Read Online Babylon by Camilla Ceder - Free Book Online

consolation, plus you’d be cheering me up as well?’
    ‘What about Markus?’
    ‘I’m a free woman! Markus is at a sleepover tonight.’
    Seja felt much better by the time she hung up, so much so that she rang Christian’s friend Jonas right away to tell him the trip was postponed. But perhaps Jonas and his girlfriend would like to meet up with Seja and Hanna later?
    It was rare for Hanna to have a child-free night and Seja always had to think about night buses or make arrangements for the animals if she stayed away overnight. As a result they usually met at Hanna’s house. After Markus had gone to sleep, they would sit and chat while stuffing themselves with over-salted popcorn. And that was fine. ButSeja still liked the opportunity to go into town, particularly as she spent most of her time working and studying at home.
    Järntorget had been regenerated so thoroughly that it was difficult to believe it had ever looked any different, that it hadn’t always been an airy cobbled piazza. Sitting outside the old Customs House was a perfect spot to watch the world go by. The perfect place to see people getting on and off buses and trams, waiting for each other, meeting and parting, hurrying past with sunglasses pushed up on top of their heads and their hands full of shopping, or cutting across the square on their way from Majorna and Masthugget towards Vasastaden and the city centre.
    As soon as the sun had gone down, the air had lost its mildness and they were sitting wrapped in blankets, chatting about the fact that Järntorget used to be a sprawling roundabout before the tunnel was built.
    ‘Here’s to the Göta tunnel,’ said Hanna, clinking her glass against Seja’s. ‘But everybody still used to arrange to meet here, in the days before mobiles. See you in Järntorget, we’d say. I remember we used to eat falafels at Grand Burger. After Solrosen and Gillestugan, but before the terminus.’
    ‘The Red Room? Or that illegal club . . . the French club?’
    They laughed at the memory.
    ‘We’d better stop talking about the past, it’s making me feel ancient,’ said Hanna. ‘These days we’d never cope if we stayed out till five in the morning.’
    ‘No, but back then we used to sleep all day,’ said Seja.
    That phase of Seja’s life had only lasted a year. Before she was forced – or persuaded – to go back into education at the age of nineteen. But if she looked back, it seemed as if the whole of her youth had been spent in dive bars or in illegal clubs where underground bands played. She remembered dragging herself through her apartment from her stuffy room to the toilet. Blinking sleepily at her mother and father as they sat at the kitchen table like beings from another planet.
    ‘Sometimes I think it’s amazing they didn’t go completely crazy,’ she said to Hanna. ‘I mean, they never told me off. I suppose they had no idea what I got up to at night.’
    ‘They probably realised there was no point in having a go at you.My mum and I fought non-stop for ten years. I didn’t take any more notice of her just because she was yelling and screaming.’
    They fell silent. Hanna’s mother had taken her own life a few years earlier. Seja didn’t want to make Hanna talk about that if she didn’t want to but, just at that moment, Christian’s former colleague and friend Jonas Palmlöf appeared with his girlfriend Sofia Frisk, weaving their way between the tables.
    Seja just had time to explain: ‘These are the friends we were supposed to be going to the archipelago with. I hope it was OK to say they could meet us here?’
    Hanna allowed the blanket to slip from her shoulders onto the chair and straightened her back. She was wearing a tight cerise top with a striking pearl necklace nestling in her generous décolletage. She flicked her hair back from her shoulders in a smooth, practised movement. Hanna was almost certainly unaware of it, but Seja noticed that her friend changed as soon as a man