Let the Old Dreams Die Read Online Free PDF

body was certainly a surprise, but she was still sure that wasn’t
it
. She couldn’t put her finger on how she knew, but she definitely knew.
    Whatever he was hiding, it wasn’t his own body. It was something else, and she
had
to find out what it was. Which meant that having him close by was the most sensible thing to do.
    Wasn’t it?
    As Tina drove home from the harbour the sky was a dark grey lid covering the world, and the treetops swayed alongside the motorway. It didn’t take an expert to realise that an autumn storm was on the way.
    The first drops fell as she turned into the drive. During the short time it took her to walk up to the house they began to fall more heavily, and with a sudden squall the downpour was upon her. She ran the last few steps and pulled the door open.
    The dog came racing towards her across the hall. She probably wouldn’t have had time to react if she hadn’t heard the patter of claws before she realised that the black mass of muscle was a dog.
    Just as Roland yelled ‘Tara!’ from the kitchen she slammed the outside door and heard the dog crash into it with a thud that madethe handle vibrate. The dog barked and scrabbled at the door, eager to get at her.
    Use the handle, you stupid bitch.
    She backed away from the door and ended up beyond the plastic roof covering the porch. The rain ran down the back of her neck. The door opened a fraction. Inside stood Roland, hanging on to the furious, barking dog with some difficulty while at the same time trying to plaster on a conciliatory smile. Above the noise of the dog he yelled, ‘Sorry. Had to put some ointment on her, she’s got an attack of mange on her—’
    Tina stepped forward and slammed the door shut. She didn’t need to know where the dog had mange. Through the door she could hear Tara being dragged across the floor, still barking.
    The landscape beyond the porch was beginning to disappear. A grey veil covered everything and the noise of the rain was like a TV channel with nothing on it. White noise. The water splashed over the guttering, made a fan shape in the water butt.
    Between the dog and the rain she had a strip about two metres wide in which she could move, and she was sharing the space with a box of old newspapers and a broken bilge pump. She picked up a copy of
Dagens Nyheter
, held it over her head and ran the hundred metres across to the cottage.
    A thermostat ensured that the temperature in the cottage never dropped below twelve degrees. If a guest arrived it took no time at all to get the house pleasantly warm. As soon as she got inside she turned the radiator full on, took a towel out of the cupboard, dried her hair and sat down at the desk just in time to witness a scene she found remarkably upsetting.
    The neighbours’ sheets were pegged out on the line. They were flapping wildly in the growing storm, tugging at their moorings like fettered ghosts. Just as Tina sat down, Elisabet and Göran came out of the house. Elisabet’s belly was so big by now that herbody was an appendage to it rather than vice versa.
    They ran across the garden in the pouring rain. If you could call what Elisabet was doing running. It was more of a fast waddle. For some reason they were in a really good mood, laughing as they tried to grab hold of the flailing sheets. Elisabet was slow and only managed to take down two, while Göran seized the other four and rolled them up into a big ball, which he stuffed under his jumper. It was impossible to say whether this was a practical measure to protect the sheets or a joke right from the start, but as he waddled off with his false belly, Elisabet laughed so much that Tina could hear her inside the cottage.
    She spun her chair around so that she was facing into the room.
    How silly can some people be?
    They were like something out of Astrid Lindgren’s
Life on Seacrow Island
, one of the scenes that was cut because even the director thought it was too nauseating.
    Although this was real, of