Page 43 of The Second Chance Bus Stop
No, I don’t know what he means. I’m pretty sure the launderette at the end of Mum’s road really does wash the sheets I give them once a month. I shake my head slowly. I’m struggling to make out what this new information means and how it fits with my mum and the love of her life.
‘Do you have a picture of him?’
Thomas shakes his head. ‘I only brought the essentials here. The rest is in stored in my daughter’s garage. Although, he wasn’t one for the camera, Sven. Handsome enough, but just not interested in the attention. I’ll ask Julia, that’s my daughter, to have a look for you, but don’t get your hopes up.’
I thank him and move on to the question that’s bothering me.
‘Do you know where he went after London? Have you seen him at all recently?’
‘I have no idea. He did give me a ring once and said he was moving back home, could we perhaps have a coffee when he was back in Malmö, that sort of thing. Then I never heard from him again. I’d always assumed he moved over there. To London. I tried a Facebook search some time ago, but the name didn’t come up.’
‘So the last time you heard from him was...?’ I search for the year in my memory, but somehow I know the answer already. And something shifts inside me because suddenly another person, his best friend at the time, tells me that Sven went missing, never to be heard from again, summer 1996. For the first time I realise that my mum could be right. Sven was supposed to meet her, they had it all arranged, and then he really went missing. Thomas’s answer sends shivers down my spine.
‘I think it was, what, 1996, springtime?’
Sven went to London and never came home again. Or went quiet when he did.
I feel the unease of the question genuinely nagging at me: If this is the right Sven, then where did he go?
Sophia sits outside the RV, with a mug in her hand and a fidget spinner on her lap.
‘You finished early.’
‘We should try fishing,’ she replies. She sometimes does this. Doesn’t say hello or hi and goes straight into whatever was on her mind.
‘Fishing? As in worm on a string, standing for hours by a waterfront?’
‘You’ve never fished?’
‘It feels like something a dad should do with you. Like learning to ride a bike.’
‘You don’t know how to ride a bike?’
‘I know how to ride a bike, Soph.’
‘I used to love fishing because you get to hang out, sit side by side with someone and look out over the water. No talking. Parallel play at its best. Sometimes my brother would take me.’
‘Not any longer?’
‘We’re adults now.’
‘You don’t have to stop hanging out because you grow up. I wouldn’t if I had siblings.’
‘My siblings are not very hangoutable.’
‘Mattias seems all right when you talk about him.’
‘He is the exception to the rule.’ She fiddles with a small stick. Seems there’s always something in her hands. ‘But even he still needs to be paid half a million for his share of the shop.’
Wait, what?
‘But you’re family! He didn’t seem like he needed money. What are your other brothers doing?’
‘One is a teacher, and one works for the fire station, handling the incoming calls. They are both fine. But it’s the principle of the thing, isn’t it? There are four of us, so my uncle couldn’t just give the shop to only me. He loved us all, really, didn’t want to play favourites. So it belongs to all of us and they’ve no real interest in keeping it, would rather have the money. My uncle’s will put a time cap on it—five years, and we could then either sell it or in order to keep it I’d have to buy the three of them out. I’ve only one year left and even if I stopped going for the organic oats I still won’t be able to come up with that kind of money.’
‘Maybe not, but surely they can see what it means to you? How can they ask you to give it up?’
She shrugs and drops the small stick back onto the ground.
