The Hand that Trembles

FORTY

What was it that made some nights so unpleasant? Even though she had not drunk any wine, which was otherwise one of the usual culprits in poor sleep and nightmares, she had still woken up several times during the night. A couple of times she had got up and looked in on Erik but she had found him snoozing peacefully. It wasn’t Erik who had woken her with a night-time whimper.

That was something else. She sensed what it might be but pushed the thoughts away. The night before, after she had put Erik down for the night and picked up all the toys, watered the flowers, and done everything that is required to keep a home in somewhat reasonable shape, she had taken a long and warm shower. Under the jets of water she shaved, first her legs and armpits, finally her bikini line. Painfully conscious of her actions, she had allowed the razor to continue its work until she was completely smooth. Afterward she had studied herself in the mirror, even taken out her handheld mirror and studied her naked genitals, and blushed a deep red when she turned her face to the wall mirror. Never had she been so naked.

Her fingertips against her skin, then the whole hand in a powerful grip, as if she was being caressed by an aroused man, the agonising pleasure when she pretended, when she dreamt for a brief moment. The most hurtful aspect was not the absence of a man but the feeling of not being seen. She was beautiful. Her body, in spite of her middle age and a child, was beautiful. She wanted to be desired, loved and caressed of course, but above all desired. No one saw her, shaved or not, no one stroked her with their eyes.

All this she had paid for. The night had been an anguish. Now she got up, ashamed, not over her body or her yearning but her inability to do anything about it. Hidden deeply under an ever more organised home life – for she had definitely become better at all this that constituted everyday life, the home and Erik, all this bustling about, plant watering, tidying up, and caretaking – was the suspicion that she would never again experience the closeness of a man.

She cracked the door to Erik’s room. He was still sleeping and would continue to do so for another half hour. She loved him, it went without saying that he stood at the centre of her concerns, but wasn’t there more to life than that? He gave her an incredible amount, but what then? In a few years he would be a teenager, all too soon a young man, and then he would disappear more and more from her sphere. Would she continue to tend her home and go to a work filled with violence and human suffering? Was a well-raised son and the prospect of grandchildren all?

She was starting to believe that if there was going to be a change she would have to do something more radical. It was not enough to shave herself and prance around in front of the mirror, reflecting her own anxiety. She chuckled suddenly as she visualised herself desperately vacuuming or interrogating suspected murderers, while her sex cried out for hands and a pulsating member. She would give everything for a hot breath against her throat.

But what to do? Something radical? Should she quit? What were the alternatives? Start to go out? What she had seen of the city nightlife, the dance clubs, had not tempted her. The chances of scoring a one-night stand were pretty good, but after that?

The feeling of being alone and unloved was more and more replaced, as she got breakfast ready, by anger. It was an anger directed inward. Would she let herself be knocked down, even affected in her dreams by her shortcomings and lack of initiative? Wasn’t it just a matter of grabbing the bull by the horns, of starting to live? And what was wrong with only one night of pleasure? Perhaps in all actuality that was the solution. If a man turned up who could become more than a temporary connection then it would have to develop of its own accord.

She paused with her hand on the refrigerator handle, saw herself at Svenssons or Flustret. How would she behave? She couldn’t go there alone. I don’t have anything to wear, was her next thought. Mentally she scoured her wardrobe.

‘I’ll buy myself a dildo instead,’ she muttered.

She had heard someone on the radio talk about a multifunctional magically vibrating thing called ‘the butterfly.’ Apparently it provided miraculous pleasure.

She had to force herself to open the refrigerator and get out the yogurt. Being horny slowed her down.

When Erik ran off to the Hedgehog room and had steered his course straight to a teepee in the middle of the room, Ann talked for a while with a newly hired preschool teacher, Lotten, who told her that they were currently working with the theme of housing. Right now they were doing tents, then they would move on to yurts, and after Christmas hopefully igloos.

Ann praised their creativity and hard work, perhaps a bit too forcefully, because the woman looked almost embarrassed and dismissed the approbation.

‘I’m envious,’ Ann went on, but aware that she was not being completely honest, ‘when I see how you work. It seems so… inspiring. My job is just about misery.’

Lotten looked closely at her.

‘You’re a cop, aren’t you?’

Ann nodded and saw Erik come crawling out of the tent, turn his head, and flash her a quick smile before he ducked back in again.

‘I read about the county commissioner this morning. What a strange story.’

‘Do you have the paper here?’

‘Yes, I think it’s lying around here somewhere.’

They went to the staff room. The newspaper was on the table and Lindell immediately saw the headline: Missing Politician a Killer?

Lotten left her and Lindell quickly read through the story, which filled a whole page. One article went through the backstory, how Sven-Arne Persson had disappeared from Uppsala in the autumn of 1993 and what speculations it had triggered.

Now he had returned and freely given himself up to the police and confessed to the killing of Nils Dufva, the so-called wheelchair murder of the same year.

Lindell left the preschool, jumped in her car, and called Ottosson.

‘Who’s been talking?’

‘I don’t know,’ Ottosson said mournfully.

‘We agreed not to let this out and the next thing we know we get wartime headlines. What is this?’

‘Fredriksson and Sammy haven’t said squat to any reporter, I’m sure of that. They’re just as mad.’

‘I’ll put money on the fact that it’s that bitch at the front desk,’ Lindell said. ‘Or Riis.’

‘We don’t know,’ Ottosson repeated.

Lindell made a violent manoeuvre with the car and nipped in front of the queue at the red light on Vaksalagatan. She wished she had strobe lights on the car.

‘And we are not likely to find out,’ he added. ‘Are you on your way out to the coast?’

‘I’m going to meet Marksson at half past eight. I’m already late.’

‘How are you doing?’

With Ottosson you could never be certain what he meant by a particular question but she assumed he was referring to the case.

‘I think there’s something we’ve overlooked,’ she said, but did not attempt to elaborate this further, mostly because she herself did not understand it.

They agreed to meet in the afternoon. Lindell turned off the telephone and thereby Ottosson and the whole unit. She thought about her conversation with Lotten. Was she envious? Was the nursery school – or something equally undramatic – a realistic alternative to police work?

She chuckled.

‘Fuck,’ she said out loud.

She was on her way to a man on the coast. But it was the wrong man.