Exquisite Corpse by Marija Pericic

Author:Marija Pericic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ultimo Press
Published: 2023-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

1.

I WOKE UP with a jolt, like from one of those dreams where you’re falling. And for a while I did think I’d just woken from sleep. The room slowly slid into focus around me. A beam of thick golden sunlight slanted in from the window, through a net curtain. I lay and watched some dust motes dip and drift in it, not really thinking much, not fully awake, but then I realised that the window was on the wrong side of the room, on my left. They must have turned the bed, I thought, trying to figure out the room, or maybe I was lying upside-down. Then I saw that it wasn’t my room at all.

There was no row of hooks where our dressing gowns usually hung, mine and Petter’s. No bedside table with the blue crocheted cloth. No chair with our clothes thrown over it, my stockings always crossed on top. The wooden chest was gone too, and the travelling clock we’d forget to wind. Instead, opposite me against the wall was a kind of workbench with a washbasin beside it and shelves above, packed full of boxes and bottles and tins and things. On my right, close to me, was a big machine that had a tube pointing at me like the barrel of a gun, and next to that a trolley with different kinds of medical equipment on it, scissors and syringes and thermometers. There were no pictures on the walls, no decorations anywhere at all.

The room seemed familiar to me, but I couldn’t place it. I thought I must be in a hospital. But I saw that I had no covers over me, and I was wearing a day dress, one I’d never seen before. Then I heard footsteps coming up some creaky stairs and a voice, a man’s, humming to himself, some tune that I almost recognised. Then all at once everything came flooding back and I knew where I was: in the treatment room in Dr Dance’s apartment.

The first time I ever saw Dr Dance was that day in the clinic at the Serafen hospital. I was a different person then. I’d been ill months before, after losing the baby, but when I went to Serafen I didn’t know what was wrong with me. The illness had no name yet, so it wasn’t real. Back then I thought, we all did, that it was from losing the baby. The baby had no name either, but was all too real even without one.

We’d never been to Östermalm before either. The closest we’d got was Kungsgatan on the way to Serafen. Even the walk to Östermalm—we walked from Söder, to save the streetcar fare—had me in awe. Along Strandvägen, past that row of posh hotels with expensive-looking people sitting under the coloured awnings being served drinks in tall glasses by waiters in bow ties, past the rich people’s boats, not tugs and ships for industry, but sleek yachts and speedboats. It was another world, right there in my own city.

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