The Snowman ( PDFDrive )

Marita. No, it was Marite. She had insisted on bringing him here to show him some zebra-skin
cushions that Marite – or was it Marita? – thought he just had to have for the bed they had left not
long before and which now sported strands of long blonde hair, which, he made a mental note,
would have to be removed.
‘We don’t have any left in zebra,’ Sylvia Ottersen said. ‘But what about these?’
She walked over to a shelf by the window; the daylight fell on her curves, which, he reflected, were
not bad at all. Her commonplace brown hair, however, was straggly and dead.
‘What is it?’ asked the woman whose name began with M.
‘Imitation gnu skin.’
‘Imitation?’ M snorted, tossing her blonde hair over her shoulder. ‘We’ll wait until you get in more
zebra.’
‘The zebra skin’s imitation too,’ Sylvia said, smiling the way you smile at children when you have
to explain that the moon isn’t made of cheese after all.
‘I see,’ M said, breaking her red lips into a sour smile and hooking her arm under Arve’s. ‘Thank
you for letting us browse.’
He hadn’t liked M’s idea of going out and parading around in public, and even less the grip she now
had on his arm. She may have noticed his distaste when they were outside. At any rate, she let go.
He glanced at his watch.
‘Ooh,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a meeting.’
‘No lunch?’ She regarded him with a surprised expression, quite able to hide how hurt she was.
‘I’ll ring you, maybe,’ he said.
She rang him. Only thirty minutes had passed since he had been standing on the Sentrum stage, and
now he was sitting in a taxi behind a snowplough churning filthy snow onto the roadside.
‘I was sitting right in front of you,’ she said. ‘I’d like to thank you for the lecture.’
‘Hope my staring wasn’t too obvious,’ he shouted exultantly over the scraping of iron on tarmac.
She chuckled.
‘Any plans for the evening?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘none that can’t be changed ’ Beautiful voice. Beautiful words.
The rest of the afternoon he went round thinking about her, fantasising about screwing her on the
chest of drawers in the hallway, her head banging against the Gerhard Richter painting he had
bought in Berlin. And thinking this was always the best bit: the wait.
At eight she rang the bell downstairs. He was in the hall. Heard the echo of the lift’s mechanical
clicking, like a weapon being loaded. A humming tone that rose. The blood was throbbing in his