Trolls

by Stefan Spjut

  ‘Well, as I said, your mum’s really worried.’

  ‘You said you were worried too.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought you were doing drugs.’

  The words just came out and she almost wanted to clap her hand to her mouth afterwards. But Susso didn’t seem offended.

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘Your mum told me you’d gone weird. I ran into her in the park, in Gruvstad Park. And she said you were living out here all by yourself and that she didn’t recognise you. And my mind immediately went: drugs. But I’ve since realised your mum suffers from delusions and that it’s probably her fault you started believing in trolls and did cryptozoology and all that stuff. It’s called folie à deux. So I really get that you wanted to make a clean break with her.’

  What she said was true. Every word. But she couldn’t understand why she’d blurted it out like that. Unvarnished, no sugar-coating. It was something about the look on Susso’s face. Her pale, drawn face, and all the memories that were surfacing. It had the effect of a mental enema. It all just came out.

  Susso seemed to ponder what she had said.

  ‘She let me move down to Kiruna after Grandpa died. I was fourteen,’ she said and illustrated the journey from Riksgränsen to Kiruna by drawing a line across the tablecloth with her index finger. Not even fifteen, I was. Fourteen.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to? I remember you being over the moon about not having to live up there.’

  ‘So what? I was fourteen years old. I didn’t even have a legal right to fuck. You can’t let a child go off on its own like that. Then, after the divorce, she came after me, in a sled full of Grandpa’s photos and all kinds of nonsense, and moved into my building.’

  ‘I think that was kind of sweet. Her wanting to be close to you.’

  ‘My mother. She just feels sorry for herself and demands that I do too. It’s all about her, actually. And now, when I’ve moved out here, up she pops again, spinning those apron strings like a lasso.’

  She made a whistling sound to mimic a lasso whipping through the air.

  ‘She thinks that Lennart Brösth guy is going to hurt you. He’s escaped. Did you know that?’

  Susso said nothing.

  ‘Are you afraid he might hurt you?’

  ‘Do I seem afraid?’

  ‘It took you long enough to get out of your car. I got the impression you were hanging back in there so you could speed off. If I’d been someone else.’

  ‘I just didn’t know whose car it was.’

  ‘Won’t you tell me what happened? You and Tobe were the ones who found those kids, weren’t you? In Sorsele.’

  She had dreaded this moment. Aware of the risk that Susso might buck and possibly kick her out. But she didn’t. She just sat there in the bright kitchen, studying her.

  ‘How come you were the ones? That old man you snapped a picture of, he had nothing to do with the kidnapping. How did you find the children?’

  ‘They weren’t children. Not any more.’

  ‘Sure, but they were children when they were taken.’

  She nodded.

  ‘How did you find them?’

  Susso kept her eyes fixed on her. Her pupils were so dilated it made her brown eyes look black. She looked at her for a long time without speaking; eventually, Diana started feeling uncomfortable and just then, it was as if Susso released her hold on her.

  ‘We had help.’

  ‘From whom?’

  Susso sat with a hand over her mouth, as though she were pondering something. Then she moved her hand, slowly extending it and unfurling her index finger to point to somewhere diagonally behind Diana.

  Diana turned around, but it took her a moment to spot what Susso was pointing at. It was a squirrel; when she saw it, she let out a surprised yelp. It was standing on all fours on top of the fridge, between a roll of kitchen towels and a packet of crispbread, staring at her. The bushy plume of its tail pointed straight up and was twitching rapidly.

  ‘A squirrel.’

  ‘He’s secretly not a squirrel. Or at least not just a squirrel.’

  Diana bunched her eyebrows together.

  ‘You’re being weird again.’

  ‘It’s a very old squirrel.’

  ‘Yeah, he looks a bit mangy.’

  ‘Watch what you say. He understands Swedish and he holds a grudge. He never forgets.’

  She couldn’t tell if Susso was pulling her leg or if she really believed the squirrel was as old as she claimed. And understood Swedish to boot. That kind of conviction would be very much in line with what she had used to believe, which was why Diana was neither worried nor even surprised. She had figured the charmingly eccentric Susso she’d grown up with was gone forever and that a disillusioned spinster had taken her place. But that evidently wasn’t the case, and it made her want to laugh.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Nothing?’

  The look on Diana’s face drew a half-muffled chuckle from Susso and then they both burst out laughing. Susso got up and put the glasses on the counter.

  ‘May I offer you a Chinese gooseberry?’

  Diana made a resigned gesture; she had no idea what she meant.

  ‘Would you like a kiwi? I bought kiwis.’

  ‘Of course I want a kiwi. Can I have two?’

  ‘Yes, you can.’

  Elias was sitting outside Frasse’s, alone under a parasol that was being inflated by the wind, making it look like an undulating jellyfish. From time to time, he put his burger down on the tray and drank from a paper cup and gobbled down clutches of French fries. Lennart looked around before crossing the car park. A newspaper placard on the wall. Nothing about the escaped cult leader. A sandwich board outside the shop. Special offer! Cantaloupes ten kronor per kilo. He sat down across from the young man, who instantly drew back in fear and lowered his eyes.

  ‘Grete’s going to take good care of the boy. No one’s going to find him odd in any way. He’s going to be fine there. And you and Fanny, you can start a new life.’

  The young man stared at his burger.

  ‘Let me see your ear.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let me see your ear.’

  Elias lifted the ring dangling in his earlobe.

  ‘Fuck,’ Lennart exclaimed, ‘there’s a hole through your ear. Like an African chieftain. Have you seen it on TV? How big is it?’

  ‘Eight millimetres.’

  ‘Fuck.’

  Elias took another bite and Lennart watched him eat. Then he put his hand on the table and tapped his knuckles against it until the young man realised he was trying to get his attention. He opened his hand like a lid; crouched underneath it was a wood mouse. It raised its nose and long whiskers in the air and ran over to the edge of the cardboard container where the golden-brown potatoes glistened with salt. The dejected look vanished instantly from the young man’s face.

  ‘Do you think he’s hungry?’

  Lennart shrugged. Then he turned to the window, through which two surprised faces were staring. The women on the other side of the glass ogled the little creature sitting on their table. Lennart glowered at them until they resumed their meal. Elias had torn off a flake of meat from his burger and was trying to feed it to the mouse; Lennart walked away.

  The little boy was sitting with the black straps of the car seat harness over his shoulders, examining a bunch of keys. Jabbing it with his sock mitten. The window was half open and he could hear the kid’s loud mouth-breathing and the jangling of the keys.

  *

  ‘She lives down by the river,’ Abraham said, ‘about a mile from the village, and there are no neighbours.’

  ‘Are we going to put her in here?’ Lennart said. ‘Because she can’t go in the van.’

  ‘Don’t you think it would be okay if Fanny’s there?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Grete said. ‘Who knows what might happen in that dark van on the way up to F
innmark? It’s a long drive. A lot could happen. It might end in a drama triangle, the consequences of which we can’t imagine. At least Fanny has a measure of control over him.’

  ‘Then I guess she’s going in the boot,’ Abraham said. He was holding a drinking cup and amusing himself by pulling his straw up and down through the hole to make a squeaking sound.

  ‘Yes,’ Grete said with a nod, ‘I think that’s for the best.’

  Abraham pulled the curtain aside and climbed into the driving seat and tried to push the cup into the cup holder, but it wouldn’t fit. Then he slurped down what was left in the cup and discarded it on the floor. The engine rumbled to life. Lennart glanced at Grete and was met by a smile. Her teeth were long and her gums were turning black around the edges; the enamel was a shade of grey like old china.

  ‘It’s probably for the best,’ she said.

  Anders was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, inspecting the underside of his tongue. The frenulum was completely severed. His tongue moved about his mouth freely and he could extend it surprisingly far. Almost down to the tip of his chin. Like that rock singer. It was yellow with coffee stains and tremblingly striving toward its most extended state. Stava had chuckled when he crawled up to her in bed and demonstrated his new ability. She claimed a person could determine the level of a lover’s dedication by looking in his mouth and that she felt heart-rendingly sad for his wife, who had shared a bed with a man with an unliberated tongue for twenty years. Then she had gone on to dismiss their entire marriage and he had lain next to her, humming agreement and licking her shoulder without paying attention.

  His face had been covered in stubble for days. Now he had a full beard. It was actually longer than he’d ever had it before. The hairs hung down, covering his top lip, and his chin was pure white; it looked like he had dipped it in flour. And he had lost weight. His cheeks were hollow and his eyes too; they had retreated into his skull, as if to get away from something.

  It felt like the change had happened overnight, but the reason for that was obviously that he hadn’t looked in a mirror in a long time, at least not properly.

  He leaned closer to the glass, with his hands on the edge of the sink. He saw his own reflection in his pupils. Two miniature versions of himself. They were standing behind the windows of his pupils like some kind of microscopic dark elves, watching him, disliking him being so close. So they leaned out, and they leaned further out than he was leaning toward them.

  He jerked his head away and when he saw his terrified face, he felt it belonged to an insane person. A paranoid junkie who jumped at the slightest sound.

  Shaken, he turned his back on the mirror and put up the toilet lid. She had said the nervous and unpredictable state he was in would soon come to an end. It was a process that couldn’t be rushed. At least his memory lapses had stopped, in the sense that there were no new ones. But the things that were gone didn’t come back. Though that might be just as well.

  Now he heard Stava’s voice.

  He flushed and left the bathroom.

  She was standing by the kitchen window.

  ‘Your wife’s here,’ she said.

  The silver Citroën had materialised in the driveway. It was undeniably sitting there. Johanna climbed out of it. She was wearing a blouse and a white summer jacket and leather loafers with white gold buckles, and he thought it was strange that she had dressed up.

  ‘What day is it?’

  ‘You’re not going to let her in, are you?’

  ‘What am I supposed to do, it’s her house …’

  Before he knew it, Stava had gone into the hallway and thrown open the front door. Johanna stopped in front of the house. She looked scared and Anders suddenly felt incredibly sorry for her. It washed over him. He didn’t want her to see him, so he moved to the side. He stood pressed against the curtain, breathing loudly through his nose.

  Johanna was the one who broke the silence.

  ‘What do you want with us?’

  ‘I don’t want anything with you.’

  ‘Where’s Anders?’

  ‘He’s at home.’

  The reply seemed to confuse Johanna and Stava paused before continuing.

  ‘I’ve stolen him from you. You’re going to have to accept it.’

  ‘Can’t you see he’s ill? Yes, he is. He really is. You don’t know him.’

  ‘Johanna. Sweet little Johanna.’

  ‘Let go of me!’

  When he got outside, Stava had pushed Johanna up against her car. She was rolling her boyishly narrow hips in some kind of taunting dance that continued until Johanna pushed her away.

  He stood in the doorway, staring at the two women. Johanna took a few steps to the side and when Stava reached out to grab her hand, she ran over to Anders, hiding behind him, and for a few absurd seconds they stood together, like the married couple they in fact were, studying the odd woman who had wormed her way into their lives. Stava sank into a squat and watched them.

  ‘My God, you look disgusting together. Pale and afraid.’

  He had nowhere to go and didn’t know what to say or do. He had gone rigid and in the end, Johanna dashed to her car, like from one sanctuary to another. She opened the door and looked at him, but her eyes slid across his face as though it were the face of a stranger and when she climbed into her car and drove off, he knew he would never see her again and that she drove off with a piece of him that he would never get back.

  He went into the kitchen and sat down at the table. They hadn’t cleared their plates from the night before. Chopped-up potatoes lay in a pool of balsamic vinegar and had turned dark. There was red wine left in the glasses, which were covered in fingerprints. She sat down in his field of vision, but his eyes were unseeing. Part of him thought she had been unnecessarily cruel to Johanna, but it would never occur to him to say anything about it. She gathered up balsamic vinegar from the plate with the tip of her index finger and painted tears on her high cheekbones. He knew what she would say: that being sad was forbidden. Was he sad? A mild melancholia was aching inside him, but it was like a pain that had been dulled by a significant amount of drugs.

  ‘I want to leave now,’ he said.

  Susso told her she was going out for beer. Then she put the squirrel on her shoulder, got into her car and drove off. Diana sat on the front steps, tapping at her phone. Twenty minutes later, Susso came back with two plastic carrier bags full of beer.

  ‘I didn’t realise there was somewhere selling alcohol in Vittangi?’

  ‘There isn’t, but I have nice neighbours.’

  Diana studied her surreptitiously. The muscles of her lower arms looked like braided ropes under her skin when she pulled the kettle grill across the unkempt lawn and ripped open the bag of charcoal. When she stood behind the heat and the rising smoky haze with a bottle of beer in her hand. In counterpoise. Except it wasn’t her hip that was popped, it was the iliac crest. A sharply protruding ridge. Diana was fairly certain Susso knew she was being studied from a medical perspective. Though it didn’t seem to bother her. Granted, she had always been like that. She had never cared what other people thought of her. A lot of people made out as though they didn’t care, well, most people really, to a greater or lesser degree, but with Susso it had always been completely genuine, and Diana had emulated her. In her case, though, it had remained just an attitude. In Umeå, she had come to realise she actually did care an awful lot about what people thought of her as a person.

  They were sitting at a rickety little plastic table, eating with sweat beading on their foreheads in the sunshine that created prisms in their drinking glasses. Salmon and potatoes wrapped in tinfoil with butter and cloves of garlic. Susso had caught the salmon herself. A plastic boat with an outboard motor was moored down by the jetty; she used it for fishing. When Diana heard this, she laughed so hard she did a spit take into her hand. Susso wanted to know what was so funny.

  ‘There’s something about this life you’ve made for yourself,’ she sa
id, making a sweeping gesture with her bottle. ‘You live here, all alone, outside bloody Vittangi of all places. Together with – a squirrel. Who understands Swedish. And from time to time you paddle out and catch a salmon or two.’

  She had, yet again, made her spill something she would rather have kept to herself. And, yet again, Susso seemed unperturbed.

  ‘You feel sorry for me.’

  ‘Yes, I do. I find it pretty tragic. But it makes me mad too, at your mum, because I think it’s her fault. She’s the one who made you think trolls are real. And talking squirrels.’

  ‘I never said he could talk.’

  ‘You’ve been brainwashed. By your mother.’

  Susso got to her feet.

  ‘I’m sorry! I shouldn’t have said that.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said. Then she picked up their plates and carried them inside.

  Diana gazed out across the garden. She had sucked down two beers while the tinfoil packets sizzled on the grill, but she felt like she’d had ten. Her head was spinning and there were grease stains on her thighs from all the food she’d dropped on herself. And all the things she had blurted out! It must have been lurking somewhere inside her. But it was the fact that Susso didn’t seem to care in the slightest too. The old Susso would have been furious. And given as good as she got. This one, she just sat there. It was almost like she enjoyed it.

  She pulled out her phone. She’d received a picture of Kiruna. She was on the merry-go-round, sitting on the back of an animal of an unidentifiable species, looking solemn. She tapped in a long row of hearts in reply. When she stood up, she lost her balance. That made her start talking to herself, which she continued to do while she cleared the table and carried the overloaded tray inside. The kitchen door was closed and when she tried to open it by pushing the handle down with her elbow, Susso came out of the bathroom.

  ‘Don’t open it! I trapped him in there.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve trapped him. So I know where he is.’