Blackwater (14 page)

When they had finished, he had to go to the toilet of course and he felt ashamed of that, too. But he said he had to change the water in the eel pail. In the car, he fell asleep at once and when he woke, his shirt stank so much, he noticed it himself. He pulled it off. It felt strange sitting there naked to the waist, but he couldn’t very well put his thick sweatshirt on in that heat.

They were driving westwards, so she must have been heading for the coast. They had not discussed how far he would go on with her. When he was awake, he thought he ought to say something, but he couldn’t come up with anything except to ask whether Happolati was a Finnish name. No, it wasn’t, she said, apparently making fun of him.

‘I thought you had a Finnish accent.’

She burst out laughing.

‘Never say that to a Swedish Finn! My name’s not Happolati. I just said that because you were so hungry.’

He could make nothing of it all.

‘What about your other name then? Ylja . . .’

‘You can call me Ylja. That’s good.’

Good? He didn’t have to call her anything. She kept using his name. ‘Are you hot, Johan?’ Silly, really. Ordering without looking at the menu, and wine and two desserts, then eating only a little of the salmon trout, that was upper-class. ‘Let the seat back if you like, Johan. Did you sleep well, Johan?’

They got out when they had reached the high peak and walked down across the marshland to look at the river running below the steep precipice, a hundred or two hundred metres down to the water. The small falls in the perpendicular cliff on the other side looked immobile at a distance. White clouds, stiff water spraying from the foam of greenery on the mountainsides.

She had changed into boots and was standing on the crowberry scrub at the edge, just in front of him. He didn’t know if he would dare stand like that with someone behind him. With Gudrun perhaps. But the woman stood there in her jeans and a smart but shabby jersey, practically leaning over to look down into the depths, where the water rushed out with no sound audible to them up there.

He had put on his sweatshirt, for the wind from the mountain heath was cold, but when they got back into the car, he had to take it off again. She looked at him once or twice.

She’s old, he thought. Her fair hair was coarse. Up on the mountain she had fastened it into a short ponytail with a rubber band at the back of her neck. She had a straight nose and a clean-cut chin, her lips pale, with no lipstick. She had painted her eyes. He felt peculiar when she looked at his naked chest.

‘Do you want a shirt?’ she said.

He didn’t know what to answer. He couldn’t have got his shoulders and neck into any shirt of hers. She said nothing more and he fell asleep again.

When they had got down level with the river and started along the winding roads north, she stopped by a building with the co-op sign on it. It was closed but she managed to get a man to come and open up the petrol pump. After filling up, she went inside with him and came back with a shirt, toothbrush, a cake of soap and a towel with Betty Boop on it.

‘I haven’t any money,’ he said, and he heard himself sounding angry. Nonetheless, he went down to the river and washed. The shirt was ordinary, brown-and-white striped flannel, and he felt at home in it. She had also guessed his size right. He checked that the eel was still alive and changed the water in the pail again.

He now realised he was running away but he didn’t know where they were going. She seemed able to be silent for any length of time without being embarrassed.

‘You’ve been up to some mischief,’ she said abruptly, after he had been half-asleep for a long stretch.

Mischief was a silly word. But it meant she didn’t believe him. He had told her about the well.

‘You didn’t want to be seen in the villages,’ she said. ‘But you’re beginning to feel safer now.’

He didn’t reply.

‘If you want to think things over, you can stay with us for a while.’

Who were ‘we’? Had she got a husband? They drove all that evening and finally he dared ask:

‘Have you got a cabin up here somewhere?’

‘My family have a place.’

She drove fast and quite fiercely up all the hills, taking them up into the mountains. He looked at the dashboard to see if the engine was about to boil. She was sure not to have thought about that. But the Saab kept an even temperature. The car was fairly new, the seats already shabby. Everything she was wearing and the stuff flung in the back seemed to be the kind of thing you paid an unnecessarily high price for. She was wearing shoes with straps round the back of her foot and leather heels scuffed at the back. Gudrun would never have worn shoes like that when driving. Nor would she have smoked. She knew that made him feel sick in a car.

Annie had locked the door, having no intention of going out any more. But they had to fetch water. There was a well in among the trees diagonally behind the house. The privy was directly across the road in an old barn, but they didn’t have to go over there because there was a chamber pot in the cupboard under the sink. They brought back great bunches of flowers when they went for water. She had found jam jars in the attic and in them they put wild chervil, red campion and buttercups. Mia worked with her lips pressed tight together. She was pale.

How much did she know? That there had been an accident. That was what Annie had said. Two people had been killed in an accident and they didn’t know how it had happened.

She thought Mia would ask after Dan, but she didn’t, just asked what they were going to have for breakfast. They had neither bread nor milk, and the store was closed.

They found some groceries left behind or forgotten in a cupboard by the stove, including a packet of waffle mix, so Annie said she would make pancakes for breakfast. And rosehip tea. Now they would have some cold macaroni, then go to bed.

‘It’s not night yet,’ said Mia.

‘Yes, it is. But it’s light like this up here.’

‘The sun’s shining over there.’

On the slope where the houses above Fiskebuan were, the grass was gleaming in the sun.

They dragged the iron bed into the bedroom and put it next to the other bed. There was also a rickety bedside table. Annie draped her Palestine shawl over it and put a jar of flowers beside the alarm clock. They both liked having the sound of the radio once she got it going. Then they crept into bed.

Mia lay with cold little paws on the covers. Annie rubbed them and tucked them in. The electric radiator ticked. It would soon get warmer.

The child fell asleep, pale even in her sleep. Evensong came over the radio. A clergyman said you should deliver yourself unto the night. God was in the night. In the daytime we have problems to solve, he said. At night we deliver ourselves unto God. She thought about the two young people who had gone to bed in the tent and delivered themselves unto the bright night and its god.

Then came the weather forecast and she could relax a little, it was so ordinary. The whole of this long, wet, windy country with its mountain regions and coastal areas, its lighthouses and headlands, its thousands of islands and great lakes, was now having a few hot days and mild nights. The forecast slowly ascended to the spot where they were now and went on past them to the northernmost point, to the light that never went out.

She couldn’t sleep. There were no blinds to pull down and it was still daylight inside. If she fell asleep, someone might come to the bedroom window and stand there looking in at their faces. She had drawn the cotton lace curtains across but they were no protection, the pattern too open. She got up and hung the bedspread over one window and the Palestine shawl over the other. It wasn’t long enough. The beds could also be seen from the kitchen window.

She thought about Dan not knowing anything about what had happened. They were looking for him. They were also looking for a woman called Barbro Torbjörnsson, the doctor’s wife. When they found Dan, he would come to her.

Then she noticed everything was quiet within her. She had always talked to him. That had gone on ever since they had been together.

At first, when they had not yet exchanged a single personal word, he had often said things that made her feel uncertain. She had been unable to answer, but afterwards she had thought up a continuation. She found ingenious replies and it became a conversation. A kind of conversation.

That didn’t stop when they really started talking to each other. Not even when they became lovers. On the contrary. Nor when he distrusted her. He occasionally said she was playing with him, like a mother playing forbidden games with a son. But she never showed him it was serious.

When they decided to go to Jämtland, he ought to have believed her. But the letters and telephone calls were sometimes so strange. She could hear the chill in his voice and she wept and carried on to find out what it was. Then the coins ran out at the other end.

Sometimes she thought she had had some kind of fever. She was hot and heavy from going around carrying him inside her. Whenever they met, the fierce tensions in her slackened. That was happiness. Or anyhow freedom from torment.

That was now silent. She hadn’t turned to him for over twenty-four hours. She hadn’t even noticed that the state she had lived in was over. She couldn’t believe there was any other explanation than that he was no longer out there. Was not alive.

Nerves and muscles hurt. Turning over in bed gave her a few moments’ relief, but after a while it was just as bad again. Her ear started aching if she lay on her side. She dozed off and woke thinking someone was standing over her. She screamed and Mia woke. There was no one else in the room.

‘You were dreaming, Mum,’ Mia said.

Annie could still see a blurred grey face leaning over her own. A lined, wooden face. It took a long time for her to realise it didn’t exist. She tried to think about other things; her cases of books that would come later, the big suitcase containing her linen, and the crate of china. Dan would think she had brought too much with her, and maybe the wrong things. But there was a great deal she had not been able to throw away.

She tried to think through the contents of her crates and cardboard boxes, thinking about them piece by piece and picturing them in front of her. That gradually made her doze off again. But she woke once more, her mouth dry and her head aching fiercely.

All she could see was fractured images from the night and the day that had passed. They were meaningless, yet seared behind her eyes. The police officers’ boots with reflector bands on them. White sleeping-bag feathers. Oriana Strömgren’s egg timer – a chicken made of white and yellow plastic. The face lay in wait for her all the time, that lined, wooden, primaeval face. She woke Mia and put a blanket round her.

‘We must get out of here. We’ll go to the lady up there.’

She put the other blanket round herself and they went out into the night of the birdsong they had heard through the rough window glass in which the light trembled. The sounds were loud now, pressing in on her, and she could no longer defend herself against either sounds or light.

The slope was very steep and the house up there had blank, empty windows. Mia banged on the door, thumping with her little fist. Aagot Fagerli stood there with a jersey over her nightdress, at first without her teeth in. She let them in and went ahead of them into the bedroom. Once there, she turned her back on them and took something out of a glass of water on the chair by the bed. Then her face looked filled out again. Mia looked on very carefully and asked about it afterwards. Annie would never even have noticed, had she been alone.

She was cold. Great shudderings ran through body. She seemed to be seeing details sharply, as if she had the vision of a bird of prey. But she could no longer find any order in why she was there. Why had she come to all this light. Mia’s face was so small.

‘Lie down, now,’ said the old lady to her. ‘Darn it, girl, how
sprø
you are.’ Annie would become familiar with Aagot’s voice, with its half-Norwegian speech and fairly innocuous American oaths. And the smell of spices in her privy. Spices and mustiness. A blanket and a sofa in knobbly check material, yellow and brown. A small ornamental lamp. There was a faint smell of paraffin. She switched on nothing electric. That would have been pointless in this room flooded with light. She pulled down the dark-blue blinds and let Annie lie on the sofa with the little orange dome to stare at. Aagot gave her some hot milk with some kind of liquor in it. She had sweetened it with brown honey.

Sprø
. She thought that meant frail. Inside she was like the glass in a thermos.

She could hear the stiff rustle as Mia and the old woman turned the pages of a big picture book on the kitchen table, then she dozed off.

There was a rumble as the car crossed a bridge. She stopped, opened the door and he could hear a waterfall. The sun was low, swollen and red, almost hidden by a mountain ridge. They must be very high up. Down below the road was a forest of birches with moisture-filled black and green lichens. Birds were busy everywhere, thousands of them. Their calls soared below and above the small waterfalls of the rapids and the murmur from the great metal pipe running under the bridge.

He felt afraid. It must be because he had woken so abruptly and didn’t know where they were. The road appeared to continue on up towards the high mountain. Worried that his voice might sound childish and angry, he didn’t say anything. Foolishly enough, he could feel his throat thickening. He had to wake up properly.

She had a rucksack with a frame in the boot. She took it out and started stuffing into it everything lying about in the car, putting the soap and toothbrush wrapped in the Betty Boop towel on top.

He took the rucksack and heaved it on. They climbed down the steep slope to the rapids and started following a path along the river.

‘Is it far?’ he said.

‘Fifty-five minutes.’

Idiotically exact. She might just as well have said an hour. He imagined she always wanted to appear certain.

‘Then I can’t carry the pail in my hand,’ he said, stopping to tie it on to the rucksack.