Blackwater. Part 24

'I'm from Starhill,' she said, but she could see that the information was superfluous. She was wearing the pale-blue quilted jacket Henny had left behind for her, thinking it made her look like a tourist. But there were no tourists in early January. And there was no other car parked by the bridge apart from his.

'I was going to ask you if you would take me and my daughter down to the village,' she said. 'And our belongings.'

He said nothing, just went on pouring measures of coffee into the pot.

'Though I didn't realise you only had a car here. I thought there was a tractor. We can hear the sound all the way up there.'

'Be all right with t'scooter,' he said. 'And t'sled. I could bring that up. On Sat.u.r.day. When I'm free.'

'I'll pay you, of course.'

'No need,' he said.

He poured out the coffee and gave her a slice of brown bread and liver pate. There was a pickled gherkin pressed into the pate. She wondered who had packed his lunch box for him. It contained meatb.a.l.l.s and macaroni.

'Do you think you could phone Aagot f.a.gerli for me?' she said. 'Ask her if I may rent her cottage by the road.'

'Then she'd better put the electric heating on this evening,' he said.

He didn't ask her about anything, but nonetheless she thought she ought to explain.

'I'm going to have a child,' she said.

That only embarra.s.sed him. He bent over his lunch box, eating rapidly.

'I daren't have a child up there. If anything should happen. I thought I'd wait at Aagot f.a.gerli's until the time is nearer, then go to ostersund.'

It was getting darker. She had no great desire to go out into the cold again, but she had to hurry away before it grew too dark. She thanked him for the coffee. He said nothing.

'See you on Sat.u.r.day, then?'

What if he doesn't come? she thought. What if I'm standing there with everything packed and Petrus and onis are miserable and angry?

'You're sure you can come?' she said.

Yes, he would come. And before he left on Sat.u.r.day morning, he would go and light the stove in the cottage.

And we thought he was the Enemy, she reflected as she made her way back up towards Starhill in the failing light. The company lackeys, Dan called people like him. I've gone over to the Enemy. She snorted. It wasn't often she laughed at herself; perhaps hardly anyone ever did. It was as if a lid of cold and ill temper had been lifted that day, a winter's day like any other. But it was the Day. She realised that; the standstill was over.

II.

He hadn't woken properly and was feeling no unease, only desire. It came over him as he lay half-asleep and turned into a dream. He was trying to nudge his way into her, cautiously nosing his way in. They were lying in front of a hot, crackling stove. From the base of his swollen, stubby member, desire radiated like the current from a small battery. But he knew he must go carefully and take it easy. The concentrated and at the same time delimited pleasure woke him.

He must have been dreaming about the first time, when there had been fear in her, as if those thin membranes and tensed muscles contained a memory. What had happened to her? He had never been given any answer, and it was all so long ago now.

He wished she would call back but did not want to hear the phone ringing. It was her voice he wanted, her voice close to his ear. Her lips, really. Those warm lips and her warm breath.

The leaves of the birches were glowing now in the sun outside her window. In his room the light was penetrating between the slats of the venetian blind. He slid back down into sleep, and it didn't seem to him that he slept long. But when he woke up it was half past seven.

She had phoned early in the morning and almost whispered that she had seen the boy who one Midsummer night long ago ran past her on the path to the Lobber. And perhaps towards that tent.

Birger didn't believe it. Not for a moment. Time must have changed the boy, and besides, he was a foreigner. Why would he turn up in Blackwater almost two decades later? She had seen a face, a face reminding her of the boy's. Maybe not even that. A feeling had come over her, like dreams or visions in a half-awake state. Deja vu?

A dream and a delusion. He wished she was there with him. Now.

It struck him that she had rung before five. Whom could she have seen at that hour? Had she been out? He had talked to her last thing before he fell asleep. They had said good night. That had been past eleven. It had been her end of term, she had been tired and was going straight to sleep.

As he reached out for the telephone, it rang. He was so convinced it was her that he cried: 'Annie!'

'Hurry, please come! She's bleeding! She's bleeding!'

An avalanche of words, in the local dialect intermingled with guttural Arabic schsch-sounds. It took him a while to make any sense of it. At first he thought the man was talking about Annie. Then he remembered there had been a fight in the refugee camp on Friday night and he thought it had started up again. But it was only Ahmed from the food takeaway. He had nothing to do with the camp and would never go there. He minded his own business.

'Leila's bleeding! You must come.'

'Phone the health centre,' Birger said, trying to sound decisive, but of course the man took no notice. Birger had to set off for the flat above the kebab takeaway to make sure she went. Ahmed's wife was four months pregnant.

'Nothing to worry about,' he said to calm him down, though he wasn't sure.

Another torrent of words. They had made Ahmed stop offering his Dish of the Day. He had been fined. Leila had been scared and had had a miscarriage.

'You won't get a miscarriage from fines,' said Birger. 'But you might get paranoia. You should have stuck to kebabs.'

'They talk about me like a dirty pig and Leila cries all day, all night. About our kitchen.'

'No, they don't. You need to have permission. You have to have showers for the staff and this and that. Fans and things. I don't think Leila will have a miscarriage. She'll be given injections and will have to lie still for a while. It'll be all right.'

That was his message. Always. Did he believe it?

The asphalt was already hot as he walked across the square in Byvngen from the kebab takeaway, once a haberdasher's, to his own flat. It had taken some time to get Leila away and now he had to shave and change, because he was due at Life Core to sit through a seminar on health care. If he hadn't been billed as a speaker himself, he would have chucked the whole thing in and got into his car. The Blackreed road took an hour. Now he would have to wait until the afternoon.

He showered and while the coffee was brewing he was just about to phone her when he remembered she had said she couldn't talk.

She had someone there. That was why she hadn't phoned. Or wasn't she at home? But where would she have gone? Or driven? There was something odd about it all, something that didn't fit, was inexplicable. Most of all, it was quite unlike her.

At first he listened to the councillor, who was a Social Democrat but wearing Levi jeans and a white Lacoste polo shirt. As usual, he was promising to sell the community. But he didn't mean for good. He wasn't thinking of disposing of it to Germany or the Cellulose Company. He was going to sell it the way you sell a beautiful girl.

He went on to talk about health and lifestyle. He didn't say 'the EC' or 'Europe' quite so often as he had done a year ago, nor did he use the expression 'quality of life'. He implied that the lifestyle in their district was health-promoting. He talked about water and snow and air, about forests and mountains and streams. He didn't mention diabetes, back trouble or coronaries, nor had he brought any suicide statistics.

Later came a lecture on the mucous membranes of the mouth. In a nutsh.e.l.l, people were as healthy as their mouths looked. Birger was irritated by the speaker's using the word diagnostics, which was inappropriate. After the inside of the mouth, they were given coffee, tea or herbal tea. Life Core was no longer as orthodox as it had been when it was called Byvngen Health Home. It was a modern conference hotel and had gone bankrupt in April, but they continued their activities. Birger had cheesecake and coffee.

He spoke after coffee, looking over the audience's already tired faces and ice-cream-coloured clothes. Many of them were wearing Life Core T-shirts with the halved red apple on the chest. He could feel expectation in the air. Ah, here's the doctor who's usually so amusing.

But he wasn't. As soon as he got up on the rostrum, he felt he was falling. His ears closed and for a moment he thought he had gone deaf. But they must have heard him through the microphone, because no one complained, the faces gleaming like empty notice boards at him. He had no idea what he said.

At first he only slowly recognised the feeling faintness, nausea, paralysis and mechanical behaviour. He talked and talked, unable to remember when he had felt like this before or how he could know what it was. It was fear, great fear.

Again and again he had to sip the mineral water. His mouth was dry and he thought his voice was disappearing. Thirty minutes. Then there was to be a discussion. He postponed it, saying he had to go and phone about a patient, cunning even in the midst of panic. He stood with his mobile phone in an empty studio and let it ring ten, fifteen, twenty times. Tried again. But she didn't answer.

He couldn't understand why he hadn't realised something was wrong before. She ought to have answered. She wasn't going anywhere because she was expecting him. He had promised to come the moment the seminar was over.

He ran out to the car, shouting to the receptionist that he had to go out on call and wouldn't be back in time.

The Blackreed road. What if he had never gone that winter evening? Would there have been another time? He didn't think so, though he couldn't explain why.

It was called chance. If it hadn't been for that abdominal case. He had forgotten what the patient's name was, but he had lived in Tangen and was a suspected case of peritonitis.

If he had gone back with the ambulance, would they ever have become close?

The phone had gone while they were having a meal. He had invited the chief education officer with his wife and two others, he couldn't remember who. And that was only six years ago. So how could she, after almost twenty years, recognise a face she had seen for only a few moments? In bad light.

He did remember the chocolates they had brought with them, whoever they had been. He still see a blue box with gold edging and the Queen's face on it, lying on the coffee table by the vase of pink carnations. He had been called to the phone just as they were about to sit down, and when he went back, he said: 'An abdominal case.'

There had been no time to warm up the car. He had cooked a Chinese meal. They had remained seated round the table with lighted candles and the carnations he had bought at the supermarket, lonely guests, as the Blackreed road swallowed up the car and the first house in Tuvallen glimmered. They had eaten and chatted while he raced on.

Houses, people and villages lay curled up and dying in the dark. Pink nylon curtains against rotting cottage timbers, rubbish heaps and wrecks of cars. And the darkness. One of the Finns clearing the Tingnas stretch had said it was called Kaamos, the winter days of no light.

Kaamos takes us.

An abdomen. Mustn't take any risks. Just drive there and feel it.

An abdomen in Blackwater an hour's drive in both directions. The lake had the same name as the village, or was it the other way round, and it was as black as ink on winter evenings. He raced on in the Volvo. The lake would keep its name after the last cottage had rotted away, and then it would exist without a name. Not very pleasant thoughts; sometimes he had them, sometimes not, as he drove by in the dark. The forest was greyish black and even the snow seemed dark, swirling like a broom into the headlights. The outside light in individual farms shone white, a small crescent in the deathly dark.

Occasionally he wondered how depressed he had really been on evenings like that. Perhaps he ought to have taken something. He had prescribed for Barbro, but that hadn't helped.

It was the miscarriage. No, it was the felling. She caught fire. There are people like that. In h.e.l.l. He had often been too tired, from chasing around palpating abdomens and listening to hearts. He was too tired; he had no energy for anything when he got home, and he had an underbite and a naff pair of sandals.

It was Frances. Barbro had thought he was impotent, and that was just as well. With Monica it was another matter. You couldn't even call that a failure. Something unreal, that's all, something that hardly happened, although they drove to ikea and bought a whole trailer full of stuff. And turned the workshop into a surgery for small animals.

In Barbro's day, he used to talk about the district and say that the solitary houses were full of warmth and secret life, that they held their own and people were courageous and civilised inside their cottages with their shimmering blue screens and illuminated indoor plants. But that was long ago now. The darkness had begun to b.l.o.o.d.y devour him after Barbro had gone. Well, he had had the car radio.

After an hour he could see the first lights of Blackwater. He stopped outside the store and let Bonnie out, though some people were annoyed with him for letting a dog pee there. Then he drove up to the nearest house and asked, because he wasn't quite sure where the people who had phoned lived. He had stopped relying on telephoned instructions.

This time he had to go out to Tangen. Dogs started barking as soon as he got out of the car. The whole of Tangen was barking. A woman came out on the steps and stood waiting with her arms folded. The snow was thinning out a bit. When he got inside there was a smell of animals, dog and cat and unwashed human beings. The abdominal case lay at the very back of a room at the end of a pa.s.sage lined with overloaded shelves. It was like going into a cave. He lifted the striped flannel nightshirt. The abdomen was taut and the whites of the man's eyes were showing.

Birger went out with Bonnie and trudged around in the fresh snow waiting for the ambulance. The sky had blown itself clean and stars had come out.

He went back in to check on the patient and then sat down at the kitchen table to read the local paper. He kept refusing coffee. He knew it would be pale and acid and coffee that had boiled always made him feel sick. But he gave in in the end, accepted some and a piece of bread with slices of sausage on it. He was given a plastic box of cloudberry preserve. She said he should take it home and put it in the freezer.

Then the ambulance came and got stuck in the snowdrift down the drive, so he went out to help shovel. When it finally got away, he was soaked with sweat, but by the time he got his own car started again, he was frozen stiff.

Now he would be seeing it all backwards. Roback, Offerberg, Lersjovik, Laxkroken, Tuvallen and finally Byv&ngen. His guests, of course, would still be sitting round the low table. He hoped they had helped themselves to brandy as he had told them.

As he drove past Blackwater school, he saw a light in the bas.e.m.e.nt and realised the sauna was on. He thought how good it would be to wash off all that icy sweat and get really warm, to relax on the wooden slats and have a chat with one of the old men and perhaps be offered a beer.

His guests would know nothing except that he was very late. They would go home. They would probably do the dishes for him and the chocolates they had brought with them would still be on the coffee table when he got back. He was so d.a.m.ned tired.

There was a pile of clothes on a bench, but no one in the washroom. He had neither soap nor towel, but he borrowed some shampoo out of a bottle on the floor and washed himself from top to toe. When the heat from the little sauna struck him, he closed his eyes with pleasure and later realised he must have grunted. He climbed up as high as he could, so high he could feel his bottom scorching. Then he saw who was sitting there. Rosy and naked.

'Oh, sorry!' he cried, and was about to rush out, but she just laughed. She was sitting on a towel and she picked up a corner of it and placed it across the very modest pale-red tuft of hair in her groin. The teacher. Annie Raft. That person. He hadn't seen her since Aagot f.a.gerli's funeral. On that occasion she had been wearing a black coat and even a little hat. There had been a kind of old-fashioned dignity about her which he couldn't quite reconcile with all the c.r.a.p he'd heard about her over the years.

He held his hands crossed over his p.e.n.i.s, which in any case lay nice and wrinkled, just where it should. He must have looked very foolish, but her laughter was not malicious. As he made his way sideways towards the door, explaining he thought it was the men's day, she said he could stay.

'They've changed the times. The men hardly ever use it. Only people from the south, during the shooting season. I don't think anyone'll come. I'm usually on my own at this late hour.'

He could see rosy patches all over her skin and her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were pink round the brownish-pink nipples, smooth from the heat. He wondered if they would contract when she went out into the cold. He confessed to having borrowed some of her shampoo and she said: 'So we both smell the same now.'

Then she got up and went out, which he thought was a b.l.o.o.d.y great stroke of luck because he could feel he was getting a hard-on. It came on so violently, it must have been preparing itself while he had been looking at her sideways, but he had felt nothing then. But when she said that about their smell and at the same time turned her back to him, that finished him. He closed his eyes and breathed out. At that moment she came back in again with a scoop in her hand and flung some water on the sauna stones. Hot steam billowed up and for a moment they couldn't see each other. But then it was obvious. He tried to hide it all behind his hands and said: 'Sorry, sorry . . .'

She gave a little laugh, a teasing look, then went out again, only to return just as rapidly.

'Quick,' she said, flinging a towel at him. 'Out you go.'

He thought he would have a heart attack as he tumbled into the relative cool of the washroom. She pushed him over to the lavatory door and shoved him inside. His clothes followed, and finally his shoes.

'Lock the door!'

He did so without understanding. Then he heard women's voices. They must be undressing in the room outside. He rinsed himself down with water from the basin and thrust his fingers through his hair for lack of a comb. He wanted to look good. He knew he would go back with her now. He didn't know how he could have known that, but he did actually know.

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 k.n.o.b 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 Goran Dubois for a couple of years. And that she had been some kind of almost official fiancee to Roland Fjellstrom. 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. Bjorne 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.