A Private Haunting (3 page)

Orange light beyond closed eyes. Don't open them, Jonas, don't turn the soft glow into the hard yellow dazzle of the morning sun. He still wanted the dream. To let in the light was to lose it.

He was back in the Beaujolais, a cartoon-coloured return to his first job after getting sick of the building sites of Copenhagen and drifting south, west. Acres of Gamay grapes, an infinity. A blood orange sun like malevolence made visible. He was picking impossibly fast, his hands a blur, overflowing baskets lining up. As he moved along the vines he heard a whimpering, somewhere near. The noise began to put him off, hands slowing, trying to place the sound.

Axel Johansson appeared, ten years old, telling him to pick up the pace, it was being
noticed
. But Jonas had recognised the sound and stopped picking altogether. The klaxon started in the distance and he saw the black uniforms hurrying down his row. He ran into the vines, following the whimpers and found it, a rabbit in a snare, whimpering louder when it saw him.

Then the uniforms were beside him, laughing at the rabbit, great belly laughs like they'd never seen anything so funny. The rabbit's tongue lolled as Jonas dug his fingers under the wire around its neck, blood on his hands and now an uncanny, human-like scream, little feet pumping the air as he finally managed to get the wire free.
Leave it
, the uniforms shouted, suddenly furious. But Jonas kept his eyes fixed on the rabbit because he knew if he even blinked it would not be an animal but a child, bloodied and dying on the ground.

Then, as ever, he blinked.

Jonas opened his eyes. He'd dreamed about the rabbit for decades, the one he had shot with Axel's .22, wounding it horribly but not killing it. Axel had to finish it off, holding the rifle one-handed like Schwarzenegger, putting a slug right through its eye. For a long time the dream had locked into this gruesome metamorphosis from rabbit to child. Such was the price.

* * *

‘How's the head?'

Eggers ignored him.

He'd picked Jonas up forty minutes late, said nothing on the drive to the stones and now slumped beside him like a bayoneted dummy. Boss Hogg had sent them to check the tar and clear the cones. 9 am they'd got there and now ten. Eggers's fault they hadn't left the truck.

‘
Jackie
.'

‘What! What do you want?'

‘How's the head?'

‘Why? Why do you need to know that?'

‘Just concerned.'

‘The Nigerians are still partying,' muttered Eggers.

‘Why Nigerians?'

‘They're noisy.'

‘So are lots of people. You being racist?'

‘You think I'm being racist?'

‘Maybe. Maybe I think you're being racist.'

‘Fine. Just leave me alone.'

‘Italians are noisy too.'

‘Oh for Christ sake.'

‘Swedes might be the worst though. I remember this one time on holiday down by Varberg when we –'

‘Shut up!'

‘So you don't want it, then?'

‘What?'

‘A little pull-you-up.'

‘What are you
talking
about?'

‘Sorry, sorry, a
pick
-you-up.' It amused him. Getting words wrong deliberately, just to annoy Eggers.

‘I'm not listening to you anymore.'

Jonas reached into his rucksack and, with a flourish, produced the bottle of
akevitt
. ‘But it's
Jonsok
!'

‘The hell is
Jonsok
?'

‘Don't you listen to anything I say?'

‘Give it here then.'

Eggers took the bottle. And soon as he did sip his face drained. For a while he sat very still and very quiet. Jonas awaited the barf but Eggers kept it down. He took another sip, another.

By ten thirty Eggers was drunk again. Jonas watched him clamber onto one of the stones, shouting
I'm sitting on a standing
stone, I'm
sitting
on a
standing
stone!
He gave Boss Hogg a wide berth when he appeared in the pick-up around midday and told them to
get
the fuckin site cleared this side of Christmas, ok?
They nodded, watched him go and ignored him.

 

Jonas walked the hedgerows. He filled another bag with elderflowers and dozed in the circle, waking to the sure sense of being watched. Just echoes, no one there but the gnarly old stones and a reinvigorated Eggers, dancing alone on the far side of the circle, the truck radio blaring.

The dream drifted back. The rabbit and the child, the blood, all that was expected. But Axel Johansson? Jonas hadn't thought of him in a long time. His first true friend. Inseparable at primary school, they drifted apart at secondary. By their final year they contemplated each other across a distance they would never again bridge. The poignancy was apparent even to a seventeen-year-old Jonas, whose default setting was ruthless condescension.

‘Meatloaf!' shouted Eggers.

‘No. Too theatrical. Sounds like a West End show.'

‘Not the music, you twat! The food. Tonight. You making meatloaf?'

‘Wait and see.'

Jonas stacked the traffic cones. Neat piles of five. How satisfying it would be if every aspect of his life slotted away like that. It must be possible to achieve a generalised neatness. He had the ability. Take
Jonsok
, the care he took with the
smorgasbord
, the smoked salmon and pickled herring, Jarlsb
erg and
knekkebrod
. Each element was set out just so.

He learned this from his mother, who spent hours, days even, preparing the food then fled before the gannets descended. She'd head down to the beach to sit and watch the sea, the bonfires. His father would come staggering along drunk, or maybe just the loose pebbles giving way under his feet. He remembered watching them, hand in hand in silhouette, disappearing into blue falling night, a secret so open he had no way of grasping it. Their affection was embarrassing, a first glimpse of an unsettling universe he knew nothing about.

Axel once noticed them kissing. ‘Look, Jonas,
look
, do you think they're going to have sex?'

Ah, Axel. A happy-go-lucky boy, stilled by adolescence like the night extinguished birdsong. Yet an unexpected teenage hit with the ladies. Jonas remembered him with girl after girl, arm in arm on the lunch hour promenade. Not the top level chicks but the Cs and Ds, the lesser-noticed, the plainer and the gauche, who Jonas found out would bloom late and well, streaking past those whose beauty peaked at sixteen and downhill ever faster from there.

A reunion was in order!

Follow the songline, revisit the tales. Get back home and onto Facebook, search down Axel Johansson and pick up the phone. Imagine the delight on the end of the line as memory's flashbulbs began to pop: the farmer's gate falling, falling,
down
, dumping them in the mud and cow shit; the button they tied to a string and taped to old Zetterlund's window, tip-tapping from the dark; his father telling him
this
isn't a second bloody home for Axel.

Jonas felt a surprising heat in his cheeks. Still that anger towards his father, thousands of days gone by. He hated telling Axel to go home because home was a frightening place. His dad worked the boats. A big guy.
A fisherman
and a fighter
, he told Jonas once, when he was still allowed to go round, before Axel's mum spent a week in hospital. Anyway, getting in touch with Axel was ridiculous, the sudden brain-fart a treacherous mix of too many hours in the midsummer sun, the guilt of passed time and some subconscious desire to atone for not even saying goodbye when he left for university in Oslo.

The past. It sucked like the tide. But what are you left with when the waves recede? Empty shells in an open hand. He thought about the sea as he threw the last of the cone stacks in the back of the Iveco and drove up the road to pick up a suddenly re-appeared Eggers.

‘I finished the booze.'

‘Where have you been?'

‘I climbed a tree. I haven't climbed a tree in
yonks
.'

‘What kind of tree was it?'

‘Big one. Big tall fucker with leaves.'

‘Leaves, eh?'

‘It's a
tree
innit?' He started to laugh.

He couldn't imagine Eggers doing nostalgia. You had to leave home for that but Eggers never had. Only distance created the melancholy, like thoughts of the sea made Jonas again think of his father, tumbling through his childhood like a plastic bag on a winter beach. The only thing Eggers got melancholy about was when the free show ended on the sex-cams.

‘So what about it? Is there gonna be meatloaf or not?'

‘You'll have to wait.'

‘Tell me or I won't come!'

‘You always come.'

‘Not this time!'

Jonas smiled. Today, he liked Eggers. Rather, at this precise moment of today, he liked Eggers.

Later, it may be different. His thoughts of Eggers ranged in a spectrum from deep hate to horror to distaste to neutrality to
whatever
to like to delight to love. Right now, perhaps, as Jonas drove to the depot, glancing at Eggers with his feet on the dashboard, a cigarette and a boozy smile, pointing out this place and that, perhaps right now
like
was edging into
delight
.

How could it be otherwise? The afternoon
was
a delight, the yellow fields and the old pubs, the limestone cottages and the hedgerows. It felt like belonging and belonging was good. If he mined a deeper sense of it from Eggers, the man who had never left here, then strike down the fool who sought happiness in a place that once wasn't his home but now was.

‘I like this place,' he told Eggers.

Eggers looked at him. ‘And?'

‘I just do.'

‘What the fuck do you want me to do about it?'

‘Nothing!'

‘Knob end.'

But Eggers was laughing and Jonas was laughing and he could
see
it,
belonging
, not just in Eggers but later on, in the warmth in Lomax the butcher's eyes as he handed over the hamper of meat and fish, and in the banter with the off-licence boys as they loaded the beer slabs into the cab of the truck. Commitment to a place. It was a practice. Just ask Li Po. But you can no more belong to a new place in a few months than you can make fire with damp tinder. And
yessir
, Jonas knew how to make fire. All those evenings round at Haakon's and Jonas's parents with no idea; burning the fingertips, honing the craft under the big man's expert eye.

* * *

Cannonball Adderley welcomed the first six guests. Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz the next seven. Just after 9 pm Sun Ra sound-tracked the breaking of the party record. Sixteen people!

Then more people. And
more
. Jonas beamed and stopped counting because he didn't need to. It pleased him on a near-molecular level to see these people enjoying themselves, eating at the
smorgasbord
. The six cases of Ringnes beer the off-licence had sourced were fast-disappearing. His buzz was already respectable and two
akevitt
shots with a red-faced man whom he'd seen but never spoken to gave it an edge of impregnability.

‘I'm Jonas.'

‘I know you are. I'm Dave, work in The Hand and Shears.'

‘Good to know you Dave.'

‘Good to know the Viking.'

Jonas saw the smirk but decided it wasn't a smirk. There was no need for it, and because there was no need it couldn't have happened. He wanted to like all these people, every couple and clique, the kids from The Hub, trying not to enjoy themselves too much; the parental units at an appraising distance; Greg and Wendy, the permanent flush revealing the obvious storyline; Eggers and the pub boys, half-cut when they arrived and sawn through by nine; the primly woollen Grandees of Village Life like Mrs Hawthorne from the village hall committee.

‘You will not believe
this
,' said Mrs H.

The little group glanced forlornly at their empty glasses and across at the winking drinks. As one, they patiently turned their faces. Mrs Hawthorne, commanding obedience since 1958.

‘I was at Sands Hill doing a risk assessment for the Beaver Cub walk. I parked the car in the car park and – '

‘
Careful
,' said some innocent interloper who didn't know the protocol. ‘I was there once and you – '

‘
Anyway
. It was only four o'clock but there were a few cars, more than I would have thought. Then I noticed there were a few men huddled round one car. When I got a bit closer I saw a girl with hardly any clothes. On her knees and.... can you
imagine
? How could I take the Beavers there?'

Glances were exchanged.

‘
Beavers
don't belong in a place like that.'

Feet were looked at.

‘Beavers should
not
be exposed to
that
.'

Jonas had to flee. An
instant classic
, a story that people would tell for years and it happened
at his party
, that time Granny Hawthorne, because she must be called Granny even if no one called her that and maybe Jonas would start it off, another tradition born of the Norwegian, he of the parties, the
nickname giver
, so Granny Hawthorne said
beaver
a dozen times until silenced by a sudden explosion of laughter. To this day she'd have no idea why.

‘Uncle Jonas.'

He gave Lacey a sideways glance. She'd appeared half an hour ago, alone, no sign of her parents. Fourteen was a bit old for the uncle thing. He wondered if she was mocking him.

‘Is it time yet?'

The wheedling little girl routine annoyed him, the flirty edge a touch unsettling.