Inger Frimansson - Good Night, My Darling

The first book in the Justine Dalvik series

Translated by Laura A. Wideburg

God natt min lskade was originally published in Sweden in 1998.

The plane touched down at Arlanda airport at six fifteen in the evening. The first leg had been late to London, which meant that they missed their connection. All the planes to Stockholm had been fully booked. They would not have gotten a seat until the next morning, if the woman from the Embassy had not gotten angry. Her name was Nancy Fors and she had been calm and a bit melancholy the whole trip. The unexpected explosion surprised Justine.

They were the first to leave the plane. Two plainclothes policemen came on board and guided them out through a back way.

The press has already figured out that you were coming, unfortunately, one of them said. Justine didnt quite catch his name.

Theyre real hyenas with all their chomping and slurping, but well fool them.

They took her into their car.

The light hit her, that pure, cool light and the delicate greenery. She had forgotten that nature could look like that. She mentioned this to Nancy Fors: Dont you miss home? How do you manage to live there in that heat?

I know that its temporary, she answered. And this is still here, here at home.

They passed the Sollentuna-Upplands Vsby exit. It was seven-thirty.

The policeman behind the wheel said, You know that girl Martina. Her parents want to meet you.

They do?

Its important to them.

She turned her face toward the window. She saw a little clump of trees with white trunks.

Sure, she said. Thats fine.

That sharp, pure cold. Grey water like a living thing, silk. No sky, no, just no contrasts, she couldnt stand that, that hurt her eyes. The gathering clouds, getting ready for snow. And the dry snow would come from the skies, swirl like smoke over the roads, and she would remove her clothes and let herself get completely misted.

Over there she had tried to imagine exactly this, the sensation of ice crystals. Her whole body tense, she would close her eyes in order to bring forth the sound of a Nordic stream one spring day when the ice had begun to melt.

She never succeeded. Not even when the fever chills were at their worst and Nathan covered her with clothes, rags, curtains, everything he could find.

She had been freezing with the wrong kind of chill.

She ran forward, forward.

You never saw me like this.

Forward, forward, force the massive body, feet light in jogging shoes. Justine had tried them out at a sports store in Solna, clinically tried them out, with a young man having bright white teeth and slick wavy hair. He had her run on a treadmill and videoed her foot movements. While she was running, she formed her fists tightly, so tightly, afraid to lose her balance, afraid that he would find her ridiculous. An overweight, forty-five-year-old woman, afraid he would see something desperate in her way of pressing her knees together.

He watched her sternly.

You pronate.

She looked at him uncertainly.

Yes, thats right. But dont worry about it, lots of people do; almost everyone does actually.

She got off the treadmill, the hair on her neck somewhat damp. This means that you run lopsided. You rotate your foot like this, which is why you wear out your soles on one side. He lifted her old winter boots and showed them to her. See for yourself.

But I never run. Ive never done it.

It doesnt matter. You pronate anyway.

Promenade?

An attempt at a joke. He laughed politely.

She bought the shoes, which cost just under a thousand crowns. He gave her a bit of a lecture: better to invest in quality, you could hurt yourself jogging with the wrong kind of shoes, tear something, overstretch something, especially if you were not used to it.

The shoes had the brand name Avia. She thought of flying when she saw them.

Of fleeing.

To reach distant horizons.

With her dark blue stocking cap pulled down around her face, she began to go up Johanneslundtippen. She ran, bent forward, and small flocks of green birds flew up from their grass nests. They were silent but accusing. She had interrupted them in some important task with her flailing human body and her heavy, whistling breath.

Were drifting apart.

No!

You should see me now, youd be proud of me, I could follow you to the end of the world and you would turn and look at me and really see me with your sky-blue eyes, Justine is the one I love, she can climb the walls like a fly.

Or a louse.

High at the top, the wind was strong and forced tears from her eyes. Beneath her, rows of houses were spread out. They looked like cardboard boxes placed in the maze of streets and cul-de-sacs, surrounded by rose hedges. The original plaster architects model must have looked exactly like this.

She nearly stumbled into some remains of fireworks, glass and plastic bottles. A group of people had been up here in order for the fireworks and themselves to be seen better on New Years Eve, shooting them up higher than anyone else, and then drunkenly stumbling down, finding their way home.

Sometimes she took the car to the new riding stables in Grimsta. There were plenty of parking spots during weekdays. She seldom saw any horses in the muddy field. Well, once she saw some long-legged animals with their muzzles to the ground like vacuum cleaners, but she could not see a single blade of grass.

Justine was overcome with the impulse to clap loudly so that one of them, the leader perhaps, would roll his eyes wildly and run off as fast as he could without realizing that he was enclosed on all sides by the fence; panic would make him forget everything but the attempt to flee, and all the others would follow him, out of their minds with fear, and they would thunder back and forth in the mud, completely losing all sense of direction.

Of course she didnt do it.

Left of the ice rink, a path of electric lights began. She followed it just part way. She cut through the waterlogged fields below the apartment houses, passed the parking lot at the Maltesholm baths, and noticed that one of the windows on a trailer still hadnt been fixed. She kept going toward the water and then ran for a while along the edge.

Four ducks waddled silently away. Although it was January, the temperatures were above freezing and it had been raining without a break for over a week, but this afternoon, the sky was bleak and white.

She drew in air through her nostrils.

Heaps of leaves lay along the slope, and the decay process appeared to have stopped. They were brown and slimy, not at all like leather.

Just like over there.

No sound, no birds, no raindrops, just the muffled thudding of her rhythmic steps as she forced her way up the slope, then echoing as she came to the boardwalk, where she almost fell. The waters dampness had made a treacherous cover that made the Avia soles slip.

No, dont stop, no weakness now; her lungs burned, a caustic, silent wheeze. She drove herself now, as if she were him. Nathan.

You were supposed to be proud of me, to love me.

Safely inside her house, she stopped, leaning against the wall just inside the door to undo her shoelaces. She threw off the rest of her clothes, the red, windbreaker suit, the long johns, the sports bra, the panties. She stood with her legs wide apart, her arms out and let the sweat drip off.