The Summer of Kim Novak by Haakan Nesser

Author:Haakan Nesser
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: World Editions
Published: 2019-12-01T13:41:48+00:00

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12

We were on our feet first thing the next morning even though we’d been awake for most of the night. Both Henry and Ewa were gone by the time we came down, so we assumed he’d given her a ride in the early hours of the morning. Of course she couldn’t stay away for too long when visiting my brother.

Or so we assumed, so our fourteen-year-old brains reasoned. We didn’t say much at all that morning. Edmund stirred his cereal around the soured milk for five minutes before he had a bite, as usual. He spread whey butter on his toast with ceremonious fuss. As if it were a task of grave importance, like a ground-breaking scientific experiment on which the future of mankind depended. As if spreading any over the crust or leaving a square centimeter unbuttered would cause the whole universe to explode.

I still remember searching for meaning in the difference between our ways of eating breakfast. Me, I usually polished off my toast and chocolate milk in under four minutes. For Edmund, breakfast was a kind of ritual, handled like a priest officiating at a communion service. Not that I had much experience of communion, but I had seen it once—when Henry was confirmed many years ago—and I’d never taken part in anything so slow or dull.

So maybe this difference in our breakfast rhythms meant something. Maybe it was one of those things that revealed the differences in our character, and if one of us had been female instead of male, it would have been impossible for us to live together as man and wife. Completely out of the question.

I had to smile at that last thought. I was only speculating to kill time while waiting for Edmund to finish up that morning. Loose, dumb speculation. Of course I’d never marry Edmund, however much of a woman I became, and I guess these thoughts appeared because I was tired of keeping my mind in check. That’s what it was like inside my head those days. When I was alert and awake, all was well, but when I hadn’t had enough sleep, anything could pop up. Cancer-Treblinka-Love …

In any case, we had beautiful weather on this day too. We lay on the dock reading until mid-morning, and then we went out on the boat. We rowed to Fläskhällen first and played a few rounds on the new pinball machine. We didn’t win a free turn; it was a stingy game on the whole and slightly tilted. When we’d had enough we ate ice cream and rowed out to Seagull Shit Island. We had a backpack full of apple juice, books, and Colonel Darkin. While Edmund tore through Journey to the Centre of the Earth for the fifth or sixth time, I tried my hand at some pretty involved panels. The image of Ewa Kaludis’s breasts bouncing last night danced before my eyes, but however hard I tried, I couldn’t capture it as it had been in real life.

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