Chapter 4
Two hours later, Emelie was back in her car on the ferry heading back towards the mainland.
She wasn’t wearing tights anymore; she had pulled them off and thrown them away.
She really wasn’t much of a tights girl, but she had wanted to make a proper first impression.
She wasn’t so sure on who exactly. When she was working as a housekeeping manager at the city hotel in V?xjo, tights were mandatory, and she hated it.
They were itchy and way too warm. No, it was nice to get rid of them.
She was thinking about the house on Sardinon.
Her big house. Andreas wasn’t sure about exactly how big the house was, but it was probably written down somewhere.
She did know it was large enough to house a family bigger than hers.
If you managed to remove all of the Christmas stuff, of course.
She sighed and rolled down the window. A fresh, salty breeze found its way into the car, cooling her down.
She lifted her fringe and put her head out of the window to get more of the fresh air.
While she had been in the house just walking around, feeling astonished by the sheer amount of Christmas decorations, Linn and Sara had texted her several times.
“What is it like?”
“Is it big?”
“Is it a shack that needs to be sold ASAP?”
“How’s the hottie?”
“Hello??”
She hadn’t had the energy to answer. How was she going to explain the total and utter Christmas chaos that reigned in Astrid’s house?
Her house, she corrected herself and stroked her hand over her face.
She had taken lots of pictures and now her phone was full of Santas, sleighs, Lucia brides and elves, so that they could see for themselves when she returned.
The ferry was almost back at the shore and, right before she started the car, she sent a text message to her friend and her eldest daughter:
“On my way home, will tell you everything once I get there. Hugs.”
She started the car and prayed to some car god that her brown heap of metal Peugeot would manage to take her all the way home.
The following day, she told Linn, Liv and Linnea about her trip.
The younger girls thought that it was amazing to have a Christmas house and thought that they should keep everything exactly the way it was and move in as soon as possible.
Emelie figured that in their mind, there was a Santa standing in the lawn outside the house, ready to fulfil their every wish of ponies and new ice skates.
Sara and Linn were both as surprised as she had been and still was, and no one really had a good solution to what she should do with the place.
“If you want to sell it, you will need to clear out all Christmas stuff. That’s some job,” Sara said as she was scrolling through Emelie’s pictures on the phone.
“But if you keep it, you will also need to clean up,” Linn said, peeking over Sara’s shoulder. Emelie dropped down at the kitchen table, her head in her hands.
“I knooow, it’s just so insane!”
Then they had discussed different scenarios regarding the Christmas decorations.
Could they be tossed? Sold? Were they worth anything?
And did she want to live there? Maybe just during summer?
What did it actually cost to have a house like that?
When Emelie went to bed that night, her thoughts were spinning even faster than before, and she had no idea what to do.
She pushed the thoughts away and tried to focus on work tomorrow and what to expect there.
The next morning, Emelie packed her wallet and sneakers into her backpack and looked at Linn, who was still sitting at the kitchen table with a half-finished sandwich in front of her.
“Come on, we need to leave. It’s your first day at the summer job. You don’t want to be late, do you?”
“Bloody hell, this is bonkers”, Linn said, emphasising the last word.
She was looking through all the pictures in Emelie’s phone for the fourth time.
“I mean, where did the old lady find all this stuff? It’s nuts” she said, turning the phone around in order to get a better look.
“I don’t know, and it didn’t seem like Andreas did either”, Emelie said.
Linn sighed and slowly started moving towards the hallway. The prospect of working as a cleaner at the City Hotel wasn’t exactly exciting, but still, it was a job.
“Was he fit?”
Emelie had one hand on the door handle and the younger girls were already in the car, waiting.
“What? Who?”
Linn rolled her eyes.
“Christ…Andreas of course!”
“Heck, I don’t know. He looked like a normal bloke. Or you know, like a 30-something kind of bloke that grew up on a west coast island, you know, moped with a loading platform, dungarees, no cap though,” she said, looking at her daughter who was slowly tying her sneakers.
“Do you think it would be possible to live there? I mean, if you managed to clear away all the Christmas stuff?” Linn said, standing up straight.
Emelie chuckled. Living there? The thought of it was absurd. Or was it?
At work it was the same mess as always during summer.
The most reliable cleaners were all on holiday and had been replaced by young, seasonal workers that had no idea how anything worked and didn’t really care.
They were only there to make money and didn’t have much appreciation for the hotel or its guests.
At the same time, the hotel was fully booked, and the tourists were flocking in with all their questions and requests: breakfast without nuts, lactose and gluten, extra pillows and duvets, thicker blinds, because the sun was just soo bright, and how come the hotel didn’t offer the same tv-channels as the ones they had at home? ”
“Oh yes, I wonder why…” Emelie sighed to herself as she rushed through the corridors on her way to fetch more pillows.
In the lift down to her office, she got to thinking about her house again.
She hadn’t told anyone but Sara and the girls about it.
Not even her mother. Most of all, she didn’t want to worry her, and she also wished to avoid all the questions that she still couldn’t answer yet.
Emelie shut herself in her office that most of all resembled a cleaning storage room and dropped down in front of her computer.
Suddenly the door flew open, and Linn came rushing in.
“I don’t want to work for another second in this disgusting place”, she yelled, and Emelie was abruptly awoken from her thoughts.
Her daughter was shaking, and tears were streaming down her face, drawing black mascara lines on her cheeks. Emelie rushed over and put her arms around her.
“But love, what’s the matter?”
“It was a disgusting old man in one of the rooms…” she sobbed.
“What? What are you saying? Now?”
Linn nodded and wiped away her tears with the side of her hand.
“Sit down, love, and tell me exactly what happened”, she said, helping Linn sit down in the chair by the desk.
Linn sat down and Emelie squatted in front of her, stroking her daughter’s leg as Linn’s breathing returned to normal.
“I came into room 328 and there was a guest in there, an old guy. I said that I could just come back later, but he said that it was okay. It felt a bit uncomfortable, because I didn’t feel like cleaning when he was there, but I figured I would do as he said.
Then he came over to me and put a hand on my bum and said that I could get a big tip if we had some fun.
Do you get it? ‘Some fun’, bloody hell it was so disgusting,” Linn said, fizzing with anger.
Before Emelie had the time to say anything, Linn continued:”
“I don’t want to work here for another day, Christ, old men are so disgusting, it’s revolting”, she said with emphasis.
“But love, take the rest of the day off and come back tomorrow. Not all guests are like that, you know, you were just unlucky.”
Linn buried her face in her hands and cried.
“No, I will never be able to walk into a hotel room after this. How will I ever feel safe? You are supposed to feel safe at your workplace, aren’t you?
Can’t we just take an early holiday and just go somewhere?
I know, how about the Christmas house? We can live there over summer. I just want to get out of here…”
Emelie held Linn and let her calm down. She eventually dried her tears and Emelie told her to go back home.
She walked her daughter to the changing room and out through the back door.
As she was walking back to her office, she thought about how to handle the situation.
And the Christmas house? No, they couldn’t live there.
That same evening, all four of them curled up in the sofa. Emelie had made popcorn and they had all decided to watch Frozen which was a family favourite.
Linn pulled her legs up, hugging them and leaned into her mother’s arms.
“Did you have a chat with the guest?”
She was whispering so as not to disturb her sisters who were sitting closely together on the other end of the corner sofa with a blue fleece blanket around their shoulders and a big bowl of popcorn between them.
Emelie shook her head. He had left before she had gotten ahold of him, but Emelie had told her supervisor what had happened, and it was going to be dealt with.
“Mum, I just cannot work there anymore”, Linn said to her with a tiny voice.
Liv turned towards Linn.
“Are you not going to work for mum anymore? Why not?”
Linn stroked her arm.
“Something happened today that wasn’t so great, so I decided not to work there anymore. But don’t worry, I will find another job”, she said. “Doesn’t Sara know the people that have the bakery on Storgatan? It would be a dream working there.”
Emelie sighed.