The Best Book in the World by Peter Stjernstrom

Author:Peter Stjernstrom [Stjernstrom, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781780942247
Goodreads: 20609607
Publisher: Hesperus Nova
Published: 2013-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 27

The Evening Breeze Blows up

Titus totters out onto the street outside Astra’s flat. Astra’s coffee was not at all satisfying. The coffee is good of course, and the milk hot and frothy. But where are the cakes and biscuits? Not a bun to be seen! No cakes, no sandwiches, no Danish pastries, no croissants, nothing. The only thing on the table was an enormous fruit bowl: organic fairtrade bananas, apples and plums. Sure, fruit can be tasty, but it isn’t what you expect when you go for a coffee. If you have fruit with coffee it ends up as something quite different to a coffee break – a damned fruit break, like in a children’s nursery. A jolly little fruit break. Kumbaya, my lord. Titus gets the shivers when he thinks about himself as a little boy at nursery school. It was on the whole quite unusual for kids to go to nursery when he was little, most stayed at home with their mothers, playing in the yard with nice new toys from the new Co-op department store. Miniature mechanical diggers. Footballs made of real leather. But not Titus. His mum cleaned offices instead of looking after him, and since he was delicate and a bit different, he always got to sit next to teacher when they assembled for a sing-song in the afternoon after the outdoor break. They all sat in a circle on the grey-beige linoleum floor and held each other’s hands. Miss Leaf (Titus had never heard her first name) had cold sweaty hands and fluttering but kind eyes with little lumps of that black stuff on her eyelashes. A shrill voice: Kumbaya my lord, Kumbayaaaah! Morgan sat on the other side of Titus. Meany Morgan. He had tough paws and he used to mangle Titus’ hand so that his fingers sort of rolled up inside Morgan’s dirty fist, back and forth until his little hand was round as a cigar. Morgan’s victory cigar. Scornful milk-teeth pegs. And then – fruit break. Brown-spotted bananas. Soft apples. Morgan’s teeth-marks. Swedish nursery schools in the shadow of the expanding welfare state in the early 1970s.

Titus is hungry and dissatisfied. He is not only in a bad mood because fruit acids and coffee are extremely unsuited to each other. Most of all he is angry with himself. He doesn’t function properly in company any longer, he just sits and is grumpy as soon as he meets anybody. He doesn’t participate, just juggles with a whole load of unfounded suspicions inside his own brain that slowly but surely is being transformed into a centrifuge that is out of balance. And the idea of pretending to be more or less tipsy, what nonsense! Damn it, he is an adult, he tries to convince himself.

Titus must cure himself. First something to eat that is rich in proteins and carbohydrates. Then he needs the company of an old friend or colleague to get a bit of perspective on life. Perhaps he has quite

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