The Shadow Girls Read Online Free

reporter who packed away his tape recorder had not in fact provided her with a way out of the camp. But she had still found her door. She had the name of a country far away wherepeople actually wanted to see her face and were interested in hearing her story: Sweden. She decided that that was where she was headed, nowhere else. Sweden. There were people there who had sent out someone to watch out for her.
    She walked them to the front gates of the camp.
    ‘Is your name just Tea-Bag?’ he asked. ‘Nothing else? What about a surname?’
    ‘I don’t have one yet.’
    He looked at her curiously but smiled. The photographer asked one of the guards to take a picture of the three of them.
    *
    It was one of the last days of the twentieth century.
    It started raining again in the afternoon. That evening Tea-Bag sat on her bed and pressed her feet against the cold floor for a long time. Sweden, she thought. That’s where I’m going. That’s where I have to go. That’s my goal.

2
    JESPER HUMLIN, ONE of the most successful writers of his generation, was worried about losing his tan. This fear easily surpassed his other anxieties, such as the fate of the impenetrable collections of poetry he published every year on the sixth of October, which happened to coincide with his mother’s birthday. This morning, a few months after his latest book had come out, he was looking at his face in the mirror and noted to his satisfaction that his tan had an unparalleled evenness of tone. A few days earlier he had returned to a chilly Sweden from a month-long sojourn on the South Seas, first in the Solomon Islands and then on Rarotonga.
    Since he liked to travel in comfort and stay in the most expensive hotels he would not have been able to undertake this trip if he had not received the Nylander grant of 80,000 kronor. It was a newly established grant, the donor a shirt manufacturer from Borås who had long nourished the dream of becoming a poet. He had been bitterly disappointed to see his dreams of poetry disappear in a lifelong battle with arrogant shirt designers, suspicious labour unions and unhelpful tax authorities. His time had been spent on button-down collars, colours and fabric swatches. In an attempt to come to terms with his own disappointment he had established the fund that would go to ‘Swedish writers in need of peace and quiet for completion of their work’. The first grant had gone to Jesper Humlin.
    *
    The phone rang.
    ‘I want a child.’
    ‘Right now?’
    ‘I’m thirty-one years old. We either have a child or it’s over.’
    It was Andrea. She was a nurse anaesthetist and never knocked on doors. Humlin had met her at a poetry reading he had done a couple of years earlier when he had just sworn off the bachelor lifestyle and decided to settle down with one woman. With her slim face and dark hair he had immediately been attracted to Andrea. He had also fallen for her enthusiastic response to his poems. When she was angry at him, which was a fairly common occurrence, she liked to accuse him of having picked her in order to have constant access to someone in the medical profession, since due to his hypochondria he was always convinced that he was suffering from a fatal illness.
    This time she was furious. Humlin wanted children, many children. But not right away and possibly not with Andrea. Naturally this was not something he was prepared to discuss with her, at least not by phone.
    ‘Of course we’ll have children,’ he said. ‘Many children.’
    ‘I don’t believe you.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘You’re always changing your mind about everything. Except, apparently, about waiting to have children. But I’m thirty-one.’
    ‘That’s no age at all.’
    ‘For me it is.’
    ‘Maybe we could talk about this a little later? I have an important meeting coming up.’
    ‘What kind of meeting?’
    ‘With my publisher.’
    ‘If you think your meeting is more important than this conversation then I want to break up