He sat down and pondered the complicated notes. One thing was clear; Vera was damned serious about her studies. It was like a code, and he realized after a while that the smallest, most code-like notes were references to pages in books. He didn’t recognize any of them from when he took the introductory course: Green Economics, Global Women, State of the World.
The riddle that was Vera Lundberg seemed more complicated the closer he looked.
It was Friday night and Peter was with Matt at the big partying place downtown. It looked like it was going to be packed, because it was teeming with people even though it wasn’t yet 11 o’clock. Matt had been so highly motivated to make contact with someone of the opposite sex that he had even brought some dryer lint, so he could pull a ‘lint opener’ from the pick-up manual. With Peter’s encouragement and not a little nervousness, he had chosen a girl he thought looked nice – a cute girl with short hair.
A little shakily, he approached the chosen one and pretended to remove the lint from her back. He showed it to her: ‘Here, trash from your back… ehhh.’ He peered at her shyly from under his protruding eyebrows.
She turned matter-of-factly towards Matt and took it:
‘Oh, um. Thanks.’
Then she turned to the guy on her other side, held out the ball of lint accusingly and chewed him out for ‘never cleaning the lint’ out of their dryer.
Bollocks! There was nothing about that in the pick-up manual.
Matt returned to the bar and Peter kindly passed him a beer.
‘Listen… no big deal. We all get rejected sometimes.’
‘Seriously. I don’t believe you.’ The Brit shook his head and looked almost sorrowfully at him. ‘You’re the kind of guy who can get any girl he wants.’
Peter smiled at the flattery and took a swallow of beer. That isn’t entirely unlikely, in fact. Then Peter darkened a little. There were actually drawbacks to that too. Like with Linda yesterday, after she had seen him with Sandra. She had called and bombarded him: she had cried and screamed; she had apparently not understood that Peter hadn’t promised anything. She had thought that she was his girlfriend. He didn’t tell Matt that Linda had ‘ended it’ because he’d been ‘unfaithful with that plastic bimbo’.
‘Hey, Peter!’ Matt blurted out, already in a better mood. ‘I know – let’s make a bet! The next girl who comes through the door! Check it out, check it…’ He made a dramatic noise like the filmmakers used in Jaws. ‘HER!’
It was Vera who came in. Completely unexpectedly. Peter had been out at least once a week all fall, and he had never seen her out before. She was in the company of Cissi and moved carefully through the throng of people. Her hair was loose and she was wearing jeans and an ivory blouse with brown embroidery that showed off her collarbones. Peter’s pulse quickened. Matt had also discovered that Exhibit A, the chosen guinea pig, was their dormitory mate, and he smiled.
‘Oh, no, that doesn’t count. That’s Vera. I stand corrected. Not all of them prefer you, you know. You can get any girl you want, except Vera. She thinks you’re a… Oh, what was it? Spaller?’ He looked questioningly at Peter as he used the strange word.
Peter had to exercise enormous concentration to hear Matt, but the last part of what he said was drowned out by the increasingly loud music.
‘What? What did you say?’ shouted Peter.
Matt turned toward his friend and repeated himself slowly and clearly directly into Peter’s ear: ‘Any girl you want, except Vera!’
Matt’s yelling hurt his ear, and Peter shuddered.
‘Did Vera tell you what she thinks of me?’
Matt nodded.
‘But what did you say she said? ‘Sprawler’?’
‘No. Spaller,’ said Matt in his broad Sheffield accent.
‘Spaller? What does that mean?’
‘You tell me – you’re the one who’s Swedish!’
Now Matt’s attention shifted to the right. An interesting blonde was approaching. Peter saw Matt summon up the courage to try again.
‘Hi! Fancy meeting you here!’ said Matt, using the Swedish verb stöta på.
The girl stared at Matt before she quickly fled to another part of the bar.
‘Whoops!’ an involuntary grin broke out on Peter’s face. ‘You need to put the accent on the little word – stöta på – because then it means, like, “bump into”, otherwise it means… uh, “hit on”.’ He touched Matt on the arm in a gesture of brotherly affection, and then went off to see where Vera was.
The sorrowful Englishman remained alone at the bar, mumbling down into his glass. ‘Stöta på not stöta på? God, they’re picky.’
For some reason it felt like Vera kept slipping away from him. She wasn’t like other women, who seemed to be drawn to him. That made the challenge even greater and something like a competitive streak had awoken inside him. But he knew a place where she would be forced to stay for hours, where they would ‘meet the network in a suitably formal context’, as Sturesson had expressed it when he informed him that Tomas Lern preferred not to join the project, and that it was splendid that Peter could help out on such short notice. Peter had looked for her during the graduation ceremony, had hoped to sit near her, but he had realized too late that she had skipped that part. To absolutely no purpose, Peter had suffered through four hours of ‘Take the ring… Take the hat… Farewell,’ painfully struggling against drowsiness as a soporific number of strangers proudly wed themselves to Knowledge.
But then the evening came. He saw her at once in the sea of buzzing people in party clothes. Vera had hatched like a butterfly when she took off her dark coat and revealed her slim arms and a shimmering, dark green, full-length dress. Boredom and drowsiness disappeared. Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad evening after all?
He followed her at a distance. The messy bohemian hairstyle exposed her small, protruding, slightly pointed ears. At the sides, her dark hair was pinned up with white flowers, while other curls fell untamed between her girlish shoulder blades. Vera found Cissi in the crowd, took a small flat-bread canapé and a glass of champagne spiked with cloudberry liquor. Cissi looked good this evening, Peter noted as he helped himself to food further down the buffet. She had done something unusual with her red hair, and she was wearing a gold dress befitting a film star.
Like most of the other young men in the room, Peter was in a black suit and tie. It was that or white tie and tails for the men. When Peter saw Sturesson and Sparre on the other side of the hors d’oeuvre buffet, chatting with other