feeling fragile …’
‘I can do that just as fast,’ Mia jokes.
‘Let’s see!’
He throws the knife in the air, and it spins twice before he catches it again and puts it down next to the chopping board.
‘No,’ she laughs.
‘My ex always called me a schmuck … I’m still not quite sure what she meant,’ he grins, and stirs the deep-rimmed frying pan.
‘So you’ve dried the shrimp on paper towels?’
‘And because they’re not pre-cooked, you may need to add a little more salt than usual,’ Rex says as he lowers the fresh pasta into the simmering water.
Through the cloud of steam his eyes take in the latest news on the ticker at the bottom of the monitor: Swedish Foreign Minister William Fock has died after a short illness.
His stomach lurches with angst and his head suddenly goes empty. He forgets where he is and what he’s supposed to be doing.
‘You can get organic shrimp these days, can’t you?’ Mia asks.
He looks at her and nods, without actually understanding what she’s saying. His hands are shaking as he picks up the tea-towel from the counter. He dabs slowly at his forehead so as not to spoil the make-up.
It’s a live broadcast. Rex knows he has to get through this, but all he can think about is what he did three weeks ago.
This can’t be true.
He holds onto the edge of the counter with one hand as he feels sweat trickling between his shoulder-blades.
‘In the past you’ve talked about saving some of the pasta water to pour on the cooked pasta afterwards if you want to cut down on the amount of oil,’ Mia says.
‘Yes, but …’
‘But not today, eh?’ she says with a smile.
Rex looks down at his hands, sees that they’re still working. They’ve just turned up the heat beneath the frying pan, and are now squeezing lemon juice on the shrimp. As he squeezes the fruit, a few drops of juice end up on the edge of the pan. They look like a string of tiny glass pearls.
‘OK,’ he whispers. His brain keeps repeating the news: the Foreign Minister has died after a short illness.
He was sick, and nothing I did made any difference, Rex thinks as he picks up the bowl of shrimp.
‘The last thing you do is fry the shrimp,’ he says, watching as the hot oil swirls in dreamlike patterns. ‘Are you ready? Um, dois, três …’
The dolly-mounted camera films the big copper pan as he empties the bowl with a theatrical gesture and the shrimp tumble into the oil with a noisy hiss.
‘High heat! Keep watching the colour, and listen … you can hear the moisture evaporating,’ Rex says, turning the shrimp.
The pan sizzles as he sprinkles a pinch of salt over it. The second camera is filming him head-on.
‘Give it a few seconds. Your beloved can stay in bed because the food’s all ready now,’ he smiles, lifting the pink shrimp from the pan.
‘It smells fantastic. I can feel myself going weak at the knees,’ Mia says, leaning over the dish.
Rex drains the pasta, quickly tips it into a bowl, stirs in the garlic butter and peppers, then adds the oiled shrimp, adds a splash of white wine and balsamic vinegar, then plenty of chopped parsley, marjoram and basil.
‘Then you can take the bowls back into the bedroom with you,’ Rex says directly to the camera. ‘Open a bottle of wine if you want to stay under the covers, but otherwise water goes very well.’
The Foreign Minister is dead, Rex repeats to himself as he leaves the studio where the guests are eating his pasta dish. He hears them praise the food as he pushes the soundproof door open.
Rex runs along the hallway to his dressing room, locks the door behind him, staggers into the bathroom and throws up in the toilet.
Exhausted, he rinses his mouth and face, lies down on the narrow bed and closes his eyes.
‘Fuck me,’ he whispers, releasing the hazy memories of that night three weeks ago.
He had been at a party at Matbaren, and he had a little too much to drink. He decided that he was in love with a woman who worked for some investment company with a stupid name.
Almost every time he got drunk, the night ended with him in bed with a woman. If he was lucky, she wasn’t a production assistant at TV4 or the ex-wife of a colleague. On this occasion, she was a complete stranger.
They got a taxi back to her villa out in Djursholm. She was divorced and her only child was on an exchange trip to the USA. He kissed the back of her neck as she switched the alarm off and let them in. An old golden retriever came padding through the rooms.
They both knew what they wanted, and didn’t talk much. He selected a bottle of wine from the large wine fridge, and remembers swaying as he tried to open it.
She got out some cheese and crackers which they never touched.
With an air of inevitability, he had followed her through the carpeted hallway towards the master bedroom.
She dimmed the wall lights and disappeared into the bathroom.
When she came back she was wearing a silver nightgown and kimono. She opened the drawer of the bedside table and handed him a condom.
He remembers that she wanted to be taken from behind, maybe because she didn’t want to look at his face. She got on all fours, with her pale backside uncovered, the nightgown pulled up, bunched around her waist, and her mid-length hair hanging over her cheeks.
The antique bed creaked and a framed embroidered angel wobbled on the wall.
They were both too tired, too drunk. She didn’t orgasm, didn’t even pretend to, just muttered that she needed to sleep when he was finished, sank onto her stomach and fell asleep with her legs wide apart.
He had gone back to the kitchen, helped himself to a glass of cognac, and leafed through the morning paper, which had just been delivered. The Foreign Minister had made some stupid comment about how there were extreme feminist forces that wanted to destroy the age-old relationship between men and women.
Rex had swept the paper onto the floor and left the house.
He had one thing in mind. He had walked straight down to Germaniaviken and followed the shore all the way to the Foreign Minister’s villa.
He was too drunk to care about any alarms or security cameras. Driven on by a very clear sense of justice, he clambered over the fence, walked right across the grass and up onto the deck. Anyone could have seen him there. The Foreign Minister’s wife could have been standing at the window, or a neighbour could have driven past. Rex didn’t care. One thought was running through his mind: he had to piss in the Foreign Minister’s floodlit swimming pool. It felt like the right thing to do at the time, and he smiled like a prize-fighter as his urine splashed into the turquoise water.
Rex ignores the taxi that’s waiting outside the TV4 building and starts walking instead. He needs space to breathe, needs to collect his thoughts.
A few months ago he would have calmed his nerves with a large glass of whisky, followed by another three.
Now he walks along beside the busy Lidingövägen instead, and