Free The Viper by Hakan Ostlundh Page B

about the size of a fifty-öre piece.”

 
    12.
    Elin Traneus dropped a Treo Comp effervescent analgesic tablet into a glass of water on the bedside table. She didn’t have a headache, yet, but could feel how it was lurking there ready to pounce. For the moment her entire world was wrapped up in a gray haze, but just the sound of the tablets dissolving made her feel perkier.
    She looked out across the room in the ridiculously small apartment that she had been subletting since New Year’s. The room where she would sleep, study, socialize, and look at TV was about fifty square feet. Beyond that there was a corridor of a kitchen, an intestine-like hallway, and a miniscule bathroom. The apartment was on the third floor of a building on Atterbomsvägen in Fredhäll. And Fredhäll was on the island of Kungsholmen, right in the center of Stockholm, although she had soon learned that it was the part of Kungsholmen that anyone living in the center of the capital didn’t recognize as being part of Kungsholmen.
    “Oh, I see, in Fred häll, ” they had corrected her with polite smiles when she had explained where exactly on Kungsholmen she was living. What inevitably followed was the obligatory, “It’s a really neat area, Atterbomsvägen.” That she had also learned. The inner suburbs were always “really neat.” Totally unhip, but really neat. The outer suburbs weren’t even really neat; “pretty nice” possibly, and when you got as far out as suburbs like Alby and Tensta they had nothing to say at all.
    Her building was actually wonderfully situated on top of a high cliff with a view out over Riddarfjärden, even if the only thing Elin ever saw from her apartment was the light yellow facade of the building next door.
    She was happy with her apartment, loved it in fact, even though she had grown up with closets that were as big. She couldn’t care less what the inner-city crowd thought. It was her life, not theirs.
    The Treo tablet had finished fizzing. Elin downed the contents of the glass and reached for her cell phone. She dialed her mother’s number, but waited in vain for her to pick up.
    “Damn it,” she said out loud and threw off the blanket that she’d wrapped herself up in.
    She had been trying to get hold of her mother since yesterday afternoon with no luck. It was as if her mother could sense that she was going to wriggle out of it and refused to answer. Elin checked the time on her cell phone. There was no way she was going to make it over there in time by ferry. She considered calling Ricky and letting him deal with it, but then decided to head out to Bromma airport and try to fly standby. That usually worked.
    She slid out of her pajamas and stood naked in front of the hall mirror. Her hair was dyed black, but was actually a dull mousy blonde underneath. Her brother and sister had gotten real blond hair, while she’d ended up with her drab color. Otherwise, she looked pretty okay, she thought, even if her breasts were maybe a bit on the small side, and her stomach wasn’t quite flat. And then she was short, of course. She could feel very unremarkable next to five-eight girls in four-inch fashion heels. But there were a lot of guys who liked small girls. It made them feel more manly.
    Not that she’d had a lot of boyfriends. Her relationships were few and short-lived, and she was usually the one who broke them off. So she couldn’t exactly complain. She wanted to be seduced. Always. Every time. Why did the guys she met always think they had free access to her body just because she had given in once? That she would want to make love to someone who wasn’t ready to conquer her again each time he stepped through the door? Was that asking too much? Anyway, those were her conditions.
    She felt the impulse to crawl back into bed and touch herself, but decided that she didn’t have time. She climbed into the shower instead.
    Mother had called and told her that Father was coming home. That was a week ago.