Because what we had was fantasy and, if we didn’t talk about it like that, we knew it was true. We knew it but Wim didn’t. He was the only person I have ever known who lived life as if it were a dream, the sole one of us who appeared to have no past and no future but occupied only the present, and a present of his own creating. Convention meant nothing to him, nor ordinary social usage, nor manners. I doubt if he ever gave a single thought to Liv, or considered her as another human being with feelings and pride and the ability to suffer. Perhaps he never considered anyone like that. When he was away from her, as he mostly was, he forgot her existence. With her, that is in the same room as her, he became nothing more than an idle male animal, amiable enough, stirred to activity only when the female in heat came close.

He seemed to have arrived out of nowhere. You couldn’t imagine him as being any different from what he was now or living any other sort of life, a child with parents, for instance, or a student. I could easily picture Liv as a little girl up there in that far northern place, going to school before it got light and coming home after dark, the world covered in snow for half the year; the house-proud prudent mother, the father a mining engineer, down quilts on her bed in the efficiently heated house, polished wood floors, perhaps a Lutheran text on the wall, done in cross-stitch by a grandmother. I could understand her longing to get away, escape the narrowness and the sameness of that life, first to Stockholm, then farther afield.

Imagining Jonny’s life was no more difficult, only a good deal less pleasant: the father and his brutish friends, their activities that make you shudder, the squalid flat on the kind of estate people are afraid even to walk past. But Wim existed, it seemed to me, in the here and now. He was only himself, single-minded, covert, a silent mystery.