Parrot in the Pepper Tree (2 page)

The car ticked and creaked as the hot metal cooled. I stood there for perhaps a minute, hardly breathing for fear of breaking the extraordinary spell of silence. Then the cold was too much for me and I climbed back in. If I left the car to cool for a few minutes, it might start again. I sat behind the wheel with my mouth open, watching the heavy flakes falling in the pale glow of the snow. In minutes the car was cold, all the warmth in the cabin was gone. I tried the starter. The engine fired. I switched the headlight on and moved off unsteadily along the road.

The car was running very roughly now, not helped by a fresh snowstorm. Snowstorms can have a dangerously hypnotic effect, as the snow seems to form a whirling tunnel in front of you and it can be difficult to take your eyes from it. I was starting to get really worried. My map showed a small town about twenty kilo-metres on, so I kept going, heart in mouth, focused on the point where all my problems would end.

The town was called Åbro and as I rolled in, at eleven o’clock, it looked like it had been tucked up in bed for hours. A lone pizza place was shuttered and the only light came from the streetlights. But as I chugged on around the backstreets I came upon a dimly lit sign that said ‘Hotel’.

I parked the car and rang the bell. I waited and shivered a bit and gasped at the sheer weight of the falling snow. The Volvo creaked beside me. I rang the bell again. Still nothing, not a light, not a sound. At last an upstairs window opened.

‘Yes? What do you want?’ came the curt voice of a middle-aged woman.

‘Ah, um — this is the hotel is it?’

‘Yes’

‘Well, my car has broken down and I’d be really grateful if you could let me have a bed for the night.’

‘You can’t, we have no
övernattning?

‘What do you mean you have no
övernattning?’

‘I mean we have no
övernattning!’

‘This isn’t a hotel then?’

‘Yes, it is a hotel?

‘Well if it is a hotel then surely I can stay the night?

‘It is a hotel but you can’t stay the night because we have no
övernattning,’
she repeated firmly, and, as if this brought things to a satisfactory conclusion, slammed the window shut. I shouted that as I had nowhere else to sleep it would be entirely her responsibility if I froze to death. However, I might as well have yelled at the snow. This hotelier was not going to relent for one feeble foreigner with a grudge about its policy on
övernattning
—which, incidentally, means staying the night.

Half an hour earlier, I would have said that I had reached rock bottom but it was nothing to this new despair. My options for getting through that bitter night were looking extremely grim. I decided to sleep on the back seat of the car outside the wretched hotel and leave the engine running, both for warmth and to annoy the harpie of the hotel. There was a risk that I’d asphyxiate or freeze, but at least I’d have the satisfaction of leaving an untidy heap — car and frozen body — on the hotel’s doorstep in the morning.

I lay down, fully clothed and with a few extra layers added for good measure, beneath the sheepskin coat. My heart was full of spleen, my head full of wrath, and my teeth chattered. Soon, though, I slept and when I awoke in the early morning hours, the motor was still purring and the heater humming away and I was alive. I breathed in, exultantly, and felt the hairs in my nostrils shrivel and freeze — it’s very cold indeed when they do that.

I left that town still fulminating about the hotel. What could be the use of such a ludicrous thing? What nefarious purpose could it possibly serve? It seemed most unlikely that the town’s upstanding inhabitants were whooping it up in rooms rented hourly. Swedish country towns are not known for their erotic shenanigans, so it had to be for drinking: there is nowhere in rural Sweden where you can sit down in congenial surroundings and order a pint of beer, or work your way reflectively through a bottle of wine. The preferred method is to swig from a bottle of vodka or cheap whisky discreetly hidden in a brown paper bag. The hotel would be a drinking club, that’s what.

Within an hour, however, my anger had vanished before the mechanical ministrations of Matts, a thick-set, bristly man with kindly eyes, who helped me push the car to his workshop on the edge of the next village. Matts knew exactly what was wrong and, while his wife brought me steaming cups of tea, he beavered around with screwdriver and wrench, and in half an hour declared it fixed. I asked him how much I owed, a little nervous as repairs of any sort are astronomical in Sweden.

‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ he insisted. ‘I used to be on the road myself when I was young, and anyway it’s a pleasure to help out a traveller from abroad; we don’t get many here.’ I pressed him but he refused and he waved me a cheery goodbye as the car and I purred off into the woods. Matts was the sort of Swede who could make
övernattning
in a refrigerated van seem bearable.

Pleased with this turn of events, I began to enjoy the Swedish landscape. The clouds had lifted and the sun crawled low into the frozen blue sky. The snow glittered on the trees and as the countryside opened out a little I saw the perfect white of the frozen sea beneath a fresh fall of snow. Spotting the red bucket in a silver birch, I wound down a sinuous track through the woods, pure white and dappled with sunlight. At the bottom of the track was a little boat dock deep in snow, and sure enough, just beside it the track dipped down the bank and headed out to sea. A couple of miles off I could see some pine-covered islands dark against the dazzling white sea. The tyres of the car squeaked on the new snow as I eased gingerly down the bank onto the marked road. Then, wincing at every bump or crunch, I set off to drive across the sea.

‘What happens if I fall through the ice?’ I thought to myself. The car would sink like a brick in the icy water, of course. Then, assuming I did manage to squeeze out and swim up to the hole made by the car (no easy matter), I’d still have to scrabble out onto the thick walls of ice. I remembered that you can’t do this without ice spikes. You need one in each hand to get enough grip on the ice to be able to haul yourself out. And, even if you happen to have a pair handy and the strength to do the hauling, how long would you last, sopping wet and sitting on a sea of ice?

As I moved cautiously forward, following the marker buoys and thinking these dark thoughts, I saw a small yellow object, like a toy van, leave the island and turn my way. It grew quickly, reaching enormous proportions as it hurtled past in a flurry of snow. The driver, fag hanging out of his mouth, gave me a jolly grin. It was a furniture lorry. I felt relieved and then a little worried that its huge weight might have cracked the solid ice.

‘How do those people know the day the ice is no longer safe to drive a furniture lorry across?’ I wondered. But luck was with me and soon I arrived at the yellow reeds around the island. I stopped the car and stepped gingerly out onto the ice. Looking back I saw the lorry vanishing in the brightness.

When I switched off the engine, I was again struck by the extraordinary stillness of the Swedish winter. There is no wind, and even if there were, the trees would be too heavy with their thick load of frozen snow to move. There are no birds to sing and the sea is silenced by its sarcophagus of ice. The only sound in the landscape is you.

These thoughts were cut short by the sudden clatter of a snow scooter. A farmer, clad in an orange boilersuit and woolly hat, appeared through a gap in the trees, dismounted and trudged towards my car.
‘Hej!’
he offered sadly. ‘Welcome to Norbo? He took some time in getting his right mitten off while he gazed blankly at the snow. Then he held out a pale pink and white hand. ‘Björn,’ he muttered, withdrawing the proffered hand quickly from my grip.

‘Chris,’ said I.

‘Welcome to Norbo,’ he said again.

‘Tak
— thanks,’ I replied, trying to keep the conversation rolling, though it seemed to have a finality about it.

Björn was aged about thirty, a pink, rounded man with a melancholy look about him. He seemed more comfortable with silence than small talk although he did allow a wan smile to flicker across his muted features when our eyes met. I gave him a big grin but this seemed a little too much for him and he looked away, affecting a quiet cough into his mittens.

In amicable silence we loaded my clobber onto the trailer that dragged behind the scooter, mounted up, and scudded over the ice to the shore. Half hidden by the pines was a big yellow house, part stone and part timber. It had recently had a coat of paint but needed a bit of fundamental attention to its carpentry to bring it in line with the usual immaculate turnout of Swedish houses. But as the Swedes themselves so nicely put it:
Bättre lite skit i hörnet än ett rent helvete
— ‘Better a little shit in the corner than a clean hell?

We passed the farmhouse and weaved our way through a birch wood to the sheep’s quarters. This was a cathedral of timber, a colossal hulk of faded red planks and rotting beams. From inside came the baaing of hundreds of sheep, like the buzzing of a swarm of huge bees.

Björn took a shovel and with a few deft strokes in the snow revealed a little wooden door. With his knife he cut the string that secured it, and kicked it hard. It graunched inwards, enough for us to squeeze through. As we entered, the baaing became deafening, and my nose was assailed by the thick miasma of damp wool, mouldy hay and sheepshit.

Gradually my eyes adapted to the gloom — what little light there was entered through cracks in the planking and dusty windows — and to a truly disheartening sight. There were sheep everywhere, grubby black creatures with steam rising from their backs. The steam hung in a great smelly cloud and within the cloud, seemingly drifting in the air, were even more sheep. They were wandering along plankways that led into the cavernous vault of the barn. Everywhere were huge malodorous bales of hay and silage, with sheep on them and in them, like weevils in a biscuit.

‘Bit of a balls-up, eh Björn?’ I muttered in a feeble understatement. I was looking at one of the grimmest jobs I’d had to do in ten years of work in Sweden.

Björn looked crestfallen. His eyelashes brushed his cheeks as he looked down and wrung his hands a little.

‘You see, it’s been a terrible year,’ he said quietly.

‘It certainly has, Björn — these sheep look like shit! Still, don’t you worry about it, we’ll get at them this afternoon and in a couple of days they’ll look like new!’

‘Well then, shall we go and have something to eat?’ he said, with the beginnings of a grin. I decided that I liked Björn.

Björn’s parents, Tord and Mia, were waiting for us in the kitchen. Unlike the barn this had a scrubbed, colourful look — it was clearly Mia’s domain — and a warm smell of cinnamon buns and coffee wafted towards us from a tray on the broad wooden table.

‘Come and eat,’ intoned Mia, clumping back to the oven and then bending at the hip in a stiff bow to lift out another tray of buns. She winced a little before straightening up.

‘We hope you’ll stay,’ she added and glanced at her husband as if calling on him to flesh out the invite. Tord, a larger, rounder, pinker version of Björn, smiled broadly at me but seemed unwilling to commit himself to words. Instead he helped himself to another bun, and gestured that I should do the same.

‘Thank you, these are nice buns,’ I enthused. It was true they were nice buns, with lots of cinnamon and sugar, but they were also the same as every other bun I’d tasted from the north to the south of rural Sweden on any given day.

‘Aah det är de
— that they are…’ Tord agreed, and gestured towards the coffee pot.

‘Nice coffee,’ I commented, a mite less sincerely as I hate coffee that’s been boiled twice. This didn’t, however, seem the moment for experimental chit-chat.

I looked meaningfully at Björn. He nodded and we rose from the table to go back to the sheep shed. Back in the barn I changed into icy, grease-caked shearing clothes and hung my machine in a corner while Björn set up a mercury lamp. It was only half past two but the sun was dropping fast. The shabby black sheep surrounded us, munching insolently, and as the mercury lamp built up to full power I was illuminated in a pool of bluish white light like an actor in a very fringe theatre. Björn disappeared into the darkness and came back with a sheep. The first customer of the day. I pulled the starter cord.

The first stroke when you shear a sheep goes down across the brisket and out over the belly — or it should do. But the machine stuck almost immediately on a matted snag of belly-wool. I pushed a little harder, took the comb out and tried another angle. Same thing. I pushed and pulled and tugged and strained but still that first bit of wool of the day refused to come off. Either Björn had selected the worst sheep in the flock for me or else I was in for a time of utmost misery.

The sheep was bad all over but eventually I managed to get most of its wool off, by dint of merciless pushing and jabbing and pulling the more reluctant bits off with my hand. She looked awful as she tripped back into the darkness.

‘I’m sorry about that, Björn,’ I gasped. ‘She looks a fright, but it’s taken nearly fifteen minutes to do one bloody sheep. If there are as many as you say there are then we’re going to be here all week, and it’s going to be a god-awful week!’