The Other Woman by Therese Bohman

Author:Therese Bohman [Bohman, Therese]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59051-744-4
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2016-02-22T16:00:00+00:00

I am drawn to the harbor in the evenings. I prefer to go at twilight, but the days are so short now, it is already dark in the afternoons when I am still sitting with Siv and Magdalena on our break, gazing out over the hospital parking lot as a truck carrying a huge Christmas tree pulls up outside the entrance. Siv thinks it’s a bit early, and I agree, it’s November, the clocks have only just gone back, perhaps there has been some kind of misunderstanding, but maybe those who are responsible for the hospital grounds think that anything that will light up the darkness in the ugly parking lot where the wind always howls is a good idea, that’s what I would have thought.

I stick to the southern side of the harbor. The northern side looks more like an industrial estate, with ugly buildings housing firms that dig holes and fix drains, mountains of coal, big piles of timber ready to be sent across the world, to be loaded onto ships and transported and used in a land far away from here.

On the southern side there are cranes fixed to the ground on rails, like tramlines, they can move backward and forward along the quayside. A ship is moored next to a long row of containers full of gravel, in darkness, silent, waiting. Perhaps they are all asleep on board, the seamen from the other side of the world, or perhaps they have gone ashore and are sitting in some bar in town, or perhaps they are walking the same streets as me, looking for women who are walking the streets too.

If you walk past the cranes and the containers, past the storage depots and the sooty brick building that used to be the customhouse, farther and farther out, eventually you reach an abandoned ferry terminal. Back in the nineties ships were supposed to travel to the new Baltic, I don’t remember where, Tallinn or Riga. Nobody used the ferries, and the plans were canceled after just a few trips. Nobody from a dilapidated harbor town wants to sail across an ice-cold sea to another dilapidated harbor town, they should have been able to work that out. The terminal is still there, a low building made of metal and glass, with rows and rows of red plastic chairs, still virtually unused beneath a thick layer of dust, the same red as the shipping company’s logo, a deserted information desk and a ticket office. It has aged badly, the paintwork is flaking and faded, the metal rusty, the whole thing looks cheap.

The tower that led to the ferries is still there on the quayside, it looks like the tunnel you walk through when boarding a plane: a staircase leading up to a corridor leading nowhere. I have fantasized about this, watched it play out before my eyes like a film: I am walking up the stairs, along the swaying floor of the corridor, I am thinking that this is

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