by Will Dean
I pull onto the E16 and head north. Was there snow on Gunnarsson’s chest? Was he dragged in from outside? Or was there a snow skull sitting on his torso staring into his eyes as his vascular system drained its last drops from that neat neck wound?
There’s a clump of wind turbines on a hill and they look frozen. Their blades are turning but only just. I have to really look and they do turn but it looks like they’re too cold and too stiff and too achy. White turbines over white snow against a white sky.
The tank’s full so I drive all the way past Utgard forest and on to the pulp mill with its mountains of stacked pine trunks and then turn off and loop around and drive southbound toward Karlstad. This was the route I used to take to visit Mum in the hospice. Still is the route I’d take to visit her grave, her and Dad, side-by-side, one stone, some old carved words, some new, space for more, a kilometre or so away from Lake Vänern.
I’m thinking about death more after seeing the panic in Gunnarsson’s face, his eyes still open under the liquorice coins, the panic in his expression. That pained transition between life and death. Mum didn’t spark it off, the Ferryman did. Mum still feels like the end of a great slow arduous journey, a sad relief, an inevitable and completely predictable full stop. I don’t think about death when I think of Mum, I think about how the hell I’m going to avoid her life and live my own and live it well. I know I have control over my destiny and despite Dad’s drink problem and Mum’s misery, I choose happiness. I just have to figure out how.
Gavrik’s getting dark when I arrive back and the faded white ‘Grimberg Liquorice’ lettering down each brick chimney of the factory is almost invisible. .
‘Lars, you still have that trickle charger in your drawer?’
‘It’s home,’ he says.
‘Trickle charger?’ asks Nils from his office slash kitchen. ‘Can I come to the rescue, fair maiden?’
‘What?’
‘I’ll plug you in. Out back?’
I hand him the key. ‘Thanks, it’s the antique Toyota.’
‘You’re buying the first drink tonight,’ says Nils, pointing across the road to Ronnie’s Bar.
‘Deal.’
I can taste it on my tongue already.
Nils walks back in. ‘Nice lawn mower you got back there.’ He says it like he’s being funny and expects me to laugh. ‘Battery’ll take a few hours. Shall we?’
We don’t bother to ask Lars because he’s a solid-gold bore who has never once said yes. But then I think, what if?
‘Lars,’ I say. ‘Quick drink?’
‘Can’t tonight,’ he says.
Good for him to be honest. He does what he wants. Zero compromise.
We step out and the air’s warming up, which is weird as it’s night-time. A man limps past us and drags himself up the hill toward St Olov’s. I can see patches in the pavement where the snow’s melted away and there are tons and tons of salty grit down there, layers of briny granite shards that’ll need sweeping up in April.
The neon ‘Ronnie’s’ sign is bright blue and we walk inside and strip off our coats and scarves and hang them all up.
‘Beer, please, Tuva Moody,’ says Nils, pushing me to the bar.
I order from Ronnie and he has a blue plaster strapped around his index finger.
‘Got mice problems,’ says Nils. ‘Got ’em in the shed, in the roof, in the walls. Feasting and fucking, is how my God-fearing wife puts it. You believe they’ve nested in our patio-chair cushions? You believe that?’ He sips his beer and sighs a big pleasure sigh.
There are ten or twelve people in clusters playing pool or chatting at tables. There’s a man in the corner wearing wire-rimmed glasses with tinted lenses and from over here it looks like his eyes are black and oversize and it looks like he’s staring at me. I feel out of place. The music. The man. My lack of a Hilux. The mangled delivery truck I should have been strapped into. And the poor guy locked in the morgue with a canine tooth lodged in his neck.
Maybe I’m overstaying my welcome.
‘I can’t stay out long tonight,’ I tell Nils.
‘How’s about next drink’s on the house,’ says Ronnie.
He pours us both a shot of tequila. We drink them back with salt and then bite into lemon slices and we both make the kind of sucking noises you make when you drink tequila that way. The salt lingers on my lips. It’s everywhere: sodium chloride in the candy and all over the pavements, on the motorway; I can sense it in the air around town. This whole place is salted.
‘Another,’ I say to the barman.
We drink.
‘One more,’ I say.
‘Hold on,’ says Nils. ‘I’m not twenty-six. I’ll take a beer.’
We both take a beer and sit down at a sticky table.
‘Tell me about the Grimbergs,’ says Nils. ‘You reckon they’re somehow responsible for Gunnarsson. What do you think they’re up to?’
‘Up to?’
‘I heard things are falling apart since Gustav jumped,’ says Nils, preening his spiked hair as he talks. ‘Might be a lawsuit after that van crash. Heard the driver won’t work again. Maybe won’t walk again. Makes me happy they never gave me that sales job last year. Pay was better than the Posten, I can tell you now cos you’re almost out the door, but who knows how long I’d survive in that place?’ He does a fake shiver. ‘People are saying it’s all falling down now Grimberg’s wife’s in charge.’
‘Her name’s Anna-Britta,’ I say. ‘And she seems pretty capable to me.’
He sips his beer and checks his phone screen.
‘People are waiting for it to collapse,’ he says. ‘So they can buy it up cheap.’
‘Who’s waiting?’
‘You know who.’
‘The hunched lawyer with the facelift?’
‘And his brother-in-law, the fella that rented you that piece of crap parked out back of our office. Reckon the factory’s worth half of what it used to be on account of all this bad publicity.’
‘Brother-in-law?’
‘Yeah, Toyota dealer’s sister works in the factory, you didn’t know that? She’s a PA or executive-assistant bookkeeper or something; paper shuffler. And she’s greedy and bitter – the greediest and the bitterest of them all, I have that on good authority.’
‘Thin blonde hair, thinner than mine, all bunched up on top of her head?’
‘That’s it. Another beer?’
I nod and he walks over to the bar. My phone vibrates and Tammy says she’ll be outside Ronnie’s in ten minutes to pick me up and I reply with ‘xx’.
The music changes to Elvis singing ‘Hound Dog’ and I look around the room, my eyes darting to the dark corners, to the guy with the glasses, my hand reaching up to cover my throat.
‘You alright?’ asks Nils walking back with two fresh beers. ‘He messed up the head on these; new barrels.’
I turn down my aids to screen out the music. I’ll lip-read Nils instead.
‘My lift’s here in ten.’ I say.
‘Perfect,’ he says. ‘This is a ten-minute beer.’
‘Thanks for not being a complete prick these past three-and-a-half years,’ I say.
‘You’re welcome. I think.’ He takes a swig of beer and intentionally gives himself a froth moustache. ‘Thanks for writing top stories and boosting circulation and making my job easier than it used to be.’
I’m taken aback by this. ‘You think I write top stories?’
He nods and wipes away his moustache.
‘You handled Medusa like a pro even though it made you no friends and now you’ll handle the Ferryman slaughterer like a pro.’
I can’t get every word. I never can when I lip-read. But I can guess and extrapolate and read his body language.
‘Slaughterer? That what they’re calling him now?’
‘Or her,’ he says.
‘Or her,’ I say.
‘Nah, that’s just what I call him on account of the bloodletting. I worked my uncle’s abattoir for two summers during scho
ol and whenever I hear about throat wounds I think back to them pigs. The iron smell of it all. The squeals.’
‘One Posten left,’ I say. ‘Then it’s Newboy’s job.’
‘Pretty-boy-rich-daddy-the-third?’ says Nils. ‘I’ll give him till Midsummer.’
I hug Nils as I leave and his gel leaves a snail trail on my cheek but I enjoyed this drink, drinks, plural. Tammy’s car’s idling on the pavement so I jump in and it’s warm. I kiss her cheek and we drive up toward my apartment building.
‘Is there enough space in the car for all your stuff?’ she asks.
‘Just three cases, should be fine,’ I say.
‘You’ve checked all your cupboards, all the high ones?’
‘Affirmative.’
‘Nothing at the dry cleaners?’ she asks.
‘Negative.’
‘Nothing in your basement storage?’
Oh, shit.
23
I walk downstairs to the laundry rooms and unlock my storage unit. It’s empty, save for one item. I open the door and the unit’s about the size of a family bathroom and the troll’s sitting right there where I left it.
I approach.
The wood-carving sisters of Utgard forest admitted making it, but they told me it was customised later on. Its face, his face, for it is most definitely a he, is lit from the LED lamp I activated when I walked inside. I can see his tongue, the little animal tongue, maybe a cat’s or a weasel’s, and it’s still hanging from his painted pine lips but now it’s shredded. It’s been nibbled away. I look around at the corners of the unit and see the doll’s eyes that have settled where they fell out last year. The storage unit looks hermetically sealed but the damage to the tongue isn’t natural wasting. Something’s been eating it.
His stiff pine cock is tight against its sackcloth trousers and I grab the troll around the shoulders and hold it out at arm’s length, its protuberance poking the other way. I jog past the washing machines and driers and step outside and look for an appropriate hole in the recycling bin but there is no troll option. There’s plastics and metals and batteries and white glass and cardboard and green glass but nothing for demonic little spruce dolls with human fingernails and twig dicks. I place in on top and it just sits there looking back at me, the sackcloth rucked and the swell catching in the streetlight. The tongue is as thin as a line of saliva. I can see tiny teeth marks. I knock it over.
‘You ready?’ asks Tammy.
I hold up a finger like ‘just a sec’ and go inside the hallway of my building and I’m acutely aware of the look and sound and smell of the place that’s been a kind of home for three-and-a-half Toytown years. I open my postbox and my key dangles from my fingertips for a while and then I drop it. Clunk. I’ve thought about this mundane act many times in the past years when things have been tough: the ecstatic practicalities of handing in my notice and clearing my apartment and dropping that metal key into that metal mailbox. But all I feel now is empty sorrow.
We drive away.
I have no flat.
I have no truck.
Tam drives and the heavy crowbar she keeps in her passenger-side footwell digs into my leg. I stare out of my window. There are casserole dishes everywhere: heavy cast iron ones left outside front doors with beef stews and fish pies and chunky root-vegetable soups inside. They have bricks on top or else insulation tape to keep the wild things out. The whole town is a goddam freezer.
‘How do you feel?’ asks Tammy.
Her Peugeot’s a stick-shift manual, so I place my hand softly on top of hers and we change gears together until we get to her building. Her hand is strong and clear and knowing and mine’s just along for the ride.
I pull out two black wheelie-suitcases and Tam takes the third and together we drag them through salted snow to the entrance of her block.
There’s a low brick wall.
And there’s a skull.
A snow skalle’s perched on the end of the wall and the light from the building glows through it from behind and the eyes look alive.
Tam glances at me and I look around to see if anyone’s watching us. Lights move in windows from TV shows.
I use my phone’s torch to light up the fist-sized skull.
‘What ratshit made that?’ asks Tam.
This one has grit mixed in with the snow, it’s a dirty-grey colour, and its eyes are not liquorice. This one has doll’s eyes, the plastic or glass variety where the pupils move freely. Like the eyes of the troll I just disposed of. The light shines through the snow and through the eyes and Tam and I just stare at it. A thing the size of a grapefruit and yet it has captured us completely.
I move to pick it up.
‘Wait,’ says Tam, seizing my wrist. ‘Look.’
We move to the side of the skull.
There’s a medical needle sticking out of the indentation that is the skull’s gaping mouth. The needle is almost invisible in this light and the syringe behind the skull is transparent.
‘Ratshit kids,’ says Tam.
She doesn’t know about the meltwater on Gunnarsson’s chest. Or the skull at the factory. Or the one on my truck. She doesn’t know.
‘We can’t leave it here,’ she says.
I photograph it and then I pick it up carefully and we step to the door.
‘The code’s 1289,’ says Tammy. ‘We changed it yesterday. New code’s 1289.’
Gavrik residents are once again changing their building door-codes.
We go in and ride the lift up to the third floor. Its eyes move as I walk. Like it’s drunk or entertaining a small child. I hold it away from me. The last thing I need is to trip on a patch of meltwater and pierce myself with its needle.
I must have been to Tam’s place twenty times in the past years but now it feels different. I’m seeing it through new eyes. Clean, tidy, food in the fridge, the fire in the modern log burner laid and ready to go. It seems perfect. But there’s also a demonic snow skalle with moving eyes and a needle for a tongue slowly melting away in the stainless steel sink.
When I wake the next morning Tam’s not in bed. We slept head to foot last night like two thirteen-year-olds, even though she has a small spare bedroom. Tam’s gun rests on her bedside table. I reach over to her side of the bed, to the warmth, and then I pull on my aids.
‘Breakfast’s ready,’ she calls from the kitchen.
I pad through flat-footed and see the fire lit in the corner and the coffee steaming from its pot.
‘I should have moved in years ago,’ I say, double-checking the door locks.
She blows a raspberry and beckons me over.
‘Semla,’ I say, neither a question nor a statement, just me saying the word to myself and letting it rest on my tongue.
‘Not homemade,’ she says. ‘But they are luxury lux-deluxe.’
I stare down at the sweet bread bun filled with fresh cream and sprinkled with cinnamon.
‘Hot milk or hot chocolate?’ asks Tammy.
‘What do you think?’
We both pour lukewarm hot chocolate, the milky Swedish frothy kind not the thick rich Mediterranean kind, onto the Semla bun and let it soak up. Then we attack with spoons and drink coffee and say very little and it is hands down the best breakfast I’ve had in years.
We know there’s a needle on the sink sitting atop a folded tea towel. We both know it. But we need this moment, this food, this togetherness, this brief escape.
‘I’ll tell Thord first thing,’ I say, gesturing toward the sink.
‘Why here, though?’ she asks. ‘Because of you? A pissed-off reader? Who knew you were moving here?’
Lena knows. Nils knows. Lars probably knows. Other than that?
‘I’ll ask around, probably kids trying to scare everyone,’ I say.
‘Too late,’ says Tam. ‘We were already scared.’
She explains to me how she can only handle the harsh artic conditions of her food van, the obnoxious no-tip no-chat customers, the darkness of it all, the in
herent danger, if her apartment is warm and comfortable. She suffers this time of year, I know she does, even when there are no killers loose in this small, marginal town. It’s months with no decent light and no decent heat. It’s an endurance sport just making it through to May even in a good year.
Tammy drives me to the office. I’m glad she keeps a crowbar in her Peugeot and a gun in her van and a lock knife in her pocket. She needs to be careful and I feel especially protective now I’m about to leave her all alone in this Godforsaken town. As we pass Björnmossen’s gun store she tells me her profits would double or maybe even triple if the liquorice-factory canteen ever closed down. And if the Grimbergs ever do sell up that’s the first things any new owner would do.
I drive off in the Tacoma to ICA, it opens at 7am on weekdays, and park up. In other towns the supermarkets are open twenty-four hours a day, but this isn’t other towns. ICA’s empty, apart from pensioners and bleary-eyed nightshift technicians from the pulp mill. I recognise a council worker who repairs potholes, usually alone, she never seems to stop working, strong as a bison, wavy hair to die for. She nods ‘hi’.
I fill my basket: one window wiper on a stick for condensation and one very faux-cashmere steering-wheel cover and one portable car-charger starter thing with crocodile clips. 1,980 kronor.
The stack of papers for sale in the office is getting low by the time I get back. The Ferryman is the kind of story that non-subscribing occasional readers will trek through slush to buy.
I open a folder for Cheekbones and deposit the things I’ve kept behind for no-news weeks, we get plenty of them, stories about the local blood-sucking tick population or the elk-hunt quotas. They might help the new boy in the next weeks or months, or most likely his entire goddam career when local people won’t open up to him. At least I look semi-redneck with my scrappy ponytail and my part-Saami nub of a nose and my extensive supermarket fleece collection. Cheekbones looks like a Gant catalogue and that is not going to work in his favour one bit.
I get to the cop shop and there are three grey-haired women standing at the counter. They’re all wearing dark fleece jackets and they all have the fur-lined boots that I see on sale in the shoe-shop window each morning.
