The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

‘But listen, Harry, wouldn’t it be interesting to talk—?’
Harry threw the mobile phone at the black wall. A chip of plaster fell off.
Harry put his head in his hands, trying to hold it together so that it didn’t explode. He had to drink
something. Anything. When he looked up again, he was alone in the room.
Perhaps it might have been avoided if Fenris Bar had not served alcohol. If Jim Beam had not been
on the shelf behind the barman screaming with its hoarse whiskey-voice about anaesthesia and
amnesty: ‘Harry! Come here, let’s reminisce about old times. About those awful ghosts we have
dispelled, about the nights we could sleep.’
On the other hand, perhaps it might not.
Harry hardly registered his colleagues, and they took no notice of him. When he had entered the
garish bar with the plush red Danish ferry interior, they were already well on the way. They were
hanging off each other’s shoulders, shouting and breathing alcohol over each other, singing along
with Stevie Wonder who claimed he had just called to say he loved you. They looked and sounded,
in short, like a football team who had won the cup. And as Stevie Wonder finished by stating that
his declaration of love came from the bottom of his heart, Harry’s third drink was placed in front of
him on the bar.
The first drink had numbed everything, he had been unable to breathe and mused that was how
taking carnadrioxide must feel. The second had almost made his stomach turn. But his body had got
over the first shock and known that it had received what it had been demanding for so long. And
now it was responding with a murmur of well-being. The heat washed through him. This was music
for the soul.
‘Are you drinking?’
Katrine was standing by his side.
‘This is the last,’ Harry said, his tongue no longer feeling thick, but smooth and supple. Alcohol just
improved his articulation. And people hardly noticed that he was drunk, up to a certain point. That
was why he still had a job.
‘It’s not the last,’ Katrine said. ‘It’s the first.’
‘That’s one of those AA precepts.’ Harry looked up at her. The intense blue eyes, the thin nostrils,
the full lips. God, she looked so wonderful. ‘Are you an alcoholic, Katrine Bratt?’
‘I had a father who was.’
‘Mm. Was that why you didn’t want to visit them in Bergen?’
‘You avoid visiting people because they have an illness?’
‘I don’t know. You may have had an unhappy childhood because of him or something like that.’
‘He couldn’t have made me unhappy. I was born like that.’
‘Unhappy?’