Humlin did not pick up. He sat down and tried to imagine what it would be like to have a monkey jump onto his back. But he couldn’t do it, his imagination failed him.
He didn’t hear her come out of the bedroom. She moved soundlessly.
‘Why did you go to bed?’ he asked when he saw her.
‘I was tired. I’m going now.’
‘Who are you?’
‘Tea-Bag.’
He hesitated.
‘Your passport fell out of your pocket while you were sleeping,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t help seeing that your real name is Florence.’
She laughed heartily, as if he had told a good joke.
‘It’s a fake,’ she said.
‘Where did you get it?’
‘I bought it in the camp. On the beach.’
‘What camp? Which beach?’
That was when she started telling him her story. How she had crawled up onto the Spanish shore and been caught by armed guards and albino German shepherd guard dogs.
Even the tongues hanging out of their mouths were white. I don’t know how long I was in the camp. It may have been many years, perhaps I was even born there, perhaps the beach beyond the barbed-wire fence was the sheet on which my newborn body first felt the earth and sand. I don’t know how long I was there and that is something I don’t even want to know now. But finally one day, when my desperation was greater than it had ever been, I walked down to the fence and threw away all of the stones I used to count the days. I saw how they fell in a large fan shape of lost days and nights, and then they were washed away by the waves.
I had given up all hope of ever being allowed to leave the camp. The beach onto which I had crawled no longer meant freedom to me, it was a bridge to death and I was only waiting for the day when a finger would point at me and I would have to wade out into the water and join those who were already dead at the bottom of the sea. Every day was like the space of time between two heartbeats. But suddenly there was a tall thin man who stood in front of me, a man who swayed like a palm tree, and then I heard for the first time about Sweden. I decided I had to go there because there there were people who cared about the fact that I existed.
