains. “Mia didn’t buy coffee—”