He had nowhere to go and didn’t know what to say or do. He had gone rigid and in the end, Johanna dashed to her car, like from one sanctuary to another. She opened the door and looked at him, but her eyes slid across his face as though it were the face of a stranger and when she climbed into her car and drove off, he knew he would never see her again and that she drove off with a piece of him that he would never get back.

He went into the kitchen and sat down at the table. They hadn’t cleared their plates from the night before. Chopped-up potatoes lay in a pool of balsamic vinegar and had turned dark. There was red wine left in the glasses, which were covered in fingerprints. She sat down in his field of vision, but his eyes were unseeing. Part of him thought she had been unnecessarily cruel to Johanna, but it would never occur to him to say anything about it. She gathered up balsamic vinegar from the plate with the tip of her index finger and painted tears on her high cheekbones. He knew what she would say: that being sad was forbidden. Was he sad? A mild melancholia was aching inside him, but it was like a pain that had been dulled by a significant amount of drugs.

‘I want to leave now,’ he said.

Susso told her she was going…

Susso told her she was going out for beer. Then she put the squirrel on her shoulder, got into her car and drove off. Diana sat on the front steps, tapping at her phone. Twenty minutes later, Susso came back with two plastic carrier bags full of beer.

‘I didn’t realise there was somewhere selling alcohol in Vittangi?’

‘There isn’t, but I have nice neighbours.’

Diana studied her surreptitiously. The muscles of her lower arms looked like braided ropes under her skin when she pulled the kettle grill across the unkempt lawn and ripped open the bag of charcoal. When she stood behind the heat and the rising smoky haze with a bottle of beer in her hand. In counterpoise. Except it wasn’t her hip that was popped, it was the iliac crest. A sharply protruding ridge. Diana was fairly certain Susso knew she was being studied from a medical perspective. Though it didn’t seem to bother her. Granted, she had always been like that. She had never cared what other people thought of her. A lot of people made out as though they didn’t care, well, most people really, to a greater or lesser degree, but with Susso it had always been completely genuine, and Diana had emulated her. In her case, though, it had remained just an attitude. In Umeå, she had come to realise she actually did care an awful lot about what people thought of her as a person.