Blackwater. Part 4

'Ssh!' said Mia. She was listening intently. Then Annie could hear a sharp regular sound and a thumping. It was coming closer and she realised someone was moving along the path further up and coming towards them. She put her arm round Mia and almost pushed her down behind the tree trunk. The girl landed on the map, which rustled. Then Annie heard the noise again and realised the sharp sound was someone breathing. Panting. But she couldn't make out whether it was an animal or a human being. She held Mia pressed to the ground, but the tree trunk wasn't high enough to conceal Annie too.

He never even saw her. He was lumbering up the slope, looking straight ahead, his mouth open, his sharp breathing coming in small laboured gasps. He was very dark, with long, dead-straight hair he had tucked behind his ears. His eyes were narrow and black and he was carrying something in his arms. She had no time to identify it, seeing only that it hindered him as he hurried on. Then he was gone.

She had frightened Mia and was now regretting it. But getting her down out of sight had been an instinctive action.

'It was only a boy,' she said, trying to talk away the fear she saw in Mia's face.

'Are there animals here?'

'I don't know. We must hurry now. It's not far to Nirsbuan. We might meet Dan. He'll realise he's got the wrong day.'

She walked quietly, listening as they went on. The tall, dark-haired boy might turn and come back. Mia noticed she was tense and no longer let go of her hand.

It was colder up there so they escaped the insects. To start with the path was clear and easy, leading down into lowland ground that became wetter until it finally ran into a long marsh, white flowers looking like tufts of wool gleaming in the night light. There were thousands of them in a layer of air moving just above the shifting reddish yellow and green of the sedge. Their boots squelched and it was heavy going. Once or twice the path divided, but Annie had no difficulty distinguishing which was the most used.

The forest had withdrawn to the higher slopes. They got further and further away from it as it grew darker. She reckoned it would soon be growing lighter. Mia said nothing about being tired and Annie didn't dare ask. They had to go on. But the path was much longer and rougher than she had imagined, the marshy soil sucking at their feet and dragging them down.

They came to a little stream and crossed it. They thought of having a drink of water, but the mosquitoes attacked the moment they stopped. After balancing on stones and crossing to the other side, they found the path divided into several indistinct branches. They trudged round for a while to find the right one, getting further and further away from the stream. When they went back to find the fording place, it had gone.

Stones and clear water rippling with a chattering sound over the fine sandy bottom. Marsh marigolds, not yet out. Some woolly greenish-grey clumps of willow leaning over the water. Twisted birches festooned with black veils. It looked much the same everywhere. She couldn't tell where they had crossed.

'You know what,' she said, trying to sound decisive. 'I think it's difficult finding the path up here in the marshland. Suppose we go straight across and try to find the river instead?'

She couldn't see the water, but it must be the river there behind a broad belt of green clumps and occasional birches. To start with, they followed the stream, but walking there with no path was quite another matter. The ground was uneven and large, hard tussocks of gra.s.s grew nearest the stream. She wondered what Mia was thinking as she swiftly glanced around. The tussocks looked like scrubby skulls sticking out of the earth; the birches were twisted and full of knots.

On the last stretch down to the river, they cut across some marshland which swayed under their feet. They could hear the water now, a murmur as talkative as the stream's, but with several voices. According to the map, the river ran down from the mountain, its winding bends ceasing at the Kloppen. As they rounded a little island of birches in the marshland, she caught sight of the lake. A white sheet, a metallic gleam lighter than the sky's.

The same fuzzy grey willows grew along the river as on the banks of the stream, but the undergrowth was higher, apparently impenetrable. The ground was firmer among the birches, but very uneven. She was beginning to feel really tired. With her much shorter legs, how long would Mia be able to cope with walking up and down dips and uneven ground?

Quite unexpectedly, the undergrowth thinned out, leaving a slope running down to the river. Something blue glinted and once past the last obscuring bushes, they could see two twisted spruces close to each other and beside them a small tent. A circling bird with its wings outspread suddenly dived, its wings pressed close to its body, and they heard a whistling sound that was perhaps a call. It looked like a projectile as it dived through the air.

The tent was not big enough for more than two people. It had been pitched close to the water, which raced along between smooth, round stones. At first she felt a tremendous relief. Whoever was sleeping inside would have walked there and must know where the path led and where to ford the river. Then she saw Mia's eyes fixed on the bright-blue little tent, and they were wide with fear. She ought to tell her everything was all right now. They had found people. They would soon find Nirsbuan and their journey's end. But she said nothing. She took Mia's hand and pulled her slowly behind the undergrowth.

'Let's go,' she whispered, though it was totally unnecessary to whisper. Inside that tent no one could have heard anything above the noise of the water.

A silvery light was gleaming round the cottage, which lay high up, and through the screen of wild chervil, Johan could see how everything seemed to rise and fall in the uncertain light like the earth breathing.

He didn't go in by the door. The key to the cottage always used to be kept on a nail under the eaves on the gable facing the lake. But Torsten had said that if the Starhill people occupied it, he would report them to the police for breaking and entering. Then he put an iron crossbar across the door and locked it with a padlock. Nowadays, he kept the key at home.

It was possible to ease out the nails that held the hingeless bedroom window in place. Once he had climbed inside, he threw the eel parcel on the kitchen table and at once started the lengthy process of lighting the stove. It had to be started with meths, so he soaked some old newspaper, stuffed it inside and lit it. At first there had been a rustle when he pulled out the damper, as if something, perhaps the body of a bird, had fallen down a bit. Then a thick cloud of yellow smoke came billowing out as he set fire to the sticks and firewood. He almost started crying, as if he had lost ten or twelve years of his life as he crouched down in front of the stove, chilled to the bone and shaking. Acrid smoke soon filled the cabin.

He opened the window, pulled out the burning wood and put it into a basin. Then he started from the beginning again, the meths flared up this time and the roaring sounded different.

Running along the path, he had been thinking about the warmth of the cabin, hot cocoa and the old quilts he would wrap round himself. He would be in a nest. But once he got the stove going and the smoke had more or less dispersed, there was much to do before he could curl up and think. He wanted to think. He had to. But first he had to fetch a bucket of water from the lake, and to do that he had to climb out through the kitchen window. Then he had to put the bedroom window back into its frame and slot the nails back in. He had to hang his wet jeans over the stove and could find nothing else to wear while they were drying. There were some old jackets, but no trousers. He wrapped a blanket round his legs and stumbled around as if in a long skirt.

There was some cocoa left in the packet, but only a few yellowish lumps remained of the dried milk, sticky with damp. The cocoa he made was watery, but at least hot. The biscuits tasted of the cottage.

What a b.l.o.o.d.y ha.s.sle just to get a bit of warmth and something to eat! The sun had risen as he crawled under the quilts. All this time, the eel had lain writhing in its shirt parcel; Johan forgot all about it until he was well bedded down. He got up, untied the shirtsleeves and let the eel down into the bucket of water. For a while its long glossy body thrashed around and the water swirled from the force of those hidden muscles. Then it lay still in a circle at the bottom of the yellow plastic bucket and Johan was too tired to watch it any more. Or to think. That had to be postponed. He had to get some sleep.

But he was so d.a.m.ned cold, he couldn't sleep. It was too light, and he could hear the noise of the birds through the ill-fitting window, especially a great t.i.t constantly repeating two shrill notes. Behind his tightly closed eyelids, his eyeb.a.l.l.s were still smarting from the smoke and he could only relieve that by opening his eyes.

After a while, he got up and put some more dry birchwood full of mouse droppings into the stove. When he thought about Torsten being the one who had chopped the wood, who had hauled the beaver-felled trunk with the scooter, he felt panic-stricken. Torsten had made the warmth for him. Everything he had eaten since he was born, Torsten had provided. He could see him in front of his eyes, bare torso, work trousers sagging. Brown skin with powerful bunched muscles. Black hair growing in a cross on his chest, the foot of the cross rooted firmly in that invisible area in his loins.

He was wide awake now, shuddering with cold under the damp quilts. The sun was shining brightly through the east window, the great t.i.t persisting.

He had wanted to think. But not like this. Thoughts and images were forcing their way into him like the sunlight from outside. He couldn't shut them out or sort them.

He could see Torsten by the washstand, snorting in the water, his powerful body leaning forward, spots and blotches on the skin of his back. He pictured Gudrun's hand on that back, her fingers sliding over the spots. How the h.e.l.l could he see that so clearly, something he had never seen?

He was trapped. Caught in a web, captured. The food he ate was Torsten's muscular strength. Everything he knew, truly deep down knew, came from the minds of Torsten and Gudrun. They loaded their programs into him. And now his mind was exhausted and heated from the ma.s.s of data he wished to shut off, but could not stop as it all went on racing through his skull.

He got up and switched on the radio. It was hanging on a nail in the ceiling to escape the barrier made by the hillside behind, but the batteries were low and all he could hear was crackles.

Perhaps he'd feel better after he'd had something to eat. He found a tin of baked beans, opened it and ate them without heating them up. They tasted sweet and revolting. Afterwards, a warmth gradually began to spread from within, especially in his loins and thighs. Together with a kind of drowsiness, this feeling often crept up on him in the afternoons, making him h.o.r.n.y. He took hold of his member and it felt warm and large. Then he forgot it and could no longer hear the great t.i.t. Sleep fluttered in his mind, using no force, but nonetheless he would have been unable to resist it.

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. ke 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 ke 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 b.u.t.tercups 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 gra.s.s and flowers was so thick and high. No one had mown it. But someone had recently walked through the tall gra.s.s.

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 gra.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gra.s.s 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 h.e.l.l 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 Kloppen; 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 sh.o.r.e. 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.

Chappaquidd.i.c.k.

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 s.h.i.t 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. s.h.i.tting 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 Stromgren 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 Roback 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.

The water enveloped the slim body of the canoe. As he dipped the paddle in and took a stroke, it seemed to him that muscles were trembling under the skin of the water.

Christ, how fast it goes. A puff of wind brought the smell of resin and gra.s.s, and the water smelt of water as the paddle broke it up.

I am kept away by Norway's mountains from the King's war and my dear home.

as Grandmother used to read. All those things in that old head. Listen to the soughing in the trees. She had been to ostersund twice in her life, but never further.

Suppose people were forced to travel like the eel to mate. In an involuntary eternal arabesque. Go to Sarga.s.so. The wide Sarga.s.so Sea. Go to Sarga.s.so.

He was sitting like innards inside the shiny sh.e.l.l. He had always felt at one with a canoe. Torsten went fishing with as many as thirty nets in October storms howling with ice and mist, and he said it was a b.l.o.o.d.y silly craft. But had he ever dared get into one? That tower of muscle? That great lump of fat?

He had to think. The lake narrowed down towards the Roback and the headland thrust out its arm. The canoe glided the last bit, the blade of the paddle dripping. As he was about to pull the canoe up on the gra.s.s, it occurred to him they would find it down there below the sawmill in Roback. Gudrun would chase around asking of course.

He must have decided then. He grabbed the canoe and shoved it with full force out into the water, flinging the paddle after it, regretting it almost at once. The canoe would dance down to the sawmill and lie banging against the stones. That was stupid, but it was done now.

He ought to have realised there wouldn't be many cars about just after four in the morning. The sun had deceived him. He sat down on the roadside gra.s.s. All he could hear was the roar of the stream, like a train, or a gigantic toilet permanently flushing. He could hardly hear the birds, which was why he was surprised when a car came along at last. He leapt into road with the pail and thrust out his thumb. It was a woman in a white Saab. She braked so the gravel spurted.

'Going to Norway?'

She said it. He just nodded, but at the same moment thought about Oula Laras on his scooter. He and his family lived in Langva.s.slien.

He had to put the pail on the floor in the back. She didn't even ask what was in it. She hadn't said much yet, but he thought she talked like the Finns who used to come and do clearing work for Torsten. There were chocolate wrappers and rubbish all over the car and a plastic container of duty-free liquor on the back seat.

'G.o.d, it's beautiful here,' she said, as the road ran along Blackwater. 'I've never been this way before. I usually go via ostersund and Trondheim.'