Red Snow

by Will Dean

  I put my aids in desiccant to dry out overnight and then I get ready for bed. My sheets need changing. I say goodnight to Mum and Dad; the photo beside my bed, the one I can look at straight in the face now that they’re both gone. I can look even though she stopped taking care of me after he died. Even though I had to feed us and shop for us and cook for us. Even though she never really asked how I was for all those years. I can look at her photo now. It’s a start.

  I think back to a guy I studied with in London, a redhead – don’t think about the watermelon crack, not now, nothing you can do to help, think about the student – nice guy, never really knew him, safe to think about him, nice neck, nice hands, nice voice. And then I hear the sound of skull bone cracking on cobblestones.

  4

  My pillow alarm shakes me awake at seven and I drag myself over to the window and check the thermometer. It’s minus six, a mini heatwave. Halle-fucking-lujah.

  I get to the office and write for an hour or so, drafting headlines and story ideas for next week’s issue. The pile of Postens in reception reduces in height through the morning as Svens and Ingrids drop in to say how awful it was with the, you know, at the factory, just dreadful, he had a drinking problem, no it was drugs, and business worries, but it’s the young girl they feel for. Then they take a copy and place twenty kronor in the biscuit tin honesty box and pull on their hats and leave.

  I need to visit Mum. I’ll buy flowers and one of those long-lasting weatherproof candles from Ica Maxi and drive down to Karlstad and spend time at the grave before I leave town. Maybe I’ll go twice. Once seems disrespectful; an obvious, lazy, throwaway gesture.

  Lars schlepps in at eleven and my God it takes him an eon to get undressed from his winter gear. The hat gets un-Velcroed and then placed in his basket. The jacket comes off like an arthritic polar bear freeing itself from a straightjacket. He hangs it up. The boots are pulled off and placed on his rack. Then the fleeces and the static crackles and the big Christmas sweater with the bad stitching and then he says ‘morning’ and wanders through to Nils’s office slash kitchen with his bifocals atop his bald patch to start his coffee and sandwich routine. Honestly though, I’ll miss him.

  I draft a list of people I’ll need to talk to regarding Gustav Grimberg’s death. I’ve never covered a high-profile suicide like this and it’s tricky to know where to start. An accident, a car crash or lumberjack maiming, a murder even, or a medical procedure gone horribly wrong, I’d wait the requisite amount of time that Lena taught me was appropriate in a small town like Gavrik, and then, respectfully with condolences, I’d approach the family to see if they wanted to say a few words. Can’t do that with the Grimbergs, not yet anyway. Because they’re reclusive and pretty much unknown to the whole town, but also because their grieving process will likely be so much more jagged and complex than most. I can’t even imagine what the three women left behind must be going through.

  I pull on my jacket and boots and cross the road to the newsagent for chocolate. Storgatan’s grey with slush and grit and old salt. The factory seems larger today, that disused chimney on the right side staring the whole town in the eye, complicit in a death, responsible by way of its obscene and pointless height.

  The store has some new dark-chocolate pistachio special-offer thing but I ignore that because dark chocolate makes me want to bite my tongue off. I buy 500g of Marabou milk chocolate goodness and stick the bar in my deep coat-pocket and head to the police station. The ticker tape queue machine thing says two and the screen above the counter says two so I take the ticket and ring the bell.

  ‘Thought I might see you this morning,’ says Thord, a slice of rye toast in his hand with a limp piece of red pepper on top.

  ‘You thought right.’

  He takes a bite from the toast and a spray of fine brown crumbs showers down the front of his uniform.

  ‘What happens now?’ I ask. ‘You still think he was chased? Will the coroner from Karlstad be involved?’

  ‘Already is involved, this one’s been fast-tracked.’

  ‘Fast-tracked?’

  ‘Post-mortem happening as I eat this sandwich. And if it’s all tickety-boo, they’ll release the body and sign off the funeral taking place tomorrow afternoon, cos that’s the family’s wishes.’

  ‘That fast?’

  ‘Fast-tracked, like I said. The Chief knows the coroner real well, old friends, and the coroner can make it happen. Nothing unusual about the body, so I’m told. The Chief reckons its’s tragic but it’s an open and shut suicide. We ain’t got any other funerals planned in St Olov’s cos it’s February and cos nobody really gets buried there anymore. So this can go straight to the front of the queue.’

  ‘Poor man.’

  ‘Expecting they’ll find cigarette burns on Gustav cos he was bullied pretty bad at high school as far as I can remember.’

  ‘Bullied?’ I say.

  ‘Real bad,’ he says.

  ‘You asked me about people talking to Gustav before he jumped.’

  He stops eating. ‘You remember something?’

  ‘No.’

  He carries on eating. ‘Wasn’t nothing. Incitement to suicide is the thing. Karlstad police explained it to us cos we ain’t never come across it before. But there wasn’t no evidence. No note. No eyewitness reports.’

  ‘Incitement?’

  ‘Happened a few times on internet forums so I’ve been told. Facebook and the like. Manipulation. Mainly teenagers telling each other to take pills or whatnot, sometimes filming it, live-streaming.’

  ‘But . . .’

  He cuts me off. ‘Nothing of the sort here, Tuvs. Grimberg had two liquorice coins in his breast pocket and nothing else. There was talk of some old man, some hunched old man with a walking stick and a dog, talking to Grimberg before he jumped. Some kind of argument, but that could have been anyone. This was just a tragic accident.’

  ‘Accident?’ I say.

  ‘Incident,’ he says.

  I watch him swill his toast down with coffee.

  ‘Which church?’ I ask.

  ‘Call the factory office,’ he says, taking another bite. He swallows and says, ‘Gotta go, police business to attend to.’

  He picks up a copy of today’s Posten, my words all over its front page, the suicide, and also the back page, the ice hockey grand slam, and heads back to the office, probably to ‘take care of business’. I catch sight of the new cop back there as the key code door closes. I see her ears and the back of her head. She has excellent hair.

  When I step back out a big, black raven swoops down toward me and then flaps its uneven wings and craws and flies high between the twin chimneys of the factory and beyond. I see a man walking through the arch that cuts through the centre of the building and I’d recognise that soft body anywhere.

  Why is David Ghostwriter Holmqvist heading into the Grimberg factory on a day like today?

  I get to my desk and my left aid’s hurting in my ear. What I really need is a few days, no, a week, a whole entire uninterrupted week with no hearing aids. I’d stay silent. It’s as much of a relief as going braless, more even at this time of year. Shame my new job down south starts a day after this one ends. I can’t afford a gap. I have bills to pay, funeral expenses and arrears dating back to Christmas. Envelopes I couldn’t bear to open. Blocked it all out. I didn’t manage and now I can’t afford a week between jobs. Sucks to be me.

  I dial the factory office.

  ‘Grimberg Liquorice, Agnetha Hellbom speaking.’

  ‘Hello, this is Tuva Moodyson from the Posten. I’d like to offer my condolences, and if I may, could I ask you a few quick questions about the service tomorrow?’

  ‘Hm-hm.’

  ‘Where is it to be held?’

  ‘Service in the Lutheran church on Eriksgatan. Strictly family only, I’m sure you’ll understand what with the tragic accident and all.’

  Accident?

  ‘Will there be a public memorial?’ I ask.

 
; ‘Don’t know yet, it’s only just happened, wouldn’t you say? Let’s allow Mr Grimberg some respect before we start involving the masses.’ There’s a pause. ‘The burial part will be public. You can pay your respects then if you have any. Will that be all?’

  ‘May I ask where Mr Grimberg will be buried.’

  She takes a long breath. ‘If you were local you wouldn’t need to ask. Family plot in St Olov’s, right here next to the factory. Now, this is the one thing the family have asked me to communicate to the public: donations to the Swedish Childhood Cancer Foundation. No flowers. None whatsoever. Anything else?’

  ‘No, that’s all.’

  She hangs up.

  I keep an eye out the window, past the mouse-nibbled Christmas decorations that one of us should really think about removing, the nativity Joseph is quite horribly disfigured, the nose and ears are almost completely gone, and I keep look out for David Holmqvist. All I see is a white Volvo taxi, probably Viggo Svensson’s, drop off a girl dressed in black. She’s as thin as a spider leg and she’s wearing a heavy backpack underneath her coat that makes her look like Quasimodo.

  Holmqvist doesn’t pass by so I head outside in all my gear and I reckon I lose about an hour a day during winter just pulling on and peeling off the ugly man-made layers that keep me alive. I buy a ham sandwich from the newsagent, it has a criminal margarine-to-ham ratio, and walk up to the factory gates. The one operational chimney, the left one, is still pumping out aniseed steam. They haven’t shut down production. Through the iron gates I can see Andersson, the janitor with the attitude problem.

  ‘Hello Mr Andersson.’

  No response. He’s pushing sludge-snow with a shovel as broad as my desk.

  ‘Mr Andersson,’ I try a little louder.

  He turns to me and tuts and walks over to meet me at the gates.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Sorry about Grimberg.’

  ‘Yeah, me too.’

  ‘You going to the church service tomorrow?’

  ‘Not invited,’ he says. ‘Family only. Going to the burial though, reckon half the town will turn out and it’s my job to make sure the grave’s shipshape tidy. Terrible business.’

  ‘Very sad.’

  ‘He has a daughter, just got back from her fancy art school.’ He coughs and wipes his mouth on his coat sleeve. ‘I’d do anything for that girl after all that she’s been through. Poor Karin.’

  And then I notice the snow skalle.

  I almost step on it.

  Fist-sized snow skulls were popular in the town back in the 1800s and they’ve recently come back into fashion. It’s a peculiar Gavrik thing. I wrote about them in last week’s Posten. Kids make them. Kind of like a Scandi-folkloristic practical joke mixed with good Christmas cheer. The skull is the size of a snowball. It is a snowball. But the cheeks have been smoothed away, and little fingers have been pushed in to make eye sockets and nasal sockets and a gaping mouth. A piece of grit sits in each eye hole. And this one, this grotesque snow skalle, has red lingonberry jam dribbling from its cranium and it has toothpicks for teeth. Andersson looks at me looking at it. He raises his shovel and crashes it down on the skull sending pink snow shards flying in every direction and then he says, ‘Damn kids, no respect.’

  We say our goodbyes and when I watch him get back to shovelling I notice the area he’s working on is the area where Gustav Grimberg died. Under the snow and the frost and the slush I imagine scarlet gravel, blood frozen into the grit binding the stones. Perhaps it’ll show itself in late April when the town thaws.

  I work all afternoon from the office and never see Holmqvist leave the factory. Is there another exit? What’s he doing there the day after a suicide?

  By four, Lars and Nils have left. Some new reality TV show starts tonight, and Friday night is taco night in Sweden; tacos which bear no resemblance whatsoever to anything Mexican, swilled down with Danish beer and consumed in front of an American Netflix series and all polished off with Swedish salt liquorice from that sad, old place across the road.

  ‘Staying long?’ asks Lena.

  ‘Five minutes,’ I tell her. ‘Story to follow up on.’

  She returns to her office and I get my gear on and take my Leica binoculars and my torch and leave. And then I realise that this is my last ever normal Friday at Gavrik Posten, so I head back indoors and keep my big boots on – fuck it – and head into Lena’s office at the rear of our building.

  ‘Thanks for keeping me . . .’ I swallow a big hard dry nothing, ‘for keeping me on the level these past years.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she says. ‘You’re worse now than when you started.’

  ‘I’ve learnt a lot.’

  She smiles and turns back to her screen and I leave the office with a good feeling in my belly. I need to say these things more often. I never said them to Mum, not the things I needed her to hear, even when I knew she only had weeks left. I needed to tell her that I forgave her, or that I at least understood it, that she did the best she could even though that was almost nothing. But I never managed to get the words out. I was too late.

  I leave and turn right and pass by the factory and head up toward the pitch-black emptiness of St Olov’s ruin.

  5

  I pass the factory and it looks like a fancy brick house. The ground floor is four windows to the left of the arch and four windows to the right. The upstairs windows all have net curtains except for the one directly above the arch. There’s some kind of metal hook over the arch-tunnel entrance and it looks like a ready-to-strike scorpion tail in this dim grey light.

  I slip and slide as I walk up the shallow hill to the church; well it’s not a church, not like you’d recognise, it’s a pile of old stones. A snowplough passes. It’s lit up like a lunar exploration vehicle, scraping back snow from Storgatan and dumping down salt from its rear end. The noise is godawful.

  The churchyard is lit from two streetlights but it is dark within. I’ve worked about five minutes from this place for over three years now and I’ve never visited. Why would I? I open the gate and there’s a woman there.

  ‘Sorry, are you coming out?’ I ask, holding the metal gate open and standing aside.

  She stands in the shadow of a leaning yew tree and I can’t hear her words; she’s wearing a scarf, and I can’t read her in this darkness.

  ‘I’m deaf,’ I say. ‘I can’t hear you.’

  She walks through the gate and stands under the streetlight. She looks ancient, a brown fur coat dragging in the snow, its hood hiding her hair. She pulls the scarf down a little exposing a shrivelled mouth painted with bright orange lipstick.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Are you coming in?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Just for ten minutes. Why?’

  ‘Take this.’

  She sticks her gloved hand into the pocket of her fur coat and pulls out something and places it in the palm of my ski glove.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘It’s just a piece of bread. If you walk through the graveyard it’ll keep you safe. Pop it in your pocket. And . . .’

  ‘Yes?’ I say.

  ‘Try to hold your breath when you get deep inside. If not hold, then keep your breathing shallow.’

  Mad as a fruit bat.

  ‘Okay,’ I say.

  ‘Goodnight.’

  I walk in through the gate and she shuffles off down the street. The moon is out and it’s waxing three-quarters full but the ice clouds are floating past so the light comes and goes.

  There’s a large sign in front of the ruin itself telling me the church dates back from 1100 and was roofed and used regularly until the Gavrik black flu of 1917.

  The walls are a metre thick in places and topped with lead and moss and leaves and a thick carpet of untouched snow. It’s a small building with a large flat stone at the far end where I guess an altar once stood. This place almost feels like nature: a forest or a moor or an unlit bog. Places that terrify me. On the stone someone’s graffiti�
�d a symbol. I step closer and the moon brightens and I see it’s an emoji. A sad smiley face in black with huge angry eyes.

  I step through the tangled rhododendron bushes, their tight buds wilting and shrivelling from the unending cold, and look at the graves. I’m trying to find the Grimberg family patch because I need to unpick why Gustav died the way he did. I need to unearth the story.

  There are little stacks of snowballs piled near many of the tombs and they have candles flickering inside. One is a stack of snow skulls, these ones quite beautiful, the grown-up version, polished to almost clear ice, with no grit in the eye sockets. They look like glass ornaments or expensive crystal paperweights. And they sparkle from the candlelight within.

  Poor Mum. She deserves better. There are solar lights on sticks next to some of the stones, generally the newer-looking stones, and they’re flickering with the tiny dribble of electricity they’ve managed to eke out of the Toytown winter sky.

  The toughest to look at are the old and the new.

  The oldest stones are unreadable, moss-crusted and pocked. They’re not remembered, the people underneath, too many degrees of separation between them and the living world. Most are not quite upright. They’re forgotten and they are falling as slowly as anything in the world could ever fall.

  And the new. The freshest graves are still mounded with earth or gravel, humps of fresh soil that haven’t had time to settle. I give these a wide berth. No logical reason but I just can’t walk too close to them.

  An owl toots from a nearby tree and I reach instinctively for the old woman’s bread in my pocket.

  Toward the very corner of the graveyard, the most pristine section, the area closest to the factory itself, I find the Grimberg family plot. It’s the largest here and the most grand. A low stone wall surrounds the twelve, maybe fourteen graves, and a short evergreen hedge skirts the wall. The hedge looks black. I get wind feedback in my aids so severe I’m tempted to switch them off, but I don’t want to be without them in a place like this.