Hello mum wait for me. Don’t go. Diana came running towards the car.

Sorry she said. I screwed up. I do want you to come for dinner tonight. It won’t be the same without you.

All that made a bizzing noise like midges when you lay awake at night in the summer.

She went on to say something else just as I was rubbing some life back into my ears. The chill inside me wasn’t so easily dispelled.

I looked at my daughter thinking that it was all a mistake. We were matched biologically but I meant nothing without the software. John had his fantastic paintings. I on the other hand had little to offer. Didn’t even know who ellanilsson was.

I jumped into the car and shut her out. That was a signal as unmistakable as her parents’ dinner party. Without another glance at her I drove off. The road that joined the efour was deserted apart from the odd timber truck.

I had thought about her every day since she was born. Recreated the pain from the first contractions to the last moment of expulsion. How she lay newborn on my breast. I had even given her a name. Diana. The goddess of the wild animals.

There could not ever be any different feeling to replace the longing I had lived with since then. She was like a lingering aching phantom pain in my breasts in my womb. For twentytwo years I had hoped that we would find each other again. Before I hadn’t known who she was. Whom she shared her life with. And what it had been like. How she had looked and thought.

And that made all the difference. Now she was within reach and still not. It hurt so much I could hardly get enough air into my lungs. 301

I was driving faster now and tried the brakes. It was slippery. The diesel engine struggled to respond. The landscape with its neverending massed rows of fir and pine seemed to lean in over the road.

A speed camera flashed in the dark but I didn’t care. An elk ran across the road but I didn’t care.

In the other lane a car had overtaken on a bend and was careering towards me but I didn’t care. I didn’t brake. Didn’t even slow down. We came so close I could see his terrified face in the side windscreen pane.

Finally I reached the smalångerroad and our farm. The whole house was lit up. A warm light from advent candles and stars. Music played in the bestroom. Jameslast.

Bror and angelika were lying on the velvetclad sofa. They looked like a couple in a medieval painting. An angelic boy resting on the breasts of a fullbodied woman.

When I came in they sat up straight. Angelika tried hiding her breasts behind a cushion.