Blackwater (18 page)

When I’ve had a rest I’ll think all this is wonderful, Annie thought. All these people wanting to help one another. The calm.

They all spoke in very quiet voices, though Dan said nothing. That was unusual, too. He was sitting in the flood of light. She couldn’t make out whether he was pale, whether he was in one of his difficult moods.

He was probably just tired. Tired and golden. When Mia had fallen asleep, they would make love, quietly and intensely – the way it could be almost only when you were very tired or slightly feverish.

‘Lotta . . .’

Petrus sounded pleading. Annie realised they had come to the problems. I must put away my irony. It is a defence. Dan used to run his fingertips lightly over her face, as if to take away the pain. You won’t need that irony up there, he had said.

‘It’s difficult to talk when there are new people here,’ Lotta said, and Annie thought – that’s one in the eye for us.

‘Try.’

‘I’ve been going crazy for several days now.’

She was sitting on the floor, propped up against the wooden wall, but then she roughly drew up her knees, flung her arms round them and hid her face.

‘Annie,’ said Petrus.

‘What?’

They all looked at her.

‘We want to get to know you,’ said Petrus. ‘Tell us why you’re so tense.’

They waited. She simply had to say something, but it was obvious what was worrying her. So why did she have to say it? And she didn’t want to say anything while Mia was there, not when the children were listening. They were sitting quietly and attentively beside their parents, and all of them were looking at her.

‘It’s what happened,’ she said. ‘The accident by the Lobber. I saw them.’

‘Annie,’ said Petrus, leaning over towards her, so close she could feel his breath. It smelt odd. Like an animal’s. Was it the goat’s milk?

‘You mustn’t think about that any more,’ he said, the smell wafting over her, sour and mild at the same time. ‘It’s in the past now. It has nothing to do with us up here.’

‘But I saw . . . you have to think about how . . . well, how it happened. That it’ll be cleared up, I mean. We live so near.’

‘No.’

What a fantastic thing to say! No. We don’t live near. But she had no time to protest.

‘You’ve left that now,’ said Petrus. ‘The tabloid world. You’re here now.’

‘Lotta, dear!’

Brita had put her arm round the bony back. Lotta looked like a child curled up on the floor. She raised her face and it was wet. Wet and swollen.

‘What is it now?’

‘It’s hopeless because everyone notices it at once. I’m doomed. It’s always like this. Everyone can tell by looking at me.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Brita.

‘Yes, they do – even that kid. The new one. “Why has she got such grey teeth?” she said. I can’t take it. She saw it straight away.’

Annie looked at Mia, who had stiffened, pouting out her lips. She knew Mia was clenching her teeth hard. Her eyebrows shot forward and her face crumpled. The little monkey had appeared. Jesus, now she’s really going to blow her top, Annie thought.

‘Mia didn’t say quite that,’ she said quickly. ‘You said just now you’ve been . . . troubled for several days. And we only came this afternoon.’

Cool and sharp. Oh, Christ! She had also spoken loudly, as if in front of a class. All of them except Lotta looked at her.

‘You don’t have to defend yourself, Annie. Not here. We’re friends,’ said Brita. Annie wanted to say she wasn’t defending herself, but didn’t because she had seen from the corner of her eye a flash of something unbelievable – Dan tittering.

‘Has anyone got anything else?’ Petrus asked. He talks like a book, Annie thought. Like a damned Bible. No doubt he had noticed that everything was going off the rails.

Sigrid with her gleaming plaits drew a deep breath.

‘Yes?’

‘The girl plays with Barbie dolls,’ she said.

‘Mia?’

She nodded repeatedly.

‘Yes, well,’ said Petrus. ‘We’re going to forget about that here. There’s so much else. There are lambs and kittens, Mia. Alive and a lot of fun.’

He sounded kind, even very kind, but Mia’s face was expressionless. He went on in his singsong voice as if at all costs he had to influence her. That wouldn’t work, Annie knew. Not when she had that expression on her face.

‘Barbie dolls are dead,’ he said. ‘Aren’t they?’

Now there’ll be hell to pay, thought Annie. But to her surprise, Mia replied almost dispassionately:

‘Then I suppose they should be buried.’

‘That’s right, that’s right,’ said Petrus. He gave Annie a smile and quite a genial look. It was the soft cloven beard that did it.

Then they broke up. It was warm outside, but they couldn’t stay there because the stingers had emerged. She knew their name now, those almost invisible insects. They gave her an excuse to go into the house with Dan. Mia bustled in, fetched Barbie and Ken, then vanished again.

Annie registered that the mattress on Lotta’s bed had gone. Perhaps she ought to sort that out now, but it could wait for the time being. They could have one night to themselves. Dan disappeared again. She didn’t know what he did when he was gone, but things would become clearer. She went out and looked into the kitchen. There was an iron stove, a table covered with oilcloth, one cupboard on the wall, and some wooden boxes on the floor, apparently used as cupboards or shelves, for there were bags of groceries in them. Everything was clean and bunches of herbs were hanging drying above the stove. Önis and Enel, she thought. They’re sure to be clean people. This’ll be all right. But Dan must make some cupboards.

Wailing sounds of singing came through the window, and to her surprise she saw it was Mia, with Sigrid and Gertrud joining in. A drift of flowers lay heaped on the slope above the house and Mia was squealing away, waving a sprig of birch about.

Going out, Annie saw Barbie’s bare foot sticking out of the heap of flowers. The rigid little foot filled her with unease. Mia was burying Ken and Barbie with great enthusiasm. She had fashioned a cross with sticks, neatly made and fastened together with tacks. She must have had help. Perhaps Sigrid was already capable of that.

‘Eaaarth to eaaarth, duuuust to duuust, God is deaaaath, deaaaath, eaaarth to eaaarth, duuust to duust,’ Mia was chanting, and Annie wished she would get it over and done with.

‘The bird shall come, the great bird, strike dust in deeeath!’

Sigrid and little Gertrud were trying to sing along but had no idea what to do with the words, or the tune, either. At last they had finished, as definitively as if it had gone according to the book.

‘Now they’re asleep,’ said Sigrid quietly.

‘They must have a tent,’ said Mia and bustled inside. She seemed quite untroubled by the insects, but Annie couldn’t stand them any longer. Moving to the kitchen window, she watched Mia put a handkerchief like a tent over the dolls and the harvest of flowers. Sigrid helped her prop it up with sticks and as soon as that was done, Mia left the other two without even looking at them.

She fell asleep the moment she was up in the top bunk. She ought to have washed, but Annie didn’t really know how to go about it. Tomorrow, she thought. That’s when we’ll make a proper start. Dan had come in and stretched out on the bed. His face was very pale.

‘What was it about Lotta that everyone saw?’ she asked him.

‘What?’

‘That grey-teeth business.’

‘We’ll take that up when Lotta’s with us.’

He had closed his eyes, his skin moist and greyish. He isn’t well, she thought. He’s having a bad time again. Yet she couldn’t help asking again.

‘I want to know.’

‘Amphetamines.’

‘Uh-huh . . . you’ve taken care of her? To help her.’

‘
We
have taken care of her,’ he said. ‘You, too.’

Before she went to bed, she went out to fetch Ken and Barbie. The cross was still there, and the handkerchief supposed to be a tent, and the flowers. But the dolls had gone. Damned kids, she thought. Hypocritical little monsters. Though it was human. They wanted nothing greater. And tomorrow I’ll stop thinking bad things and talking sharply. They’re only children.

Petrus and Brita had already gone to bed. Annie was embarrassed when he opened the door in a grey-striped, almost full-length nightshirt. She whispered quietly that Sigrid and Gertrud had taken Mia’s dolls with them. He pulled her in through the door, for midges and mosquitoes poured in towards the warmth when it was open.

‘The girls didn’t go and get them,’ he said. ‘I did. Mia won’t miss them. You heard that yourself. She accepted they were dead.’

‘Maybe so,’ said Annie ‘But I think it’d be better for us all if they’ve been resurrected from the dead when she wakes up tomorrow morning.’

He stared at her with round blue eyes. There was sorrow in them.

‘Give them to me,’ she said.

Slowly he went across to the wood box and opened it. As he handed her the dolls, he was looking infinitely sad. But she felt she already knew him. He isn’t sad, she thought. He’s just damned annoyed.

He should never have told her his name, should have said something else, as she had done. Now she knew his name was Johan and she had turned it into Jukka. Well, they did call Per-Erik Pekka at home, but Jukka was much too Finnish.

‘Jukka, Jukka, Jukka . . .’

She said it as she sat astride him and moved with him inside her. He was ashamed, but the shame was sweetish, and she laughed.

He had slept far into the morning and woken soaked with sweat with the sun directly in his face. He felt anxious, not really afraid, but apprehensive. Would she tell him it was time for him to go? He had no money. He had to stay at least until after the Midsummer holiday was over. Or borrow some money. But would she lend him any? Maybe she would laugh at him, or give him a lot, several hundred. He didn’t know.

She had brought mugs for tea and a teapot in a basket with her, and sandwiches. Everything seemed ordinary, almost normal. At first he thought it was soft goat’s cheese spread on the bread, but it was peanut butter. She ate nothing, but she drank some tea. At first she had spoilt it by putting milk into it. She might have asked him first.

‘I’ll go and make some more,’ he said.

‘You’re not allowed out,’ she said, laughing.

‘I have to go out!’

‘All right, but don’t go and pee where they can see you from the house.’

When he was down by the river and the birch leaves were moving, glittering above him, he remembered a dream he had had just before he woke up. He had been flying over vast forests. It was a blue twilight, his body flying without causing him any surprise, nothing below him except the tops of trees. He was flying low and saw smoke and swirling sparks from fires glowing down in the felling areas.

Back inside, he remembered she had told him something as they had lain on the mattress. Europe had once been covered by vast forests from the Caucasus all the way to the Atlantic, though the Caucasus had been called something else then, something that had been forgotten. People had lit fires at the Midsummer solstice all over Europe, throughout the forests called Europe.

The strange thing was that he had dreamt about it and seen deciduous trees in the twilight. Chestnuts and oaks, dark elms, limes and ash trees. Thick hazelnut bushes. The guelder rose. Dogwood. He wasn’t even sure he had ever seen all those trees in reality. She had said the words and he had dreamt he had seen them.

When he had finished eating, she locked the door, went over to the window and drew the curtains. He thought of saying he wanted to clean his teeth but didn’t dare. He was afraid she would laugh at him. She pulled down the zip and got out of her jeans, leaving them on the floor with the holes from legs and feet still there. He thought about a cartoon film – if she stepped backwards they would roll back up her legs and close round her slightly protruding, firm little bottom. She’s not as old as I thought yesterday, he thought. For then she would be flatter there. Or was she sway-backed?

She flung away the striped jersey and again he saw her breasts, like the kind of pale pointed jam muffins Gudrun used to make. That thought put him in a good mood and his anxiety vanished. He felt like saying, Do you want to greet an old acquaintance? That raced through his mind once they were down on the mattress on the floor and he was about to enter her. But he was afraid it would sound stupid. She still had her pants on and when he pulled at them, they tore. She ripped them off and flung them impatiently away.

‘They’re made of paper!’

She didn’t reply. But he almost forgot what he was doing because he was looking at the soft little heap of pale blue paper. That was good, because in that way he could hold back longer.

She was more pleased with him now, though she had a strange way of showing it, slapping his bottom so that it stung, patting and slapping alternately on his right and left buttock.

When she had dressed again and went to pull back the curtains, she called over to him and they looked through a crack.

‘Can you see him?’

He saw a man with quite a few grey silvery streaks in thick hair that had once been black. But he probably wasn’t all that old. He was sitting by the river looking out over the water, in green windproof trousers with flap pockets on the thighs and a green check shirt.

‘He mustn’t see you. Don’t forget.’

Johan said it was impossible to hide away indoors for a whole day in an old grouse shed. She said he didn’t have to do that, as long as he just kept away from the house.

‘It doesn’t matter much if the others see you at a distance. But watch out for him. ‘He’s daangerous,’ she drawled.

It was impossible to tell whether she was joking or not. But he had to stay all the same.

Sunday was another hot day. He roamed around without going anywhere near the house. There was a large dog run but no dogs. The kennels had been broken up by the birch scrub, pale shoots making their way out of the entrances. He found the ice house, which was empty and likely to have been so for decades. It would have been really good to have found some ice under the sawdust, for there was no electricity here. In a shed full of old tools and rusty fish buckets, he found a rat cage. He rummaged among the rubbish and finally found a long otter line in a wood store. He fetched his soap and the pail with the eel which he had put by the river, and in the shelter of the forest he made his way down to the little bowl-shaped pool he had seen the morning they arrived. He went round to the north side of the mere, where the banks were steep and rocky.