Blackwater (16 page)

For he knew nothing.

‘Were you asleep? In Nirsbuan? It was you, wasn’t it?’

She had no desire to talk much about it, not now anyway, and she couldn’t bring herself to describe that terrible walk all over again. Nor did she need to, he said. Everything was all right now. Everything was just the way it should have been when she got off the bus. He said she enclosed him like a tight, soft, wet glove and so everything was all right now and she had no need to wonder. But she did think one thing was strange.

‘But I knocked on the window.’

He knew nothing about that, but probably because he had been asleep, sound asleep.

‘Why didn’t you meet the bus? Did you think Mia and I were coming on the old Midsummer Eve?’

That was it. Nothing that had happened had anything to do with them. She had just happened to walk past. It was like being a witness to a train crash. It had nothing to do with you, but was simply terrible. They were free now.

She had been ensnared. A fish in a net. A thousand stupid things, people, regulations, papers and things, things, things. Like the car battery. In the winter it had to be taken out, carried indoors and left on the draining board, if it was more than ten degrees below zero and if the car was to start at a quarter to seven.

The child minder took tranquillisers because she needed to lose weight, but the truth was she couldn’t even vacuum-clean without them. So on some days her face was like a pale moon with spots, and she had to be sent home. For Annie it was back to the car, the road, the black ice, lamplight. And at college. ‘Sit down and draw now, Mia. I’ll get you some biscuits.’

Eight lessons with biscuit crumbs and chalk dust and the smell of sweaters and exhalations, Mia wanting to pee and being bored, her chatter dispersing whatever concentration there had been in the classroom, if any.

Dan had come to the college during the revolution. The revolt, anyhow. It had been slightly ridiculous, because he was so slim and his words so powerful. Beautiful little body, dark stubble. He never cared what he ate.

To revolt. That presumably really meant to roll round. Just as we rolled round. It hurt a little at first. ‘Isn’t it a little nice as well?’ he whispered. Oh God, oh God, oh God.

At first in town, at an artist friend’s of his. Those friends. Sometimes a three-week acquaintance: share everything, Kropotkin. But this one was the kind who still bought crisps. Cans of beer, bottles of turpentine, bags of potato crips, flattened tubes of paint, paint on cardboard plates, stained mattress. To revolt! With a pupil.

Grandmother Henny babysat in Karlbergsvägen, thinking Annie was on a course. Then Mia and she had begun to stay overnight in Mälarvåg, the second winter. That was the car battery. But Dan as well.

Out there, though, the atmosphere had turned grey around them. The revolt was sluggish in a county college of great brutes who wanted to be policemen and put rebels up against the wall. And little girls wanting to be nurses and dental receptionists and put on plasters and mend people as well as rebels.

In the corridor it always smelt of cake baking and hairspray. The pupils exchanged magazines and drank lager. Dan was a storm petrel but the storm was a long time coming. They were still washing their nylon shirts and hanging them up to dry.

She would never have broken free. Although three colleagues had ceased talking to her, she would never have had the energy, never dared (Mia!), if he hadn’t come in one morning when Mia was asleep and crept under the covers and made love wonderfully and sweetly as if in a summer cottage.

She would never have broken free if Mia hadn’t woken, seen them and run out, still quite silent but crying, and met Arlén, who taught social studies.

‘Dan’s hurting Mummy!’

Then it was the principal, his light office with its tapestry pictures and woodwork bowls.

‘Your presence here is no longer a matter of course.’

Trembling chin. The ballpoint to hold on to. He was more terrified than she was. God, how she had longed for a reprimand, a few gobs of words, real language! These academics on the staff, councillors and female volunteers.

Dan was like a dog shaking itself, not even wet. But my life.

It was the test. He must realise that.

Mia didn’t want to come. That was already quite clear when they started driving up. She curled herself up into a ball in the back, put her hands over her face and said something inaudible in a sharp little voice. Anna asked Dan to stop.

‘Want to go back home.’

Annie tried to explain, but she wouldn’t listen.

‘Want to go home. Want to go home.’

She was speaking doggedly behind her hands. Annie got out and went to sit in the back with her.

‘We’re going up to Starhill now. We’re not going to Nirsbuan at all. And we can take another road to Starhill. We won’t be going past where we walked before. We’re going to live up there. There are other children there.’

Dan had started driving again while Annie was talking. Mia threw herself backwards, arching her back and screaming.

‘Stop, Dan!’ said Annie.

But he drove on, very slowly along the bumpy timber track up towards Björnstubacken. When they stopped at a loading bay by the road, she tried to take Mia in her arms, but the girl had grown big over the last year and she was strong when she resisted. Dan had got out of the car and was standing watching them. He’s thinking I’ll give up now. He damned well looks as if this is just what he expected.

Anger flared up and died away just as quickly. She grew angry when she was under pressure and could say idiotic things. But she had never before felt under pressure like this with Dan. Mia was sobbing now, though she sounded slightly calmer. Outside, Dan was tying up the rucksack, looking rather absent, and she thought he was pale. The police questioning had presumably been more unpleasant than he had let on.

‘Do you still want to?’ he had asked her when they left. She had simply nodded.

‘You’re not afraid?’

It had nothing to do with them. It was something that had happened during Midsummer drunkenness – tourists, a foreigner. It was horrible, but it was over.

‘We’re a whole gang up there,’ he said. ‘No one is alone.’

Packing up their things and paying Aagot Fagerli had gone quickly. Aagot had asked about Dan. They could have coffee before they left. She seemed to want to see him. But Annie said no thank you and that they were in a hurry.

‘Hurry’ was a word from the old days, but when it slipped out of her she thought it all right. At least it was something people understood. She felt the same powerful relief as she had the first time she had left the village. But Dan set off towards the store.

‘I’ve got to make a phone call.’

His words seemed to remain hanging in the car. She had thought they had left all that behind. He sounded as if he were tied up, fully booked. Perhaps he was phoning home? But where, in that case? He had said he no longer had anything to do with his parents.

But there had been a murder. She herself had phoned her parents from Aagot Fagerli’s house and told them everything was all right.

He spoke earnestly for a long time. She could see him through the glass and it hurt inside, the nerves in her stomach cutting like knives. It hurt so much she realised with a kind of astonishment that she was jealous. Suspicious. I am destroyed. Perhaps I can never live any other life but this complicated one.

He said nothing about the phone call when he came back. Perhaps he hadn’t time. The police car slid out from the space behind the petrol pumps the moment they set off up towards the road to the homestead and the mountain. It must have been there all the time, and now it passed them and flagged them down before they had got out of the village.

She thought it unpleasant, but Dan was openly scornful. He told them that the faded red VW had been outside Aagot Fagerli’s barn since early that morning.

‘You could have come in at any time,’ he said.

They took no notice of what he said, only asked him to go with them to the camping site where they had an incident room. Annie had to have coffee with the old Norwegian woman after all, afterwards roaming round the steep slope with Mia until he came back two hours later. By then they were hungry and she ought to have gone back to the cottage to fix something, at least for Mia. But she thought it would take so. long to explain to the old woman why they had come back. And to go shopping for food, then clean up the cottage again after they had eaten. Anyway, Dan had some fruit in the car.

He had two ways of being. He was mostly turned on and energetic, a field of force surrounded him and he inspired others. When he moved round a room and spoke, everyone looked at him. She had thought of intellectual and sexual energy when she had seen him for the first time, reckoning it was zest for life.

But it was more a gathering of strength, willpower, defying boredom and loss of energy. Dancing. Keeping himself visible.

His other way of being always started with pallor, his lips turning thin, his voice slightly irritable as he retreated into himself, and he seemed to turn grey. She wondered whether that was coming on now. He walked round the car without looking at them. In a quiet voice, she tried to explain to Mia that they were going to walk a totally different way. They weren’t going to wade across the river. There was a small bridge higher up and then an easy path through the forest all the way to Starhill.

‘All our things will go there later.’

‘How? Cars can’t go that way.’

Yes, how? They would presumably have to be carried up.

‘I don’t know,’ said Annie. ‘But we’ll have all our things there.’

When they reached the bridge late in the afternoon, she saw it was quite big and the path was broad with tractor tracks along it. Dan said the bridge was new and they were making a road for timber trucks, so presumably they were going to start felling soon. The commune felt threatened, but still didn’t really know what was going on or how close to Starhill the felling would come.

‘Petrus doesn’t want us to use the bridge.’

‘Because it belongs to the Enemy?’

But he seemed to dislike her joking about it.

It took them a long time to get up there. Usually it took about an hour, Dan said, but they had heavy rucksacks with them and often had to stop to let Mia rest. The much used path ran steadily upwards, the bark on spruce roots worn away by feet, paws and hoofs. Occasionally they saw a deep, clear hoofprint where the ground was dark and muddy. Annie knew nothing about tracks, but such large cows didn’t exist, so she told Mia elk had been there, leaving their round and oval spheres of droppings in big heaps.

They came to a plateau and Mia had to rest again. Annie was worried Dan might think they were being too slow. But he let Mia look through his binoculars and talked encouragingly to her. The spruces were sparser now and there were no pines to be seen. Birches had taken over with their black banners of lichen and pale-green clouds of foliage.

Dan whistled under his breath as he walked. Annie realised it was quite unconscious, a toneless whistling through scarcely pursed lips. She could distinguish two tunes. One was a popular song from the fifties of which she remembered only the chorus:

The other was a song of yearning. They had been walking for over an hour when she realised what it was:
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg
. Film music. She couldn’t connect either of the tunes with Dan. Of course, that was because she knew nothing about his previous life. Things hadn’t been good for him. That was all he had said. Had they been so poor? Were there any really poor people nowadays? Her own background never felt so petitbourgeois as when she thought about his past. She didn’t even know how to ask the questions.

Her head was aching and she reckoned it must have something to do with the pressure of the rucksack straps on her shoulders. After a time she couldn’t think about anything else. She had thought they would talk to each other, but they did so only at the beginning, then fell into a kind of vacant plodding and got out of breath on the uphill stretches. Her headache settled above one eye, where it kept exploding and flickering. As soon as the going was more or less level or went downhill, Dan started whistling again. She wished he would stop, but was reluctant to say anything. In the end she began to lag behind with Mia in order not to have to hear that hissing little whistling, just out of tune.

After two hours, the birches started thinning out. They walked down into a hollow where the path turned darkly muddy, thick clumps of globeflowers growing in the grass, the buds still tight, hard and green, only faintly turning yellow. She remembered they had been right out at Nirsbuan and realised that here they must be very high up, almost in another season. She also saw the grass was grazed where the slopes rose after the hollow. When they reached the first hilltop, Starhill became visible.

A handful of cottages, red and grey. One with a stone base. The nearest cottage was wooden, the colour of the timbers alternating, gleaming in grey, silver and grey-green. Beyond it were red-painted houses, the paintwork eroded by the wind. They look natural, she thought. Sensible.

It was all washed over by a chilly mountain breeze, carrying neither smells nor warmth. Tasteless and odourless, the breeze washed over their faces as if they were stones or grassy slopes, the sound of birds rising and falling from the birchwoods.

A stony mountain rose behind the pasture, a perpendicular precipice down towards the belt of birches collapsed into a rectangular pattern. The meaningless straight lines and angles frightened her. In the other direction, the pasture land was encircled by blue-black mountains with irregular white patches, unmoving and distant to the north, west and south. The ravine of the river Lobber ran in a wide curve round the foot of the mountain, separating the forested hillside and pastureland from the mountain. But it was really their height that made them so distant.