Red Snow

by Will Dean

  I sit with my back to the tills facing Tam’s van so I’ll see her approach when she’s done.

  Halfway through my coffee a hand taps my shoulder.

  ‘You’re early,’ I say, looking around. But it’s not Tammy. I straighten myself. It’s Noora, the new cop. ‘Oh, sorry, hi, I thought you were . . .’

  ‘Anyone sitting here?’ she asks.

  ‘No.’

  She’s wearing a blue fleece, royal blue, with a yellow zip-toggle, and dark jeans, the fleece-lined ones they sell in ICA.

  ‘Thought I should say hello properly as you’re the famous local journalist and I’m the new girl.’

  ‘I’m not famous,’ I say, my cheeks on fire. I pull off my scarf and lay it on my lap.

  ‘Not what Thord and the Chief tell me. Let me try introducing myself again. I’m Noora Ali.’

  She holds out her hand. I shake it and it is soft, not like mine, smooth moist skin and that’ll be gone by next winter here I reckon, doesn’t matter how much fancy cream you use.

  ‘Good to meet you properly.’

  ‘They’re bringing over my food,’ she says. ‘Apparently fast food in Gavrik isn’t that fast.’

  ‘It’s made to order, though,’ I say. ‘When so few people come in they don’t leave burgers and nuggets under the lamps to go limp, they make them fresh. It’s better, actually. How do you like it here?’

  She smiles and pushes a strand of black hair behind her ear and I try to keep eye contact but I have to look away. How old am I, fifteen?

  ‘It’s different,’ she says. ‘That’s unfair. I don’t know. I’ve only seen Gavrik in mid-winter so I’m sure it’s not always . . .’

  ‘Shit?’ I say, and she bursts out laughing like my lame one-word joke uncapped a whole pressurised canister of pent-up frustration.

  ‘Yes!’ she says. ‘It’s . . .’ she looks around to make sure we’re not being overheard. ‘It’s a really small town, no?’

  ‘It is,’ I say.

  ‘Thord explained to me that it’s evolved this own way because of the location,’ she says. ‘He says people have grown up and married and passed on the same beliefs and superstitions because they never seem to leave.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I say, and then her meal arrives. Two cheeseburgers, large fries, can of sparkling lime-flavoured water. Nice choices.

  ‘Help me with these,’ she turns the carton of fries to face me.

  ‘No, I’m fine, thanks.’

  She shrugs. ‘Mind if I eat?’

  I shake my head and then watch her. She has a certain way. She unwraps each cheeseburger and then kind of rewraps it with the paper and then nibbles at it. She takes a few fries and bites them and then, I don’t know, she eats elegantly somehow, not like me or Tammy. Next to her food is her set of keys. She has a mini torch on the ring along with a sheathed nail file.

  ‘You talk.’ She part-covers her mouth with her hand while she chews. ‘Tell me what I need to know. I’m off-duty and I’m eating. You talk, please, go on.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say, awkward. ‘Well, you probably know about me. I’m twenty-six. Reporter. I’m deaf, have been since childhood.’ I watch and she nods and she doesn’t frown or stare at my ears. ‘I’ve been here almost four years and actually aside from the Medusa murders which were pretty intense, and now this new nightmare, it’s been fairly quiet. I have a great boss, have you met her?’

  She shakes her head.

  ‘Lena Adeola. I’ll introduce you. She used to work in the US. Taught me a lot. Now I’m moving down to join a bi-weekly journal focussing on regional stories and migration.’

  She raises her eyebrows. ‘My parents are immigrants.’

  I nod.

  ‘From Iraq in the eighties.’ She dips a cluster of fries into a ketchup puddle. ‘I was born here but if you ever need an inside perspective on life as a second-generation Swede you know who to call.’

  ‘Be careful, I might just do that.’

  She smiles and unwraps her second cheeseburger.

  ‘Do you mind doing all the talking?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  What a perfect question. No man I know would ask that question.

  ‘Great,’ she says, sinking her teeth into the burger. She has a scar from an old piercing below her lip and three more in her right ear.

  ‘Chief told me you got a new lead,’ I lie.

  ‘Got two,’ she says.

  I stay silent but my eyes scream ‘tell me what you know’.

  ‘Too early,’ she says. ‘Nothing firm. Even had one old-timer asking us to question you, can you believe that?’ She waves a fry at me like it’s a judge’s gavel. ‘Old timer with a big dog, not someone Thord recognised, lives up by the sewage works, he reckoned you’ve been at the scene of too many of these incidents so it’s likely you’re involved and have we checked out your alibis.’

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘You serious? I was with the janitor when Grimberg jumped and I was with him again when we found Gunnarsson.’

  ‘I’m not questioning you, Tuva,’ she says, smiling. ‘Relax.’

  I spot Tammy outside walking toward me with a bobble hat and a deep frown. She’s talking, she’s talking a lot, but I can’t read her lips through the glare of the window.

  ‘My friend’s coming,’ I say. ‘I’m meeting her for dinner, I’ll introduce you.’

  Noora looks up enthusiastically like she desperately needs friends in this town.

  ‘Tammy,’ I say, standing up. ‘Meet Noora, she’s police, off-duty.’

  Tammy says hi and then stands glaring at me.

  ‘Join us,’ says Noora, moving in along her plastic bench. ‘Please.’

  Tammy orders for us both and then sits down. She doesn’t say much. She’s tired. I know she’s exhausted after a full day cooking in her van, serving ungrateful customers in huge coats who buy from her every week of the year and yet just grunt the order and leave, never any conversation, never any ‘how are you’.

  I sense Noora doesn’t feel too welcome and she makes her excuses and leaves. As she walks away from the table I breathe in through my nose and manage to smell her, to capture her scent. Vanilla and something else?

  ‘That’s your Valentine right there,’ says Tammy.

  28

  Tammy’s already gone when I wake up, but she’s left a note and a stack of pancakes in the kitchen. I’ll get her a cactus in a decent pot and I’ll make it up to her at my leaving drinks tonight.

  The office is quiet.

  A guy who used to work at the pulp mill had an accident yesterday. He had a fight with his wife about Christmas decorations, that’s what his neighbour told me, a vocal argument about how come they were still up in February. So the guy took his ladder and raised it up to his roof to remove his illuminated sleigh but the ladder wasn’t secure at the base and, long story short, he broke both legs. I got quotes and a statement from Thord about safety around the home and a few photos. Bread and butter.

  At eleven I pull on my winter gear. It’s crisp and bright outside, and there are more people out than I’ve seen in weeks. I turn right and notice a van parked under the archway in the centre of the factory. It has ‘trap-a-rat’ written across the back doors.

  I squeeze past it to get to the yard. Stacks of summer tyres, the narrow kind that fit the Grimberg trucks, have been taken from the root barns and piled up near the wall to St Olov’s. I think these guys are humane vermin exterminators? Humane exterminators? That even a thing? They’re setting up elaborate runs and clear Perspex boxes with trapdoors at the end of them. The old tailless cat with the missing ear is watching them from the wall close to the family grave.

  I sign in and walk through to the factory floor. The mixing and heating zone looks like it always does but when I reach the extruding machines I can see the liquorice snakes are a deep shade of red. Glossy. Each fine line of sugar paste and flour and aniseed flavour and liquorice and salt and anti-crystallisation agent is as red as my blood. As red as you
r blood. The stampers are pounding their little hand tools down onto the scarlet coins like border officials at some stamp-happy bureaucratic country. Valentine’s is coming.

  The canteen’s filling up and staff are pulling chairs down from the tables where they’ve been resting upside down to allow the cleaners, two white-haired guys who look like twins, to mop underneath. I swing left and open the heavy door to the staircase. I can hardly move it, it’s so thick. Must be half a tree. The door has a new ‘keep closed at all times’ sign screwed to it. I walk up.

  There are about forty stairs because the ceilings of the ground floor are industrial high. I walk up past hundreds of suspicious eyes, and one of the mirrors has a fine hairline crack in one corner and I wonder whether or not to tell Anna-Britta. It’s the kind of thing that might be important to her.

  The Grimberg office is quiet, even quieter than the Posten; at least we get drop-ins and phones ringing, this place is a mausoleum. There are four individual offices, but I’ve only ever seen Anna-Britta in hers and candyfloss Pissy Knickers in hers.

  ‘Tuva, you’re going to think I’m avoiding you,’ says Anna-Britta, opening her office door wearing a navy dress with matching cardigan. And her broken rectangular watch.

  ‘It’s your book,’ I say.

  ‘It is not,’ she says, an appalled look on her face. ‘I’ll have Karin talk to you again today. I have visitors in downstairs, you probably noticed, and this is a very busy time for production, second only to pre-Christmas.’

  ‘Is Karin in the Receiving Room?’

  Anna-Britta nods and I see that the bags under her eyes are darkening, the skin thinner and more creased than before, like my uncared-for elbow skin.

  I find Karin sitting cross-legged on the Gustavian sofa playing on a Gameboy, a boxy grey thing I used to play on as a kid.

  ‘Retro,’ I say.

  She looks up and narrows her hooded eyes. ‘I like it,’ she says. ‘Ludy and I used to play Mario all the time, it’s very addictive.’

  You should try Grand Theft Auto.

  ‘It stops me from thinking too much,’ she says. ‘Helps me forget.’

  I know exactly what she means.

  ‘Can we go through again?’ I ask.

  She looks at me and walks over to the residence door. She opens it and gestures for me to go in.

  The room looks like it did before. The exposed brick wall, the slime wall, is dark green in hue and all the furniture is positioned well away from it. I see the cabinet, it looks innocent enough with the doors closed, and I see the table with the gleaming knives lined up underneath.

  ‘What’s that?’ I ask.

  Karin looks at the fruit bowl on the table, the one full of pine needles with a snowball the size of a bowling ball planted on top.

  ‘Granny’s thing,’ she says.

  And then I hear a whistle.

  The acoustics up here are awful. Some sounds get lost in the space of the room and some get amplified out of proportion. But I can hear whistling like sitting next to a fireplace on a stormy night. And then I hear it again.

  ‘She wants you,’ says Karin, looking over toward the attic.

  I walk slowly to the base of the stairs, my Dictaphone in one hand, my handbag over my shoulder. I open the door.

  ‘Come on up,’ says Cici. ‘Come on.’

  She looks like she’s been crying but she takes my hand and leads me up the stairs to her attics. It’s mild up here now, the frost patterns gone from the window panes.

  ‘Wait there, or not, do what you like. I’ll be just a minute.’

  She trots off to her changing area between the chimneys and I look at her, impressed with her mobility considering she’s in her early eighties. She moves as well as I do.

  There are mannequins up here, dozens of them. They’re not the figures you see in H&M, these are old, maybe 1970s, all yellowed plastic and sad tired eyes and bad joints. One has false eyelashes and red lips and beautifully-painted pale green eyes, but the tip of her nose is missing. Like it’s been gnawed away. Some of them are dressed and some are half-dressed and one’s naked with a crispy dried-out daisy chain swinging around her neck and it’s so long it reaches her caved-in navel.

  Music starts. It’s not loud but it’s there: tinny speakers playing something I vaguely recognise. Cici looks from behind the conical brick chimney and then springs out and walks down her linoleum catwalk jutting her hips and when she gets to the end, to within about two metres of me, standing here like a dullard with my handbag and my wool jumper and my Dictaphone, she bends down to show me her peacock-feather wings and looks up and bares her teeth and blows me a kiss.

  ‘You should be in Hollywood,’ I tell her.

  ‘They should come here,’ she says.

  I walk with her around the perimeter of the attic space and she’s staring at the roof itself, at the wooden beams and trusses and joists. They’re old wood, hard like steel, and they are littered with bodies. I make out bees, three of four types, and wasps and lapwings and moths and spiders. The bees and wasps are sleeping, hibernating, and so are the horseflies and bluebottles. Their furry thoraxes are pulsating and their breathing rate has slowed to what looks like a human’s breathing rate, their tiny lungs inflating and deflating inside them at the same tempo as mine; and that is unnerving.

  ‘Never wake a white moth,’ she says, in a serious tone. ‘Or a sleeping bee. Another month and they’ll start making their way. I provide safe harbour up here. I find them quite an inspiration, just look at the blue of that housefly.’

  She points to an average-looking bug and I look closer and it’s black-blue and it has a metallic hue. I move my head to see it in better light. She’s right, it is beautiful.

  ‘I like you, Cecilia, if you don’t mind me saying.’

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘I like you. Do you knit?’

  She walks off toward her changing area, which has heaps of discarded dresses and boots and strings of multi-coloured plastic beads.

  ‘I used to,’ I say.

  There’s a sewing and knitting area up here on a big table and her sewing machine is one of those foot-powered types from the fifties. A slow-burning grave candle flickers next to it.

  She waves her arm around at the sewing kits. ‘I mend everything,’ she says. ‘That’s how I earn my keep now I’m an attic dowager. If KK has a hole or Anna-Britta’s grey-on-grey two-piece gets bobbly, I can sort it.’ She taps her fingers across her embroidery scissors and knitting needles, all stabbed vertically into a florist’s oasis sponge, vaguely face-shaped, one of those stiff green ones you can’t help but push your fingertips into.

  ‘Can I ask you a delicate question?’ I say. ‘It’s something that’s cropped up with the book.’

  She holds up her palm. ‘Delicate, delicate, delicate.’ She walks over to a long stainless steel rack of boleros and capes. ‘Delicate, delicate, delicate.’ Finally, she pulls on a new thread of beads, these ones are amber with green aquamarine stones in between, and she looks at the mirror and squeezes her lips together and reorganises her bracelets.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she says, turning to face me.

  ‘Per Gunnarsson. The man who died. Do you remember, about seven years ago, that someone complained he was talking inappropriately to a young girl?’

  Her face hardens. ‘It was dealt with. He was allowed to keep his position here on the basis that he kept away from her. On the basis that he kept himself to himself.’

  ‘Her?’ I ask. ‘Who was the girl he was talking to?’

  ‘Keep the past in the past,’ she says. ‘It was dealt with.’

  ‘You can tell me.’

  She narrows her eyes. ‘I said it was dealt with.’

  ‘Alright then,’ I say. ‘What happened with your grandson, Ludo?’

  ‘What happened?’

  I nod.

  ‘Lilla Ludo was such a little tyke, one of those fun children, not one of the scared, timid ones. He had a backbone and a flame in his belly. He an
d KK were inseparable, they used to play up here as children, with the puppets and dressing up.’

  ‘It must have been dreadful, losing him.’

  ‘Always incredibly hard to lose a little one,’ she says, turning one of the amber beads in her lemon-scented fingers. ‘But I believe very firmly in your time. You know?’

  ‘Your time?’

  ‘When it’s your time it’s your time. Lilla Ludo had leukaemia, dreadful disease, and he didn’t suffer much until the very end, thank goodness. As awful as it sounds, it must have been his time. Because that’s the only way I can cope with it all. I have to accept it was his time, otherwise I’d be long dead. And so would his mother. We all would.’ She looks older now. Her back’s curved and her chin’s dropped. ‘It was dear Gustav’s time, although nobody around here will accept it except KK.’

  She scratches her chin and I notice her rings. She has one grey pearl carved to look like an eye. Next to it she has a razor-blade ring with a strip of cork on each edge. There’s a huge pink rock on her little finger and it has an insect trapped inside it, a mosquito I think.

  ‘Next time you come up I’ll have a whole rack for you.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. How do I respond to this? ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Lilla Ludo was treated in Karlstad by excellent doctors. They did all they could with their medicines, and we did all we could with our precautions. But it was his time. He died in his own bed in this very building, which is how, I think, he would have wanted it. My son blamed his stupid antennas up there.’ She points through the roof to where the right chimney stands. ‘He blamed himself but all the experts said there’s no connection. The antennas give off less radiation than holding a telephone to your own ear.’

  A hum starts up near the walls.

  ‘Heaters,’ says Cici. She walks to the window and looks east out of the slanting window toward the ruin of St Olov’s. ‘Weather’s coming, just look at that.’

  There’s a grey cloud approaching on the horizon and it’s like I can see the actual weather front they show on TV. It’s moving in.

  ‘Well, it has been mild,’ I say. ‘Why didn’t the mobile phone company take the antennas down?’