Free The Living and the Dead in Winsford by Håkan Nesser Page A

remarkable how they can take possession of you. And the fact is, he wasn’t anything like me at all – surely you have to agree about that? People commented on it, don’t you remember? Your brother, for instance.’
    ‘If there was ever a person who was like his father, that person is Gunvald,’ I said. ‘Not in his appearance, perhaps: but if you look inside him, you must realize that you . . . that you are looking into a mirror.’
    Martin thought that over as we covered a kilometre of deserted motorway. I knew that I had offended him. That he thought it wasn’t worth the effort of trying to conduct a sensible conversation with me. That he had overlooked that fact, as usual. He was a level-headed and discerning man, an optimistic person who actually believed that language could be a tool rather than a weapon; but I was a woman who swam and sometimes drowned in an irrelevant sea of emotions. Yes, irrelevant is the right word for it.
    Or perhaps I am being unfair to him. That’s not impossible, and I reserve the right to be so.
    But I couldn’t understand what he was fishing for. Did he want me to agree with him? To confirm that it was perfectly reasonable for him to have suspicions about how our first child came into being? That this was a new and interesting insight into what it was like to be a man? That it perhaps was somehow connected with his need to rape – or at least to have sex with and spray sperm onto – an unknown waitress in a hotel in Gothenburg many years later.
    ‘I’m pretty sure he’s yours,’ I said.
    ‘What?’ said Martin.
    The car swerved slightly.
    ‘I said that he’s yours,’ I said.
    ‘You didn’t say that at all,’ said Martin. ‘You said something quite different.’
    ‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at,’ I said. ‘How was it with Synn, did you have similar thoughts then?’
    Martin shook his head. ‘Not at all. It was only in connection with Gunvald. I’ve actually spoken to a few friends about this phenomenon. Or I did so several years ago. They admitted that they’d had similar thoughts.’
    ‘When they had their sons?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘But not when they had their daughters?’
    ‘Come off it!’ said Martin. ‘None of them have any daughters, incidentally. But if you don’t want to talk about this, we can drop it. I just thought it might be worth mentioning.’
    ‘Were they academics?’
    ‘Were who academics?’
    ‘Those others who had problems with being a father. Were they university people?’
    ‘Why do you ask that?’
    ‘Because it needs a special sort of mind to come up with something so bloody stupid. Anyway, he is yours. I didn’t have any other men at that time.’
    I hadn’t really intended to make a response as cutting as that, but it kept Martin quiet for several minutes. For several more dark kilometres along the E4. Further out towards that dead star – for some reason I found it difficult to shake off that image.
    ‘How do you think he is now?’ he asked in a somewhat more normal tone of voice as we passed the first turn-off to Nyköping. It was a couple of minutes past one.
    I thought that was a justified question, at least. Gunvald had never been in good shape, not since puberty at any rate. He had difficulty in making friends, and started having sessions with psychologists and therapists while he was still at school. We suspect he tried to commit suicide a couple of times, but that has never really become clear. He was legally of age on both occasions, and hence everyone involved was bound by secrecy. If the patient gives permission then of course the veil of secrecy can be lifted: but Gunvald refused to do so. He lay there in his hospital bed, glaring apologetically at us, and pretended he had fallen by accident from a balcony on the fifth floor. What could we say?
    On the second occasion he also spent time in hospital, but by then he had already moved to Copenhagen – it was when Kirsten had left him. It was