Red Snow

by Will Dean

  ‘Wasn’t in the mood,’ I say.

  ‘It was a horrible end to the year,’ he says, misunderstanding me, thinking I was talking about Medusa. ‘I couldn’t have written such a thing.’ He downs the remainder of his wine. ‘I don’t celebrate either, never do.’

  ‘What are they like?’ I ask.

  ‘The Grimbergs?’

  I nod.

  ‘They’re intriguing, I must say. Kind of quasi-aristocratic and incredibly superstitious, well-read, and that means a lot coming from me. They’re all bright, hard-working, stoic to the point of I don’t-know-what. You might need to spend hours and hours with them to gain their trust.’

  ‘Actually the biggest story for the Posten is Gustav’s suicide, ‘I say, ‘so I’ll need to interview them for that. Kill two birds.’

  ‘Ah,’ he says, his eyes pained.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t call it a suicide when you talk to them, call it “the accident” or “the tragedy” or something like that. They don’t think like you and me.’

  I don’t think like you, mate. I don’t know anyone who does.

  ‘Fine,’ I say.

  He smiles an arrogant smile and clears away our dessert bowls; mine wiped clean, his hardly touched.

  ‘Are they tempted to sell the factory now Gustav’s dead?’

  ‘The vultures are circling,’ he says. ‘That lawyer with the stoop and the sculpted face, the one with all the real estate, he’s very interested, well he would be wouldn’t he? Now that my lawyer’s retired, Hellbom has the whole town to himself. A monopoly. And what with his wife working there, they could modernise and make a fortune. But the Grimbergs won’t sell. Over their dead bodies. And this book deal should help them keep the place in business.’

  He stretches an arm out to me over the table.

  ‘Glad to work with you,’ he says.

  I reach out tentatively to meet his grasp, his knuckles sliding next to mine. ‘Same,’ I say.

  I pull on my outdoor gear, happy for the unexpected and very much needed twenty-thousand kronor and imagining my next apartment, maybe one with a partial sea-view and a washing machine. Then my hearing aid beeps a battery warning and I rattle my key fob, two spare batteries in there, I never go anywhere without them. I say goodbye and drive away. I stuck to my one glass limit and that feels pretty good. Every evening is a test and I passed this one with flying colours. I drive by the sisters’ woodsmoke and head slowly down the hill and as I pass Viggo’s cottage I notice lights and exhaust fumes in my rear-view mirror and his Volvo pulls out onto the track and follows me.

  11

  Viggo’s on a job, that’s all, maybe taking someone to Karlstad Central Hospital or to Ronnie’s Bar. Big deal. But I accelerate and switch my lights to full and look at my phone because it might be a big deal with this creep, it just might be. He locked me in the back of his taxi once before and scared the colour right out of me.

  I’m sweating.

  Cold sweat, chills under my sleeves and up my calves. Nobody else around. Empty roads. My mirrors are bright with his headlights and he’s too close to my rear bumper. Nobody drives like this on snow, not even on a ploughed asphalt road. If I brake he will hit me. So I accelerate, opening up a small gap, but then I see the bend near Bengt’s place and slowly tap my brake, pumping it gently, partly to show the shithead behind that I’m slowing down, and partly to keep a grip on this ice. I skid little skids but I steer out of them and the carved tracks help me to stay on the road. I make the turn and carry on at about fifty kph and then indicate and turn left and judder up onto the main road and accelerate like hell.

  He’s still following me.

  The gap’s closing.

  Why wouldn’t he be driving this way, there’s nothing in the other direction, just an empty road leading to a junkyard and then Spindelberg prison. But the distance between us is too small. Unsafe. I spray antifreeze on my rear windscreen and turn my heated seat to low, sweat beading on my neck and my upper lip. I can make out his face and his sallow grey eyes. He turns his headlights to full beam and they flash in my rear-view mirror and now I can’t see him back there. I wipe the rear screen and he’s coming faster now, no one else on the road. I can feel him behind me, his bumper, my nerves on edge, his Volvo right there, with its ‘Kids on Board’ safety sign erect on the roof. He dips his headlights and starts flashing his hazards. What the hell is that, some sort of message? Some sort of Nordic distance flirting? My heart races and I put my foot down and nudge one ten which is way too fast on this road.

  He dips his beams and switches his interior lights on and I can clearly see his grey, pallid face and I can see the objects hanging from his rear-view mirror. I can’t make out detail but I remember from before. A thumb-sized hustomte troll. A crucifix. And a Swiss army knife.

  I head under the underpass, my hands tight on the steering wheel, my body stiff, my mind as focussed as it can be; the taste of hot dead tongue still lingering on my warm live tongue. And then he turns up and off without indicating and joins the E16 northbound, toward the pulp mill. He’s gone. Of course he didn’t indicate. The worst men don’t indicate. Ever. It’s like they feel entitled to turn whenever they feel like it.

  I breathe and slow down to sixty.

  Seven days, Tuva. Seven days and then out of this place for good. I slump in my seat and rub my eyes. I grab the pack of wine gums on the passenger seat and squeeze it with my hand until it bursts and then I take three and put them in my mouth to get rid of the bull taste.

  The colours outside change. It was all white in the woods, all unbothered snow and clear ice-streams, motionless over granite. Here, approaching town, the white picked out by my headlights is grey from exhaust fumes and grit and salt and boot prints, and the colour, what colour there is, is man-made and uncoordinated; bright jarring flashes of windproof sportswear and kid’s sledges.

  I pass between ICA Maxi and McDonald’s and I’m starting to wonder if I’m getting paranoid here in my last week. The chimney suicide unsettled me. And Viggo Svensson was on a job, an urgent pick-up, and he drove from his house to the motorway. That’s all.

  I could do with a puritanical cocoa-only smug month and maybe I’ll do that in March. Or April.

  When I park I take the bottle of water from my truck because it’ll burst if I just leave it there, and head upstairs to my apartment. There are three empty black suitcases in my living room next to my PlayStation. One’s old and I bought the other two in Karlstad for the move. Straightforward. That’s my life. No pets, no relationships, no furniture, no heirlooms, no plants. No living things whatsoever.

  I unpeel one of those sheet face-masks. This one’s peppermint and I reckon I could do with about six consecutive treatments. Just fucking wallpaper me. I look like a horror movie but my skin’s hurting which means it’s getting a drink. I pull out my aids and pour three fingers of white rum and check the headlines on my iPad. Police ask drivers to be prepared and have a phone and blankets when they travel. Goddam February. Living here is like living in Siberia except our broadband’s ten times faster.

  I sleep an agitated sleep and wake up and turn off my pillow alarm. Holmqvist asked me to meet him under the factory arch at 9pm and that’s where he is when I drive past at 8:55. I park at my office and walk over to him standing right there in Gustav’s death spot. Right there.

  ‘Morning,’ he says.

  ‘Morning,’ I say, not wanting to get too close.

  He moves away from the arch and he’s got a confidence I haven’t seen before, like he’s guiding me around a show-home and he’s ready to sell it to me, like he’s prepared his spiel and he’s pretty happy with his product.

  ‘Look from back here,’ he says, gesturing to the railings, razor burns raw under his chin. ‘Better view.’

  We stand with our arctic coats resting against the iron railings, looking up at the building.

  ‘Let’s start with the basics. Built in 1839 from local brick, the tallest non-eccle
siastical structure in Värmland, outside of Karlstad of course, for ninety-seven years. Seven men died during construction. The scaffolding failed.’ He looks up at the chimneys and then back down to the archway. ‘Most of the site is deconsecrated land.’

  ‘Sorry?’ I say.

  ‘It was church land before, belonged to St Olov’s.’ He points to the ruined church and then back to the factory. ‘There are graves underneath us, hundreds of ancient tombs. What you can see here used to be the factory in its entirety. The ground floor left of the arch was the cooling and stamping rooms, and the furnace under the chimney to heat that part of the building. Used to be that the right side of the arch, ground floor, was the shredding and mixing and heating area, big vats of sugar syrup, and a furnace there under that chimney.’

  I stare at the death chimney.

  ‘Nowadays all the manufacturing goes on at the corrugated-steel structure at the rear left, behind the old stamping rooms, which are now in fact the canteen, you following?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Upstairs hasn’t really changed. Left of the arch: the offices and archives. Over the arch: the Receiving Room, you’ll be working from there mostly. To the right of the arch is the most luxurious part of the whole building: the residence. Which includes the “Grand Room”. I hope you’ll get access, someone needs to.’

  ‘You haven’t been inside?’

  ‘Follow me.’

  He walks to the arch and I do as he says. It’s not swine cold today, just about minus-seven cold. It is discomfort chilblain cold not death cold.

  ‘This way,’ he says, pointing to the staircase I saw after the burial.

  I follow him up the stone risers with their red carpet runner and brass poles. The pictures lining the walls are mostly black-and-white, a big house by a lake, wide-angle photos of the entire staff from the thirties and forties, a picture of a small boy with a kitten. Two of the photos are hung upside down and three have sheets covering them. We get to the top and I feel a chill around my neck.

  ‘Offices that way,’ says Holmqvist. ‘Elegant staircase, isn’t it?’

  It is. A high ceiling and mustard-yellow wallpaper. Faded. More paintings shrouded with sheets of linen.

  ‘Why are some of . . .’

  ‘The Receiving Room,’ says Holmqvist. ‘Come this way.’

  He opens a heavy door inlaid with old tapestries in the panels, and I follow. He’s acting like he owns the place. The room’s lit by a sprawling chandelier and the bulbs are flickering like they might all expire at any moment, like they’re original from 1839.

  ‘Now, tell me, what do you think?’

  I start to answer but then he says, ‘Exquisite, isn’t it? Finest room in Gavrik, no question.’

  Someone coughs in the doorway we just stepped through and now I feel like a nosey babysitter roaming around rooms I haven’t been invited to visit.

  ‘You must be Ms Moodyson?’

  I approach and hold out my hand and do some godawful little curtsy type-thing I haven’t done since I was about seven years old and that I hated even back then.

  ‘My name’s Anna-Britta Grimberg, pleased to meet you.’

  She has a kind face, all eye lines and rushed make-up and burst capillaries. Her eyelashes are extraordinarily, almost painfully, short. They’re practically non-existent and she does what she can with mascara but gets more on her lids than her lashes.’

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ I say.

  She nods like she doesn’t want to talk about that with me. Not now, not ever.

  ‘You’re here to assist with the book? You can talk to myself and my mother-in-law and my daughter in this room. You can talk to the employees, wherever they happen to be working, but please, I ask you, do be considerate. My employees need to focus and they’re all in mourning so please bear that in mind.’

  I thought she was going to ask me to be gentle around her ailing mother and her grieving kid, but no, apparently I need to look out for the factory workers.

  She doesn’t acknowledge Holmqvist or talk to him or even look in his direction.

  ‘Andersson will give you a tour,’ says Anna-Britta. ‘I trust that will be okay?’

  I nod and try to ask her about her husband but she excuses herself, her well-cut charcoal dress leaving the room and replaced by Janitor Andersson in his overalls and fluorescent-yellow fleece.

  ‘I’ve got pipes to lag. Let’s get on.’

  Suddenly the elegance in the room drains away and Holmqvist looks awkward next to Andersson who, like Anna-Britta, completely ignores him.

  ‘Tuva, I’ll be getting off back home,’ says Holmqvist. ‘Call me if you have any questions.’

  ‘Wait,’ I say, Andersson itching to leave this panelled room with its Gustavian furniture and the unlit tiled fireplace in one corner. ‘You want me to talk to the staff and the family, but what do you need in particular?’

  ‘Everything,’ he says. ‘They don’t, I mean, they haven’t spoken to me yet. You need the personal angle, the quotes and the insight into the generations who’ve worked here.’ He looks at me conspiratorially, the mole on his Adam’s apple rising and falling as he swallows. ‘And whatever you can on the family. Gustav gave me anecdotes, but they were dry and mostly public information. You’re excellent at the Posten with your human-interest stories.’

  I’m floored by the compliment, one of the few I’ve ever received in this town about my writing.

  ‘The publishers need interesting stories. Details that will sell the book,’ he says.

  ‘Pipes won’t lag themselves,’ mutters Andersson. ‘And it’ll be minus twenty tonight, that’s what the Posten says.’

  That weather report is taken, by me, from a Gothenburg paper and it’s already two days old so he may as well lick his finger and stick it in the air.

  ‘After you, Mr Andersson,’ I say.

  We walk downstairs and I put my hand on Andersson’s shoulder and he jumps.

  ‘What?’ he says.

  ‘Why are some of the photos upside down?’

  ‘What a thing to ask on a day like this.’

  Is there someone the family can’t stand to see in those photos? Someone they’re blaming for Gustav’s jump? A worker or a distant relative? An ancestor?

  ‘Why are pictures covered or hung upside down?’ I ask again. ‘Whose face don’t they want to see? I helped you back in that ditch. Now you help me.’

  He half turns and says, ‘I don’t owe you or nobody else nothing. Never have.’

  We walk out through the arch to the rear yard. Everything on my left is modern: a one-storey steel structure with loading doors and a metal roof. To my right are old wooden barns, open to the elements except for warped roofs that I wouldn’t want to walk underneath. I can see the wall of St Olov’s beyond, dark yew trees lining its perimeter.

  ‘This is where the workers come in,’ says Andersson. ‘No car park on site.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why do you think? Not enough room as it is for the trucks to come through and load up, never mind with all them Korean hatchbacks trying to fit through. You’ll be out in a delivery truck tomorrow evening. Mrs Grimberg set it up. You’ll get to drive along with our oldest driver, daft goat, he drives truck number one and he can fill you in on that part of the business.’ He coughs and points. ‘We got parking down the road past St Olov’s and workers got to walk round. It ain’t convenient in winter time but it works pretty good. And some of them could do with the exercise.

  ‘Keep up,’ he says, trudging through slush to a door with a sign above it that says, ‘Employee Entrance’. Inside is a room with a desk and a wall-sized clocking-in machine, like something from a museum. Little cards that get stamped and a big analogue clock in the centre.

  ‘Is that machine still working?’

  ‘Just cos things are old don’t mean they’re bad, you just gotta look after them.’ He tuts and opens a door to the right without looking inside.

  ‘To
ilets,’ he says.

  Oh, thanks. Great place to start, Mr Tourguide School-dropout. The room has cracked stained tiles and old white sinks with brown marks where the water hits the porcelain, but it’s clean I think, or as clean as you can make an old communal toilet block. There are about a dozen doors at the far end and they’re not good cubicle doors, not like you or I would want them to be, these are half-size things so people could stretch up and see your hair or bend down and look at your boots.

  He opens another door without looking in.

  ‘Lockers.’

  It’s like something out of a derelict school. Hundreds of dented locker doors, a long boot rack, coat hooks, drying cabinets humming at one end, hot cupboards for wet clothes that always smell of teenagers.

  There’s a row of plastic baskets near the door, each basket holding hairnets or shoe covers or face masks or latex gloves, the thin surgical kind.

  ‘Don’t just look at them,’ he says. ‘Put them on.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘I got pipes to lag.’

  I slip blue plastic shoe covers over my boots and a hairnet over my ponytail and then start to put on a pair of gloves.

  ‘You’re not cutting or stamping, you don’t need no gloves, come on.’

  He leads me to the automatic double-doors and they open and he walks away in the other direction.

  I step inside.

  The vast room is clean and dry and sterile. It feels like a factory. The floor is rubberised in some way and it extends up the walls on each side about half a metre. I can see stainless steel vats of what I guess must be liquorice being made and stirred with stainless steel blades. Above us are extractors and aluminium air-ducts sucking air up toward the big chimney. There are workers everywhere and they look like drones. Or ants. Or worker bees. White-coated humans with identical hairnets and identical shoe covers scuttling around not looking up and not acknowledging I’m here.