Blackwater (17 page)

They all had different characteristics. Furthest north stood a long sloping mountain that appeared to have been halved like a loaf of bread, the perpendicular sliced surface gleaming blue. It looked unreal, a piece of scenery. Diagonally behind it rose another which was white and gleaming with ice. It resembled the top of a pyramid and must have been very high and far away.

Fallen, shattered shapes, inhuman proportions. This chaos of stone appeared to have been recently petrified in the wind.

She heard a low grunting sound and when she turned to look at the pastureland down below the mountainside, she saw a flock of ewes with their lambs. They were watching, standing quite still, their silvery heads and long curved noses raised and turned towards the path. Their ears were pink, the sun coming through them. She felt they were waiting for one of them to move or say something. Mia looked scared. Then Annie took a step towards them and without her knowing where they came from, a few words appeared, a childish rigmarole.

‘Oh, little sheep, oh, little sheep, we won’t harm your babies . . . such lovely babies, such lovely babies you have, you little sheep . . .’

Mia giggled, the tip of her tongue between her teeth. The ewes resumed grazing. Of course they hadn’t recognised her voice, but she hadn’t frightened them.

A dog started barking. She should have known how quiet it was up there from the whispering of the grass. She could hear the tinkling of the waterfall in the stream far away, but she first heard the silence when the barking of the dog broke out and sounds came from the mountain. They were dull, regular and of frightening strength. At first she couldn’t connect them with the figure silently but rhythmically raising and lowering an axe at the corner of one of the houses. Then she managed to make out the dry real sound of the axe blade and the echo from the perpendicular mountainside.

She still knew nothing and was accepting everything as if it were reality. The primaeval wielding of the axe. The security of the rhythmical sounds of a blade striking wood. The eternal barking of a dog.

They came closer and she realised that the long cloven beard of the axe wielder was not white round his mouth but yellow, his eyes not faded and watery, and he was not ancient as he had first appeared to be. Petrus. She had the impression that the wood chopping had been staged the moment Dan, she and Mia had come into sight from the cottage nearest to the path. The dog must have come out at the same time as the man. Otherwise it would have started barking much earlier.

Then Brita appeared in her long home-woven skirt and an apron raised by her stomach. She was in an advanced state of pregnancy. Her plait lay curled into a knot at the nape of her neck. The plaits of the two girls were hanging down in front. Annie could see the plaits were glossy, but only because they were greasy, lying close to their heads and divided into strands. Confused, she felt a sense of disgust. Mia had stiffened.

Children are like strange dogs. Alert almost to the point of terror. So she didn’t hear or see much more than Mia and the strange children as they were taken into the timbered cottage. She was also more tired than she cared to show and she knew Mia was very hungry.

Porridge, it was. Brita ladled it out of a saucepan on the iron stove. Porridge with husks and seeds and small hard bits in it. Petrus thoroughly analysed it in his melodious voice, names of grasses and herbs, kinds of seed, fruits and nuts slowly enumerated and repeated. Mia pushed her bowl away so that the milk slopped.

‘It smells nasty,’ she said. ‘Like inside shoes.’

Blank looks. Everyone looked at her. Brita said it was goat’s milk and that was the milk they had. Annie was panic-stricken, not just a rapidly passing shudder, but panic that would rule her for a long time. What if Mia wouldn’t drink the milk? What if she refused to eat?

They were there. It was serious. Dan had disappeared outside. Above the stove built in between slabs of shale, a pair of socks was drying. She had such a bad headache she couldn’t look out of the window, where the light was hurtling in. No one mentioned what had happened down by the Lobber. No one asked her what she had seen. The lilting voice was talking about species of wild seeds and growing things. Mia sat there with her mouth clamped shut, avoiding looking at the two strange girls.

They were to live in the sensible building. She thought that was probably better. The ceilings were higher. But it was hideous and connected with something called the cookhouse. She couldn’t really make out what that was, but they didn’t cook food in there. Further away was a goat shed of corrugated iron and planks.

Petrus and Brita did not go inside with her. Dan showed her the room and the first thing she saw was a head of untidy hair. Whoever was in the bed had pulled the blanket up so far that only the hair showed. The head did not move.

‘Lotta!’

Dan said it appealingly, as if to a child. The face appeared and gradually the body, thin and rather bowed. This was no child. Lotta was a grown woman and she looked ill. Mia stared with attention and held on hard to the Cretan rucksack.

There were two bunk beds made of metal tubing. The room had only one window. Beneath it a piece of hardboard served as a kind of table, and on that stood a paraffin lamp, another hanging from a nail in the wall. The room was papered with wallpaper painted over in a greyish-blue colour, buckled and split in a couple of places. There was an iron stove by one wall and a mirror with a broken plastic frame by the door. She felt it. Not plastic. Celluloid.

Lotta was using one of the two chairs as a bedside table. She had arranged a nest for herself. Some pictures of cats were on the wall, but otherwise she hadn’t bothered about the room. Nothing remained of the curtains except a pelmet of loosely woven cotton, once white but now yellowish grey, the stripes still red and green. The curtain material roused a sense of childhood in Annie, as did the frame of the mirror – forties style. The rag rug running from the door up to the table by the window was so dirty, the colours could no longer be made out.

It was incredible. Perhaps she would have started planning – white curtains, jars of meadow flowers, clean rag rugs – had she not had such a headache. She was also feeling sick now, so she just sat down on the vacant bed, careful not to hit her head on the upper bunk, and stared at Dan. She was waiting for him to say something, explain, but his eyes avoided hers. He seemed to be busy untying the rucksacks and talking to Lotta.

‘I’ll go now and you two can settle how you want it here,’ he said. But he did not sound calm, so he must have noticed after all.

From the very beginning Annie had said that she couldn’t live in a commune. That was really the only thing she had stated with any conviction. Otherwise her life was open. She wanted to change it. But never to live with other people. Not after Enskede.

She hadn’t told him about Enskede, though. It had seemed petty to complain about overcrowding in an ordinary house. The sounds from the lavatory. The stock-exchange quotes on the radio. The roar of the vacuum cleaner. The neighbour’s circular saw. Perhaps it would have been paradise to Dan. A house.

He had promised to find a house of their own, and had finally written about Nirsbuan in his letters. But it wasn’t possible to occupy it. He must have realised that. It belonged to someone, even if it was only a summer place. She had thought he was putting it in order for them, that it was almost ready. He hadn’t written that, but he had surely said it over the phone?

‘Is this bed free?’ she said, unable to stop herself sounding ironic. That happened to her when she was under pressure. Lotta nodded. She was hunched up on the edge of her bed, looking cold.

‘You two don’t want to live with anyone else.’

Annie was forced to look at her grey face. The girl was like a dog waiting to be kicked out. Mia had climbed up on the top bunk. There was no ladder and Annie never even noticed how she did it. Now she was sitting up there with the striped rucksack in her arms, pouting and frowning so that she looked like a watchful, intelligent monkey. I must go carefully, Annie thought. With them all.

‘Who else lives in the house?’ she asked. ‘Well, I know who lives here. But I don’t know in which house.’

‘There’s only this one. And then Petrus and Brita’s. There are two more rooms here. And the kitchen. Bert and Enel live in one and you know they have a little girl. And Önis in the other with her Mats. Though they’ve got only one bed. I mean two. One like this, I mean.’

She had a Stockholm accent and was anxious about being thrown out. Her options were limited: here or with Bert and Enel. She smiled timidly. Mia said from above:

‘Why are her teeth so grey?’

It should have been a whisper, but it was shrill. Lotta flung one arm round her pillow, snatched up the blanket and rushed out. She came back shortly afterwards and started tearing the cat pictures off the wall, the drawing pins scattering down on the bed. I must remember, Annie thought. So that no one lies on them. How cold I am. I ought to stop her.

‘Don’t rush off like that,’ she said, but not very convincingly. Her headache was so bad now, she was afraid of throwing up. If so, where? There must be some kind of privy somewhere.

Lotta pulled out a suitcase and two bags from under the bed, noisily, scraping and shoving. Clearly she had found some courage and was pleading with all this racket. But Annie had lain down and closed her eyes. She could smell mould from the pillow. The smell of old foam rubber must come from the mattress. One movement and I’ll puke. Dan will have to do something about this. She heard the door slam and the frame of the mirror rattle against the wallpaper. They were alone.

She must try to sleep for a while so that her headache would lift. Dan came back and Annie knew a long time had passed, but she couldn’t look at her watch. The light from the window squeezed its way in even when she closed her eyes. Her headache rocked and crackled. He said they were to eat and she asked him to take Mia with him.

‘Egg,’ she whispered.

‘What?’

‘She eats eggs.’

In her torpor, images from the night had returned. That lined wooden face. A hood. Dear Lord, what was it? How could your mind produce images of things you’d never seen? Evil. Dry. A head that was dead and alive. Like rotting wood, crawling with life in the cracks.

Mia had come back and begun to unpack the Greek rucksack, where her Barbie dolls and their clothes were. Ken had nothing on but a pair of white gauze underpants. Barbie had a pink bra and matching panties. Mia was dressing them. Dan wasn’t there. But the two girls were standing in the doorway. Annie knew they were nine and seven and called Sigrid and Gertrud.

It was like watching timid animals. She vaguely pretended to be asleep so she wouldn’t have to make the effort to talk to them. Mia was chattering away, but Annie heard it was to the dolls, or they were talking to her. Her voice rose to a rather artificial falsetto when she was Barbie wanting to wear her silvery evening dress. But Mia was sensible and said it was windy out. Ken rumbled.

‘Why weren’t you on the bus?’ she heard one of the girls say from the door. Annie didn’t know whether the child was speaking to her and hoped it was to Mia, but Mia didn’t answer, either.

The pathetic little troop by the bus! The Inca hoods. They believed we’d be coming, she thought. Well, we did. Though we were in the churchyard then.

The smell of foam rubber came and went in waves. I must borrow some sheets, Annie thought. Until my own come up. And something for this headache.

She woke in another light. Must be evening. Her head felt muffled but better. She could see without it hurting.

Yes – the rug was dirty, like the curtains. Everything was threadbare, dingy, stained with smoke and decades of damp. The house had belonged to Wifsta Fishing Club, she remembered now, in the days when Wifsta shipyard had owned the forest round Starhill. It had long ago been sold to another company and their employees never came here. Perhaps they had another place.

She had come here to work. To make it beautiful. Not to step into something completed. Mia was mumbling away above. Ken and Barbie were no doubt being ticked off for their pretensions.

That evening there was a meeting in the main cottage. Brita gave them herbal tea with honey. Petrus explained to Annie that they planned the work for the next day at these meetings. Then each person could bring up his or her problems.

‘Problems?’ said Annie stupidly, and Petrus looked thoughtfully at her. There was a silence. Dan had tipped his chair back and was chewing on a piece of grass he had brought with him. The rosy light from the evening sun through the window fell on his face; he was made of gold. She felt a small movement in her loins and a wave of blood spread into her thighs. She felt like doing what he was doing, leaning back and closing her eyes.

Enel and Bert were on the kitchen sofa with Enel’s daughter, a five-year-old or thereabouts. She was called Pella, a name that had made Mia snort through her nose.

Enel was thin and sinewy, Bert rather gaunt, his jeans loose on him. He was going bald and had brown eyes. They were both divorced and had moved here. Dan had written that Bert was an architect but that was not true; he had been a draughtsman employed at the town architect’s office in Nynashamn. Enel had worked as a nursing assistant at the hospital there.

Marianne Öhnberg was called Önis and she was the only one from Jämtland. But she had lived in Stockholm for several years and had Mats. She had worked for the social services in a home for severely disturbed children. She was fat and her face was beautiful. She had bitten her nails so far down that the lacerated flesh on her fingertips had swollen. Lotta was sitting next to Önis, hunched up, a jersey over her shoulders. She had been crying; her face and eyelids were puffy, her lips sore.

They were talking quietly about boiling. Annie gradually realised they were talking about goat’s cheese. They discussed food supplements. Bert thought the lambs should be given extra. Melodiously, Petrus said the grazing was enough. The grass was lush enough, green and wonderful. Woooonderfoool, he said. His voice was remarkable. It sang, as if he were speaking an old-fashioned dialect. But which? Everything he said sounded calm and reflective. And he smiled into his light-brown beard which was yellow round his mouth. Annie was terrified Mia would say something about that. It somehow looked as if he had been eating something that had stuck there.