She was holding her cup but hadn’t so much as sipped her coffee yet; it was probably ice cold by now.

‘He’s with Diana’s parents.’

‘Is he going to stay there?’

‘No. I think we’ll be heading home in a few days.’

We sat in silence for a while. Then I said:

‘How are Kent and Eva anyway?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You don’t know?’

She shook her head.

‘But surely Diana’s been over?’

‘She’s been busy with her own things. So I don’t think so.’

‘Maybe I should talk to them.’

Susso got to her feet and stood there looking at me with her living eye and her dead eye and I didn’t know which one to focus on. It looked like she was about to say something mean but chose to bite her tongue.

Then she left. The front door slammed shut and I sat at the table with my hands on the table top, gazing out the window. As usual, my eyes were drawn to the mine. Sometimes I think it looks like one of those Mesopotamian ziggurats and sometimes the kind of flat-topped mountains you see in westerns. Now I fancied I could see the mountain itself, with its levelled summit. Like some kind of melancholy mirage from days long gone. I could glimpse the city hall steeple with its blue bandage between the downy birch trees in Ferrum Park. They were finally renovating the clock, which had stood still for an eternity. The wind turbines on Viscaria were standing still too. A sparse sprinkling of small, deathly pale flowers that no one wanted to pick. In the distant wilderness. Outside my window.

About the Author

Stefan Spjut (b. 1973) has worked as a literary critic and culture editor. Stallo, his English-language debut in 2015, has been published in fifteen territories to date. He lives in Stockholm and has two children, a girl and a boy. He holds a black belt in taekwondo and considers himself a reprobate MMA junkie.

Copyright

First published in the UK in 2019
by Faber & Faber Ltd
Bloomsbury House
74–77 Great Russell Street
London WC1B 3DA

Originally published in Sweden by Albert Bonniers Forlag in 2012
First published in the USA in 2019

This ebook edition first published in 2019

Design by Luke Bird
Cover images © Ebru Sider and Aimee Marie Lewis, Arcangel

The right of Stefan Spjut to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988