Red Wolf: A Novel Read Free Page B

against her body. She felt dizzy, shaky. Loud noises had begun to startle her in a way she had never experienced before. Open spaces had become impossibly large; cramped spaces made her feel suffocated. Her sense of spatial awareness was warped, so that she had difficulty judging distances. She was always covered in bruises from where she had walked into things, furniture and walls, cars and the edge of pavements. Sometimes the air seemed to vanish around her. Other people used it all up, leaving nothing for her.
    But it wasn’t dangerous, she knew that. She just hadto wait until it passed and the sounds came back and colours became normal again. It wasn’t dangerous.
Wasn’t dangerous
.
    She suppressed the thought, letting herself float away, feeling her chin drop, and suddenly the angels were there.
    Fear made her sit bolt upright in her chair. She hit the folding table, spilling orange juice against the wall of the cabin. The racing of her heart filled her head, shutting out all other sound. The fat man was saying something to her, but she couldn’t make out what.
    Nothing scared her as much as the sound of the angels singing.
    She didn’t mind as long as they kept to her dreams. The voices sang to her at night, chanting, comforting, meaningless words with an indefinable beauty. Nowadays they sometimes carried on after she woke up, which made her mad with anxiety.
    She shook her head, cleared her throat, rubbed her eyes, and checked that she hadn’t got orange juice on her laptop.
    As the plane broke through the clouds on its final approach it was surrounded by swirling ice. Through the snowstorm she caught a glimpse of the half-frozen grey of the Gulf of Bothnia, interrupted by dark-grey islands.
    The landing was uncomfortably rough, the wind tugging at the plane.
    She was last out of the plane, restlessly shuffling her feet as the fat man heaved himself out of his seat, got his luggage from the overhead compartment and struggled to pull on his coat. She ran past him on the way out and noted with some satisfaction that he ended up behind her in the queue for hire-cars.
    Key in hand, she hurried past the crowd of taxi-drivers by the exit, a cluster of dark uniforms that laughed, shamelessly evaluating passers-by.
    The cold shocked her as she walked out of the terminal building. She gasped for air, pulling her bag higher on her shoulder. The lines of dark-blue taxis sparked a memory of a previous visit here with her closest friend Anne Snapphane, on the way to Piteå. That must have been almost ten years ago.
God, time flies
.
    The car park was down to the right, beyond the bus-stops. Her gloveless hand holding the laptop was soon ice-cold. The sound her feet made on the ice reminded her of broken glass, making her cautious. As she moved forward, she left doubt and fear behind her. She was on her way, she had a purpose.
    The car was at the end of the row. She cleared the snow from the number-plate to make sure it was the right one.
    Dusk was falling incredibly slowly, covering the daylight that had never really arrived. The snowfall was blurring the outline of the stunted pines that edged the car park. She leaned forward, peering through the windscreen.
    Luleå, Luleå, which way was Luleå?
    In the middle of a long bridge heading into town the snow suddenly eased, revealing the frozen river beneath her. The structure of the bridge rose and sank around her in soft waves as the car rolled onward. The town gradually crept out of the snowstorm, and off to the right dark industrial skeletons rose towards the sky.
    The steelworks and ore harbour
, she thought.
    Her reaction as the buildings began to surround her was immediate and violent, a déjà vu from childhood.Luleå was like an arctic version of Katrineholm – only colder, greyer, lonelier. The buildings were low, in varying colours, built of cement blocks, steel and brick panels. The streets were wide, the traffic thin. The City Hotel was easy to find, on the main