Free The Shadow Girls by Henning Mankell

morning after he could no longer tell if he thought it was a good idea or not. And this suddenly frightened him more than the thought of what Andrea would say when he returned.

5
    EVERYONE WAS AGAINST it, but for different reasons. Andrea, who had been waiting furiously for him to return, didn’t even want to hear a word of his new plan.
    ‘I can’t take my eyes off you for a second, can I? The only thing you ever put any thought into is how you’re going to sneak around without getting caught.’
    ‘I’m not unfaithful to you, Andrea.’
    ‘Then who is Amanda?’
    Jesper Humlin stared back at her with surprise. They were sitting across from each other at her dinner table in the apartment in Hagersten some days after his return from Gothenburg.
    ‘Amanda is married to a good friend of mine, Pelle Törnblom. He runs a boxing club.’
    ‘When did you ever let that stop you? You called out her name in your sleep.’
    ‘So what? What matters is I’ve been inspired to write a book about – and
with
– immigrants.’
    ‘And what makes you qualified to do this?’
    ‘You can’t deny that I am a writer.’
    ‘Soon you’ll be telling me you’re going to write a bestseller.’
    Humlin looked at her with horror.
    ‘What makes you say that?’
    ‘It just sounds like you think you can write whatever you please without effort. I think you should leave this poor girl alone.’
    Humlin stopped trying to convince Andrea of his new idea. The rest of the evening was spent discussing his inadequate commitment to having children. Then she left for her night shift at the hospital. Before she left he promised her he would spend the night in the apartment and be there when she came back.
    As soon as she left he went into the bedroom and started looking through her papers and diaries. He found a draft of something that described one of their early encounters. He sat down in the living room and read it through thoroughly. His anxiety returned. It was good, unnervingly good, actually. He put the piece of paper down with a grimace. His first thought was to end the relationship immediately, or at least threaten to. But he wasn’t sure where that would lead.
    According to his usual habit he then proceeded to read her diary. She had an old-fashioned model, the kind that teenage girls used, with a small heart-shaped lock. He knew how to pick the lock with a hairpin and he eyed the entries she had made since last time. He was indifferent to most of it since it was mainly about work-related matters. But he studied the few passages about marriage and children very carefully, poring over her jerky handwriting. A couple of the sentences caught his eye.
I must keep asking myself what I want. If you don’t keep stoking the fire of your will, it dies
. He decided to write them down in his own notebook immediately. He hadn’t written a poem on the topic of will yet. Her formulation here could perhaps be developed and used in his next poetry collection.
    After the assault on her diary he started to feel better. He poured himself a glass of grappa in the kitchen, then lay down on the sofa with one of her fashion magazines that he read in secret.
    Humlin, exhausted after his evening with Andrea, had just gone to bed when his mother called.
    ‘I thought you were coming over,’ she said.
    ‘I’ve just gone to bed. I was tired. If you like, I can come over tomorrow.’
    ‘Is Andrea there?’
    ‘She’s working.’
    ‘So should you be. It’s only half past eleven. I’ve set out a little supper for us. I went to a delicatessen just for your sake.’
    Humlin put his clothes back on, ordered a taxi and noticed, as he looked in the hall mirror, that his South Pacific suntan was already fading. His taxi driver was a woman who couldn’t find her way at all in the inner city.
    ‘I’m a third-generation Stockholmer,’ she announced cheerfully after she had made a large detour to get to the one-way street his mother lived on. ‘I’m born and