Blackwater (33 page)

They had taken that way because Petrus considered that the other way belonged to the Enemy. The road was the timber company’s and they shouldn’t use it. He had principles they didn’t always take into consideration when they had to carry up packs. But when he was with them, they had to walk on the proper, old path. Dan had gone ahead with Barbro Torbjörnsson and they were still quite high up when they saw something moving down by the river. They were on the exposed rock where the pine forest started and they had a free view down towards the Lobber. He had seen through the binoculars that it was the police – overalls, blue caps, shoulder harness – he could see it all and the stretchers they were carrying, two of them, covered.

‘No faces. You see? When they cover the faces they’re dead. We stood up there and saw it all, though we didn’t know what it meant, and we turned back. We hid a little further up, where the view was blocked, and we waited for the others there. That took some time, since Brita is so heavy now and Önis has sores. But they came and we let them go up between the trees and look through the binoculars, so they all saw the police and the stretchers. We could watch them for a long way on the marshland, where it was open. Then we didn’t know what to do – go back or take the route over the bridge to Björnstubacken. We didn’t want to go down from Starhill and land up among the police.’

But why not? She couldn’t understand, and she held him off, grabbing his upper arms and forcing him up so that she could see his face.

‘You’re a teacher so of course you would have gone up and asked what had happened and put yourself at the disposal of the authorities.’

His mockery was now friendly. She remembered the interrogation down in the Strömgrens’ kitchen and thought he was mistaken about her. But not entirely.

They had not wanted to get involved. He said Petrus and Brita were worried about the girls. If the Starhill commune were mentioned in the papers because they had been questioned by the police, that wouldn’t be good for the custody dispute. Nor was it good that people had died close to Starhill, and it would be best not to know anything whatsoever about what had happened.

One of them had had the idea of going down to Röbäck and pretending they had been there all night. The children had slept there, hadn’t they? It would seem credible that the adults had also done so. But Dan and Barbro had to go on to Björnstubacken because the VW Beetle was up there. Barbro couldn’t have been in Röbäck. She didn’t know Yvonne and had no good reason to be there.

So Dan and Barbro had set off eastwards where the path divided and had continued down to the bridge and Björnstubacken. The others had left the path and gone down towards the Klöppen. It had been difficult for Önis and Brita to walk on unbeaten tracks, but then they had found the path along the lake and followed it to the outlet at the Röbäck and had turned up at Yvonne’s. She had been in complete agreement that they had done the right thing.

His penis was between her thighs, trying to nudge its way in. She felt it as a round head, puppylike, with an innocent forehead. She had no desire to reject his playfulness, nor could she. But it was strange that while he moved inside her, she was thinking about that light night when she had been drifting about in the marshlands looking for the paths.

He was not that big, but swelled inside her and her own desire also swelled for every soft thrust, her walls tightening and loosening again, assuaging the memory of her terror, diffusing it, melting it down into a blurred recollection of confusion.

If he had asked why she had walked across unfamiliar and treacherous ground instead of trying to find somewhere to stay in the village, she would not have had an answer. She had answered in a muddled way when the police had asked her, almost lied, in any case kept some things quiet.

We didn’t want to expose our confusion, she thought, not even to each other, though we ought to have. He had not told the truth about Midsummer Eve because he was ashamed. He hadn’t gone to Nirsbuan expecting me to go there at all. He thought I was staying in Röbäck with Yvonne.

He had had a guilty conscience because he had done nothing about the cottage. We were to live there, he had promised me that. So he went there to see if he could do something about it in a hurry.

Dan always has so many irons in the fire. He promises too much. Dan, so delicious, so intensely warm and delicious, moving inside me, slowly, who is inside me and as confused and ashamed as I am.

‘It doesn’t matter any longer about Nirsbuan,’ she whispered. ‘I wouldn’t want to live there, anyhow. Not now after what’s happened. It’s better here with the others.’

‘Are you frightened?’

‘Sometimes.’

He tickled her with his tongue in the cleft in her upper lip. It was a game she recognised. In the end he used to get her to put her legs round his back and make a violent movement towards him. But her desire was splintered, coming and going.

‘Don’t think, don’t think,’ he whispered.

‘Just one thing. When you were at Nirsbuan. I can’t understand how you got into the cottage?’

‘Not difficult. The Brandbergs always hang the key under the eaves.’

Later, when summer was on its way out and the haymaking over, Mia wanted to sleep in the hay. They took blankets and pillows up with them to the loft in the barn. Annie herself had helped fill it with the fine meadow hay from the pastureland. They lay enjoying the scents, which might have been mint, white clover and maiden pinks. The bright yellow of the buttercups faded in the darkness and the columbines grew brittle. She and Lotta and Mia rustled and giggled beside each other. Mia didn’t want to go back to bed that night, but slept in the hay. As you and Dan did, she said.

But Annie hadn’t slept that night when it was raining, though she said nothing about it now, just fell in with Mia. Not until towards four in the morning did Mia start complaining of the cold. Annie carried her down and put her into her own bed, and Lotta followed with the blankets and pillows and the Moomin book, which they hadn’t been able to read because it had been too dark up in the loft. The summer was drawing to an end and it was no longer so brilliantly light at night.

No, she hadn’t slept at all that night with Dan, although they had stayed there until three in the morning. He had slept, his breathing calm as he lay curled up in the curve her body formed round his back. She had hardly dared move for fear of waking him.

She had lain there seeing Nirsbuan before her eyes. The door of the cottage. The metal bar and the padlock that no one had unlocked. There was no other way of remembering it. That was what it had been like.

The man looked like a satyr – the goatee, the moist red lower lip. Was that why the villagers said he kept a harem?

A herd of goats had faced Birger on his way up. He hadn’t dared turn his back on the big billy goat and had had to make grotesque twists and turns to keep it ahead of him. The billy goat was a shaggy grey and yellow, his horns coarse and curved, a dark-spotted scrotum weighing at least a kilo dangling between his hind legs. The goats were inquisitive, staring fixedly at him, pressing round him on the path so he didn’t dare sit down to rest. Once up there, he was exhausted, a stitch in his side and blisters here and there.

Märta had told him they had already had a visit from the social services and he wondered who had had the energy to get up there. Märta had shown him the large headline in the local paper:

FIRST CHILD BORN AT STARHILL

Below it had been a photo of the parents. The man with the cloven beard was holding the child. He was wearing a kind of bobble hat. The woman sat beside him on a porch entwined with hops. Two women, a small boy and a dog were sitting in the grass below the steps. Annie Raft could not be seen in the photo. Round the corner of the house peered a face which he thought was a boy’s. Then he realised it was the little girl he had examined at the Strömgrens’. She had had her hair cut and he thought she looked thin.

The memory of the little face he had seen at Oriana and Henry’s came back to him. The greyish light of a summer’s night in the room had been deceptive and he’d thought she had been abused, but then he’d seen the swellings were caused by insect bites. Looking at the photo, he was uncertain. The small face was blurred, thin, resolute. How was she? Did she get enough to eat up there?

The social worker had told them the baby was healthy. But had they looked at the girl? Märta didn’t know.

The goat-man had no cap on now. He received Birger with a friendliness that made him ashamed of having acquired papers from the company to say he was allowed to fish in the two small lakes below Starhill and spend the night at the club cottage. He had been afraid they would be suspicious if he came for no particular reason. He remembered Annie Raft, her remoteness during that first questioning.

The Starhill crofter really had four womenfolk, which must have been what the villagers meant. No man put in an appearance and the diabetic man and his woman seemed to have gone.

They had come to his surgery a week or two earlier, the man pale and complaining of headaches. His skin was cold and moist and he had begun to get small sores on his feet that refused to heal.

The woman had sat in the waiting room in her long woollen skirt, a kerchief on her head pulled right down over her forehead, hiding her hair. She had said nothing and had scarcely even looked up from her knitting, but she had spread a strange atmosphere in the room. Eight people were waiting and not one of them said a word, nor did they touch any of the tattered magazines.

Birger fetched her in to ask about their diet and way of life at Starhill and she told him that the man had had severe insulin troubles. One day during haymaking he had almost gone into an insulin coma. He seemed ashamed to mention it himself. She had had the presence of mind to put out a bowl of the soft goat’s cheese for him and he had gobbled down the lot and recovered. Otherwise they ate mostly potatoes and goat’s meat, milk and cheese, just the things he ought to be very careful about. Besides, he was supposed to take light and regular exercise, not do heavy physical labour. Birger advised him to move back to Nynäshamn, his original home town.

‘And when it comes to hash and that sort of thing,’ he had said, ‘you must realise yourselves that it’s just not on in this situation.’

Thank heavens they hadn’t got angry. They were probably too tired. She just said quietly that they had nothing to do with that kind of thing – that was those people down in Röbäck.

He knew Yvonne in Röbäck had been caught when she had crossed the border with a stash of marijuana. She and her two lodgers, a couple of strays considerably older than she, had been charged. She maintained that they had only been on their way to a party and she hadn’t sold anything. The court had been inclined to believe her. For one thing, they were friendly with some Norwegian petty rogues in a village just over the border, and for another, the marijuana was of very poor quality, according to the police. In fact, hardly saleable.

The police had found hemp plants flourishing in a mountain crevice below Starhill when they searched the terrain after the murders, by the Lobber. Then the customs people had begun checking on Yvonne whenever she crossed the border in her old Volkswagen bus. She maintained the commune had nothing to do with growing it, but the police suspected one of the men up there. Birger didn’t believe it was the diabetic. He and his woman had seemed much too wretched. Their faces remained with him, hers thin and sunburnt, his pale and flabby. Märta had arranged a draught in the surgery after they had gone, to rid it of the strong smell of goat they had brought with them.

He couldn’t smell it up here. One of the women was conspicuously beautiful, with very fair hair but dark eyebrows and eyelashes, dark-blue eyes and a marked cupid’s bow. She was severely overweight and must have found it as difficult as he had getting up to Starhill.

That might be a solution for me, he thought. A plump woman. Swayingly fat. A meeting between two lots of generous flesh, our angular cores embedded. She must have dark hair down there. And those beautiful eyes and thick eyelashes, her mouth, the contours of her upper lip, which seemed all the clearer and finer because the rest of her face had flowed out into the fat. Buttocks fitting tightly together, huge thighs and breasts weighed down and swinging towards the midpoint of the earth.

The man with the divided beard was talking eagerly about cheese mould. The billy goat is in me, Birger thought. The satyr. This man’s only interested in goat’s cheese.

He knew people as far away as Byvången were divided into two camps, one considering the commune should be eradicated like vermin, and the other thinking they ought to be allowed to stay. They were putting a derelict place in order and bringing some life into the area, letting animals into the forest, which the company could well have done, mowing the pasture where the wild
Silvaticum geranium
and the poisonous monkshood were taking over and the scrub creeping in.

Without thinking about it, he had joined the tolerant camp. He was used to doing that with Barbro. He reckoned they could stay as long as they didn’t neglect the children.

Up here, he couldn’t take a stand, his attitude vacillating. He was angry when he saw the ramshackle clubhouse and wondered whether they knew it wasn’t insulated. How would they cope with the winter? When the fat woman called Marianne leant over and poured herb tea into his mug, he was uneasy. She didn’t smell of goat, but of milk and cotton fabric and warm skin. The divide between her breasts was deep and narrow. In confusion, he raised his eyes and looked out over the pastureland. In three directions he could see the mountain ridges, the dark-blue precipices, the patchy, still snow-covered peaks which looked like grouse breasts in the thaw, the shifting green and blue slopes of marshland down towards the forest. The sky was blue-white, sizzling in the hot air above the pasture.

He wondered what it would be like to live alone here with four women and have their quiet voices and gentle movements around him all day. The murmur of the stream and the wet swaying tussocks in the marsh down towards the lakes. The feel of water.