The Swimmer by Joakim Zander Read Free Book Online

the opposite of how she’d imagined it. The city she’d dreamed of living in since traveling there by herself the summer after high school. Dancing to soul at the 100 Club on Oxford Street. Buying 1960s dresses in Camden and scratched seven-inch singles at Spitalfields Market. The cafés on Old Compton Street just before dawn, the night buses and the awkward hookups with floppy-haired, anorexic boys in small, damp flats in Brixton and Islington.
    But instead London had been a rainy, lonely prison. She could hardly remember the first few months. No details, just the purely physical sensation of spending the autumn in a miserable dorm room a few blocks from the Strand. The chill coiled its way through the thin walls and poorly insulated windows, and there wasn’t a hot water bottle in the world big enough to keep it out. She had a vague memory of the endless hours spent at the library on Portugal Street that she escaped to with her textbooks and her emptiness. It felt like an eternity of nothingness.
    And worst of all was the guilt. The feeling that she had let herself down. She was exactly where she’d wanted to be, where she’d always strived to be. At a prestigious postgraduate program in a city she loved. But for the first time in her life, she had no idea where she was going.
    But then Gabriella had finally come to visit her for a short weekend in December. Klara would never forget the sight of her through the frosty window of her completely empty room. How Gabriella jumped out of the cab onto the street, the early winter snow in her red hair. How she paid so nonchalantly, with the sophistication of someone who’d already started to work her way up the winding steps of a law office. How she’d looked up and through the snowflakes and caught sight of Klara in the lighted window on the third floor. How Klara, even at that distance, could see the obstinacy in her eyes, the warm and indomitable determination.
    They’d circled around each other in law school. Although they were in the same year, Klara hadn’t initially been receptive to making friends at all, really. She’d met Mahmoud during her second semester, and that felt like more than she’d ever hoped for. She’d called him Moody from the first day. Because he looked moody. Temperamental. A little confused, as if he was brooding about something, like he was hiding a hot temper under that controlled surface.
    Klara couldn’t remember ever having a best friend while growing up on Aspöja. When she’d finally ended up in the same group as Gabriella halfway through law school, it was a revelation almost as palpable as when she met Moody. She couldn’t comprehend that another person felt the same way she did about northern soul and vintage dresses. It had been an infatuation that Moody had made fun of. But Klara had thought it’d be good for them, good that she was looking outside of their airtight sphere.
    But then, much later, in the darkest days of that dreary autumn in London, Klara sometimes thought that all of the terrible things had happened because she’d let Gabriella into her life. If she’d just stuck to Moody, if she’d just sealed the walls around them, never allowing anyone else to get close to her, maybe it would have worked out.
    But that night, in the snow, when Klara saw Gabriella on the street in London, full of vigor and determination, she knew just how crazy those thoughts were. Sometimes there is no explanation. Sometimes you just die. And that bitterly cold Friday in December, Gabriella had come to save her life.
    And she’d succeeded. London never became exactly what Klara dreamed about, but she got her strength back, though not her desire. She passed her exams, wrote her thesis, and sent out her job applications. When Eva-Karin Boman, a well-known, respected politician with international ambitions, said she wanted to meet Klara for an interview, even Klara’s desire returned. The unimaginable thrill of being around high-stakes