by Stefan Spjut
‘Kiruna Sillfors is wondering why you’re shouting,’ he said.
‘I’m shouting because I’m starving.’
Håkan pulled the cling film off the bowls; the little girl climbed onto her Tripp Trapp chair. But he ordered her back down: first she had to turn off the TV and wash her hands. In that order. He held out the breadbasket with the taco shells. Diana said thanks, but then he put one hand behind his ear and she corrected herself. It was an idea of his, that you weren’t allowed to say thank you when you ate tacos, you had to say gracias. Kiruna thought it was hilarious and became unusually polite, so that was good at least. Though she didn’t eat much. The mince and sweetcorn went down okay. And some cucumber she munched away on.
‘Then I’m going out to Vittangi tomorrow.’
‘You’ll miss the festival.’
‘Oh no.’
She turned to the little girl.
‘I’m going to go see a friend.’
‘Who?’
‘Her name’s Susso.’
‘I didn’t know you had a friend called that.’
‘But I do. When we were little, people called her Myran.’
‘Because she was small?’
‘No, because her last name was Myrén. And do you know what they called me?’
The girl shook her head, full of anticipation.
‘Sillen. Because my name is Sillfors.’
The little girl giggled.
‘And do you know what I was called?’ Håkan said and took a big, crunchy bite. ‘I was called Håkan.’
‘Håkan Hellström,’ Diana whispered.
The little girl giggled. Then she said: ‘If you hadn’t named me Kiruna, my name wouldn’t have been Kiruna.’
‘True,’ Håkan said, ‘then your name would have been something else entirely.’
The little girl nodded.
‘Is that weird to you?’ Diana asked.
She nodded again.
‘Yes, it’s pretty weird. When you think about it.’
‘Can I come with you?’
‘To Vittangi? I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. I haven’t
seen her in so long. And she’s not feeling too well.’
‘Is she sick?’
‘That’s what I’m going there to find out.’
Anders was sitting on the sofa in the living room, trying to figure out why he was home alone. He was, quite clearly, at home. In his living room. He was sitting in it. In the middle of the day. But it wasn’t a weekend, because then Johanna and William would have been home too. He knew he had a lot of leave saved up. Was he on leave, was that why he was sitting there? He swallowed hard and made a new attempt at driving his thoughts forward, but he didn’t get anywhere.
When he turned his head, he felt he could make out shapeless figures coming at him from both sides. Quick, stealthy shadows with evil intent. It was highly unpleasant, so he sat dead still to avoid it. Then he turned his head, but he did it stiffly and slowly like an old-timey robot.
He remembered something now. Something had happened at the field station. After the wolf incident, he’d been put on sick leave. Sick leave, he had that phrase to hold on to. But then? Had he broken something? Yes. He had a memory of glass shattering. People shouting. Several people talking over each other and attacking him with vicious tirades he had no way of defending himself against, a bombardment of accusations. Or was that something he’d dreamt? It was impossible to say. It was like there had been a merging in his brain. Everything blended together in a blurred mass and he knew he had tried to explain this to Johanna, what it felt like and how insanely difficult it was to put it into words and how it affected him, but she didn’t want to listen, the only thing she wanted was for him to seek help.
You need help, Anders.
You’re going mad. This is what it feels like.
Still, he felt he could remember more and more when he really put his mind to it. When he sat like this and searched his recollections. He had talked to Johanna, was that yesterday? She had said he ran about outside in the night. He remembered that. Not that he did but that she had said he did and he remembered exactly what she’d looked like when she said it. That was a step in the right direction. Maybe things were clearing up. Blue skies ahead.
He closed his eyes for a few seconds and the moment he took the leap into sleep he jerked like he was being electrocuted.
There was a notebook on the kitchen table. It was open and he could see that someone had written something on it. Words meant for him. How many lines? The paper was blue all over. Johanna’s handwriting. It was not a greeting, not a message. It was a letter. She had written him a letter and put it on the kitchen table. That was very ominous; he only reluctantly went up to the notebook and prodded it to make the writing turn the right way up. His fingertips strayed to his hairline but his glasses weren’t there. The only thing he found was a small piece of bark. A flake from a pine tree that he crumpled to dust between his fingers. He picked up the notebook and calibrated a distance at which he could make out the letters.
When he had finished reading, he put the notebook down on the table. Practically threw it. Then he went into the bathroom and closed the door and tried to cry, but he couldn’t. Nothing came out. His mouth was ugly and twisted in the mirror, but no tears came.
*
Their bed was made; she had even arranged the decorative cushions in a pile on the bedspread. He stood and looked at the bed and tried to connect this level of care with what she had written in her letter. Is that really something you do if you’ve given up? If you’re so afraid of a person you are unable to sleep in the same house as them?
He pulled the blinds down and closed them. Shut the door and lay down on the bed. He didn’t have the heart to either move the cushions or pull the bedspread aside and he lay on the side that was usually hers.
*
A low wailing woke him. It couldn’t really be called a howling. He lay still, listening. The house was dark. Night. Had the sound come from inside his head, or outside? He often snored so loudly he woke himself.
He was unable to go back to sleep; he couldn’t even keep his eyes closed. The tension was too powerful, it was coursing through every part of his body. Eventually, he got out of bed.
He twisted the blind wand and widened the gaps. He couldn’t see much. The black contours of the garden furniture. The rotary washing line like a dead tree.
He went into the living room and over to the terrace door, turned the key and opened it. Stepped out into the night. Stood there in his stocking feet, waiting. Even though his mouth was open, he breathed solely through his nostrils; there was like a block of some kind in his throat.
A human figure materialised out of the darkness of the woods. A short woman with a wimple of dark hair. She moved gracefully and silently like a shadow. Stopped a few feet from him.
‘Why do you look so scared?’ she said.
He backed up toward the house and almost fell over.
‘Anders.’
‘I feel so weird.’
‘I noticed the car’s gone.’
‘What car?’
‘Her car.’
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she’s gone.’
The sound of a lorry reversing woke me. A cruel honking sound that found its way into my dream, where it morphed into some kind of klaxon. Not at all a nice sound to wake up to and I was cross with Roland for opening the window. After the rock music had finally died down, people had roamed the streets shouting like lunatics half the night. And now this. It was unbearable. I tried to go back to sleep but I couldn’t.
Roland was already up, of course. And vanished without a trace, as I discovered when I went into the kitchen. He hadn’t even read the paper. I licked my thumb and flipped through the news. Nothing about Lennart Brösth. Not a word. I had a shower and then sat down on the balcony with my coffee cup, shivering with cold. Four boys walked down the street carrying a section of a fence; they were heading toward the main
stage in Ferrum Park, where Status Quo were booked to play. Thrilled shrieks were drifting up from the spinning rides at the carnival.
It was going to be a busy day; Ella was coming in to lend a hand and I knew she was looking forward to it. Not only because she needed the money. She liked manning the till. Taking payments and using her English. And spending time with her grandmother.
She was waiting for me in the foyer. Dressed in a short-sleeved shirt with a printed outline of Kiruna’s two famous high-rises, and the text ‘The Erskine Skyline’. The shirt was from the shop; I’d given her it for Christmas and I welled up picturing her back in that grimy, chaotic flat, picking this out as something suitable to wear. I squeezed out a smile but immediately realised she saw right through me with those shy, worried eyes of hers.
I unlocked the door and went over to the counter and put my handbag down. Ella went and picked up a book. A picture book. She always looked through the children’s books, she was still that young.
‘Well then,’ I said, ‘how’s your mother?’
She shrugged.
‘She’s at some spa. In Piteå.’
‘Again?’
‘She said she needed to pamper herself a little.’
‘Well then. Right. Have you seen these? Pretty, don’t you think?’
She looked at the cloudberry I was holding out and then she took it in her hand and weighed it.
‘What’s it made of?’
‘I should probably know that. What do you reckon, glass? So you’re home alone now then?’
She nodded and I sighed.
‘It’s okay. I like being alone.’
I put the cloudberry back in its little box, then pulled out the drawer, put the box in it, closed the drawer and locked it.
‘He was in the paper. That old man.’
‘He was. But they’ll catch him before you know it.’
The girl was quiet for a moment.
‘That picture your dad took, do you have it here?’
‘What picture?’ I said, even though I knew very well which picture she meant.
‘The one with the troll.’
‘No, it’s not here.’
‘Then where is it?’
‘It’s gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Oh look, customers.’
Lennart peered into the reeking darkness of the back of the van. A patchwork of newspapers and flattened cardboard on the floor and at the far end, a small armchair with upholstered buttons.
‘Have you ever driven him?’
Elias shook his head.
‘What about the girl?’
‘Huh?’
‘Fanny. Has she driven him?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’
Lennart slammed the doors shut and walked around the vehicle. A yellowed newspaper lay on the front seat. An evening paper. He took it out and was eyeing it when Fanny approached with the toddler on her arm. The little boy wore a hat that shadowed one of his eyes, the skin around his mouth was jaundiced and his eyes were darting around as though he’d never been outside before.
Elias installed the car seat in the front cab. It was a struggle. His trousers sagged under his wide behind, revealing the crack between his white buttocks. A belt-clip keychain snaked from his wallet, which was shoved deep into his back pocket, in under his shirt.
Now Rune was walking toward them. He moved his feet slowly. A bent little creature in a chequered shirt that hung down to his knees. Lennart backed away and when the old man with the dead, distorted face strode past, he noticed there were still tufts of fur in his ears.
He didn’t want to ride in the back; he put his gloved paws on the front seat as if to show that he was going to sit there, in that exact spot. But Fanny managed to persuade him that it would be better if he sat in the back. She stroked his luscious silver mane and looked in through the mask’s eyeholes. Let’s do it that way, okay? she coaxed.
When she had helped the old man into the back of the van, she shut one of the doors and gave him a smile and some encouraging words before closing the other. Then she jumped up next to the little boy in the front seat.
Lennart watched the van as it slowly reversed out of the driveway. Then he lumbered back across the meadow.
Abraham was standing outside the motorhome with the milky-eyed hare on a lead. His hood was up and his face grim. Lennart stomped up the stairs, pulled the curtain aside and climbed into the seat next to Ingvill, who was behind the wheel, waiting with her foot on the gas pedal.
*
When they reached the E4 motorway, the skies suddenly opened; the rain continued to beat down on them with undiminished force mile after mile. The three wipers sweeping across the windscreen only managed to keep the lower half clear of water, tirelessly drawing wavy triptychs that instantly filled with new droplets. Lennart looked out at the dark spruce tree palisade. Clearcuts with solitary, scraggly pine trees rising from the broken terrain. Gravel pits and desolate sandy heaths. Game fences rushing past. One trampoline after another in garden after garden. Ingvill was silent like an animal and he was too.
Diana ended up setting off later than planned. They had lingered in bed and even managed to pull off touching each other a bit while the little girl watched TV. It had been kept simple by necessity. Quiet, goal-oriented side sex that could quickly and easily stiffen into an embrace if caught. Håkan had entwined his fingers in hers and gasped and grunted his way to climax. Then he had breathed warm air on her neck and pressed his lips against her shoulder and pulled out. Her nether regions were still throbbing. And she was hungry. And warm. A combination she hated.
The roadworks meant the car shook and jolted its way to Restaurant Gruvköket. Which was closed, of course it was closed. She should have bloody known. She decided to turn in to Svappavaara. Thanks to the mine, the town was expected to flourish again, that’s what they had told her on the local news, so maybe she’d be able to find something to eat.
Long rows of construction site cabins. A pointless fence that was rotting into a bank. Brownfield land lush with weeds. A lone petrol pump and a newsstand without newspaper placards, without any colour whatsoever. Car tyres, a mountain of them in the greenery. A hatchback parked in the middle of a lawn that a person in shorts was watering with a hose. The only person in sight. Egg-white caravans hidden behind birch trees. Sofie Lindmark Road. How common was the surname Lindmark in the village? Probably inappropriately common. More caravans. A shuttered shop with windowpanes blinded by sheets of Kraft paper. Damn local news. There was never any nuance. It was either depopulation and shrinking tax bases and doom and gloom, or it was new jobs and budding hopes for the future. People didn’t mind working here, but living here? No, they stayed well clear of that. She drove out of town with the same feeling she had every time she visited one of the villages around Kiruna. That this was tissue death. Necrosis.
She got back on the main road, floored it and had soon caught up with a lorry. Which irked her, because her empty stomach was starting to affect her mood. Soon her brain would stop working. She was tempted to overtake, but the straights were short and the right moment refused to occur. When the enormous equipage swerved out and touched the centre line only to then glide over into the oncoming lane, she took her foot off the gas pedal and had a vision of her immediate future, how she’d have to drag some overweight trucker out of a crumpled driver’s cabin. A flock of children were riding their bikes along the side of the road. He had swerved to avoid them. Each and every one of them had a helmet on. As if that would make any difference if a lorry driver were to receive a text message at the wrong moment. What were their parents thinking? Of other things or not at all?
After passing the signs with the town’s Swedish and Sami names, she briefly considered the OKQ8 petrol station, picturing a slimy fried hotdog, but she decided to push on, into the village that was under siege by men in hi-vis clothing who had jackhammered the pavements and blocked the streets with signs and diggers.
S
he rolled past the pizzeria. There was a supermarket further down the street. She pulled up outside and ran in for a yoghurt and a pear. It was an unexpectedly hard pear; she ended up having to hold it between her teeth until she started drooling.
By the barn with the three green doors, she turned off and followed a gravel road leading down to the river. There was no car outside; she was relieved to see that. She had brought pen and paper and even a plastic folder and a thumbtack. Tools to alleviate her guilty conscience.
She slammed the car door shut and looked up at the house. A red wooden house with a tin roof and richly mullioned windows that looked transplanted from an older house. Down by the river, a shed encircled by chicken wire. Nothing moving inside it, just weeds and bric-a-brac. The shaggy grass sprinkled with yellow buttercups. A snow sled propped against the railing of the front porch.
She thought she saw something moving in an upstairs window. The curtain twitched. As though the fabric were experiencing a spasm. She stood there for a long time, looking up toward the window, but the curtain didn’t move again.
She knocked and waited a few seconds before trying the door. It was open.
‘Hello?’
She stood motionless, listening.
‘Susso?’
Clothes were hung on steel hangers on a rail underneath the hat rack. A sailing life jacket. A raincoat, a proper raincoat of dark-green vinyl. A crocheted long cardigan with a belt that had ended up uneven and was touching the linoleum floor. She glanced at the shoes. Nothing with high heels. There was a baseball cap on the hat rack.
A loud, tinkling noise made her cross the threshold to the kitchen. The tap was on; a thin jet was thrumming onto a laminated placemat in the sink. Turning the tap off was like turning on the silence.
She had figured it would be messy, filthy even, but it wasn’t. At least no messier than her own house. Even the windows, through which different sections of the river could be seen, were clean. Unlike the Sillfors’ windows, which were more akin to pieces of modern art. No syringes, no empty bottles. Because that was what she had expected. She realised that now.
