Free Third Voice by Cilla Börjlind, Hilary; Rolf; Parnfors Page B

poster, paused, hesitated, and then slid back across the bare wall again.
    Abbas sat on the floor with a small torch in his hand. He’d wrapped himself in a grey bedspread. His eyes were just about visible in the light, sore and red from all the rubbing and crying, and lack of sleep. He tried to look at the wall opposite, tried to reach the part that was shadowed in darkness, but he didn’t dare. He closed his eyes to win some time. He knew he had to look at the poster.
    Now.
    He’d been sitting here for hours, waiting for the darkness to fall, trying to gather his strength. To no avail. His entire body was drained, the arm holding the torch was limp and weak, the signals from his brain hardly reached his hand.
    ‘I have to look at it now.’
    He heard himself utter those words. He repeated them again. Slowly he opened his eyes and began steering the shaft of lightacross the wall and towards the poster again, held back, the light trembling up and down, and then he allowed it to spill over the edge, carefully.
    It was a large, beautiful poster, a circus poster from France, Cirque Gruss, from the mid-nineties, in red and blue. The light explored the energetically charged image, the jugglers, the trapeze, the elephants; it took a while before he dared to move all the way to the bottom, towards the texts with the performers’ names.
    There it remained.
    Suddenly, the light went out and it became pitch dark. The only sound to be heard was a heavy inhalation.
    The hoover had fallen silent.

Chapter 6
    Just before reaching the top of the stairs, Agnes Ekholm had to stop and take a breather. She had trouble with stairs, especially going up, and she was now on her way to the fourth floor. She’d pulled a coat over her pink dressing gown and put her feet in a pair of soft fluffy slippers. When she reached the landing she hesitated a little.
    Which door was it?
    Her vision now required different glasses for different distances, and she had of course taken the wrong pair with her. She stuffed them back into her coat pocket and leant very close against the door. Yes, it had to be this one. With a slight tremble, she rang the doorbell. The noise on the other side was clear even to Agnes with her massacred hearing. After a couple of minutes she rang again. Maybe he wasn’t at home? She rang once more, waited and pushed down on the door handle. The door was locked. Agnes sighed and turned to leave. All that mountaineering for nothing. Just as she shuffled towards the first step, the door behind her opened. She turned around. There was a man standing in the doorway, she could see that, wrapped in a bedspread. He had thick stubble, his hair was all over the place and his eyes were nestled into a couple of dark cavities. Agnes recoiled a little.
    ‘Sorry. I was looking for Abbas.’
    ‘Yes?’
    Agnes stared at the man and was forced to realise that it was indeed Abbas standing in the doorway. In a state in which she’d never seen him. She’d never even seen him unshaven.
    ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t see that it was you.’
    ‘What did you want?’
    ‘I just ran into the postman and he said that your box was full, there was no room for today’s post, it looked like it hadn’t been emptied for a while.’
    ‘I’ve been unwell.’
    ‘Well, I can see that, poor boy. What’s…’
    ‘I’ll empty the box.’
    ‘Good. Well, I do hope that you feel better soon. You don’t want some carrot cake?’
    ‘No, thanks.’
    Agnes nodded slightly and made her way back down. Abbas quickly pulled the door closed.
    A full letterbox?
    He took a few steps into the hallway and looked at himself in the narrow mirror. He immediately understood Agnes’s reaction. He looked terrible. How long had this been going on? He let go of the bedspread and saw a couple of large stains on his jumper. Did I throw up in the kitchen sink? He vaguely recollected that. He stepped into the living room and saw the hoover on the floor. Have I been hoovering? Why?