Blackwater (8 page)

There weren’t many midges by the Blackreed River. The evening was warm enough but maybe they hadn’t yet got going that year. Nor were the salmon trout rising. In three hours, they managed to get twelve, though only five of any size. They saw a beaver swimming, the last glint of sun on its head. It turned with a great slap of its flat tail and vanished almost simultaneously with the sun. Then it grew rapidly colder. The fish stopped rising, so they went back to the camping site. It was past one o’clock when Birger fried the small salmon trout. The cabin filled with grey fumes, but it smelt good. Åke had poured out whisky and put out crispbread and beer.

After they had eaten, exhaustion hit them and they went to bed without clearing the table. As Åke started snoring in the upper bunk, Birger was suddenly overwhelmed by the poverty of it all; the smell of frying fish in the cramped cabin, the sound of cars driving on to the site, the drunken shouts and the squeals of girls. But those skidding around out there had at least got hold of women. Here were two old bachelors lying scratching themselves under the blankets. Not so much as a flower on the table, although it was Midsummer Eve. I must pull myself together, he thought. Tomorrow I’ll cook a proper meal.

The moment he made the promise – it was a promise he would gradually come to keep – he realised he no longer believed she would come back.

The very ground itself frightened her. They kept falling into deep hollows. Mia was crying. They followed paths that tunnelled through the thick undergrowth or disappeared into large holes, and in the end she realised that these paths hadn’t been made by people. But she found the place where the river ran into the lake and they heard the small rapids between the stones talking and murmuring.

The stony riverbed made it difficult to get across with Mia and she stumbled several times, water getting into her short boots. Once they were across, the path was distinct even where it was hard going, the undergrowth thick all round it. They stuck to the path almost without raising their eyes from the narrow strip, slippery with pine needles. At last they came to Nirsbuan, on a slope where buttercups were flowering in their thousands in the light of the night.

Small timbered grey buildings. Not until they started walking up towards what must be the actual outfield cottage did she understand why the mat of grass and flowers was so thick and high. No one had mown it. But someone had recently walked through the tall grass.

The cottage was locked on the outside, a padlocked bar across the door. She felt it and was unable to open it. Someone had been there and walked through the night-wet grass up to the cottage. But not through the door.

She climbed up on a pile of bricks and peered through the window into the kitchen. Everything inside was low, the stove almost down on the floor. The light fell in so that she could see the maker’s label on the oven door. There was an empty sofa in there, perhaps called a bed. You could pull a drawer out from underneath and at least two children would have room to sleep in it. A rickety-looking table, two broken ladderback chairs. A yellow plastic bucket. On the wall, a framed picture of Jesus in his crown of thorns. Some rubbish – a tin and a torn newspaper – on the table. A soot-stained bowl. Nothing else. As she went round the house to look in through the other windows, she heard Mia crying. The moment she stood still, the mosquitoes and midges attacked.

The curtains, blue check and rather dirty, were drawn across one of the windows at the back. She could see only a small section of a wall of blue floral wallpaper, on it a new pattern of brown patches of damp. A piece had loosened and hung down off the wall further down. Then there was a bit of a bed. It must be a bed because she thought she could identify a faded quilt. A foot sticking out at the end. So Dan was there!

It was dim inside behind the drawn curtains. She knocked on the windowpane to wake him and saw the foot swiftly disappear.

She waited, but nothing happened. Silence. She looked at the quilt. It was still and flat. Nothing moving. She didn’t dare knock again.

A foot. Quite white in the thin, uncertain light. Must have been Dan’s? Why was he hiding?

She went round to the front again, involuntarily walking quietly, creeping along, trying to avoid treading on anything that might make a noise.

Mia was crying like a baby now, her mouth open and tears smearing her face. Annie couldn’t explain the inexplicable to her, that Dan was there but didn’t want to come out. She couldn’t imagine how Mia would cope with the long walk back; indeed, she was hardly able to imagine how she would herself.

She carried the little girl into the forest again, out of sight of the cottage. Was it Dan in there? Why had he pulled in his foot? She sat down on a tree stump with Mia in her arms, waving the midges away with a sprig she had broken off. She whispered that they would go back, but only to the blue tent. They would wake whoever was asleep inside and ask for help. Maybe they had a paraffin stove and could make some tea for them. Or cocoa. Then they would be sure to take them to the road and if one of them was a big strong man he would carry Mia. They would drive them down to the village in their Renault 4L, for they must be the owners. And soon, quite soon, in only an hour or two, they would both be tucked up in a warm bed. Mia’s tears had abated and turned into hiccups. She put her thumb in her mouth again and slept for a while.

The morning sun was coming through the trees as they started walking, the birdsong soaring. Everything seemed so much easier now the sun was warming up. They crossed the river at the same place. She didn’t dare try anywhere else. Once on the other side, they were to make their way back to the tent, but it was not easy to walk along the riverbank. The undergrowth was tangled and the ground churned up by animals. They had to move further up, to the edge of the marshland.

At last she recognised the two spruces storms had twisted together into a knot, but she couldn’t see the tent. There couldn’t possibly be two other deformed spruces like those by the river. She was having trouble finding landmarks in the marshland, for in the uncertain light it looked as if both trees and undergrowth had moved.

‘You stay there,’ she said to Mia. ‘It must be down there by those spruces. I’ll go down and look. Then you won’t have to walk that last bit if I’m wrong.’

She gave Mia the rucksack to sit on, and a birch sprig to keep off the midges. But the insects appeared to have given up in the morning sun. Mia was anxious and tearful.

‘I’m only going down to the river. You’ll be able to see me all the way.’

It was the right place. As she came down to the spruces, she saw the jeans hanging over one of the branches. But the tent had collapsed. That was why she hadn’t been able to see it from up in the marsh. She went closer.

What did she actually see? Afterwards, she didn’t know. So many hideous descriptions appeared. She had probably read some of them. She couldn’t remember later.

For a long time, there was a great empty space there. She saw her own hands under the water, white, even whitish green. She saw the spruces. They had knotted together to form a great nodule, grown together where one of them had been bent by a storm long ago. The wet jeans were hanging over a branch. The swampy patch of small birches on the other side of the river – always softer, greener and more secretive than the side you are on.

She wanted to run away. But she must have gone on a few steps more. She felt sick and her legs refused to carry her. Then it struck her with great violence. She fell to her knees, the palms of her hands propped against the swaying ground. When she got up, her hands were bloodstained. She rubbed and rubbed them against each other, then tried to wipe them on her skirt, but that wasn’t much use. She staggered away, crawling the first bit, then dipping her hands in the water. It was cold. Strong current. Swift transparent water. Her hands were clean. She vomited into the water and the current took away the mess she had heaved out of herself. The water was soon clean again, clear and swift-running. With her head averted and without looking at the tent, she went back up to Mia.

‘They weren’t there,’ she said. Roughly she grabbed the girl’s arm and hurried away towards the marsh. The sun was coming right through the white woolly tufts now, floating, apparently hovering above the sedge. The tent was no longer visible. She saw the river and its swift water, dark, foaming in whirlpools. And the ground on the other side.

Afterwards, she was no longer sure of the place. It was not marked, had no boundaries. It wandered like a sunspot between shadows of clouds. It was an event, an event by water. As everything is.

He had read that an eel could live for a long time without food, making its way through shallow ditches to new waters and down towards the sea.

If trapped in a pool with no connections with streams or lakes, it could wriggle its way through damp grass to reach fresh water.

It was now lying quite still in the yellow plastic bucket.

Early morning and clear sunny weather, warm indoors, so he had no need to get up and light the stove. He had been scared by the banging on the window, but that had gone now. As soon as he’d heard it was a woman’s voice, he had calmed down. Gudrun was looking for him. She could go on doing so for a while. But he couldn’t go back to sleep. That didn’t matter much; he wasn’t particularly tired now, and he needed to think.

But he couldn’t. He was too hungry. He got up and rummaged in the cupboard above the sink. A packet of pancake mix. White pepper. Cocoa. How idiotic, the whole house at home was stuffed with food; both freezers, the larder, the fridge and the cold cellar. He would have to go back home without having done any thinking.

Well, that wasn’t the end of the world. He had lain low in his room before, hunched over his desk. He could say to hell with them for hours on end. And it was only over the weekend that there would be as many as five of them. Five towers of muscle. The smell of aftershave and cigarette smoke. Drinks. Football on the shimmering blue screen, drawn curtains. Racing off in cars. And the unease that spurted out now and again. Gudrun like some kind of bloody incense in the room.

Where did hatred come from?

He got up and pulled on his jeans. They were dry but stiff from the clay. He stirred some water into the pancake mix and cocoa. It did not dissolve, sticky lumps swimming around, the cocoa dry on the surface. He lit the stove to heat up the unappetising mess.

He had to climb out of the window to take a leak. It was all so silly, so much trouble. He had never liked things that wasted time and were tiresome. Like camping.

As he was climbing back in, the cocoa gruel was boiling over, thick now and burnt to the the bottom of the pan. He ate it once it had cooled a bit, then cleared up behind him. No point going on with this. Gudrun had probably been really worried. She must have woken the whole household. No one had moved at first, he was sure of that. He wondered whether she had had to go and search on her own.

They would grin a bit when he got back, then say nothing. Nor would he dare say anything. He would have to go on living there, curled up, one year at a time. Then military service.

It struck him it would be the same then.

Torsten and his real sons fitted in. They belonged, only sometimes they went a bit too far. Then there were fines to pay.

It would be the same doing his military service, and at college. Though there he would have a better chance. There he could be just as confident as Torsten was up on the tractor and perhaps occasionally go a bit too far himself.

He hunted out a cloudberry pail with a lid and put the eel into it. It didn’t thrash around, but he was afraid it was a deceptive old devil, so he firmly clipped down the lid before climbing out of the window.

The sunlight was bright over the Klöppen; he could hardly keep his eyes on the water. Before he left, he had to go to the privy down by the trees on the shore. The planking was silver-grey and faintly green, covered with a thin coat of decay. Insects were clicking inside and it smelt of rot. He began to read an old magazine, the paper yellow round the edges. It was difficult to find anything he hadn’t read before.

There was a serial he had ignored before, thinking it was about love, but now he found it was a political story – though with love in it. A weeping wife who was an alcoholic. The husband had got drunk and the pretty young girl he was out with in his car had been killed. The worst thing would be if her brother found out. And the newspapers.

Chappaquiddick.

The word popped up in his head, meaningless at first, then he remembered, Edward Kennedy. He started shuffling through the heap of magazines to find some more episodes of the serial.

Yes, it was the story of the president’s brother, though they had changed all the names. The beginning and the end were missing, but he read what he could find.

Outrageous, really.

Edward Kennedy was still around and active. He had only gone a little too far. But it had worked out.

Things always worked out for them.

His revulsion rose like the smell of shit from the torn paper. He ripped out a page with a picture of the president’s sister-in-law on it – tears, staling eyes, pearl necklace, a red mouth that had yellowed – and rubbed it soft before wiping himself with it. Shitting had made him even hungrier.

The lake looked peculiar, oily in the stillness, as if the water were sticky. He could see no one on the other side and was pleased, though it didn’t matter. Soon he would be up at the Strömgren homestead and would meet people on the road. They would wonder what he had in the pail.

Then he noticed the canoe, a light metal one glinting in a willow thicket.

What actually happens when you decide?

Afterwards, Johan reckoned he never had decided, not when he fetched the paddle from the cookhouse, nor when he picked the lock on the chain. He had thought it would be good not to have to walk, that’s all. He would come out by Röbäck if he paddled down the length of the lake. Then he could hitch home. That was better than trudging on sore feet all the way from the homestead carrying a pail.