I fetched Louise, who was sitting on the steps outside the front door.
‘It’s beautiful here,’ she said. ‘Almost like the depths of the forest.’
‘I’m scared stiff of big forests,’ I said. ‘I’ve always been frightened of getting lost if I strayed too far away from the path.’
‘What you’re scared of is yourself. Nothing else. The same applies to me. And Harriet. And the lovely little Andrea. Caravaggio as well. We are scared of ourselves, and what we see of ourselves in others.’
She went to change Harriet’s pad. I sat down on the bench under the apple tree, next to the dog’s grave. In the far distance I could hear the dull thudding from the engines of a large ship. Had the navy already started their regular autumn manoeuvres?
Harriet had said that she’d never loved anybody as much as she’d loved me. I felt touched. I hadn’t expected that. I was beginning to appreciate just what I had done.
I abandoned her because I was afraid of being abandoned myself. My fear of tying myself down, and of feelings that were so strong that I couldn’t control them, resulted in my always drawing back. I didn’t know why that should be. But I knew that I wasn’t the only one. I lived in a world where many other men were just as afraid as I was.
I had tried to see myself in my father. But his fear had been different. He had never hesitated to show the love he felt for my mother and for me, despite the fact that my mother wasn’t easy to live with.
I have to come to grips with this, I told myself. Before I die, I must know why I’ve lived. I have some time left – I must make the most of it.
I felt very tired. The door to Harriet’s room was ajar. I went upstairs. When I’d gone to bed, I left the light on. The wall behind the bed had always been decorated with sea charts my grandfather had found washed up on the shore. They were water-damaged but you could make out they depicted Scapa Flow in the Orkney Isles, where the British fleet was based during the First World War. I had often followed the narrow channels surrounding Pentland Firth, and imagined the British ships sitting there, terrified of the periscopes of German U-boats.
I fell asleep with the light still on. At two o’clock I was woken up by Harriet’s screams. I stuck my fingers in my ears and waited for the painkillers to kick in.
We were living in my house in a silence that could be shattered at any moment by a roar of intense pain. I found myself thinking more and more frequently that I hoped Harriet would die soon. For all our sakes.
The heatwave lasted until 24 July. I noted in my logbook that there was a north-easterly wind and the temperature had started to fall. Troughs of low pressure queuing up over the North Sea brought changeable weather. In the early hours of 27 July, a northerly gale raged over the archipelago. A few tiles next to the chimney were ripped off the roof and smashed on the ground below; I managed to climb up on to the roof and replace them with spares that had been stored in a shed since the barn was demolished in the late 1960s.
Harriet’s condition grew worse. Now that the weather had started to deteriorate she was awake for only short periods of every day. Louise and I shared the chores, but Louise washed her mother and changed her pads for which I was grateful.
Autumn was creeping up on us. The nights were getting longer, the sun was losing its strength. Louise and I prepared ourselves for the fact that Harriet could die at any moment. When she was conscious, we would both sit by her bed. Louise wanted her to see the pair of us together. Harriet didn’t say much. She might ask about the time, and if it would soon be time to eat. She was becoming more and more confused. Sometimes she thought she was in the caravan in the forest, at other times she was convinced she was in her flat in Stockholm. She was not aware of being on the island, in a room with an anthill. Nor did she seem to be aware that she was dying. When she did wake up, it seemed to be the most natural thing in the world. She would drink a little water, perhaps swallow a few spoonfuls of soup, then drop off to sleep again. The skin on her face was now stretched so tightly round her cranium that I was afraid it might split and expose her skull. Death is ugly, I thought. There was now almost nothing left of the beautiful Harriet. She was a wax-coloured skeleton under a blanket, nothing more.
One evening at the beginning of August, we sat down on the bench under the apple tree. We were wearing warm jackets, and Louise had one of my old woolly hats on her head.
‘What are we going to do when she dies?’ I wondered. ‘You must have thought about it. Do you know if she has any specific wishes?’
‘She wants to be cremated. She sent me a brochure from an undertaker’s some months ago. I may still have it, or I might have thrown it away. She had marked the cheapest coffin and an urn on special offer.’
‘Does she have any sepulchral rights?’
Louise frowned. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Is there a family grave? Where are her parents buried? There’s usually a link to a particular town or village. In the old days, they used to talk about sepulchral rights.’
‘Her relatives are spread all over the country. I’ve never heard her mention visiting her parents’ grave. She’s never expressed any specific wish regarding her own grave. Although she did say quite firmly that she didn’t want a headstone. I think she would prefer to have her ashes cast into the wind. You can actually do that nowadays.’
‘You need permission,’ I said. ‘Jansson has told me about old fishermen who wanted their ashes scattered over the ancient herring grounds.’
We sat without speaking, thinking about what to do. I had bought a plot in a cemetery: there was probably no reason why Harriet shouldn’t lie by my side.
Louise put her hand on my arm.
‘We don’t really need to ask permission, in fact,’ she said. ‘Harriet could be one of those people in this country who don’t exist.’
‘Everybody has a personal identity number,’ I said. ‘We’re not allowed to disappear when it suits us.’
‘There are always ways of getting round things,’ Louise said. ‘She will die here, in your house. We’ll burn her just like they cremate dead people in India. Then we’ll scatter her ashes over the water. I’ll terminate the contract on her flat in Stockholm and empty it. I won’t supply a forwarding address. She’ll no longer collect her pension. I’ll tell the home health-care people that she’s died. That’s all they want to know. Somebody might start to wonder, I expect, but I shall say that I haven’t had any contact with my mother for several months. And she left here after a short visit.’
‘Did she?’
‘Who do you think is going to ask Jansson or Hans Lundman about where she’s gone to?’
‘But that’s just it. Where has she gone to? Who took her to the mainland?’
‘You did. A week ago. Nobody knows she’s still here.’
It began to dawn on me that Louise was serious. We would take care of the funeral ourselves. Nothing more was said. I got very little sleep that night. But I eventually began to think it might just be possible.
Two days later, when Louise and I were having dinner, she suddenly put down her spoon.
‘The fire,’ she said. ‘Now I know how we can light it without giving anybody cause to wonder what’s happening.’
I listened to her suggestion. It seemed repulsive at first, but then I began to see that it was a beautiful idea.
The moon vanished. Darkness enveloped the archipelago. The last sailing boats of summer headed back to their home ports. The navy conducted manoeuvres in the southern archipelago. We occasionally heard the rumble of distant gunfire. Harriet was now sleeping more or less round the clock. We took it in turns to stay with her. While I was a medical student, I had sometimes earned some extra pocket money by doing night duty. I could still remember the first time I watched a person die. It happened without any movement, in complete silence. The big leap was so tiny. In a split second the living person joined the dead.
I recall thinking: This person who is now dead is someone who has in reality
never existed. Death wipes out everything that has lived. Death leaves no trace, apart from the things I’ve always found so difficult to cope with. Love, emotions. I ran away from Harriet because she came too close to me. And now she will soon be gone.
Louise was often upset during those last days. I experienced an increasing fear that I myself was approaching the end. I was afraid of the humiliations in store for me, and hoped I would be granted a gentle death, one which spared me from having to lie in bed for a long time before I reached the final shore.
Harriet died at dawn, shortly after six o’clock, on 22 August. She had endured a restless night – the painkillers didn’t seem to help. I was making coffee when Louise came into the kitchen. She stood beside me and waited until I had counted up to seventeen.
‘Mum’s dead.’
We went to the room where Harriet lay. I felt for a pulse, and used my stethoscope to search for any sign of heart activity. She really was in fact dead. We sat down on her bed. Louise was crying quietly, almost silently. All I felt was a worryingly selfish feeling of relief that it wasn’t me lying there dead.
We sat there without speaking for about ten minutes, I listened again for any heart activity – nothing. Then I draped one of Grandma’s embroidered towels over Harriet’s face.
We drank coffee, which was still hot. At seven o’clock I telephoned the coastguard. Hans Lundman answered.
‘How’s your daughter?’
‘She’s fine.’
‘And Harriet?’
‘She’s left.’
‘Andrea is staggering around on those beautiful light blue shoes. Pass that message on to Louise.’
‘I’ll do that. I’m ringing to say that I’m intending to have a big bonfire today, to get rid of lots of rubbish. Just in case anybody contacts you to report a fire on the island.’
‘The drought’s over for this year.’
‘But somebody might think that my house is on fire.’
‘Thank you for letting us know.’
I went outside down to the boathouse and collected the tarpaulin I’d prepared as a shroud. There wasn’t a breath of wind. It was overcast. I had soaked it in tar. I spread it out on the ground. Louise had dressed Harriet in the pretty dress she’d worn at the midsummer party. She’d combed her hair and made up her face. She was still crying, just as quietly as before. We stood for a while, embracing each other.
‘I shall miss her,’ said Louise. ‘I’ve been so angry with her for so many years. But now I realise that she has opened up a gap inside me. It will remain open, and blow sorrow over me for the rest of my life.’
I checked Harriet’s heartbeat one last time. Her skin had already started to assume the yellow colour that follows death.
We waited another hour. Then we carried her outside and rolled her up in the tarpaulin. I had already prepared the bonfire that would transform her body to ashes, and placed at the ready a drum of petrol.
We lifted her up into my old boat, and balanced it on top of the pyre. I soaked the body and the worn-out hull with petrol.
‘We’d better make ourselves scarce,’ I said. ‘The petrol will flare up. If you stand too near, you could catch fire.’
We stepped back. I looked at Louise. She wasn’t crying any more. She gave me the nod. I lit a ball of cotton waste soaked in tar, and threw it on to the boat.
The fire flared up with a roar. There was a crackling and sizzling from the tar-soaked tarpaulin. Louise took hold of my hand. So my old boat had come in useful after all. It was the vehicle in which I sent Harriet into another world, in which neither she nor I believed, but which we no doubt hoped for, deep down.
While the fire was burning away, I went to fetch an old metal saw from the boathouse. I started to cut Harriet’s walker. It soon became obvious that the saw wasn’t up to the job. I put the walker in the dinghy, together with a couple of herring-net sinkers and chains. I rowed out towards Norrudden, and heaved the walker with its chains and sinkers overboard. Nobody ever fished or anchored there. So nothing would ever hook it and reel it back to the surface.
The smoke from the fire was billowing up into the sky. I rowed back to the island, and remembered that before long Jansson would arrive. Louise was squatting down, watching the boat burn.
‘I wish I could play an instrument,’ she said. ‘Shall I tell you what kind of music Mum liked to listen to?’
‘Wasn’t her favourite music traditional jazz? We used to go to jazz concerts in the Old Town in Stockholm when we were going out together.’
‘You’re wrong. Her favourite was “Sail Along Silvery Moon”. A sentimental song from the fifties. She always wanted to hear it. I wish I could have played it for her now. As a sort of recessional hymn.’
‘I’ve no idea how it goes.’
She hummed the tune hesitantly. Maybe I’d heard it before, but not played by a jazz band.
‘I’ll have a word with Jansson,’ I said. ‘Harriet left the island yesterday. I took her to the mainland. Some relative or other came to collect her. He was taking her to hospital in Stockholm.’
‘Tell him she sent him her greetings,’ said Louise. ‘If you do that, he won’t wonder why she left.’
Jansson was on time, as usual. He had with him a surveyor who had official business to carry out on Bredholmen. We nodded in acknowledgement. Jansson stepped on to the jetty and stared up at the bonfire.
‘I phoned Lundman,’ he said. ‘I thought your house was on fire.’
‘I’m burning my old boat,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t make it seaworthy again. No point in having it lying around for another winter.’
‘You did the right thing,’ said Jansson. ‘Old boats refuse to die unless you cut them up or burn them.’
‘Harriet has left,’ I said. ‘I took her to the mainland yesterday. She sent her greetings.’
‘That was kind of her,’ said Jansson. ‘Pass on greetings from me. I liked her very much. A fine old lady. I hope she was feeling a bit better?’
‘She had to go to the hospital. I don’t think she was any better. But she sent her greetings anyway.’
Jansson was pleased to hear Harriet had thought of him. He continued on his way with the surveyor. A few drops of rain started to fall, but it soon cleared up. I went back to the fire. The stern of the boat had collapsed. It was no longer possible to distinguish between charred wood and the tarpaulin with its contents. There was no smell of burnt flesh from the fire. Louise had sat down on a stone. I suddenly thought of Sima, and wondered if my island somehow attracted death to it. Sima had cut herself here, Harriet had come here to die. My dog was dead and my cat had vanished.
I felt despondent. Was there anything about me that I could be proud of? I wasn’t an evil person. I wasn’t violent, I didn’t commit crimes. But I had let people down. My mother had been in a care home alone for nineteen years after my father died, and I only ever visited her once. So much time had passed before I got round to seeing her that she no longer knew who I was. She thought I was her brother, who had died over fifty years before. I made no attempt to convince her that I was me. I just sat there and went along with her. Yes, of course I’m your brother who died such a long time ago. Then I deserted her. I never went back. I wasn’t even present at her funeral. I left everything in the hands of the undertaker, and paid the bill when it eventually came. Apart from the vicar and the organist, the only other person present in the chapel was a representative of the undertaker’s.
I didn’t go because nobody could force me to do so. I realised now that I had despised my mother. Somehow or other, I had also despised Harriet.
Perhaps I felt nothing but contempt for everybody. Most of all, though, I despised myself. I was still a small, scared creature who had seen in his father the brutal hell that ageing could bring.
The day passed, just as slowly as the clouds drifted across the sky. When the fire began to die down, I added branches that I had first soaked in petrol. It took time to cremate a human being in the open
.
Dusk fell and still the fire burned. I added more wood, raked around in the ashes. Louise came out with a tray of food. We drank what was left of the brandy, and were soon drunk. We cried and laughed with sorrow, but also with relief at the fact that Harriet’s pain was at an end. Louise was closer to me now. We sat there in the grass, leaning against each other, watching the smoke from the funeral pyre drifting up into the darkness.
‘I’m going to stay on this island for ever,’ said Louise.
‘Well, stay until tomorrow at least,’ I said.
Only when dawn broke did I allow the fire to die down.
Louise had curled up on the grass and gone to sleep. I spread my jacket over her. She woke up when I poured buckets of seawater over the embers. There was nothing left now of Harriet or the old boat. Louise scrutinised the ashes I raked out.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Not long ago she was a living person. Now there is nothing left of her.’
‘I thought maybe we could take the rowing boat and scatter the ashes over the water.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I can’t do that. I want her ashes at least to be preserved.’
‘I don’t have an urn.’
‘A jar, a tin can, anything. I want her ashes to remain here. We can bury them next to the dog.’
Louise headed for the boathouse. I felt uneasy about creating a graveyard under the apple tree. I could hear rattling noises coming from the boathouse. Louise appeared, carrying a tin that had once contained grease for the engine of my grandfather’s old boat. I had cleaned it up and used it for nails and screws. Now it was empty. She blew out the dust, put it down next to the pile of ashes and started filling it, using her hands. I went to the boathouse and fetched a spade. Then I dug a hole next to the dog. We placed the tin at the bottom of it, and filled it in. Louise went off among the rocks, and after a while returned with a large stone on which sediment had created something that looked like a cross. She placed it on top of the hole.
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