Blackwater (40 page)

He could hear the women showering and chatting away to each other as he dried himself with his vest and put on the rest of his clothes. Once the women had gone into the sauna, Annie had drummed lightly on the door. He opened up and they slipped out, she close behind him.

It turned out just as he had known and realised. She left the kick-sled at the school. Some of the embers in the fire were still glowing back at her house. She had a large Lapp-hound cross which barked at him. Bonnie had to stay in the car.

She gave him tea and sandwiches at first and everything went very calmly. He felt it was right that this should be so, and they had a lot to talk about. He wanted to ask her a great many things. About Aagot. About the school. And why she had come back to Blackwater. She laughed a little at his eagerness and said they would have to take one thing at a time. When she got up and cleared away, he followed her, grabbed her from behind and steered her over towards the warmth of the fire. Her hair was short and it was easy to find the nape of her neck. The first place he kissed her was the back of the neck. He could feel the knob on her top vertebra very clearly and he was overcome with a tenderness for her so great that tears came to his eyes.

‘So much has happened,’ he murmured. ‘So many years.’

So much loneliness, he thought. He knew she had been living with that gutless worm Göran Dubois for a couple of years. And that she had been some kind of almost official fiancée to Roland Fjellström. But he also knew, and could feel it in the tension of her deltoid muscle, how lonely it had been. How long the winters. How light the sleepless summer nights. How she had sat reading for hours in the little room that had now been extended with a bedroom section. In Aagot’s sister’s day, they had done the baking in there.

‘If you put a couple of decent logs on now, it’ll burn for a while,’ he said. She had electric heating, but confessed she didn’t want to be without the fire.

‘How do you manage for wood?’

‘I buy it. I get help with the chopping, too. Björne Brandberg is my household gnome.’

‘Is that since that time?’

She nodded. Then he saw she was crying quietly and he was sure she had not cried over the dead child for a very long time. Perhaps not for years. It’s thawing inside us, he thought. In me, too. A whole lot of longing.

She insisted on changing the sheets. It was almost solemn. Then he undressed before she did. She had already seen him naked, but he asked all the same.

‘Do you think I’m too fat?’

‘I think you’re nice and plump.’

Because of that they fell into bed laughing, she dressed and he naked. It was much less long-winded than his peculiar turns with the Östersund ladies whom he had had to give expensive perfumes or – even worse – take out to starchy dinners at the Winn Hotel.

He was fascinated by the red hair on the mound between her thighs, not stiff and curly but as soft as silk. She was worried it was thinning out. He examined her everywhere with fingers she maintained were short and stubby. He asked her about a scar on her shin and looked carefully at the white streaks on her belly. He wanted to know whether she had had an easy delivery when she gave birth to Mia, and he confessed there were a whole lot of questions he had wanted to ask her at the time, when she had come to see him. But he hadn’t dared, for they were things that had nothing to do with him. Not at that time.

‘Now we’re going to do this,’ he said, very gently parting her legs. ‘In a moment, you’ll be as good as engaged to me.’

He realised she hadn’t done it for a very long time and that she was slightly scared, physically scared that he would go too far in and be too rough. But he had no desire to be rough. She was small inside and only slowly became moist.

Yes, there was fear in her. A flash of furious rage went through him as he thought about Dubois and Fjellström and that incredible shit Ulander. But he realised he should put aside all such thoughts, all thinking for that matter, to make it good for them both.

Then she seemed to melt inside and start flowing. They kissed hazily and moistly and he forgot to be careful, forgot everything he had thought out for her sake. He stopped thinking, and so did she. She whimpered occasionally and he turned her quickly, pleased that he was strong, and it was all so intensely bloody wonderful, he was just about to come. But then he heard their breathing, out of step, and thought about his haunches going up and down, and she noticed he was thinking about something and asked what it was. All he said was what a peculiar activity it really was.

‘I’m chief medical officer of the District Health Authority, did you know that? Here’s you, lying whimpering under me, and I’m doing everything I can to make you whimper and gasp and the best I can do about it is this . . . and this . . . and this . . .’

Then it was all over but she just laughed.

‘I think I’m dreaming,’ he said as he lay on his back.

‘Never mind. You’ll still be chief medical officer of the District Health Authority when you wake up.’

There was a space between the bed and the wall and he was lying with his arm out, wondering why she had arranged the furniture so oddly. He felt with his hand and found something cold and metallic. Then wood. Fine, dense wood. A butt. He had to look.

‘Do you keep a shotgun here?’

‘Always,’ she said.

‘A fine ole gun,’ he said when he hauled it out. ‘Real nice, little ole lady’s gun. What do you shoot with it? Hares?’

They fell asleep, forgetting to put more wood on the fire. When they woke he said ‘Hell!’, because he had only just remembered Bonnie. The car would be cold by now, so he had to bring Bonnie in and they both hoped it would be all right. But the two dogs immediately started fighting. He tried to separate them by pulling Bonnie’s hind legs, but almost got bitten by the other dog. Annie filled a pan with water to pour over them, but he took it away from her. In the turmoil of growls, sharp barks and threatening snarls, he pulled her back into the bedroom again and closed the door.

‘To hell with them,’ he said. ‘They can’t kill each other. Bonnie’s stronger, but the other one’s more aggressive. They’ll give up when they find that out.’

‘I think Saddie would fight to the death,’ said Annie. But it was already calmer beyond the closed door and they lay down on the bed again. It was just as he had said; the dogs would have to get used to this.

He liked remembering that evening, the whole of that winter evening and night, and when he recounted it to himself in his mind, he browsed through it in images. Images of chocolates on the coffee table, the roses of warmth on her breasts, the ambulance jammed in the snowdrift as if trying to hide, the tense abdomen under a grey-striped nightshirt, the stars, the notice board beside the general store with its schedule of evening classes and advertisements for bingo in Norway. But he realised he had amalgamated images from a great many journeys in the winter darkness on the Blackreed road, the abdomen one of dozens, perhaps one of hundreds of sore and distended abdomens he had palpated in musty bedrooms. He couldn’t be sure he remembered correctly even when it came to the house and the woman and the cloudberry preserve. It had all happened. But it had happened all too many times. Image had been superimposed upon image; the memories of that evening were precious, and he had amalgamated them with care. Perhaps he had taken some of them from elsewhere, from other long journeys and other dark, glimmering, somnolent and dying villages beside ice-covered or jet-black water.

And what did she remember? A face she had only glimpsed before it vanished in the uncertain night light. A boy. A dark head of hair and an expression. Of what? Agitation perhaps. Or excitement? Birger couldn’t remember exactly what she had said. And she could see nothing but a blurred patch in her memory where that face was supposed to be. Someone had filled it in for her. Wishful thinking?

The summer day was hot now, the light drab as he drove along the gravelly, frost-damaged Blackreed road. He was driving too fast, not a habit of his. He was annoyed with health freaks who disapproved of plaque and obesity, but tolerated twenty dead in the weekend war on the roads. At Offerberg a pothole made him hit the roof and there was a bang from the chassis. Again and again he dialled Annie’s number. Still no reply.

When he got to Blackwater, there were a lot of cars and people by the store, which was just closing. Norwegians had been shopping for the weekend and were coming out with sausage rings, cartons of cigarettes and boxes of snuff. He drove through the village looking straight ahead to escape being stopped. He could see the little white house on its ledge below the ridge. As usual, nothing was moving up there. That was normal.

He drove up to the house and sat waiting for a few seconds. The kitchen window gleamed. From the doorhandle hung a plastic bag with something inside it. He saw a thermos and a plastic box as he went up the steps. The door was locked.

He knocked a few times. Although she was rather deaf, Saddie ought to have heard him by now, and he was somehow cheered by the fact that she had Saddie with her. That seemed normal. He reckoned he must have gone over the top when he rushed away from Life Core like that. He had also acquired a headache.

He had no keys with him. They were still at his apartment, but he knew she kept a key hanging in the woodshed. He fetched it and went in.

There was a strong smell of flowers in the kitchen, mostly lily-of-the-valley. Fat little bunches of them from the end-of-term ceremonies stood on the table, the worktop and in both windows.

There were two used mugs on the table, a sugar bowl and a bread basket. No jam. The cheese was in its plastic bag on the worktop. There were crumbs on the tablecloth. It looked as if she had just been clearing away.

She had had tea with someone, then gone out. He felt the teapot. It was cold, no tea in it, only a thick layer of used tea leaves at the bottom.

In the living room, he saw that Saddie had rucked up the rug under the coffee table and lain on it. There were more flowers in there. Annie’s bed had been made. For a moment, he sensed her loneliness just as strongly as when he had gone there for the first time.

We damn well ought to be married!

That suddenly broke through, and it was true. Though he had always agreed with her that things were best this way.

But he hadn’t wanted it like this. Perhaps it was right for her, but he wanted to be married to her, to live with her, and he had wanted that all the time. To have her. He oughtn’t to have left her alone in a house with no neighbours. With that damned Sabela she maintained she could load in twenty-two seconds.

It was panic. He recognised it. He suddenly remembered squatting down above Westlund’s and shitting his guts out. Out of pure terror.

That was long ago now, almost twenty years. That affair up by the Lobber, although half-forgotten and wiped out of their conscious minds, still had power over them. Annie’s whispering voice had sounded frightened. And now she had infected him.

He felt calmer once he had realised that. He went out into the shower room and found some Disprin. As it fizzed in the tooth mug, he put water for coffee on the electric plate. It was too hot to light the stove. It looked as if it had rained on her newly sown bit of land, but the moisture had long since evaporated from the grass. No midges yet, no stingers and hardly any mosquitoes. She was spending her first free day doing what she had longed to do. She was walking. Not far, presumably, because Saddie was with her. The dog had bad hip joints and could no longer go uphill. Annie had taken the car and perhaps driven up. But she had forgotten the thermos of coffee she had prepared.

She wasn’t far away and he would wait for her. It looked like being a fine, warm evening. He opened a window in the living room. The smell of decaying lilies-of-the-valley bothered him.

A man and a woman were skiing east down the mountainside and it was raining. The snow was transparent and crackled round their skis; the rain was light, whipping in squalls on the wind. Their faces were wet, the rain not pouring down but flying towards them.

The snow was shrinking. The streams, silent all winter, were now rippling loudly. They had to walk long stretches over the mountain heath, carrying their skis on their shoulders. They came down to the river and crossed it on an arched bridge of ice and packed snow. He held his breath as he heard the water rushing below.

She was pregnant and he was so delighted he had shouted aloud as they raced downhill. They had been moving with the patches of sun all morning, chasing them over the mountain but never really catching up with them. He had shown her an old place of sacrifice. He wanted to show her everything. That was why they were back home. When she had unhesitatingly taken a steep downhill run, he had sounded like his grandfather:

‘Now, now . . .’

He was careful with her. All kinds of things he had never thought of before now occurred to him, as well as a great deal he had only heard talked about. The darkness of Sami tents, warning yelps from dogs, and bear spears. He wanted to protect her with dog, spear and bearskins, and he laughed out loud at himself from sheer exhilaration.

To him, this was home. He realised that it always had been. It was a place he could describe only in this way. It had no name and roamed like a patch of sun between shadows of clouds when he started thinking about it. But they were racing round in it now. He wanted her to be in it.

He thought about the baby that was not yet a baby. She didn’t even want him to say ‘the baby’. Not yet. ‘The foetus’ sounded too clinical, but he hadn’t had to say that either. She had understood his half-question and assured him it wasn’t harmful to move, to go skiing. Despite obvious discomforts, she was secure in her early motherhood. But as she skied across the bridge of hard-packed snow and hollowed ice, she had no inkling of the power of the water beneath her, the cold or the savage force of the current below.

Naturally the water had a name. The river was called something it hadn’t always been called. He didn’t feel like saying it. It had its name in the other language, too, older but not as old as the water.