Shame

there in the flat, dependent on home help for her continued existence. And the fact that through her lies Maj-Britt acknowledged what a failure she actually was.

    She heard no word of greeting when the door opened and then shut. Saba raised her head and wagged her tail a little, but stayed lying there next to the balcony door. She wanted to go out, but Maj-Britt hadn’t been able to get up.
    She heard footsteps approaching, and when they stopped she knew that Ellinor was in the room, only a couple of metres behind her.
    ‘Hi.’
    Maj-Britt didn’t reply, just turned up the volume with the remote. Ellinor appeared at the edge of her field of vision, on her way to Saba and the balcony door.
    ‘Do you want to go out?’
    Saba got up, wagged her tail, and squeezed her heavy body through the open door. Outside the wind was blowing, and when a gust tore the door wide open, Ellinor shut it again. Maj-Britt saw her standing there with her back to the room, gazing out through the glass door.
    Something was different. Ellinor’s usual chatter was gone, and there was an oppressive air about her that Maj-Britt found unpleasant. A confusing change that she had to handle in some way. Ellinor stood by the door for a long time, and when she suddenly started speaking it happened so unexpectedly that Maj-Britt gave a start.
    ‘Do you know anyone in this building?’
    ‘No.’
    She answered even though she considered refraining. Ellinor’s new behaviour scared her, especially since she now knew that the person behind the friendly façade was concealing her real intentions.
    ‘There’s a family living across the courtyard; the father died yesterday. In a traffic accident.’
    Maj-Britt didn’t want to know, but she could picture that father, the one who used to go out and push his daughter on the swing, and that mother who seemed to be in some kind of pain. As usual she was being informed of things that she didn’t want to deal with, things she hadn’t asked to be told. She changed the channel.
    Ellinor opened the door to let Saba back in, and then Maj-Britt heard her go out to the kitchen. On the TV three people’s faces were being transformed using plastic surgery and make-up, and Maj-Britt succeeded in keeping up her defences for a long time. But then Ellinor was back. Maj-Britt acted as if she didn’t notice, but out of the corner of her eye she saw Ellinor come into the room with something in her hands and sit down on the sofa. She sat down with the self-confidence of someone who knows she can get back up from it at any time.
    ‘I thought I’d mend this.’
    Maj-Britt turned her head. Ellinor was sitting with her dress in her lap, one of the two she always wore. This one had started to come apart a bit at the seams. Maj-Britt wanted to object but knew it needed to be mended. The alternative was to take the trouble to have a new one made, and she shuddered at the memory of the last time she did that. Or sew it herself? Impossible. For some reason the thought had never crossed her mind, not even in the days when she could have managed it physically. She didn’t even own a needle and thread. But to watch Ellinor’s fingers moving over something that usually clung tight against her skin was repulsive.
    Maj-Britt pressed her lips together and went back to watching TV. But then she reacted to a movement from the sofa. Ellinor had stretched her arm up over her head. Maj-Britt never had a chance to think. She never had a chance to figure out rationally what made her turn all her attention to Ellinor; at the same time she was filled with a terror so strong that she suddenly couldn’t move. She stared at Ellinor. Between her hands was an arm’s length of sewing thread, and Maj-Britt couldn’t defend herself. As if bewitched she followed the thread down to the spool in Ellinor’s left hand. And then it was too late. The memory forced its way in from the whiteness. Like a shade pulled down, with the spring stretched to the breaking point, and suddenly it rolls up with a snap. Maj-Britt sat as if paralysed and looked at what was taking shape before her. What had so long been repressed but which without warning had come back through all those years. And there was nothing she could do to protect herself.
    Nothing.

    She was sitting in the kitchen, but it wasn’t her kitchen at home, it was the kitchen that belonged to the pastor and his family. She had been there for almost two weeks, sleeping in a cold room with two