Lena Andersson
Translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death
Matilda
Matilda Ström was once terribly in love with a young man, Emil. Or rather, she was terribly in love with Emil, a young man. He was in her thoughts when she woke up in the morning and when she went to sleep at the end of the day. But she never dreamed of him, not at night when she was asleep, because there was nothing there to scrutinise or process.
Matilda and Emil were both at the same high school but on different programmes of study. Some evenings they both did the same part-time job, monotonous but relatively light work that Matilda longed for during the school day. They lived on the same side of town and would often end up together on the way home.
One evening, after they had been keeping each other company on the walk home for months, Matilda asked Emil if he fancied going to the cinema sometime. She had spent days weighing up assorted ways in which she could say it. Going to a film seemed innocent yet also intimate, a shared experience in the dark. But Emil looked at her as if she had said something very strange, and asked: “With you?”
Matilda had foreseen many different answers, excuses and tones of voice,but not that.
The little answer tore such big holes in her self-esteem that she could never be truly whole again. She realised that the interplay between man and woman was a source of degradation and that the noblest course would be to reject it. Never again would she let herself hope for something when the outcome did not lie in her own hands; never again would she ask another person to love her. She would rather be alone and her own master than a slave to someone else’s will.
With you?
The words resounded inside her like a peal of bells that was out of tune and went on and on, a perpetuum mobile. Even now that she was double the age she had been then, she could recall the sound and the feeling with the same intensity.
This refusal roused a proud, perverse resistance inside her to the accepted idea that a human is born a half and seeks out its other half. It was an affront and should be treated as such. Matilda was whole and required no complement. The humiliation of begging for love was what reduced people to halves!
The indignity when Emil asked, “With you?” lay not only in his surprise and the negative answer that it implied, but also in the fact that she had put her halfness on show, displayed her lack of something.
The shame made Matilda feel muddled, tell a lie, and revise her intentions, which heightened her sense of being obliterated. Her exact question was: “You wouldn’t fancy going to the cinema one evening?” In that form of words there was a tiny way out, a barely suspected but carefully foreseen way out. Strictly speaking she had not involved herself in the question, which was also what prompted his clumsy answer, but she did not realise it. The important thing for her was that the formulation of the question left a small chance of being saved from admitting her halfness, even if it led to absurdity.
So when she heard him say “With you?”, it only took a brief struggle with herself and then she could casually say:
“No, no, not that. I meant… Wouldn’t you fancy going with your girlfriend to see that film I told you about recently? I think you’d like it.”
She genuinely managed to make it sound as if it was an equally bizarre thought to her that the two of them might go to the cinema. Neither of them recalled her talking about a film, and nor had she.
“I haven’t got a girlfriend,” said Emil with surprise in his voice.
A few moments before, this assertion would have been of great significance, but now it meant nothing. The fact that his tone also had something leading and tentative about it was lost on her.
“Then you can go and see it on your own,” she said, keeping her expression neutral and her voice matter-of-fact and reasonable. “It’s just the film for you.”
They were both still ignorant of which film it was.
“I never go to the cinema on my own,” said Emil, but Matilda was so engrossed in herself and the indignity she had endured that she did not hear the proposition contained in his words.
“It’s pretty much always best to go to the cinema on your own,” she declared, “because then you can really concentrate on the film.”
The moment had passed and Emil did not have the energy to correct his mistake. He had felt nervous and had been caught unawares. He had blurted out his clumsy question because he was anxious not to let his feverish longing make him misinterpret her intentions—rather than heeding his own will, shouting yes, and giving Matilda Ström a different lot in life from the one that came to be hers.
And that was lucky, thought Emil, as it turned out she had not meant it that way.
This event played out in Matilda’s youth in a small town in southern Sweden where she still lived and had a job in a haberdashery shop. The town was picturesque. A river ran along its outskirts.
Now it was brown-gray autumn and the damp penetrated to the bone. The streets were covered in a dark mulch of wet leaves. There were some bright days, however, and the colors were stunningly beautiful. This year Matilda had created an autumn ensemble for herself, inspired by the shades of the season. Her trousers were mole brown, her blouse mustard yellow, her jacket maple-leaf red, and at her neck she had a dark green scarf as a hint of the summer leaves that remained. The first time she wore the set of clothes she was too rash in her handling of the delight she felt at having made them. A locksmith came early in the morning to mend the lock on her balcony door, and said:
“That’s a very fine outfit you’ve got on.”
Matilda could hear, of course, that this was praise of a rather ambiguous nature and could mean both hideous and eye-catchingly attractive, but the man’s appreciation appeared so unfeigned that she decided he thought her clothes were in good taste. She explained her thinking to him: the constant brownish shade of the tree trunks and the changing colors of the leaves. As the locksmith tightened the necessary screws he said without looking at Matilda that if he was called back for anything in the winter he looked forward to her being inspired by the trees then, too. Matilda could only imagine that he meant the trees were naked in winter, and her cheeks turned bright red.
All day long she mused on the locksmith’s words; they burned like fire inside her. She remembered another handle that was a bit loose, but it was in the bedroom and she could not ask him to come in there. In the weeks that followed she would sometimes detour past the locksmith’s shop, even when it was closed. She simply wanted to be near it for a while. Once she saw him coming out of the shop, lugging his bag, which he shoved into the back of the company van. Her heart turned somersaults in her breast and the locksmith gave a friendly nod as if he recognised her but could not quite place her, even though she was again wearing her brown trousers, mustard-yellow blouse, maple-red jacket, green scarf and reddening cheeks.
Matilda’s appearance was not of the kind that anybody remembered. She could merge into gray wallpaper but her inclination and yearning were for color and pattern. In that respect, the haberdasher’s suited her well. She was good at her work but so timid that others had to be very attentive to notice it. She was often browbeaten by her boss who failed to see that Matilda’s gentleness was a sensibility; the boss saw only lack of backbone. Almost everything that was said to her, she would accept without defending herself. She had always been that way. She was not short of ideas about how to respond but it was as if her energy drained away and she could not summon enough energy to enter the fray.
“For God’s sake speak up for yourself for once,” said the boss, “or people will trample all over you.”
The boss clearly knew that trampling all over people was wrong but did it anyway, so there was nothing to add. Matilda had no interest in presenting her own opinions. The world did not need them to hear what it already knew. She always ticked off her nephew Ernst when he was being unpleasant and self-absorbed, but adults should be able to work things out for themselves, she thought.
On Sundays she had dinner at her mother’s place in the middle of town. Sometimes her sister would also come, and bring her family. Ernst liked Matilda a lot. “Matilda’s such a laugh,” he would say precociously. “She says such funny things.” They generally had fillet of chicken in cream sauce with chilli, ginger, and rice, her mother’s favourite recipe.
The autumn the locksmith came to mend Matilda’s balcony door, a gale blew in from North America bearing with it a wave of women’s liberation. Women had long been liberated and emancipated, but there was always more to do. The extent to which Matilda could be seen as emancipated was far from clear, considering that she had never physically known a man.
The boss was called Anki and was forty-three years old. She came to work that morning with an expression on her face that none of her colleagues had seen before. In her capacity as manager, she declared, she was responsible for not brushing things under the carpet and for opening them up and airing them out and being attentive to the wellbeing of her co-workers. She explained that they all had to play their part, that they could not stay stuck in a rut, and that what they needed was participation and transparency.
This was new territory for Anki, but she had heard and read the testimonies in the mass media and other media and now proposed an exercise, a preparation exercise that was also an exercise for the future, like those that are held when a country is strengthening its defences.
All the shop’s employees were women and the customers, too, were largely women. Matilda thought of them as ladies. There were a few younger customers as well, often coming across as rather different and not caring about it, sometimes even rebellious. They made their own clothes or curtains. Matilda enjoyed discussing with clients which fabrics, colors, and patterns were right for curtains and which were more suitable for trousers. Sometimes she saw young girls come in with trousers made of curtain material. This sent a black discordant note slicing through her, but she did not let it show.
Formulating experiences and setting them out is part of healing, an expert had explained on television that morning. Anki asked them to sit around the table so they formed a circle. Matilda kept her hands clasped on her lap; some difficult moments lay ahead. This was the sort of thing that she wished could be prohibited by law. She longed to get out into the shop, to the customers and fabrics, the scissors and needles, the buttons and everything that made it meaningful and beautiful out there in the warm light. Here in the staffroom, it was all bright white and the lighting was sterile.
The shop would soon open for the day but even if the time was past ten o’clock it did not matter, because this was important. They were to go round the circle, but when no one took the initiative, Anki went first. She tentatively related a couple of episodes from early in her working life in which she had been subjected to improper proposals. In recent days she had come to recognise that at the time she had been on constant tenterhooks, fearing unwelcome advances.
She had not given these events a thought until now, when everything was coming back. She had moved through life like a sleepwalker, accepted unpleasantness as “normal” and something a woman was expected to put up with. She used her fingers to indicate that normal was not a word with any bearing on reality. This new movement, she stressed, had woken her up.
To avoid looking at anybody else, they were all staring down at the table. The boss was a woman transformed, her testimony spurring her to become someone neither they nor she recognised, but she had realised that this was her true self, the self that had been crushed. Her drive had always been seen as pushiness, she told them, her desire had been seen as morally dubious. Perhaps it sounded odd, but she felt that she had become more of a woman with every passing day since this wave had swept her along. It felt like “coming out” as a woman.
When Anki had finished and it all went awfully quiet she added that one episode she had forgotten had come back to her that morning. When she was in her twenties she answered the phone and there was heavy breathing down the line from an unidentified male voice, probably a drunken older colleague from her office job, but she never found out who it was.
Matilda sat there fiddling with a bit of wool. She felt strange and confused. Thoughts had occurred to her. If you only remembered these things now, then presumably they had not done too much damage? But this was not a time for questions, it was a time for confessions.
The strand of wool running between her fingers had come from her apron pocket. She wore an apron as her work uniform and found it both practical and neat. The others had abandoned the apron after a work-experience student from a vocational high school who had spent a week with them said work uniforms were a prelude to fascism. Anki had let herself be persuaded that the apron would no longer be compulsory. Since then, no one had worn the apron except Matilda. It had the shop’s name embroidered on the left chest. In pockets on her stomach or on loops she carried scissors, a thimble, and a seam picker. Matilda was working her fingers along the wool as if it were a rosary; it helped to keep the unpleasantness at bay. Her hands were blueish, cold and thin, her nails rough and broken. But she was careful not to touch the scrap of wool so much that it drew any eyes in her direction.
The others started to give their testimonies, cautiously at first and then with increasing boldness. The boss took the moulded plastic bowl that was meant to look like crystal, emptied the wrinkled fruit into the rubbish bin and set the bowl in the middle of the table. That was where they were all going to put their stories. They were to think of them as possessions to get rid of, a ballast that they no longer wanted to drag around with them.
Apart from Matilda, the staff comprised a work-experience student and two other employees who both worked part time as a result of reduced physical capacity. One had smoked too much and was suffering from obstructive pulmonary disease, the other had spent too long standing and had worn out her hip joint. To Matilda’s astonishment, it turned out that both of them had had problems all their lives in warding off men. One of them looked like a bundle of sticks, at any rate, and the other was red and bloated, as if a stroke might be lurking just around the corner. Matilda did not enjoy appraising people’s appearance but in this perplexing case it was unavoidable. The woman with lung problems ended every sentence with a cough. Once she got going, she announced that she could fill the bowl to overflowing with all the unsolicited intimacy she had endured, and she gave a wheezy laugh that turned into a fit of coughing. The woman with the hip claimed in her turn that she would need a barrel to offload all her ballast.
The ease with which they articulated all their grave accusations showed, of course—and even Matilda realised this—that it was not the quantitative measure or the degree of truth that mattered. Their statements were to be understood symbolically and as proof of a trend. But at the same time she could not rid herself of an impression of concealed boasting, and that this was their principal business. Matilda could only make sense of this in terms of it having been a very long time since the two women had been able to think of themselves as irresistible.
After them it was the work-experience student Hedda who spoke up. She told them that her boyfriend always thought of her as his to touch, and he could come from behind, bend over her when she was peeling onions, say, and grab hold of her breasts. Matilda gave a laugh, an obliging laugh, because it seemed to her that the breast and onion example was intended as a joke and Hedda was poking gentle fun at the others’ self-congratulation. She did not really find it funny and felt envious of Hedda for getting her love life underway so early, but laughed as a matter of course, to show her support. To her dismay she saw that Hedda was glaring at her.
“You’re laughing, Matilda?” said Anki.
“No. I misunderstood.”
“This is nothing to laugh about,” said Hedda.
“Definitely not,” said the woman with the lungs.
“How about your contribution, then?” said the woman with the hip.
Matilda was thirty-four years old and had never chopped her onions in anything other than solitude. She would have liked to ask Hedda why her boyfriend wasn’t allowed to touch her. That was why you had a boyfriend, wasn’t it, because you wanted him to touch you at the most unexpected moments, like when you were chopping onions? Wasn’t that the distinction between a boyfriend and other boys, the fact that you’d given him the right to touch your body?
The boss said what an excellent session this was turning out to be. The idea had come to her, she told them, when she saw her teenage son shamble out of bed that morning and expect breakfast to be waiting, his clothes washed and the house clean. Many little streams make a great river and if we all add our stitch to the sampler, our hay to the stack, contribute what we can, then the world will be a better place.
“Matilda?” she said encouragingly. “Would you like to share something with us, like the others have? There’s no obligation but I think it’s good for the person who testifies and for solidarity.”
It was the first time Anki had used the word solidarity. It lay there in her mouth, feeling unfamiliar, not in a bad way, just unfamiliar. And perhaps it was not the last time, for there was a new order in prospect, they were part of an 180 avalanche. She wanted to say the word again to ratify her experience, put a seal on it, like states did when they signed treaties with each other.
“It’s a question of solidarity.”
She did not say this to put pressure on Matilda, but for the sake of the word, a costly chocolate that suffused her palate with flavours.
Matilda’s own mouth was dry and desperate and her teeth felt scoured, as if she had been eating rhubarb. Anki got herself a glass of water that left a wet ring on the table, even though she put it down carefully. It was after ten o’clock but only just. Four women looked at Matilda in supportive communion. They waited. Matilda’s breath came fast and jerkily.
“No,” she said in the end. “I have been spared. Have never been . . . ,” she chose carefully, “afflicted by men in the way you all describe, by their pawing and rampaging.”
She felt ashamed of her words but was satisfied that she had been able to use them in a way that did not contradict their description of men. She knew what they were talking about, was the impression she hoped her formulation had conveyed.
The others seemed less satisfied. They had a quizzical look. Matilda felt obliged to say something more.
“I can’t recall any unwelcome advances, unfortunately.” She was on the point of adding “I’m sorry,” but that would have seemed weird, of course. Perhaps she made it sound as if she had had lots of welcome advances and came across as just as vain as them, but it could not be helped, it was costly enough never to have been molested.
The electricity in the air made itself felt on her skin, the words crackled against it. She wondered whether it would be worth inventing something. The locksmith seemed the most convenient choice. Could it be that his comment about naked winter trees would count as an assault, even though it made her feel warm and happy? Emil came to mind, as well. Perhaps she could imply that Emil had done and said things that were not good and that she had felt compelled to try to please him?
She had noticed that Emil ran a cabinet-maker’s over on the industrial estate. Once or twice they had run into each other in the food store, most recently a year ago. He looked just the same as ever and only appeared to be shopping for himself.
“Perhaps no one has ever wanted much to do with me at all,” said Matilda.
Without that sentence she had been their enemy, but with it she disarmed the resistance they had sensed in her. Now they could view her with affection.
“It’s often those who have had the worst experiences that find it most difficult to talk about them,” said Anki. This, too, had been discussed on television that morning.
Matilda did not know why she said what she then did, only that whatever she wanted, it was not sympathy. Afterwards it dawned on her that she had wanted the others to catch sight of themselves and the way they portrayed themselves.
“The thing is that no one has ever been particularly interested in my body.”
In a gesture of comfort, Anki laid her ring-adorned hand on Matilda’s lower arm. She gave a warm, tender smile. “We can help you, Matilda. You’ve got a nice body. It won’t take very much at all to spruce you up. There’s nothing wrong with your face, either; you’re basically quite pretty. With a different hairdo, some make-up to accentuate your eyes and a bit of color on your lips, a whole set of new opportunities would be open to you. And your clothes—there’s plenty of room for improvement there. As things stand, you’re sending out the signal that you get on very well without men and their advances. They can sense that kind of thing. There’s nothing they’re more attuned to than our… well, our willingness, if I can put it that way. I’ll take you out with me one Wednesday and just you wait and see how they change their tune.”
Matilda did as she normally did when she was taken aback and thought there was no point telling people things that they would find obvious if they wanted to. Everyone around the table nodded in agreement and made their own comments about men’s sensitivity to signals.
Matilda heard them talking about their shame, the shame of having let themselves be led into doing things they didn’t want to, the shame of not having said no. But they knew nothing of the deep-seated shame of never having had a chance to say yes—the real shame, the one that lived up to its name by being so great that it could never be named.
After work, Matilda walked home as usual. She bought cut flowers and some fruit and then went up to her flat and reheated the leftovers of yesterday’s dinner: falafel with pita bread and hummus, feferoni peppers, pickled red cabbage and garlic sauce. While she ate, she watched the seven o’clock news as usual. The bulletin devoted a lot of time to reports of a member of parliament sending offensive photos of himself to three female colleagues, who had then compared the photos and their experiences. A psychologist pointed out that the sending of such pictures was now so widespread that it had become a significant workplace problem.
Once she had done the dishes and cleared up she watched an old black and white film, which was another habit of hers. Matilda liked habits, routines, and the leisurely lope of life. She liked old black and white films and old color films, especially those that ended in a long kiss, full of promise. The films warmed her heart for many hours, especially Singin’ in the Rain which she watched roughly every six months, or whenever a particular need arose. By ten o’clock she was lying in bed reading a novel from the bestseller list. When it came to books, she was more attuned to the new than the old. In her book group they only read new books, and she scarcely had time for anything more. The group met on the last Thursday of every month and the meetings energised her. She was glad that the group had been resurrected after that misadventure involving Ellinor and the book group leader’s husband.
Matilda had quite a few female friends and did different things with each of them: went to the cinema with one; had discussions with another; talked about relationships with a third, mostly work-related ones and girlfriend problems. It was an area in which Matilda was clear-sighted because she had the knack of stepping outside herself and seeing things from different perspectives, with passion but without indignation. Watching Hollywood films had honed her capacity
for disinterested observation of that sort of dynamic. But love was a subject on which she could not speak. It was impossible to share with any human being the confidence that one had never been desired by a man. However much her female friends liked her it could not be done, because they all had a little space inside them where doubt would bide its time and criticism would grow. She knew that there is distance between each and every individual, sometimes so small that it accommodates nothing but barely thought thoughts, yet that was enough for her not to be able to confide such a matter to anyone.
If she did in fact happen to meet a man, it was getting harder and harder with every passing year to explain that no one had wanted her. It was like people who had served time in jail with gaping holes in their CVs, into which employers would stare and ask: What were you doing in those years?
So the simplest thing would be if he were a foreigner. Then there was already a built-in distance which naturally included not telling each other about things that had not happened. She thought he ought to be English and called John. Perhaps John the Englishman had a dash of the Scot about him, too, something colorful and tartan on high days and holidays, a cheery affection for popular culture that lightened his subdued English style. He would play Waltzing Matilda for her and insist on a full English breakfast at weekends. Being British, John was well brought up and avoided blunt questions. He was discreet and distracted and let things lie.
“The conventional way of ordering one’s life isn’t for you, Matilda,” her girlfriends would tell her with a warmth in their voices that had not decided if it was admiring or deprecating. Their flattery was intended partly as praise for her firm principles in renouncing the half-measures of love, partly to shield her from the knowledge of what they thought and said when she was not listening.
This procedure was conditional on Matilda realising that no one actually envied her for coping with life on her own. But sometimes she had fallen for the temptation and started to talk about herself in line with the way her girlfriends had expressed their appreciation, only to find this met with aching silence. Once or twice she had let it be known that there had been suitors whom she had turned down to keep her freedom, and had immediately noticed the lack of follow-up questions and agreement. Her girlfriends’ convictions about how things stood in that respect could not have been clearer if they had come with little bells attached.
Because their protective attitude to Matilda’s sore spot was a service they rendered her, it had to be repaid. In order for the praise not to leave a nasty taste in the giver’s mouth, Matilda had to realise that it was consolation to someone not favoured by fortune.
This had taught Matilda to be wary of compliments. They came with a price tag. Sometimes they were only there to take the sting out of a spiteful remark. How I envy your lack of self-criticism. How strong you must be not to care how other people see you. How lovely it must be to opt out of taking part in the real world. The price tag could be cut off, like when you give someone a present, but that only meant the buyer still had it in their possession.
With one girlfriend, Ellinor, problems arose when it transpired that Matilda had neither the sense to repay the confidences that she had received by sharing her own misery, nor the tact to forget what Ellinor had told her about the emptiness of marriage, the periodic dreariness of her husband, the boredom of family life, and the disparity between what she had wanted to do and what she was actually doing.
One Sunday the two friends were out walking by the river, which attracted strollers and anglers on weekends. Matilda was a good listener with a good memory and insightful analyses to offer. She made a comment on something Ellinor had said earlier, as if it were a statement of fact like any other. Ellinor had so often bemoaned how flat life with a husband and children was that Matilda thought that this state of affairs could be a given starting point for the conversation. Even if she for her part had nothing against her friend feeling a little dissatisfied, her intentions were not malicious, it was just that she did not understand the distinctive nature of love-based relationships. She thought it was perfectly okay to reintroduce later some statement that had been made about a husband, in the same way as if it had been made about a friend.
Ellinor was furious and asked how Matilda had the gall to talk about her and Peder in that way; what did she know, as someone who had never seen love from the inside? Shaking with anger, Ellinor took the next available turn off the path, where she was faced with rough ground and prickly bushes, but anything rather than continue walking at Matilda’s side.
This happened not long after Ellinor, as if telling a joke against herself, had praised Matilda’s stoical ability to live alone, reminding her in a tone of mock reproach to count herself lucky that she was independent. But it was all in inverted commas. It was so self-evident to Ellinor that no one could prefer Matilda’s stagnant life of dreary solo dinners and old films to her own passionate and adventurous one that she could allow herself that touch of self-deprecating disparagement.
As Matilda stood watching her friend struggle up to the top of the ridge, she remembered something that she sometimes made sure to forget because it was so awful. It was another of her girlfriends, Liselotte, who had explained it to her a long time ago.
“Sometimes when we tell someone she’s got a nice top, it’s because we don’t think it’s nice at all. And sometimes when we tell someone how clever she is, it’s because she isn’t. We think she’s so useless that she needs encouragement, and we know it does us no harm to say it, to her of all people.”
It was the word “sometimes” that made her feel most queasy.
In her solitude that evening, after the team at work had unburdened themselves of their abuses and placed them in a bowl, Matilda brooded on whether Anki had been right about her image. Perhaps she too rarely smiled and ought to wear her hair loose? But her hair was fine and straight and not worth letting down, and she was sure she smiled when there was something to smile at. In one of the films she liked to watch, they used the expression plain Jane. The unsparing frankness of it was horrible. A human being was not first and foremost an individual, but assigned to a clearly defined, hard-hearted, ruthless, walled-in category that was comprehensible to all, a human type—homely Matilda.
This kind of brutal denotation seemed to her to be more common in Anglo- Saxon countries. Would her Englishman with a hint of the Scot, her John, have this cruelty so imprinted in him that he would think of her as plain? Would he even want her, in that case? Her stomach churned at the thought—there’s nothing wrong with your face, you’re basically quite pretty—of being discussed like some object of anthropological study, of being observed, judged, and rejected.
“That’s not how people live!” she wanted to shout. “You live from the inside, not the outside!”
The next day was a Thursday. Matilda was tired, even though she had slept for eight hours. She had a shower as cold as she could bear it and made strong coffee. It was raining when she left home, so she took the bus. It stopped on the square, a hundred metres from the shop. Anki was already in the staffroom, reading the paper over her breakfast. Like Matilda, she ate hers at work, but their nutritional choices were markedly different. Anki consumed two large tea- cakes with liver pate and pickled gherkin and a decent helping of cultured milk with some wholegrain cereal. It seemed repugnant to Matilda, but perhaps the fact of the matter was that women who enjoyed eating also baked and cooked lavishly for men, and that this was the kind of clue men were searching for when they scanned a restaurant, hunting for someone to share their lives or their night with, which was why their gaze never landed on Matilda.
A hint of mischief crept into Anki’s face. Between two mouthfuls she said:
“You look as if you haven’t slept.”
Matilda got the impression that Anki had planned to say this no matter how she looked. Even if she had appeared as fresh as a daisy, Anki would still have said that she looked as if she had not slept a wink, because that was only the prelude.
“You didn’t happen to be out last night and take somebody back home with you? Halfway to the weekend, Matilda, and you’re footloose and fancy free, after all.”
This was delivered with roguish looks to soften the unseemly intimacy of the words. But it was still so indiscreet that Matilda took a step back in alarm. It was all the more incomprehensible in view of the exercises of the day before.
Anki was evidently trying to compensate for something that had not felt right during her séance of witnesses. She was making a genuine effort to include Matilda as a given part of the female experience of picking up men at the pub on a Wednesday night and taking them home.
Matilda looked at Anki who was chewing her sandwich and shovelling in soured milk and muesli while she still had bread in her mouth. The morning paper that Anki was reading as she ate contained outcry after outcry from women in all walks of life of the times they had been forced to live their lives with male hands on their bodies, tongues in their ears and sexual organs inserted in them without permission. They were legion.
The work-experience girl Hedda emerged from the cloakroom. Her eyelashes were thick and heavy and stuck on, and reminiscent of windscreen wipers on the slow setting when she blinked. Hedda had the same smell as the scented candles in the sort of homeware shop that Matilda avoided, a sweetly insistent, expansive fragrance, pleading and suffocating in one.
Hedda went over to Matilda and told her she had been thinking a lot about Matilda’s testimony the day before, saying that men had never been interested in her body. Her dad always used to say that men liked something to get hold of. “They’ve got to have a bit of flesh,” quoted Hedda, almost fifteen, giving Matilda a helpful look. With that in mind, Hedda had dropped by the cake shop on her way in and bought Matilda a Danish pastry and a boozy chocolate truffle. She proffered a paper bag bearing the company’s name and logo, Berglunds, est. 1849. Berglunds was famous for three things, its Danish pastries, its boozy giant truffles, and its time-honoured traditions. The staff wore black with little white caps and lacey aprons, as they had since it first opened. The residents of the little town were proud of their cake shop and gave it their custom to make sure it survived.
Hedda’s innocent expression was not feigned. She was trying to be kind. She had gathered that Matilda was to be seen as ill-favoured and disadvantaged. So Hedda wanted to be extra kind.
Moving with her customary control, Matilda took the bag without betraying for a moment that she felt like thumping Hedda over the head with it and then stuffing the girl’s face with Danish pastry and chocolate truffle until she threw up and choked.
Relating the episode to her classmates later, Hedda would describe the color of Matilda’s face as a sign of the shame she felt, the shame that no woman should feel any longer and that should be consigned to where it belonged. The fact that the rush of blood came from rage and affront would simply not have occurred to Hedda.
This was about the time of day when Matilda generally started feeling hungry. Then she would eat some cottage cheese and an apple. She liked Danish pastries and chocolate truffles, and she found the smell even more heavenly, but her self-control was far stronger than her desire and in present circumstances no self-control was required. She tied on her apron and went out into the shop, having slid the bag of cakes in among the other rubbish once Hedda was out of view.
Later that day, she and Hedda were over by the buttons, which had got into such a mess that they needed some thorough tidying. There were no customers in the shop. Matilda had calmed down sufficiently to put her question into words.
“Hedda, can I ask you something?”
“Absolutely, no problem,” said Hedda, reaching for those untuned service phrases used by young people for finding their way in a perpetually restless language, poised to offer Matilda advice on relationships and help her in any way necessary.
“Didn’t you say yesterday that you considered it a serious violation when your boyfriend took hold of you just because he felt like it?”
An indifferent Hedda fluttered her long, curling eyelashes as she waited for Matilda to continue.
“When you were chopping onions?”
“The onions were just one example. There have been lots more.”
“Exactly. But what makes you think I ought to feed myself up on Berglunds’ cakes to be the way your father wanted women to look?”
The surprise made Hedda look dim-witted and foolish because the silver glitter she had applied to her softly rounded cheeks was better suited to a different kind of expression.
“Explain to me,” insisted Matilda, “why women should be something to ‘get hold of’ yet you simultaneously consider it a violation when your boyfriend touches you?”
“But you haven’t got a clue, Matilda, you simply don’t get it! Just because I want my boyfriend to touch me, it doesn’t mean he can do it whenever he wants. That’s for me to decide, right?”
Hedda decided she was going to take her break. She asked Anki not to leave her alone in the shop with Matilda for the rest of her work-experience placement and her request was granted.
It had stopped raining, so Matilda walked home after work and went into the food store on the corner to buy potatoes, pork chops, and frozen peas. She generally cooked enough for two days and warmed up the leftovers the second day. She went up to her flat, got busy frying and boiling, and had her meal in front of the seven o’clock news. Afterwards she put on Singin’ in the Rain. She needed something to lift her out of her gloom.
The next morning there were even more outcries in the newspaper. Column upon column of molested women, names that were familiar and names that were not. Matilda read them all, wondered who they were, what their lives were like, and what she had done wrong to stand no chance of inclusion in any such list.