Page 32 of The Sleepwalker

‘I’m talking to you. I really need—’

Hugo leaves the kitchen.

‘Please don’t walk away while I’m .?.?.’

Bernard hurries after him into the hallway.

Still sitting at the kitchen table, Agneta hears a hanger screech against the rail and the repressed anxiety in Bernard’s voice as he tries to reassure his son.

‘We can work this out, Hugo,’ he says.

She doesn’t catch the boy’s response, because the shoe horn clatters to the tiled floor, and the front door opens and slams back against the wall.

‘You’ll always be welcome here, you know that. I didn’t mean—’

Bernard follows Hugo outside in his stockinged feet, and Agneta hears him shout ‘sorry’ with heart-breaking anguish.

* * *

Hugo passes the tall maple, whose red leaves have always reminded him that his mother moved back to Canada. He strides up the driveway, hears his father shouting behind him, and continues along Pettersbergsvägen. When he reaches Bellman’s Well, he turns right and stops. He lowers the bag containing his laptop and chemistry book to the ground and does up his black leather jacket before setting off again.

In his pocket, his phone starts vibrating, but he ignores it.

Hugo doesn’t know what the problem is, or why he feelsso trapped, suffocated. Agneta’s presence always makes him ashamed at having lost touch with his real mother.

He knows that he is unfair towards her, but his life is none of her business. That’s just the way it is. She exists, and he does, too. But he has just been released from prison, and his dad is going to throw him out, and it’s all her fault.

Hugo never asked for a new mother, he never chose her. It was his dad who brought her into their lives, who let her move in and wanted to share a bed with her.

He knows he was an anxious child, but he had no choice; he was afraid of going to sleep, didn’t want to sleepwalk, and she was the only one who was there for him. He couldn’t help but turn to her for comfort, to cling to her even though all he wanted was his own mum.

Once, after Hugo woke up in the patch of nettles behind Dr Grind’s garage, she sponged him down with cold water and applied a menthol-scented ointment to soothe the stinging.

He can still remember the feeling of cold, invisible leopard spots all over his body.

Hugo went out to pick wild strawberries afterwards, threading them onto a long blade of grass and giving them to Agneta to say thank you. He had never seen her look happier than she did then, and an icy chill gripped his heart and he ran away and sat down on a bench in Krausparken.

Before Hugo met Olga, Agneta had almost made him forget his real mum.

12

The roar of the traffic on Södertäljevägen fades slightly as Hugo rounds the corner of the grubby nougat-coloured apartment complex, enters the code and makes his way inside.

He stands quietly for a moment in the dim stairwell outside Olga’s door, undoes his coat and pushes his long hair back from his face.

The cold air has left his cheeks rosy and his nose red.

Hugo raises a hand and presses the tip of his index finger to the worn buzzer. He hears the shrill sound through the letterbox, followed by her shuffling footsteps on the linoleum floor.

The lock clicks, and the handle turns.

‘Hugo?’ she says, her face tense. ‘You can’t just show up here like this. You have to ring before you—’

‘I know, I’m sorry, but I was about to lose my shit at home. I had to get out .?.?. and then I got scared you’d say no if I called.’

She smiles at him, but the tension from a moment ago is still lingering in her eyes.

‘I never say no to you, do I? But I have a life, a job, things that need doing.’