Erotic Refugees (3 page)

“
Okay, you're right. I'm
just out of practise.”

“
What practise? Just open
your mouth and talk! You have one of the sexiest accents on earth,
so use it. Just don’t speak Swedish and you’ll be fine.”

“
Sexy?” Eoin said,
looking up. “Really?” This was news to him, as he'd never
considered his accent particularly sexy. It was just a fairly
standard Irish accent, nothing as exotic as a Cork or even a Dublin
accent. It had never been notable in Ireland, naturally, and he'd
not been single long enough in Sweden to think much about it.
Perhaps this was just a quirk of Alice's. Maybe she thought Irish
accents were the hottest thing ever, but maybe other women didn't
notice or care?

He went through quite a few
seconds of internal dialogue until he picked up on the rest of what
Alice had said. He glowered at her.

“
Wait, you're saying my
Swedish is bad?”

Alice matched his glower and
added some stern. “Yes Eoin, I am. Not bad for having only been
here four years, but still fairly awful. You should always use
English, and keep the Swedish locked away, to be used in case of
emergency. And if you do the ladies will pay attention, I promise
you.”

Damien was quiet now, his head
pressed against Eoin’s chest. The little boy’s hair, despite hours
of frantic running around, was still sweet-smelling. Damien ruffled
it gently and watched as the three mums passed on their way out of
the park. They were walking three abreast with their buggies in a
line before them. Then Middle Mum threw a casual glance in Eoin's
direction. Her eyes lingered, for only a second, but linger they
undoubtedly did. He could only watch as they exited the park,
turned the corner up Skånegatan and disappeared from view.

Alice gave him a fierce look
and Eoin sighed.

“
I know, I know! But
they're probably not even single.”

“
What? Eoin, you throw a
rock in this park, you'll hit a dozen single mothers. Stockholm is
the world capital of separated parents. They probably have it on a
little brass plate somewhere for the tourists. You could not be
single in a better place!”

“
I suppose,” Eoin said, still
thinking of the luscious silhouette of Middle Mum. “But how am I
supposed to meet anyone? When I don't have Damien I work extra, and
when I do, I'm stuck at home. Not much time for socialising, is
there?”

Alice shoved her notebook at
him. “Exactly! So this is perfect for you! You find women online,
you chat them up when you have Damien, and when you’re free you go
out and meet them. In fact, how have you not done this up to now?
You have Facebook, right? And what is Facebook for if not for
massive flirting? Come on Eoin, you need to get out there and get
yourself some dates!”

Eoin shivered. He'd never been
one for dates, even back before he'd met Jenny. All the
game-playing, and trying to pick up on what the other person meant,
and the hysterical charm and effort … no thanks. He didn't have
that kind of energy any more, and probably never did.

The clouds covering the sun
were becoming grey and threatening. Alice stood and made her way
over to Nils, who was still amusing himself inside the jeep. His
big sister Rosa was busy with a bucket and a large water puddle
close by. Eoin held Damien’s hand and headed that way too to help
pick up their scattered things.

Alice manoeuvred Nils into the
buggy and installed Rosa on the little skateboard device behind.
The sky was growing darker but few of the other park visitors
seemed in the mood to leave. Eoin studied them as they walked by.
They were mostly in their teens and early twenties, and he felt a
burst of longing for the kind of life they had. They were young,
attractive and privileged, and all they had on their minds was how
to fix their hair, and where they would be going on Saturday night,
and which bed they might wake up in on Sunday morning.

He wondered if they appreciated
what they had now, and if they really understood how fast it would
all disappear.

“
Long walk?” said
Alice.

“
Long walk,” Eoin agreed.
“Then I'll fix you all some home-made pizza, if you're
interested.”

“
Pizza!” Rosa said and
turned a beaming smile in Eoin's direction.

“
Great,” Alice said.
“We'll rent an annoying kid's movie. And then plan how to advertise
your presence on the Internet and get you the girl of your
dreams.”

She leaned closer and added, in
a conspiratorial whisper: “Before you explode from your obvious
lack of sex and I get stuck with the mess.”

Eoin gave a meek grin. He
followed after Alice's nicely toned bottom, trying to imagine all
of the other nicely toned bottoms that might be lying in wait in
some distant and poorly-lit corner of the Internet. Bottoms with
his name on them.

In a very odd and slightly
pervy manner of speaking.

Chapter
4

Rob had booked a washing time
for fifteen-zero-zero. This required that he stay indoors the whole
morning planning his laundry. He had to separate his whites from
his colours, his sixties from his forties, his wool from his other
stuff. He’d also have to hunt under the bed and locate every
fragment of errant underwear, even the ones that clearly weren't
his.

Sure, it wasn't much to fill a
whole day with, but after two weeks of not working Rob's threshold
for activity of any kind was rather low. And to be honest he wasn't
really trying that hard for a new job either. He didn't need to, as
he would be paid eighty percent of his old wages to keep him going.
Not to mention the fantastic Internet idea he would be filling all
of his spare time with. That and Guinness.

So the temptation to take it
easy was pretty strong and Rob was a big fan of temptation of any
kind, generally giving it the full benefit of the doubt.

He slouched from his living
room to his kitchen in his usual stay-at-home outfit of boxers and
a ragged t-shirt. His flat wasn't large and consisted of a single
living room/bedroom and a separate small kitchen with a table
capable of seating four rather slim and unfussy guests. But the
size of the place was not really a problem because, apart from the
occasional lady invited home from one of Stockholm's many bars in
the wee hours of the morning, there was usually just him in it.

He fixed a mug of instant
coffee then collected the newspaper from where it had been shoved
through the front door. He made his way back to the living room and
sat down on the bed with a contented sigh, averting his gaze from
the pile of clothes lying in a state of sad semi-organisation.

With a happy smile he sipped at
his coffee, and blew on it, and watched the blobs dissolve, and
then sipped again.

Just as he was entering that
state of perfect distraction brought on by idleness, caffeine and
sitting cross-legged on something soft, the phone rang. Rob stared
at it accusingly, wondering once again why he still had a home
telephone. He allowed it four rings before he carefully transferred
the coffee mug to a pile of old newspapers and snatched up the
receiver.

“
Yeah?”

“
Hello?” said a confused
voice, as if the owner of that voice was worried that it had called
the Royal Castle by mistake, and not an apartment where only one
person lived. And where that person was the only one who would ever
answer that particular telephone, ever.

Rob slapped a hand silently to
his face and took a deep breath.

“
Oh hi mom.”

Without further preamble, Rob's
mother started to talk and Rob did his best to listen. This wasn't
easy, as the news from home generally consisted of people Rob
vaguely knew who'd contracted cancer, produced an offspring,
mangled a limb, left the country, or died in any number of horrible
ways. A wedding or two might occasionally be mentioned but usually
it was all fairly grim stuff.

“
Mmm,” Rob said, reading
his paper and doing his best to keep the volume of the page-turning
low. His mother pressed on, and after the last
baby-with-a-deadly-illness had been catalogued she turned to the
next phase of the conversation, the one that Rob looked forward to
the least. The How-to-fix-Rob's-life phase.

This generally required a bit
more than an occasional grunt from Rob as he didn’t want to
inadvertently mutter “yeah” to some maternal suggestion he hadn't
really heard. So he did his absolute best to pay attention.

“
No really mum, there's
lots of jobs. Loads. No I won't be back in the bar. No, it's not a
crash, more like a cleaning out, ye know? And I don't work in a
bank, do I? Yeah, they do have the dole over here. It's better
actually. No mom, I shouldn’t have stayed in school. No, I
shouldn't, and I don't care how good Cousin Mike is doing. He's a
tit anyway, shure you complain about him all the time!”

Rob, although he would have
loved to cut the conversation short, felt it was his sacred duty to
allow his mother the occasional rummage through his life, just to
give her the impression that she could sort things out for him. In
fact, by his second day of unemployment, he had already formulated
his first rule of losing your job—don't tell your mother because
she will bug you to distraction and send you every clipping she
finds with any mention of work on it, even ones for which you are
hilariously unsuited and unqualified.

Rob, still making the
occasional affirmative noise, shifted his gaze from the bed to the
window. It was a nice May day outside, a bit cloudy but bright
enough. Later on he might head on down to the Old Town and grab
something to eat, and see if anything was happening at Malone’s. Of
course there was always something happening at Malone’s, so there
was little risk he'd stick his nose in the door, find it
insufferably boring and head back home again. That was one of the
true joys of being unemployed—the right to hang out in Irish bars
on a weekday.

“—
and then she really
wants a job, so we decided she might go over and visit you for a
while and see what's there—”

Rob's attention was suddenly
jerked back to the here and now. He pressed the receiver to his
ear. What had she just said?

“
And I told her to go to
university but she said no, it's better to get into work as soon
as—”

“
Wait, hang on there
mum,” he said. “Just a second. Who's maybe coming over to visit
me?”

“
Your sister Karen! Who
else would I be talking about?”

Rob sat up. He swung his legs
over the side of the bed and planted his feet firmly on the floor.
He passed the receiver to his right hand.

“
Karen? Karen wants to
come here? But”—he threw a glance around his small and messy
flat—“it's feckin' tiny here, there's no way I've room for someone
else!”

“
Well she's not that big,
and it won't be for long, just until she gets a job and finds her
own place.”

“
Her own place? Mom, this
is Stockholm, not Bally Go Backwards! You don't just buy the paper
and call the ads, it's not like that here! It's really hard
to—”

“Robert,” his mother said, switching to her
rarely-used but brutally effective matriarch voice. “If your sister
wants to come over then I think you should be happy about it. I
mean, it can't be easy over there, having no family.”

He sighed. “When?” he said.

“
In a month or two. She's
already talked to some companies in Stockholm. I think she has a
few interviews fixed.”

“
What, in a month or two?
But—”

“
I'll get her to call
you, Robert. And I want you to take care of her. She is your little
sister, after all. And I'll be checking up on you to make sure you
do.”

“
Right then,” Rob said
through gritted teeth. “Fine.”

His mother rounded off the
conversation and Rob, with a sigh of relief, put down the receiver.
He scratched his head as he allowed the news to soak in.

Karen? Looking for a job in
another country? And she had already fixed interviews? He just
couldn't grasp it.

Could this be the same sister
who regularly lost her shoes at the swimming pool? Who'd managed to
drop her library books in the fire on two separate occasions? And
who could never manage to be less than thirty minutes late for
anything, including weddings, funerals and her own eighteenth
birthday party?

Rob realised he had very little
room for manoeuvre. His mother still swung the heavy fists in the
family and although she didn't put her foot down very often, when
she did they made a deep and resounding boom and there was nothing
at all that could be done about it.

Having Karen in his place also
meant that there would be even more washing—vastly more if his
experience of living with women had been anything to go by. He
glared at his washing pile and tried to imagine it twice as large.
No, three times as large, with the added complexity of things that
were pink, and things that needed hand-washing, and things that
could not be tumble dried, and things that required gentle
scrubbing in unicorn spit in a forest glade at midnight.

Well, there was nothing for it
except to start planning. He needed to work out the quickest way to
find a flat—or a room, or a cupboard, anything at all really—for an
over-enthusiastic nineteen-year-old fresh from the dales of Ireland
before she informed his whole family that he was the Swedish King
of the Slackers.

He glared at the washing pile
once more and decided that there was nothing else for it. He would
have to give the whole thing a miss and head into town early. That
was the only feasible solution. Maybe then, after a bracing stroll,
a cappuccino, a platter of spare ribs, and a refreshing Guinness at
Malone’s, he would decide what the hell he was going to do about
the whole bloody unnecessary mess.