Free The Living and the Dead in Winsford by Håkan Nesser

been blinded and made to feel rather ill by that mirage that manifests itself for a fleeting moment and then fades away.
    And nowadays, much later in life, when I unexpectedly bump into my old schoolmate Klasse, or Britt-Inger – or even Anton come to that, the first boy I ever kissed and the one who once massaged my pudendum in a people’s park that no longer exists – on such occasions I suddenly get a lump in my throat, and feel an urge to turn round and run away. Whatever happened to you? I think. I can’t bear seeing you. Surely you can’t be Anton Antonsson with that lovely laugh and those warm, gentle hands: whatever happened to him? Where does this miserable-looking middle-aged creature with a pot belly and a strained expression on his face come from? And then Gunsan comes into my head, as I am lying in her bed under the sloping ceiling and reading Astrid Lindgren stories to her and I think – have always thought – that I don’t want that bloody childhood any more, that damned romantic glow; I don’t want to recall her half-closed eyes and her arms around my neck when I lift her out of the water and onto the jetty down by the lake and she half sings, half whispers the old Swedish folk song ‘Who can sail when there is no wind’ into my ear.
    Or my mother’s and father’s funerals, I can do without them as well – there was barely a year between them and I am well aware that you can create cancer inside your body at any time if you try hard enough. That’s what my mum did as she sat at home in that melancholy house: she created cancer in her own body by thinking hard about it – it took seven years but she managed it in the end. And since my dad was buried – cause of death: a broken heart – I have hardly ever set foot again in that central Swedish town. On the very rare occasions when I have done so, I have always found it difficult to breathe, and thought that it’s like eating breakfast in the evening even though you don’t want to.
    We set off shortly after midnight. It was Martin’s idea that we should start with a night drive, get to a favourite hotel in Kristianstad, have breakfast there and then take the ferry from Ystad. And that’s what we did, from a geographical perspective at least. But for some reason or other we began talking about Gunvald.
    ‘There’s something I’ve never told you,’ said Martin.
    We had just filled up with petrol at that garage near Järna that never closes. Ahead of us was four hundred kilometres of the deserted E4, then diagonally down through Småland and northern Skåne along various numbered roads. It was the night between a Thursday and a Friday in October, dawn was light years away, and we could equally well have been in a space capsule on the way to a dead star. Aniara.
    ‘What? What have you never told me?’
    ‘I didn’t think he was mine. In the beginning I simply couldn’t believe it.’
    I didn’t understand.
    ‘Gunvald,’ Martin elaborated. ‘I was convinced that somebody else must be his father.’
    ‘What the hell do you mean?’ I asked.
    He laughed in that good-natured way he had been practising ever since he was forty.
    ‘Well, like in that play of Strindberg’s, The Father . . . It’s the kind of thought that crops up in every man’s mind. Just think! What if the father is somebody else? How could you be certain? And you can’t very well ask, can you?’
    He tried to chuckle. I had no comment to make. I thought it was best to let him go on. I started to toy with a very special thought, but it was too early to mention it yet. We had the whole night in front of us after all, maybe six months in fact: there was no hurry. No hurry with anything at all.
    But as things turned out I never took up that thought.
    ‘Anyway, please don’t misunderstand me,’ he said after a few seconds of silence, drumming lightly with his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘It was nothing more than one of those obsessive thoughts, but it’s