Page 66 of The Second Chance Bus Stop
Linköping
When we arrive at the field where yesterday’s bustling scene has been replaced by still and scattered litter on trampled grass, Blade helps me unload my crates and boxes to pack up, then he hovers.
‘See you at four. I’m not going anywhere today. No more places to visit.’
‘Later than that. I’m meeting Vincent.’
He has asked me for a meeting to talk over the project and say thank you before I leave, but I’m guessing it’s more my uncle and old times he wants to discuss. I don’t do reminiscing. My memories of him are mine, they’re childhood and warmth and a very big hole in my life ever since. Listening to another person talk of my favourite person in the world is like watching a movie: I may smile and feel touched but it’s not me or my life.
‘So I’ll wait for you at six, then?’
‘Perfect.’
‘I hope you eat pizza?’ Vincent says. He has stubble today, and I think that would be a helpful detail for my sleep routine should the sheep fade from my memory.
‘I do.’
It’s not busy at five o’clock and we choose a table by the window, where prams are pushed past and college students flock in groups with Fjällräven backpacks.
‘How are you finding it, this project? I take it that it was a bit out of your comfort zone.’ I have a water, and he has a Coke, full sugar. I take a sip and am glad he added that last clarifying bit, or I might have started into an explanation of the satnav and drive to the project.
‘It’s been good. Thank you for the opportunity. I do look forward to being at home with my plants, doorbell and regulars, though.’
‘I never could get your uncle as far as this town. He also liked it best close to home.’
‘Really? I thought he had the shop busy with projects and sales? A thriving and booming business,’How else would he expect me to save up more than a million?
‘Not at all. He made just enough and was happy to make just enough. Sometimes he’d have lodgers when trade was down, recession of 2006 and the early nineties recession.’
I remember this now. Faintly. An Afghan woman in the spare room, so I’d slept on a blow-up mattress in the living room when I visited.
‘It’s a bit of a different situation for me. I’m not sure you’re aware, but I need to buy my brothers out.’ Every time I say it I feel embarrassed, as if I’ve failed already.
‘Well, you’ve had quite a few years to learn to stand on your two feet and show that bunch what you are capable of, am I right? Doing that well. I can have a chat with your brothers, if you like. They were very impressed with your work, Sophia.’
I think of the message Mattias sent me last night. I knowhe’s proud of me, but I still don’t think I’m ready to confront them.
‘It’s better not to. But thank you.’
The food arrives. Pizzas with garlic sauce and white cabbage salad on the side. More Swedish than meatballs and Zlatan.
I crease my forehead as I think for the first time: perhaps I got it wrong. Perhaps the five-year period was not there to allow me to make enough money to pay my family off, but to allow them to change their minds about me. For them to see that I am capable and deserving of the inheritance.
‘My uncle must have had quite a few lodgers, but I think I only met one of them.’ I say, shuffling the pizza around on the plate, not able to finish it all whilst also talking and having the added distraction of pedestrians walking past on the other side of the glass. ‘I used to receive letters for one of them.’
I stored them for some time but must have thrown them away eventually. They never looked important and it’s rude to open a stranger’s post. I search in my memory for the names of the lodgers now. The Afghan woman was definitely Damsa.
‘I think he was lonely,’ Vincent tells me. ‘If it was up to him he’d have had you living with him full time.’
I let myself imagine that childhood. Going to a different school, quiet dinners for two every night and practical clothes that suited gardening.
‘I think I might have loved that,’ I allow myself to say then close the chapter as one that wasn’t meant to be.
‘Trust me, it was enough for him just having you for holidays and odd weekends. It was the getting back from England and taking on the business that needed a settling-in period. Easing back into solitude. He solved that with people staying.He wasn’t one to go out and socialise, but having someone around helped ease the loneliness. He could read a book and they could cook, and at the end of the night they hadn’t both been entirely alone, there’d been the turning of the pages and the smells of the food to remind them of each other’s existence. Was more like himself when I saw him a couple years after he got back. Your birth probably had something to do with it as well.’ All I can hear is the name of a certain country.
‘England? My uncle?’
‘He lived there for some time. Before you were born.’
