Read Online The Spring Tide by Cilla Börjlind, Rolf Börjlind - Free Book Online

the water lock in the floor drain. She felt even more nauseated when she realised that some of that hair was probably not hers. It must have accumulated over the years. Holding the hair sausage at arm’s length, she carried it to the rubbish bin and then tied the plastic bag as soon as she had deposited her burden. She almost felt as if it could come to life.
    Now she would open her emails.
    Spam. Spam. Spam. And then her mobile rang.
    It was her mum.
    ‘You are already up, aren’t you?’ she asked.
    ‘It’s half past eight.’
    ‘I never know with you.’
    ‘What do you want?’
    ‘What time should I pick you up tomorrow?’
    ‘You what?’
    ‘Have you bought masking tape?’
    Oh, that meant Tynningö. Yes, of course. Maria had phoned a couple of days earlier and explained that it was time to deal with the sunny side of the house, where the façade got the worst of it. Arne had always paid particular attention to that. They would repaint it over the weekend. She had never asked whether Olivia had any other plans. In Maria’s world you didn’t have other plans if you were Maria’s daughter and Maria had plans.
    This weekend they were going to repaint that side of the house.
    ‘Can’t make it.’
    Olivia quickly flipped through the calendar inside her head searching for an excuse.
    ‘What do you mean, you can’t make it? What is it that you can’t make?’
    A fraction of a second before she would be exposed as a bluff, she caught sight of the file next to her laptop. The beach case.
    ‘I need to go down to Nordkoster this weekend.’
    ‘Nordkoster? What would take you there?’
    ‘It’s umm… it’s a college thing, an assignment.’
    ‘But can’t you do it next weekend?’
    ‘No, it… I’ve already booked the train ticket.’
    ‘But surely you can…’
    ‘And you know what the assignment is? It’s a murder case that dad worked on! Back in the Eighties! Weird isn’t it!’
    ‘What’s weird?’
    ‘That it’s the same case.’
    ‘He worked on lots of cases.’
    ‘Yes, I know, but even so.’
    The rest of the conversation didn’t take long. Maria seemed to realise that she couldn’t force Olivia to go to their summer house. So she asked how Elvis was, and then hung up straight after Olivia had answered.
    Olivia quickly opened the railway booking site on her laptop.
    * * *
    Jelle had kept pretty much to himself all day. Sold a few copies of the magazine. Visited the New Community soup kitchen on Kammakargatan. Got some cheap food. Avoided people. He avoided people as often as he could. He could cope with Vera and perhaps one or two of the other homeless, otherwise he completely avoided contact. As he had done for several years now. Created a bell jar of loneliness. Isolation, physically as well as mentally. Found an inner vacuum where he tried to keep his footing. A vacuum that had been drained of all that had happened in the past. All that had happened, and that nothing could ever change. He had mental problems, and a diagnosis, he was on medicines to keep his psychoses in check. So as to be able to function – more or less. Or survive, he thought, it was more a question of surviving. To manage to survive from when he woke up in the morning, to when he fell asleep in the evening. With as little contact as possible with the rest of the world.
    And as few thoughts as possible.
    Thoughts about who he had been in the past. In another life, in another universe, before the first stroke of lightning came. The one that wrecked any possibility of a normal life, and created a chain reaction of breakdown and chaos and finally the first psychosis. And the hell that came in its wake. How he became a totally different person. A person who successively and deliberately destroyed all the social nets he had. So as to be able to sink. To let go.
    To let go of everything.
    That was six years ago, in a formal sense. For Jelle it was far longer ago. For him, every year that had passed had managedto rub out