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  1   Her mother calls Sven is in hospital and he is not coming back He will most likely be transferred to a hospice He asks about you He can’t get out of bed He is shitting himself He lies in bed swearing I’m going to have to call you back, she says, his sister is here now   Sven had always been around, coming by with his bulldog, cracking jokes about her mother, whom he had nicknamed and seemed to like Her mother blushed and laughed They lived in neighbouring terraced houses suitable for single parents or small families He was not nice when he first moved here, but then her mother had told him off, and the two of them had been friends ever since Her mother was one of the people who had been there the longest She had arrived after her divorce, with two little children who were now adults, and now she lived alone with her cat   She too had grown fond of Sven She would fix their drinks, whenever she visited Once, just after her mother’s knee surgery, she accidentally stirred cubes from the ice pack into their sparkling wine Her mother had laughed so hard and said, let’s keep it to ourselves Sven and her mother shared a passion for traditional Danish cooking Potatoes and gravy, and something roasted She thought that she had perhaps finally created enough distance, away from home, to see it for what it was    Sven had lost his parents to cancer when he was quite young, and had been ill many times himself This was why he had decided to become an undertaker, at forty Whoever arranged his father’s funeral was sloppy; they had made mistakes, he said Small slips, but those details meant the world to Sven, and came to bother him He wanted to do it properly, perfectly He started a small business and it ran pretty smoothly with just him and an assistant for the next fifteen years   Anything for you, my dear, he said, when her