Midnight Sun Read Free Page A

they’ve promised to send it on the bus in a couple of days.’
    â€˜But you’ll be wanting something to practise with,’ she said, then smiled. ‘Before the
season
starts.’
    â€˜I . . .’
    â€˜You can borrow my husband’s shotgun. The two of you can wait outside until I’m done, this won’t take long.’
    A shotgun? Hell, why not? And because none of her questions was phrased as a question, I simply nodded and walked towards the door. I heard quick breathing behind me and slowed down slightly. The young lad tripped over my heels.
    â€˜Ulf?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Do you know any jokes?’
    I sat on the south side of the church and smoked a cigarette. I don’t know why I smoke. Because I’m not addicted. I mean, my blood doesn’t thirst for nicotine. It’s not that. It’s something else. Something to do with the act itself. It calms me down. I might as well smoke bits of straw. Am I addicted to nicotine? No, I’m sure I’m not. I might possibly be an alcoholic, but I’m really not sure about that either. But I like being high, wired, drunk, that much is obvious. I liked Valium a lot. Or rather, I really didn’t like not taking Valium. That’s why it was the only drug I’ve ever felt I had to actively cut out.
    When I started dealing hash it was mainly to finance my own use. It was simple and logical: you buy enough grammes so you can haggle about the price, sell two thirds of it in small quantities at a higher price, and hey presto, you get free dope. The path from there to turning it into a full-time occupation isn’t a long one. It was the path to my first sale that was long. Long, complicated, and with a couple of twists and turns I could have done without. But there I stood, in Slottsparken, muttering my concise sales pitch (‘Dope?’) to passers-by I thought had long enough hair or freaky enough clothes. And like most things in life, the first time is always the worst. So when a bloke with a crew cut and a blue shirt stopped and asked for two grammes, I freaked out and ran.
    I knew he wasn’t an undercover cop – they were the ones with the longest hair and the freakiest clothes. I was scared he was one of the Fisherman’s men. But gradually I realised that the Fisherman didn’t care about small fry like me. You just had to make sure you didn’t get too big. And didn’t venture into his amphetamine and heroin market. Unlike Hoffmann. Things had ended badly for Hoffmann. There no longer was a Hoffmann.
    I flicked the cigarette butt in amongst the gravestones in front of me.
    You have an allotted time, you burn down to the filter, and then it’s over, for good. But the point is to burn down to the filter, and not go out before that. Well, maybe that isn’t the whole point, but just then it was my goal. I don’t really give a shit about the point of it. And there’d been plenty of days since the funeral when I hadn’t been very sure of the goal either.
    I shut my eyes and concentrated on the sun, and on feeling it warm my skin. On pleasure. Hedon. The Greek god. Or idol, as he should probably be called seeing as I was on hallowed ground. It’s pretty arrogant, calling all other gods, apart from the one you’ve come up with, idols.
Thou shalt have no other gods before me
. Every dictator’s command to his subjects, of course. The funny thing was that Christians couldn’t see it themselves, they didn’t see the mechanism, the regenerative, self-fulfilling, self-aggrandising aspect which meant that a superstition like this could survive for two thousand years, and in which the key – salvation – was restricted to those who were fortunate enough to have been born in a space of time which was a merest blink of the eye in human history, and who also happened to live on the only little bit of the planet that ever got to hear the commandment and