The Crow Girl (35 page)

The only name that means anything is Martin’s.

She had been ten and he three when they got to know each other that week out at the cottage.

The first time he had put his hand in hers he had done it without wanting anything more.

He had just wanted to touch her hand.

Sofia puts her hand over Martin’s name on the desktop, and feels grief rising like sap in her chest. She had him in her hands, he used to do whatever she suggested. So full of trust.

She sees herself next to Martin’s dad. The threat she thought he was. The way she had tried to play the game she knew so well. Constantly waiting for that moment, the time he would catch her and make her his. The way she had wanted to protect Martin from those adult arms, that adult body.

She giggles at her own memories and the naive assumption that all men were the same. If it hadn’t been for the fact that she had seen Martin’s dad touching him, everything would have been different. It was that moment that had confirmed beyond any doubt that all men knew no boundaries and were capable of anything.

But in his case she had been wrong.

Martin’s dad had been a perfectly ordinary dad. He had been washing his son. That’s all.

Guilt, she thinks.

Bengt and the other men made Martin’s dad guilty. The ten-year-old Victoria saw the collective guilt of all men in him. In his eyes and the way he touched her.

He was a man, and that was enough. No analysis was required. Only the logical conclusion of her own thoughts.

She reads the label on the videotape in her hand.

Sigtuna 84.

A car passes at high speed down Skärgårdsvägen, and she drops the tape on the floor. To her the noise is deafening and she stands frozen, but there’s nothing to suggest that they heard her down in the sauna.

It’s still quiet, and it occurs to her that everything might have just stopped after she vanished from their lives.

Maybe she was the root of all the evil?

If that’s true, then she has no framework to follow, no timetable to put her faith in. In spite of her uncertainty she can’t resist watching the film. She has to experience everything once more.

Relief, she thinks.

She sits down on the bed, puts the tape in the video player, and turns the television on.

There’s a hiss as the film starts, and she lowers the volume. The picture is sharp and shows a room lit up by a single, bare light bulb.

She sees three girls kneeling in front of a row of pig masks.

She is on the left, Victoria, smiling faintly.

The sound of the old video camera is audible.

‘Tie them up!’ someone hisses, then bursts out laughing.

The girls’ hands are bound behind them with duct tape, and they’re blindfolded. One of the masked girls brings forward a bucket of water.

‘Silence. And … action!’ the girl holding the camera says. ‘Welcome to Sigtuna College for the Humanities!’ she goes on, while the contents of the bucket are emptied over the three girls’ heads. Hannah coughs and Jessica lets out a yelp, but Sofia sees herself sit in complete silence.

One of the girls steps forward, puts on a student cap and bends over, making a sweeping gesture towards the camera, then turns towards the girls on the floor. Sofia watches in fascination as Jessica begins to sway backwards and forwards.

‘I am the representative of the student body!’

The others all burst into loud laughter, and Sofia leans forward and lowers the volume on the television a bit more, while the girl goes on with her speech.

‘And to become full members you must eat the welcome gift from our school’s most eminent headmistress.’ The laughter gets even louder, but Sofia can tell that it’s forced. As if the girls are laughing out of obligation, and not because they are genuinely amused. Goaded on by Fredrika Grünewald.

The camera zooms in to show just Jessica, Hannah and Victoria sitting on the floor.

Sofia Zetterlund sits mutely in front of the flickering television screen, feeling fury bubble up inside her. They had agreed that they would be served chocolate pudding, but Fredrika Grünewald had served them real dog shit in order to cement her hold over the younger girls.

As she sees herself in the film she feels proud. Because she had fought back, and had gained victory by being responsible for the final shock.

She had played her role to the end.

She was used to dealing with shit.

Sofia takes the tape out and put it back in the box. The water pipes are rumbling and the boiler clicks into action down in the cellar. She can hear his agitated voice from the sauna, and her mum’s attempts to calm him down.

Sofia thinks it smells musty and cautiously opens the window. She looks out over the dusk-shrouded garden. Her old swing is still hanging from the tree below. She remembers it being red, but none of the paint is left. Just dry, yellow-brown flakes.

A world of facades, she thinks, as she turns and looks around the room. There’s a picture of her on the wall, from when she was in year 9. Her smile is radiant and her eyes full of life. No indication of what was really going on inside her.

She had learned to play the game.

Sofia feels that she’s close to tears. Not because she regrets anything, but because she suddenly comes to think about Hannah and Jessica, who got caught up in Victoria’s game but never found out that it had been her idea all along.

It had turned into an experiment in guilt. A joke that became serious.

In front of Hannah and Jessica she had played the role of victim, even though she was actually the opposite.

It was a betrayal.

She spent three years sharing the shame with them.

For three years the idea of revenge held them together.

She had hated Fredrika Grünewald and all the anonymous upper-class girls from Danderyd and Stocksund, who used their parents’ money to buy the nicest and most expensive brands of clothes. Who thought they were something special because of their smart names.

Four years older.

Four years more mature than her.

Who carries the greater anxiety today? Have they forgotten it, suppressed it?

Sofia sits down on the soft, pale blue carpet and leans her head back. She looks up at the ceiling and sees that the cracks in the plaster are still there. Others have appeared since she was last there.

She wonders which of them stuck to the contract they signed with their own blood.

Hannah? Jessica? She herself?

They stuck together for three years, then they lost touch.

The last time she saw them was on the train from the Gare du Nord in Paris.

She pulls out the battered photograph album and opens the first page. She doesn’t recognise herself in the pictures. It’s just a child who isn’t her, and when she thinks back on herself as a little girl she feels nothing.

That isn’t me, nor that one who’s five, nor that one who’s eight. They can’t be me, because I don’t feel what they felt, I don’t think what they thought.

They’re all dead.

She remembers when the eight-year-old had just learned to tell the time, and would lie in bed pretending to be a clock.

But she never managed to trick time. Instead time had taken her under its arm and carried her away from there.

In the album in front of her she ages each time she turns a page. Seasons and birthday cakes follow on, one after another.

After the pictures from Sigtuna she had stuck in an Interrail card next to a ticket for the Roskilde Festival. On the opposite page are three blurred pictures, of Hannah, Jessica and her. She goes on looking at the pictures as she listens for sounds from the basement, but he seems to have calmed down.

They had been the Three Musketeers, even if the other two had turned their backs on her towards the end and proved themselves to be exactly the same as all the others. To start with they had shared everything and solved problems together, but when it really mattered they had let her down. When things got serious and it was time to show their character, they had burst into tears and run home to their mothers, like little girls.

She had thought they were completely stupid. Now she looks at their photographs and realises that they were just unsullied. They had believed the best of people. They had trusted her. That was all.

Sofia jumps when she hears banging and shouting from the basement. The sauna door opens, and for the first time in several years she hears his voice in person. ‘Not that I imagine for a second that you’re ever going to be clean, but at least this ought to get rid of the smell!’

She assumes that he’s grabbed Mum by the hair and pulled her out of the sauna. Is he going to scald her or force her to stand under ice-cold water for several minutes?

Sofia shuts her eyes and thinks about what she’ll do if they decide to get out of the sauna. She looks at the time. No, he’s a creature of habit, so the torment will continue for at least another half-hour.

Sofia wonders what Mum usually says to her friends. How many times can you split your eyebrow open on a kitchen cupboard, how many times can you slip in the bath? Shouldn’t you take more care on the stairs if you’ve managed to fall down them four times in the last six months? Surely people must wonder, she thinks.

On one single occasion he raised his arm to Victoria, ready to strike, but when she smashed him in the head with a saucepan he withdrew like a shark, and spent several months complaining of headaches.

Mum never hit back, just cried and came and curled up beside Victoria instead, looking for solace. Victoria always did her best, and lay awake until her mum fell asleep.

After one of their fights Mum had driven off and stayed in a hotel for several days. Dad didn’t know where she’d gone and got worried, and Victoria had to comfort him as he sobbed against her chest.

On days like that she didn’t go to school, and spent hours cycling around, and when the absentee notes appeared they would sign them without asking. There had been some advantages to all the arguments.

Sofia laughs at the memory. That feeling of having an advantage, a secret.

Victoria bore their weakness deep within her. They both knew that she could use it against them whenever she chose. She never did. She chose to think of them as air. She never paid them any attention, and so they never had an opportunity to defend themselves.

She sits down on the bed, picks up the little black dog made from real rabbit skin, and buries her nose in it. It smells of dust and damp. Its little yellow glass eyes stare at her, and she stares back.

When she was little she used to clutch the dog tight and look deep into its eyes. After a while a little world would open up, usually a beach, and she would explore this miniature world until she fell asleep.

But she’s not going to sleep now.

This journey will free her forever.

She’s going to burn all her bridges.

She hugs her dog again. It is as if she used to think no one could harm her back then as long as she held everything inside herself and played along, trying to be smarter. As if she had believed you won victories by destroying others.

That had been his logic when he suffered his attacks.

‘Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,’ she mutters to herself in an attempt to empty the word of all meaning.

He’s sitting downstairs in the sauna, and no one has ever dared leave him. No one but Victoria. The only thing he instilled in her was the desire to escape. He never managed to teach her to want to stay.

Escape, above everything, she thinks. Self-defence mechanisms hand in hand with destructiveness.

Memories attack her from within. They sting her throat. Everything hurts. She isn’t prepared for the deluge, or the images from a time she hasn’t thought about for more than twenty years. She realises that she ought to have felt much more than she did, but knows that she has gone from one thing to the next, always laughing. From one humiliation to the next.

She can still hear it, that laughter. The sound gets louder until it’s deafening. She rocks back and forth in her childhood bedroom. She hums quietly to herself. It’s as if the voice inside her head leaks out through her clenched lips. The sound of a deflating bicycle tyre.

She covers her ears with her hands in an attempt to shut out the manic sound, a sound she once thought was happiness.

The man downstairs in the sauna had destroyed everything that could have been, partly through his sick, sadistic desires, and partly through his lachrymose self-pity.

Sofia takes the envelope from the box. It’s marked with the letter M and contains a letter and a photograph.

The letter is dated 9 July 1982. Martin obviously had help writing it, but wrote his name himself, and says that it’s sunny and hot and that he’s been swimming almost every day. Then he drew a flower and something that looks like a small dog.

Beneath the drawing are the words SEA STACK AND SPIDER FLOWER.

On the back of the photograph she sees that it was taken in Ekeviken, on Fårö, in the summer of 1982. The picture shows Martin, five years old, under an apple tree. In his arms he’s holding a white rabbit that looks like it’s trying to get away. He’s smiling and squinting against the sun, with his head slightly tilted.

His shoelaces are undone, and he looks happy. She strokes Martin’s face gently with her finger and thinks about how he never learned to tie his shoelaces, so he was always tripping. And she thinks about the laughter that meant she could never resist hugging him.

She loses herself in the photograph, his eyes, his skin. She can still remember the way his skin smelled after a day in the sun, after his evening bath, in the morning when the folds of his pillow were still visible on his cheek. She thinks about their final hours together.

Sofia shuts her eyes, folds her arms across her chest, hugs herself.

The pipes beside the bed begin to roar. Then she hears footsteps on the stairs. Footsteps whose weight she recognises.

Her heart is beating so hard she almost can’t breathe. It wasn’t me, she thinks.

It was you.

She hears him clattering around in the kitchen, then turning the tap on. Then he turns it off and disappears down into the basement again.