Shame

he had revealed to her. The few times their eyes met they lost contact at once and drifted off amidst the choir.

    Vanja had given her some good advice.
    ‘But, Majsan, you have to talk to him, you know that, don’t you?’
    But what was she going to say?
    ‘Well, think up something you know will spark his interest. What else does he do besides sing in the choir? There must be something else he’s interested in. Or drop something right in front of him so you have a reason to start talking. You must have some sheet music or something that you could drop …’
    It was easy for Vanja; she was so brave. But Maj-Britt’s sheet music was almost glued to her hands, and to make it flutter all the way over to the tenors would take a miracle. But He who performed such things was very clearly not interested. And Vanja was not satisfied. After each choir practice she rang to hear all the details.
    Finally, Vanja herself solved the problem. Through shrewd detective work amongst her friends, she ascertained that Göran was interested too. So, when pressuring Maj-Britt didn’t work, she took the matter into her own hands. One evening she rang Maj-Britt and asked her to come down to the kiosk. Maj-Britt didn’t want to, and for the first time Vanja got angry and called her a bore. Maj-Britt didn’t want to be a bore, especially not in Vanja’s eyes, so in spite of her parents’ surprise she put on her jacket and headed off. She wasn’t allowed to use make-up, but she usually borrowed some from Vanja, carefully wiping it off before she got home. She hadn’t even brushed her hair before she set off, and she fretted about it as she neared the kiosk. Because there he stood. Right next to the ice-cream sign by the bicycle stand. He smiled and said hi and she did too and then they just stood there, shy and embarrassed, and it felt just like it did the time they had stood on the church steps. Vanja never showed up. Or Bosse, the boy that Göran was waiting for. Maj-Britt kept glancing at her watch to assure him that she really was waiting for someone, and Göran did his best to keep the conversation going. They talked exclusively about the two people who hadn’t shown up yet. And why they hadn’t. It took them twenty minutes before they clicked. Bosse was Vanja’s cousin, and as the seconds ticked by Maj-Britt realised that Vanja probably had no intention of appearing at the kiosk that evening either. She had decided to give fate a little push. Göran was the first to figure it out.
    ‘If Bosse doesn’t come and Vanja doesn’t either, what do you think we should do?’
    Maj-Britt had no idea. What do you do on a Tuesday evening when you’re eighteen and have just realised that your secret love is no longer secret, and that he is standing on the other side of the bicycle stand and has also just been revealed? At that precise moment it began to rain, and neither of them really wanted to leave. It wasn’t a little drizzle, it was a cloudburst that came out of nowhere. The kiosk owner had started to close and was winding in the awning that would have protected them.
    It was Göran who first started to laugh. He tried to hold it back, but then the rain came down so hard that there was no resisting it any longer. Maj-Britt began to laugh too. Liberated, she let him take her hand and they ran off together under the cover of his jacket.
    ‘We could go over to my house for a while if you want.’
    ‘Can we do that?’
    They had stopped on the other side of the road where they normally would have parted. He seemed surprised by the question.
    ‘Why not?’
    She didn’t answer, only smiled uncertainly. Some things were so simple for other people.
    ‘I have my own entrance so you don’t even have to meet my mother and father if you don’t want to.’
    She hesitated a tiny, tiny bit, but then nodded and let herself be drawn into all the wondrous things that were about to happen.

    As he had described, he had his own entrance. A door at the end of the house and behind it a stairway to the second floor. He even had a little cooker with two burners and an oven, almost like his own flat. And why shouldn’t he? He was twenty years old, after all, and could have moved away if he’d wanted to. She could have moved out too, for that matter. Yet, the idea was inconceivable.
    He opened a cupboard in the hallway and gave her a fluffy towel to dry off the worst of the rain. He hung her soaked jacket on the back of a chair and moved it