Dark Angel (Anders Knutas 6)

my stomach got worse. ‘I’m sure it won’t take very long, Mamma. Here, let me carry the bag.’
    The sun was shining, it was warm outside, and no one else seemed at all concerned about the wait. They were talking and laughing and joking. I wished that Mamma could be as relaxed as they were.
    The queue slowly moved forward. Ruth powdered her nose. Mamma lit a cigarette. ‘God, why is this taking so long? What can they possibly be doing up there?’
    When we finally passed through the turnstile, everyone had to use the loo. But I was too excited to pee.
    Skansen was located high atop a hill and we began making our way up the slope. Suddenly we found ourselves right next to an ice-cream stand, and Ruth stopped.
    ‘OK, I’m treating everybody to ice cream! Then we’ll sit down and get re-energized before we climb any further. Skansen is a big place, kids. It takes a long time to walk all the way around. Right over there are the elephants, but you have to finish your ice cream before we can go and see them. Or else they might swipe the cone right out of your hand! All right. Choose any kind of ice cream you want!’
    The strained look on Mamma’s face disappeared when she sat down at a café table with a cup of coffee and a vanilla cone.
    ‘This is exactly what we all needed,’ she told Ruth, giving her sister a grateful smile.
    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