Dark Angel

The mood immediately lifted, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

When we each had to choose the ice cream we’d like to have, I was too timid at first to ask for a soft ice cream in a waffle cone, which is what I wanted most. But Ruth refused to give up until I admitted that was what I wanted. The man in the ice-cream stand gave me a wink and let the soft ice cream come swirling out of the machine until I had the tallest ice-cream cone I’d ever seen. Delighted, I carefully took the cone from him. It was a blend of vanilla and chocolate, and it tasted wonderful. I’d only had a soft-ice cone a few times before, and this was the best one of all. I sat down at the table next to Mamma.

I felt butterflies churning in my stomach as I looked towards the entrance to the elephant house. Soon we’d be going inside. All the kids had ordered the same kind of cone, but when I looked around at everyone else seated at the table, I was happy to see that mine was a little taller than everyone else’s.

As if my cousin Stefan could read my thoughts, he suddenly cried: ‘Who has the biggest cone?’

He leaned forward, holding out his cone to compare it with mine. I rose halfway out of my chair to do the same. But in my eagerness, I happened to bump into Mamma’s coffee cup. It toppled off the table and landed in her lap. I can still hear her angry shout as the hot coffee spilled over her skirt and bare legs. I jumped up so quickly that all the ice cream fell out of my cone.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing, you little idiot!’ she bellowed. The next second she burst into tears.

Ruth leaped up and nervously began wiping Mamma’s skirt with paper napkins from the holder on the table as she tried to console her sister. ‘Hush now, it’s not so bad. We’ll just wipe you off here and then go into the loo to wash off the rest with water. Your skirt will dry in no time in the sun. You’ll see.’

The other children and I sat in horrified silence as Mamma sobbed. She kept switching between feeling sorry for herself and yelling at me.

‘Why does everything always have to get wrecked? Why can’t I ever be happy for just one minute?’

I noticed that the people at the other tables were staring at Mamma with a mixture of surprise and alarm. And then, to my dismay, I suddenly felt something running down my legs. When Mamma saw it too, she got even angrier.

‘So now you’re peeing your pants like a baby? Haven’t you already done enough? Haven’t you? You stupid sodding brat! You always ruin everything – absolutely everything!’

Terrified, I sat frozen to my chair, incapable of moving. In one hand I still held the empty cone.

Mamma was silent and withdrawn the whole way back to Grandma’s flat. I never got to see the elephants. I would never visit Skansen again.

SUNDAY STARTED OFF slowly at the editorial offices of Regional News in Visby. Johan Berg rarely had to work on Sundays; it only happened a few times a year. What annoyed him most was that on this particular day, the editors in Stockholm had decided that they didn’t need any stories from Gotland. The news reports would consist entirely of stories compiled at headquarters on the mainland. Having to sit in the office when nothing was going on seemed to Johan like the stupidest waste of resources. But there’s no use trying to second-guess the managers of Swedish TV, he thought morosely. He really could have used a few more hours’ sleep.

At the moment he was sitting at his desk, having his morning coffee and eating a sandwich. He listlessly rocked his chair, casting a critical eye at the cramped quarters of the editorial office. He let his gaze wander over the bookshelves, the computers, the bulletin boards and the windows overlooking a park. He also glanced at the stacks of jumbled documents and the map of Gotland, which always gave him a guilty conscience because there were so many small parishes that they almost never visited.

Although Gotland was Sweden’s largest island, the distance between the northern tip of Fårö and the southernmost district, Hoburgen, was no more than 180 kilometres. And the island was barely 50 kilometres at its widest. That’s why we ought to be doing more, thought Johan. We should be covering more of the island.