The Invoice Read Online Free

anywhere. She’d run out of patience for excuses and explanations. I could hear voices in the background, and got the impression that my time was running out.
    “Let me put it like this: Have you ever been in love?”
    “Er, yes.”
    “When?”
    “A few times, I suppose.”
    “More than once, then?”
    “Yes. I mean, well, once properly.”
    She was running on autopilot. Probably already thinking about the next conversation. But she still sounded friendly, in a professional way. “There, you see, you must have experienced some wonderful things.”
    I thought about Sunita, whom I had been with for several years back in the nineties. A small wave of memories coursed through my body. A pang of melancholy.
    “Yes, I suppose so,” I said.
    She was obviously in a hurry to hang up now, there was no mistaking it. As if she had suddenly realized that we had exceeded our allotted time. As if it had struck her that she didn’t have time to make idle conversation with me.
    “Well, if there’s nothing else, thank you for calling.”
    “Hang on a moment,” I said. “How do I…? What can I do?”
    She must have loads of calls waiting.
    Maybe she could see the constantly rising number of people in the queue. She probably had a boss who was eager for her to move on. She was talking faster now.
    “Have you checked with your bank?”
    “No, but…It doesn’t really seem very likely that I…”
    “No, I suppose not.”
    She sighed audibly, and someone said something in the office where she was sitting.
    “Do you know what?” she said. “Take a thorough look at your finances in peace and quiet—people usually manage to come up with something—and then call me again.”
    “But,” I said, “the queue to get through is really long…”
    “You can have my direct number.”
    “Okay.”
    I got her number and wrote it on the bottom of the ice-cream tub.
    “My name’s Maud,” she said.
    We hung up and I sat there for a long time with the phone in my hand. The sun had passed behind a cloud. The warm ray of light across my knees was no longer there.

I could hear ringing in my ears. The sort of sound you get after a concert or a sinus infection. I’m not sure when it started. Maybe it was just that long phone call. It was already as hot as Greece inside the apartment. And I knew it was only going to get hotter when the sun moved completely round to this side of the building later in the afternoon. I wondered if it was best to carry on leaving the windows open, or if I was only letting in more heat. An overwhelming feeling of tiredness washed over me. I hauled myself up onto the sofa, thinking that somewhere at the back of my mind I’d always had an inkling about this. The feeling that life couldn’t really be this simple.
    I leaned back, took some deep breaths, and felt a weak breeze just about reach me as I sat there on the sofa. I surrendered to the heavy, numbing tiredness and felt myself slowly drift from consciousness and into a wonderful drowsiness where time and space and thought gradually dissolved. After a while I fell asleep, and only woke up when my phone buzzed.
    It was a text from Roger.
Call me
, it said. But I didn’t feel like calling. Not just then.
    I stretched out my legs and lay back on the sofa. The fabric was warm. I felt warm, right down to the roots of my hair. Everything was warm. For a brief moment I got the impression that everything was just a dream, until I caught sight of the ice-cream tub and the number written on the bottom. All of a sudden it felt pretty irresponsible that I’d gone out to buy ice cream when my financial situation was so precarious.
    —
    I had a bit of a headache when I stood up and wandered aimlessly round the apartment until I finally ended up in front of my collection of vinyl records. What could they be worth? There were quite a few genuine collector’s items. I had a number of limited-edition Blu-ray films, and then there were my instruments, of course, but no