A summer with Kim Novak Read Free Page B

All-Swedish and national teams, he was going to wind things down by becoming a player-coach for our town’s handball team, with the aim of taking it to the top of the league. Even someone like Veikko knew what this meant, and we’d all read about it in Kurren a few weeks ago. Super-Berra was going to move into one of the newly built houses over in Ångermanland, and he was taking up his post as vice president of parks on the first of July.
    What wasn’t in the papers was that he was engaged to Kim Novak, and that her name was actually Ewa Kaludis.
    And that she’d be standing in for hopeless old Eleonora Sintring, who had broken her femur while spring-boarding over a plinth during Housewives’ Gymnastics earlier that month.
    The day after Ewa Kaludis arrived, several football players passed around a volunteer sign-up sheet that you could add your name to if you were willing to break Sintring’s other leg when she came back to work. The idea was that all the willing participants would then draw straws to see who would do the deed.
    By the time Benny and I wrote our names down, the list was already several pages long.
    The next Saturday I bumped into Edmund in the library.
    ‘Do you come here often?’ I asked.
    ‘Sometimes,’ said Edmund. ‘Quite often, actually. I read a lot.’
    It might have been true. I came here once a month at most, so I wasn’t surprised that we hadn’t run into each other here before. After all, Edmund was relatively new in town.
    ‘What do you like to read?’ I asked.
    ‘Crime,’ he answered without hesitation. ‘Stagge and Quentin and Carter Dickson.’
    I nodded. I hadn’t heard of any of them.
    ‘Jules Verne, too,’ he added after a pause.
    ‘Jules Verne is damn good,’ I said.
    ‘Damn good,’ said Edmund.
    We stood around avoiding each other’s eyes.
    ‘What about the summer?’ he then asked.
    ‘What about it?’ I said.
    ‘With that place,’ Edmund said. ‘Your house.’
    I couldn’t see where he was going with this.
    ‘Huh?’ I said.
    He removed his glasses and adjusted the tape that held them together. This time he seemed to have broken them at the bridge.
    ‘Shit,’ he said.
    I didn’t answer. There was a long silence.
    ‘Can I come or not?’ he finally said.
    ‘Can I?’ I said. ‘What do you mean?’
    He sighed.
    ‘Well, shit, you’re the one who gets to decide if I can come with you,’ he said.
    And then the penny dropped. Suddenly I felt ashamed. Goosebumps prickled my spine.
    ‘Too damn right you can,’ I said.
    Edmund put his glasses on.
    ‘Are you sure?’
    ‘Of course I am,’ I said. The goosebumps vanished. There was a pause.
    ‘Cool,’ he said then, with the same thick voice he’d used in the playground. ‘Umm, do you prefer Märklin or Fleischman trains?’

3
     
    Henry, my brother, was a beanpole. Everyone said so.
    He was handsome, too; at least that’s what women said. Personally, I didn’t have an eye for men’s looks at the time, but he did remind me of Ricky Nelson, and I assumed that was a good thing.
    Or Rick, as he was called as of the previous year.
    Henry smoked Lucky Strikes. He pulled them out of the breast pocket of his white nylon shirt with a gesture that indicated he had been working hard, goddammit, and it was time to regroup with a smoke.
    The year before our mother ended up on her deathbed, he’d bought his first car—the family’s first car, in fact: a black VW Beetle that he drove around in when he was reporting from the countryside. He’d bought a camera, too, so he could take pictures of accidents and the ‘victims’ of his interviews. I was under the impression that things were going well with the freelancing.
    Our father used to say so: ‘He’s getting along well, our Henry.’
    I didn’t really know what was meant by the term ‘freelance’. Henry only seemed to be writing for Kurren , but that word was intertwined with the others. Lucky Strike. Beat. Freelance. He’d christened the VW