The Farm
Page 24
As I climbed down, the building once again disappeared from sight. I walked in its rough direction and before long I could, beyond the heaps of snow, distinguish timber walls. It had been built using silver birch wood. By its size I guessed it was a toolshed or workshop, probably connected to my grandfather’s farm by a dirt track. There was a rusted padlock on the door. Using the edge of my keyring, I unscrewed the hinge from the timber, removing the padlock and stepping inside.
Having found the cabin under the light from a full moon, for the first time I needed my torch. Directly in front of me I saw a distorted reflection of myself. My stomach appeared swollen, twisted around the curved side of a giant steel container. This was where my grandfather collected his white honey. The space was functional. The only decorative item was an elaborately crafted cuckoo clock on the wall. It no longer told the correct time. I toyed with it until the mechanism sprang to life. There were two doors, one on either side of the clock face, one high and one low. When the clock chimed, the doors opened at the same time, two timber figures emerging, one male and one female. The man was at the top, he stared down at the timber woman and she stared up at him. Instinctively I added the dialogue:
Hello up there!
Hello down there!
The couple returned inside the clock and the cabin was silent again.
Around the back of the steel drum I saw, hanging on a peg, my grandfather’s beekeeping outfit, the protective clothes he’d wear when retrieving honey from the hives. The outfit was made from white leathery material. Placing the torch on the floor, I dressed myself in the clothes, the trousers, the top and gloves. I put on the hat with the black protective netting, turning to study my distorted reflection. Before me was the troll my mum had described, with dinosaur-thick skin, pale webbed hands, extended fingers, and instead of a face, a single huge black eye that stared and stared and never blinked.
Taking off the outfit, I noticed a second locked door. I didn’t bother with stealth, kicking the door with the sole of my heavy boot until the timber fractured. Squeezing through, I shone a light on a floor covered in wood shavings. There were saws and chisels – this was the place where my grandfather would repair and restore the beehives. It was also the place where he made cuckoo clocks. There were several incomplete clocks on the floor and a stack of half-finished timber figures. Faces jutted out of planks of wood. I held one in my hand, running my finger over the long curved nose. A few of the figures were fantastical creatures, exhibiting an imagination I would never have associated with my grandfather. This was a space to be creative, where he could shut the door on the world and express himself. Crouching down, I picked up a coarse coil of wood.
I don’t know how long my grandfather stood at the entrance, watching me. On some deeper level I’d known he was coming, perhaps my kicking down the door had been a way of calling him, beckoning him from the farm. With a deliberately unhurried pace, I finished my examination of the workshop, imagining that he’d used fear before, when bringing my mum here, but he wouldn’t have fear at his disposal now. I crushed the coarse coil of wood in my hand as I heard him shut the outer door.
I turned, raising my torch. He waved the light out of his eyes. I obliged, lowering the beam. Even in the middle of the night, hearing me outside, he’d put on a suit. I said:
‘You brought my mum here. Except she wasn’t Tilde, you gave her a new name. You called her Freja.’
‘No.’
He was going to deny it. I felt a flush of anger, about to present the evidence, when he added:
‘She picked the name. She’d read it in a book. She liked the way it sounded.’
It was an astonishing detail, hinting at complicity. I paused, reevaluating this formidable man. An expert politician, he’d signalled his approach. He wouldn’t deny the allegations. Far subtler, he intended to transfer some of the responsibility onto my mum. I couldn’t allow it:
‘You told her a story – your story. You would play her husband. You ordered her to play your wife. This place, you said, would be your farm.’
I waited for him to speak but he said nothing. He wanted to know how much I’d figured out.
‘Tilde became pregnant. With your child.’
The teacher, Caren, had told me about the disgrace my mum had suffered because of her pregnancy. Though she’d been kind towards Tilde, many others hadn’t. So effective had been my grandfather’s lies that Caren still believed, even today, that it was the farm labourer’s fault:
‘You blamed a local farmhand. He lost his job. You’re an important man. All your lies were believed. They became the truth.’
‘They are still the truth. Ask anyone old enough to remember, and they will repeat my story.’
The power to commit a crime, and the power to get away with it, and while I couldn’t stomach to think of him still drawing pleasure from the memory of the first crime, he evidently still relished the power of being believed.
‘Did my mum speak to your wife? Or try to? And she refused to believe her?’
He shook his head:
‘No, my wife believed Tilde. But she hated her for telling her the truth. She preferred my lies. It took her a little longer than everyone else, but, in the end, she learned to forget the truth. Which is something Tilde should have learned too. My wife and I lived on this farm, happily married, loved by everyone around us, for over sixty years.’
‘What happened to the baby?’
As soon as I asked the question the answer came to me. Finally I understood my mum’s overwhelming desire to protect Mia – an adopted daughter.
‘She was given away.’
I said:
‘What now, Grandfather?’
I watched as he pressed a finger against his lips, the gesture my mum had showed me in the hospital – the clue she’d asked me to seek out. It didn’t mean silence: it meant he was deep in thought. I wondered if he’d pressed a finger against his lips while devising the various elements to his role-play scenario, signalling some new fiction would soon be forced upon her. For this reason she’d come to dread his finger against the lip. Eventually he took his finger away, placing his hands in his pockets, taking on the appearance of a man at ease:
‘Now? Now nothing. Tilde is in an asylum. No one will believe a word she says. She’s sick. She will always be sick. She talks of trolls and other nonsense. This matter is over. It was over a lifetime ago.’
He considered my mum’s hospitalisation a victory, providing him with certainty that he’d never be exposed. What could I do? I’d not come for retribution. I’d come for information. Thoughts of violence flashed through my head, but they weren’t real, they were ideas, and childish ones at that, clutching for resolution when in truth I was powerless. My only aim was to help my mum. Revenge was not my intention, nor was it mine to claim.
As I walked to the door, it occurred to me that one missing detail might be useful to know:
‘What name did you give yourself ? She was Freja. And you were . . . ?’
‘Daniel.’
The reply caught me by surprise. I stopped, looking him in the eye as he added:
‘She named her only child after him. Whatever you think of me, she must have enjoyed her time here a little.’
It was a lie, an improvisation, a vicious one – a glimpse of his cruelty, and his creativity, since viciousness can be creative too. My grandfather was a storyteller and a masterful one, stories told first out of desire, then out of self-preservation.
Sitting in my car, resting my head on the steering wheel, I told myself to drive away, to start the engine and leave, but when I closed my eyes I saw the burnt tooth, a remnant of my mum’s childhood that couldn’t be destroyed no matter how hard she tried, and I stepped out, walking to the boot, reaching for the spare canister of petrol.
Before my courage left me, I hastened back through the snow using the footprints as a path to the silver birch cabin. Working quickly, I used a stick to clear the roof of snow. Expecting my grandfa
ther to return at any moment, I poured the petrol over the wood shavings and cuckoo clocks, over the tools and the workbench, over the protective clothing and under the steel drum. I stood on the threshold, my hands shaking as I tried to light a match. Eventually, holding the burning match, I asked myself if this was the right thing to do and if anything would be gained. The flame descended towards my fingertip. But I couldn’t decide. The flame singed my skin and I dropped it harmlessly into the snow.
‘Give them to me.’
My grandfather was standing next to me, his hand outstretched. I didn’t understand the request. He repeated the instruction:
‘Give them to me.’
I gave him the box of matches. He lit a match cleanly, at the first attempt, holding it at eye level:
‘You think I’m a monster. Look around you. There’s nothing here. What else was I supposed to do with a frigid wife? I was a good father for fourteen years. And a bad one for two.’
My mum had described Freja as being a woman not a girl. On the cusp of adulthood, with breasts and an awareness of sexuality, she’d caught my grandfather’s eye. She’d blamed her transformation for his. When describing the imagined villainy of my dad, she’d stressed that he’d changed, become another person, abruptly, over the course of one summer – just like her father had done in the summer of 1963.
With a flick of the wrist my grandfather tossed the match inside the cabin. The petrol flames were quick to spread, the woodchips and shavings were first to take, then the half-finished timber faces. The waxy protective clothing melted slowly, the troll’s skin burning green and blue. As the fire grew, the metal drum warped and buckled. Soon the walls were ablaze and then the roof. We were forced to step back from the intense heat. A plume of smoke blocked out a patch of stars. I asked:
‘Will someone come?’
My grandfather shook his head:
‘No one will come.’
As the roof collapsed my grandfather said:
‘I stopped making honey a long time ago. Customers always preferred their honey to be yellow. My white honey was a delicate taste, wasted in tea or on bread. People would buy one jar, for the novelty, and leave it in their larder, untouched. It broke my heart. Tilde understood my pain better than anyone. To properly appreciate it she would only ever eat it on its own. She used to list which flowers she could taste.’
We stayed there together, by the fire, grandfather and grandson, warmed by the heat. It was the most time we would ever spend together. In the end the snowmelt extinguished the flames. Without a parting word, he returned to his farm, alone, to the smell of electric heaters and flypaper, and no matter what he claimed about his happy-ever-after ending, I didn’t believe it.
Driving away from the farm I imagined my young mother pedalling along this road as fast as she could manage with the coins she’d saved up in her pocket. I drove past the bus stop where she’d waited, visible for miles around, standing beside nothing more than a metal pole with a schedule attached, where no more than a handful of buses passed each day. I imagined the relief she’d felt as she’d paid the fare and taken her seat, at the back, looking out the rear window to see if she was being followed. She’d carried with her a wooden music box full of trinkets, including a tooth, memories of this place – memories of those fourteen happy years, and the saddest of stories about the other two.
I followed the same route her bus had taken out of this region, the main road south, passing a sign that marked the end of the province. Behind this sign was an outcrop of rocks some thirty metres high, the tops of which were spotted with trees. Among the fringe of vegetation, near the cliff face of the tallest boulder, I saw a magnificent elk. I braked sharply and parked the car. Much of the circumference of this outcrop was steep, but I found a point where I could clamber up the rocks towards the summit. At the top was the elk. The creature didn’t flinch even as I clumsily approached. I touched its back, its neck and antlers. The elk was made of sculpted steel, legs fixed to the rock with rusted bolts, head upright in a protective gaze over this land.
Driving overnight, I stopped frequently to brush my face with snow in order to stay alert. By the time I reached the farm it was the morning, too early to phone London, and anyway, I hadn’t slept and doubted whether I could provide my dad with more than a summary. I decided to sleep for a few hours before calling. When I woke, I’d slept unbroken for an entire day. Fresh snow had fallen. My tracks over the past week had been filled in. Feeling as if I’d emerged from hibernation, I lit a fire and warmed porridge on the stove, spicing it with a pinch of powdered cloves.
I made the call at eleven in the morning, for some reason waiting until it was exactly on the hour. My dad was silent for the majority of the conversation. He might have been crying. I couldn’t be sure. He made no sound. It occurred to me that I hadn’t cried, nor expressed any emotion, unless the pouring of petrol over the silver birch cabin could be called expression. When I spoke to Mark, he ascertained that my granddad had lit the fire – I could hear him silently constructing my defence case. Having heard the details of what happened, he asked:
‘How are you doing?’
All I felt, at that point, was acute awareness that my discoveries were incomplete. The gap in my knowledge was like a missing tooth in my mouth – a gummy space my tongue couldn’t adjust to. To Mark’s ear, my reply didn’t match up to his question:
‘I’m not ready to come home.’
‘But you have the answers?’
‘No.’
He nudged the word back at me, trying to understand:
‘No?’
‘I don’t believe the connection between the two summers is just in my mum’s mind. Something happened here, something real. I’m sure of it.’
Mark’s rational mind couldn’t make the jump. My claim was unsubstantiated and seemed to run contrary to my discovery. However, he no longer gave off the impression of wanting to contradict me, trusting my assertion that the two summers formed a circle. One unlocked the other.
I drove past the tourist beaches; my destination was the deserted coastal wilderness where my mum had regularly run. Carrying a small backpack, I set off through brambles and dunes, wrapped up against a bitter sea wind. I wore the hood of my corduroy jacket up, tied securely around my neck to stop it blowing down. Eventually, through watering eyes, I saw the stub of an old lighthouse.
The waves had lined the rocks with black ice. At times it was so slippery I was on my hands and knees. Cold and bruised, I reached the door where Mia had once hung her flowers. There were none there now, replaced by an arch of icicles where the sea had splashed. I hit the door with my shoulder, icicles falling around me, smashing on the rocks.
Inside, there were cigarette ends and beer cans. Much like at Teardrop Island, teenagers had reclaimed this space as their own, far from adult eyes. I’d been here before, in my first week, and found nothing. But something had struck me as odd. The ground was dirty – the lighthouse had been abandoned – yet the interior walls were freshly painted.
I took off my bag and, from the Thermos, poured a hot sweet coffee, clutching the cup for warmth. My plan was to remove the top layer of paint, exposing whatever was underneath. In a hardware store, far from the local area, I’d discussed the project. Without access to power I’d been forced to opt for chemical stripper. After my coffee, feeling revived, I targeted several areas at once, exposing fragments of a mural. One particular spot caught my eye, a patch of bright colours – a bouquet of summer flowers. Concentrating on the area around the flowers, slowly I revealed a painting of Mia, dressed in midsommar white. There were flowers in her hair and flowers underfoot. In my haste I damaged the painting. Despite being far from a professional restoration job, it was good enough to offer a sense of the mural’s exceptional artistic quality. Though I’d seen her picture on the missing person poster, this mural gave me my first real sense of Mia as a person. She was proud and strong, also a dreamer, head aloft, as she ambled through the forests.
Mark had a friend who worked in a contemporary gallery in east London, and in collusion with him, using his email address, I messaged every university and college art facility in Sweden, attaching a series of photos I’d taken of the mural in the abandoned lighthouse, explaining that the gallery would like to arrange a meeting with the artist responsible. The results trickled back over several days – negative, until an email arrived from a teacher at Konstfack, the University College for Arts, Crafts and Design, the largest art school in Sweden, located just south of the capital. He was sure the mural was by one of his former students. The artist was a recent graduate. Had the academic been of a suspicious mind he might have wondered how a private gallery in London knew about an abandoned lighthouse in the south of Sweden, but I’d calculated that the flattery and excitement generated by the email would over come most doubts. A meeting was set for Stockholm. The artist’s name was Anders.
I drove up the night before, checking into the cheapest room in a grand hotel near the waterfront, spending much of the night rehearsing my part, reading profiles of obscure new artists. The next morning I waited in the lobby, facing the main doors. Anders arrived early, tall, handsome, dressed in skinny black jeans and a black shirt. He wore a stud in his ear and carried a port folio under his arm. We chatted for a while about his art. My appreciation for his talent was genuine. However, I told many lies about myself, marvelling at how good at lying I’d grown over the years. But something had changed. I hated every lie I told. Only the prospect of failure stopped me from telling the truth. Mia might not want to be found. If I risked the truth, Anders might walk out.