Blackwater (29 page)

‘So that’s why they’ve taken you off the case?’

‘Yes. I’ve made a formal error, they say. However foolish I thought his statement was, I should have taken it down. But it doesn’t exist! And they don’t believe that. Recently I’ve been thinking I was going crazy. That shit! That shady bastard! He burnt a whole load of Three Towers boots. He was afraid the police would come snooping into the house. They must have been stolen goods, for there’s no such delivery in his account books. He has no delivery note, no invoice, nothing. And he sold them incredibly cheaply. Almost everyone in the village bought some. That doesn’t exactly make the investigation any easier. And they believe him.’

‘What about the capercaillies? Why did he burn those? He’s paid his dues and has shooting rights for small game. Surely there was nothing to be afraid of there?’

‘I don’t know. It’s conceivable they’ve got somewhere with that, but I’ve heard nothing about it. They’re looking for sleeping-bag feathers.’

Åke wasn’t looking at Birger as he spoke. He was gazing over in the direction of the big window facing the garden, but there was nothing to see except reflections in the glass. He was gazing at nothing, looking inwards at winding marshland paths disappearing into the night mist. He could see people moving around the Area. He could see them appearing and disappearing from his gaze, which was no gaze, but grinding thoughts.

He was obsessed. He was following the paths in the marshlands and along the highways from the village as Birger each day followed the whorls in the latticework of the veranda. He had been taken off the case, but all his energy was still going into it. To no purpose.

Dan was lying on her bed as she came in. He was alone in the room and lay half turned to the wall, naked, the light from the window reflected in his brownish skin, which looked slightly moist. He was holding his penis and moving his wrist and lower arm. She started backing out, but he had already noticed she was there.

‘What are you doing?’ she said, hearing herself laughing what was not a real laugh.

‘Masturbating,’ he said in a not entirely clear voice. Annie sank to her knees and slipped the papers and books to the floor, trying to do so as quietly as she could. Then she didn’t know what to do. She picked up a bundle of papers and a few diaries, then put them under the bed. She could hear his breathing had got faster. He made a movement and the bed creaked, then it was quite quiet.

Her mouth filled with saliva, making her swallow, but she went on pushing the diaries in towards the wall. He had got up off the bed. When she had finished and had to get up, he was standing in the doorway wiping himself on a towel. Confusedly, she thought that it belonged in the kitchen.

‘You mustn’t disturb me when I’m thinking about you,’ he said. She pretended to straighten the shawl she had used as a tablecloth as she tried to find something to say. All she could think of was, He’s more natural than I am. He would laugh if he knew how I feel. How dramatically I take everything. She hurriedly slapped shut the notebook lying on the table and when she turned round, he had gone.

In the last few days, Dan and she had made love several times in the hayloft above the barn. The hay was dry and sharp and prickled through the material of her blouse. Afterwards she had wanted to stay there in that scent of summer. She would have liked to fall asleep there, but the smell was not really all that pleasant. It was old hay.

He wanted them to do it in the room at night as well, but she didn’t want to because of Mia. She couldn’t rely on her being asleep. It rustled up there occasionally. Mia played with her dolls in the dark, whispering to them.

Annie had hidden in the hayloft when the journalists had come. She had heard them walking past with Petrus, and she heard him telling them about keeping goats and breeding sheep. She was the one they wanted to meet. They wanted her to tell them what the slashed tent by the Lobber had looked like and how much she had seen of the bodies. Instead Petrus had told them all about how to make cheese when there is no electricity.

They stayed for a long time and now and again she heard their voices. To pass the time, she had taken the opportunity to look for the box for her diaphragm, which she had lost in the hay. Stirring up dust and chaff, she rummaged around, and soon felt a hard edge. It wasn’t the box, but a white plastic medicine jar. A tranquilliser. Prescribed for Barbro Torbjörnsson, and almost empty.

She went on searching for her box and found it, as well as a nailfile and a small hotel soap container. The contents of a sponge bag must have fallen into the hay. She showed the things to Dan and he took them. She said she was feeling dispirited.

‘Why?’

‘I thought it was our hayloft. Our hay. Yours and mine.’

He said she couldn’t expect that they should have any place to themselves up there. Private bedroom. Individual hayloft.

She was having to make many changes. Stop listening to the radio. She was tied to the little plastic box, listening in bed, the round speaker pressed to her ear. Couldn’t sleep if she hadn’t heard the eleven o’clock news; Vietnam, Cambodia, Mozambique. She had to hear the words.

‘Changes don’t happen so quickly you have to listen every hour,’ said Dan. ‘It’s poison.’

He might have been right, but that was the way she was. Dependent. On one thing or another. As he was on her body, she had thought before. But was he really?

Sometimes she thought he was weird. But she realised that was a word with which you disposed of anything that didn’t really interest you. And yet it was the other way round – she was intensely aware of him. How thin he was, how slim his back and fine his hands and feet. The way the colour of his hair changed in the lamplight from ash to gold. More than every fifth strand was golden. She often lay with a lock of it on her arm or breast, examining it hair by hair.

She had noticed him among a group of more than twenty new students standing outside the door of the classroom. He was unlike them with his slim, supple body, and he moved like a dancer. In the lecture room, in the dullness of a winter afternoon and the muffled atmosphere of wool and exhalations, he was a core of pure energy which she had to reach.

At first, before anything personal had passed between them, she had thought of him as that strange student. She started fantasising about him. He might say something in a lesson that bewildered her or made her feel uncertain. Afterwards she would think out a continuation. She found clever answers and it became a conversation. A kind of conversation.

In fact they were monologues she held, always silent. She had found a great deal clarified when she said it to herself, to him. But in reality she hadn’t said much, not even when they had started sleeping together.

Her reserve still came from a kind of dependency. Poison – in his fierce words. Something she held on to with an atavistic, dark and tangled part of herself. She thought it came from Enskede, and later from the Academy and Karlbergsvägen. From a life that would be utterly inexplicable to him.

Sometimes they had agonising scenes, misunderstandings, conflicts – whatever it was called. It felt like knives in her stomach, and she didn’t dare touch him because that cold point ruled. She could see it in his eyes, at the centre of the pupil: mistrust.

Sometimes he mistrusted her, thought it was nothing but a game to her. An affair of a few weeks. A nice little game with political ideas and strong sexual attraction. Sometimes he actually said he was nothing but a body to her. Golden and fuzzy. Like an apricot. That he was too young.

There were nine years between them. Occasionally he had said she didn’t take him seriously. He seemed to sense sometimes she had that feeling, the feeling that he was weird. Totally unknown. Like living tissue that is rejected. Alien, incompatible tissue of the soul.

Önis was standing in the doorway asking her if she had forgotten the evening milking. Yes, she had forgotten, and she was uneasy about the smell in the room. She picked up the towel and bundled it up under the blanket. Önis watched her, but said nothing. She had Sigrid at her heels and Sigrid said it wasn’t really Annie’s turn to do the milking. The rota had been drawn up wrongly.

Annie put on a large apron Brita had given her and went out with them to the goat shed. She didn’t like the goats and she had never done any milking before she came to Starhill. She assumed that was why she was not allowed to do it with Dan, who was slow and clumsy. She was in Önis’s team, in which Lotta should also be, but Lotta was nowhere to be seen.

They were variegated goats, brownish grey, yellowish white, streaky and spotted, no two alike, but she hadn’t yet learnt to tell them apart. They had bulging, slightly hairy udders with stiff teats. They leapt up on the milking table quite willingly and it wasn’t difficult to squeeze the milk out of them, though more so to remember all the stages. The udders had to be wiped clean, and the first splashes of milk were not to go into the bucket, because they were full of bacteria. Petrus had taught her that if she forgot to wipe them, no suckling reflex would be released.

The smell of goat was overwhelming. If she turned away and stopped the squeezing and pulling for a while, the goat was uneasy. The animals had strange ruptured eyes with oblong pupils. They gleamed like crushed amber. Some had dangling growths on their necks, little clappers of flesh. She didn’t want to know what they were. She would rather have worked with the gentle, lanolin-smelling sheep, but they needed nothing at this time of year.

Afterwards, they had to deal with the milk. They cooled it by carrying down the churns and putting them into the stream. They had to boil the curds every day now because of the heat. When the milk had curdled she had to stir it with large forks they called riddles. It took for ever and her arms ached. She wasn’t trusted with squeezing the lumps and putting them into moulds, but she was allowed to deal with the whey. That had to be boiled until it was brown and thick and could be ladled up into soft cheese.

Mia refused to have anything to do with it all. The first time she had held her nose, then she had disappeared with Mats and Gertrud. Sigrid always wanted to help and Annie noticed she was a good milker. She also kept a check on the milking rota and found it very difficult to admit she might have made a mistake.

‘Dad did the milking on Midsummer Eve, not Önis. It’s not Önis’s team today. It’s wrong.’

Annie knew she oughtn’t to start arguing with her. She was only nine, but she was obstinate. She followed Annie to the kitchen, going on and on about it. Annie’s arms and back were aching and she could feel her irritation rising. She stopped in the doorway and held on to it to show she wanted to go in alone.

‘I did the milking for the first time on Monday,’ she said. ‘And the second time was today, Thursday. There are two days in between, as there has to be when there are three teams. That’s OK, isn’t it?’

‘But the rota’s wrong.’

‘So you say. Let’s drop it now. Your father can’t have done the milking on Midsummer Eve because he was in Röbäck then.’

She went on in and closed the door, regretting it the moment she had done so, but it was good to be alone for a while. She could see Sigrid through the window, pacing back and forth, hitting at the grass with a stick, clearly furious. A future dogmatist?

‘Just let her be right,’ Önis said as they heaved the milk churn across the threshold together. ‘She’s fearfully upset. The pastor’s coming to fetch her and Gertrude on Wednesday.’

‘The pastor in Röbäck?’

‘No, their dad. Didn’t you know?’

One clergyman had already come up to Starhill and Annie had kept out of the way that time as well. She thought he was the same one who had opened up the parish hall on Midsummer Day and invited people in for coffee and buns. For the shock. She’d heard about it while sitting in Oriana Strömgren’s kitchen and the police were going in and out. But this was a pastor who had been married to Brita and was the father of Sigrid and Gertrud. Önis said they were in dispute over custody.

She couldn’t take it in. There was something so primordial, so primaeval about Petrus’s little family. She had thought the girls looked like Petrus. They had his long goat face. If Brita had been a clergyman’s wife, that at least explained why she knew her St Paul. Annie wished Dan had told her something about all this.

‘The pastor has got the court to say that Starhill is an unsuitable place for the girls, but for their sake he was going to take it easy. Come up here and persuade them. I’m not sure that’s needed, for that matter. His trump card was the school. That they had to live in Röbäck in the winter and be away from their mother. Yvonne isn’t all that suitable, of course. I mean, from the authorities’ point of view. But then they heard you were coming to be the teacher here. Then it looked as if Brita might have won. Until this happened. Down by the river. Now they’ll come and fetch them. Will you see to the milk?’

Annie was left alone with the boiling. She stood with the thermometer in her hand, staring down into the milk still swirling round after Önis’s stirring. So that was how they saw it. If Mia had had a father who’d known she was here, he would perhaps have arranged to have her taken away because it was dangerous for her to live here. It’s as if there are two worlds, she thought. One out there. Where it happened. And another here.

‘Would you write down how much milk, please?’

Önis had opened the door and called out. Her face was rosy and smooth. She wore no make-up and her lips were a touch blue. A lovely fat girl. She could have been one of Krishna’s milkmaids whose lips had taken on some of their colour from kissing his skin.

If there had been any danger here, deadly and nearby, she wouldn’t be occupied with milk quantities and concentrated feed. Önis was a sensible person. She could milk. She was from Öhn in Jämtland and had been a social worker.

The milk records were pinned to the wall and a ballpoint hung on a string beside them. Annie wrote down ‘38 litres’ and signed it. The others put abbreviations of their given names. Her AR looked rather officious, but she didn’t want to change it because that was how she had started. Petrus wrote P-us. She saw his name in the column for Midsummer Eve. ‘36.5 1. P-us. 40 1s. P-us.’