A summer with Kim Novak Read Online Free

Beetle ‘Killer’.
    The next Sunday morning, we were sitting in the kitchen.
    ‘Hey, Erik.’
    ‘Yes, Henry?’
    Killer was parked out on Idrottsgatan. He’d lit a Lucky and was slurping the lukewarm dregs of the coffee Dad had left behind before he took the bus to the hospital.
    ‘We’re mucking in together this summer.’
    ‘That’s what I hear.’
    He took a drag.
    ‘It’s probably the best thing for you.’
    I nodded and looked out of the window. The sun was shining brightly. On a day like this, you could swim in Möckeln.
    ‘This situation with Mum … it’s horrible,’ said Henry.
    ‘Definitely,’ I said.
    With his elbows still perched the table, he leaned back a bit and looked out at the sunshine.
    ‘Nice day.’
    I nodded.
    ‘We could go for a spin and check the place out.’
    ‘Sure,’ I said.
    ‘Are you up for it?’
    ‘I don’t have anything else to do,’ I said.
    Henry and I did some sorting out in Gennesaret that Sunday. We tidied up and prepared for the summer. We dragged all the mattresses and pillows and blankets on to the lawn so the sun could draw out the winter’s damp. We aired the house and swept the floors. Upstairs and down. There wasn’t really that much to do. On the ground floor there were two rooms and a small kitchen with a basin that drained into a dry well, a refrigerator and a stove. To get to the top floor you walked up a stairway on the gable wall. Two rooms in a row. A slanted roof. When the sun was out, it was scorching up there.
    We also had a swim. The jetty was in its usual spot at the southern end of the point. Henry said he’d turn it into a floating dock this year. I nodded and said that it was a damn good idea.
    But we’ll need better planks, Henry said.
    We sunbathed on the mattresses and chatted. Well, actually, we smoked. Henry gave me two Luckys and swore he’d wallop me if I told Dad.
    I had no intention of saying anything anyway. We drove home in the middle of the afternoon, during the hottest part of the day. Henry had a football game to watch that night. We brought both propane tanks with us, the one for the stove and the one for the refrigerator, so we could get them refilled in time for the holidays.
    Overall, it was a good Sunday, and I thought it might turn out to be a bearable summer, after all.
    Difficult, but bearable.
    I was more interested in Edmund’s dad’s magazines than I was in Edmund’s Fleischmann, but I didn’t let on.
    Edmund’s room was around eight square metres in size and the fibreboard sheet holding the railway took up about six of them. All in all it was well organized. He slept on a bed under the sheet, where he also had a lamp, a bookshelf and a few drawers with clothes. I didn’t see any Wild West magazines.
    ‘Should we rebuild it?’ said Edmund.
    ‘Okay,’ I said.
    We rearranged the whole landscape in two hours, drove the train around, and orchestrated some nifty crashes until we grew bored.
    ‘Building it up is the most fun,’ said Edmund. ‘After that, it just sits there.’
    ‘Agreed,’ I said.
    ‘One of my cousins gave it to me,’ said Edmund. ‘He got married and his wife wouldn’t let him keep it.’
    ‘Well,’ I said. ‘That’s how the cookie crumbles.’
    ‘You have to choose your old lady carefully,’ said Edmund. ‘Should we go to the kitchen and have a Pommac?’
    We had a Pommac in Edmund’s kitchen and I wanted to ask him about the girlie mags and about him having twelve toes instead of ten, but I never quite found the right moment.
    Instead, we cycled home to Idrottsgatan and had an old apple juice. I took Edmund into the woods, too, and showed him the culvert. He thought it was dead cool—at least, that’s what he said. Then he realized that he was half an hour late for dinner, and we both went home.
    Stava School’s staffroom was on the girls’ end of the third floor. It featured a sizable balcony, the only one on the building, and as summer approached the teachers often sat