Harbour

by John Ajvide Lindqvist

All children do that sort of thing!

  Anders tore open the door of the larder and found one last wine cask, which he ripped open and drank so greedily that it ran down the sides of his mouth.

  It was a wonderful life, I loved her so much...

  'Stupid stupid idiots! I hate you!'

  He spun around and caught sight of the bottle of wormwood, took a swig and swilled down the burning nausea with more wine. His stomach churned in protest and he ran to the toilet to throw up, but when he leaned over the bowl he could manage nothing more than a couple of sour belches. He sat down on the floor with his back against the warm radiator.

  It wasn't true that Maja was horrible. Yes, she got annoyed easily. Yes, she had a lively imagination. But she wasn't horrible.

  Anders jerked his head and hit the back of his neck on the edge of the radiator; shades of red flickered before his eyes. He staggered into the kitchen and pulled the photographs towards him again, looking at his family. Cecilia's warm, kind eyes gazing into his. His lower lip trembled as he picked up the phone and keyed in her number. She answered on the second signal.

  'Hi, it's me,' he said.

  He heard a faint sigh at the other end of the line. 'What do you want?'

  Anders dragged his hand through his hair a couple of times, rubbed at his scalp. 'I have to ask you something. I have to say something. Maja wasn't horrible, was she?'

  There was no reply, and Anders scratched at his scalp so hard that he drew blood.

  'That's what they're saying,' he went on. 'That's what they think. But you and I.. .we know that's not true, don't we?'

  With every second that passed without a word from Cecilia, something was growing inside his head, something that was so big and hurt so much that he could have ripped off his entire skull.

  'Anders,' said Cecilia at last. 'Afterwards...you turned her into something else. Something different from what she was.'

  Anders' voice sank to a whisper. 'What are you saying? She was wonderful. She was just...wonderful.'

  'Yes, she was. That too. But—'

  'I never thought anything else. I thought she was terrific. All the time.'

  Cecilia cleared her throat, and when she spoke again there was a sharp impatience in her voice. 'If that's the way you want it. But that's not the way it was, Anders.'

  'How was it, then? I always thought she was.. .the best you could imagine.'

  'You made that up afterwards. You couldn't cope with her. You once joked about swapping her for—'

  Anders slammed the phone down. It was dark outside the window now. He was so cold he was shaking. He sank to his knees and crawled to the bathroom, where he sat down with his back to the radiator again, staring into the washbasin and gnawing on his lips until there was a metallic taste in his mouth.

  His hands lay loosely, the backs resting on the floor. There was a faint smell of piss and his mouth was sticky after a day without any liquid apart from wine and wormwood. He was a dried-up little nothing, the shrivelled remains of something that had perhaps not even existed.

  'I am nothing.'

  He said it out loud to himself in the darkness and there was consolation in those words, so he said them again, 'I am nothing.'

  The fact that his life had been shit for the past few years wasn't exactly news. He knew that. But at least he had believed he had his memories of a life lived in the light, those precious years together with Cecilia and Maja.

  But that wasn't true either. Not even that.

  He sniggered. He sniggered a little more. Then he lay down flat on his stomach and licked the floor around the toilet, carried on up the pedestal. It tasted salty. Odd hairs stuck to his tongue, but he went on licking. He cleaned along the edges, licked off the coating on the seat and finished off by swallowing the gooey mess that had gathered in his mouth.

  So. That was that. So.

  He hauled himself to his feet, took a couple of deep breaths and said it again, 'I am nothing.'

  There, he'd said it. All done. On steadier legs he went and sat down at the kitchen table again, looked over at Gåvasten which had begun to send its signals out into the night. He was floating on a sea in a state of dead calm. No waves of expectation or false memories obscured his view.

  You have left me.

  Yes. He had not been able to put his finger on the feeling when it was there, but now it had left him he felt its absence. Maja was no longer within him. He had driven her out. She had left him.

  Nothing.

  He sat for half an hour with his head resting on his arms, chilled to the bone as he accepted the way things had been. Maja had been dreadful. He had often wished they had never had her. He had said it out loud several times: that he wished she would just disappear. That they could swap her for a dog, a well-behaved dog.

  I wanted her to disappear. And she disappeared.

  She wept and screamed and kicked as soon as she didn't get her own way. She immediately smashed things that didn't behave in the way she wanted. She had no boundaries. They didn't dare let her watch children's programs after she threw a vase at the screen when a cartoon character said something stupid. How many hours had they spent sweeping up beads after Maja had tipped them on the floor, how many hours dealing with ripped-up drawing pads and comics?

  That was the way it was. That was the way it had been. Like having a monster in the house, you had to be wary of every step, constantly on the alert to avoid provoking its fury. They had been to the clinic, they had seen a child psychiatrist, but nothing helped. Their only hope was that it would pass as she got older.

  Anders' teeth were chattering, and he pulled the blanket more tightly around him.

  This was the reason behind his enormous burden of guilt, the one he had tried to get rid of by drinking, then managed to suppress with patient effort: the fact that it was all his fault. He had wished she would disappear, simply disappear, and that was exactly what had happened. He had made it happen.

  'All parents blame themselves when something happens to their children,' the family therapist had said when Cecilia forced him to go along with her.

  No doubt that was true. But presumably those parents were able to arrive eventually at the conclusion that it wasn't their fault their child had been run over, developed cancer or got lost in the woods. At least they hadn't wished for it to happen. And if they had wished for it to happen, then at least their child had disappeared in a natural way, insofar as such a thing exists.

  Maja had ceased to exist as if she had never been there, as if she had been...wished away. That couldn't happen, and therefore the explanation that Anders had wished her away was just as reasonable as any other, and that was the one he was sticking to. Whichever way he looked at it, he always came to the same conclusion: he had killed his own child.

  It was only when Cecilia had left him and he had drunk himself into oblivion that a last glimmer of hope had appeared in the darkness: he began reshaping his memories. Through drunken days and nights he crafted a new past. One where Maja had been wonderful all the time and he had just loved her, pure and simple.

  He had never had a bad thought about her, and therefore her disappearance was incomprehensible. It was a great tragedy that had

  nothing to do with him, he who had loved his daughter more than anything else in the world.

  That's how his past had looked. Until now.

  Anders gave a start as the telephone rang. He couldn't cope with answering it, and after six signals it fell silent once more. He couldn't talk to anyone. He didn't exist, he was nothing.

  He rested his head in his hands again and listed to the emptiness. A new thought occurred to him.

  So if I wanted to get rid of her.. .why was it so terrible when she disappeared? I mean, I should have been.. .pleased. In the end. What I wished for happened.

  He got up from his chair. His stiff, frozen knees creaked as he took a turn around the floor.

  The answer was obvious: deep down, right down inside he had never wanted that
to happen. However difficult she was there were better times, good times. And they had started to become more frequent, last for longer. The change they had hoped for was on the way. That last day, the trip to Gåvasten was an example. She had almost behaved like a normal child for several hours.

  And he had loved that child, that questioning, intense, living child, he had been prepared to wait for her through the hysterical outbursts and the smashed possessions. Things had been heading in the right direction. Then she disappeared, and he could remember only his bad thoughts, until it tipped over in the opposite direction.

  I never knew her.

  No. As he stood here now in the middle of the kitchen floor with the blanket around him, he realised the heart of the matter could In- expressed in those terms: he had never known who Maja was. There had been too much wheeling and dealing. If children can be horrible, was Maja horrible, really? He had no idea. He didn't know her.

  And now she had left him.

  Heaven

  'Daddy? What happens when you're dead?'

  'Well, there's...'

  'I think you go to heaven, don't you think so?'

  '.. .well yes.'

  'So what's it like there? Are there angels and clouds and so on?

  ' 'Is that what'd you'd like?'

  'No. I hate angels. They're horrible and ugly and they look stupid. I don't want to be with them.'

  'So where do you want to he?'

  'Here. But in heaven.'

  'Then I expect that's what will happen.'

  'No it won't! It's God who decides what happens!'

  'In that case I expect God can decide that everybody can have things the way they want them to be.'

  'But that's impossible.'

  'Why?'

  'Because then everybody would have their own heaven, and God wouldn't like that.'

  'Don't you think so?'

  'No. Because God is an idiot. He's made everything bad.'

  Home visit

  It was getting towards eight o'clock and Anders was still sitting at the kitchen table with the fragments of his former life spread out before him, trying to piece together something that might help him to get up, when he heard the moped. They're coming.

  He had almost managed to forget Henrik and Björn. After his long sleep they had been reduced to a distant dream, something that had happened long ago and had nothing to do with him. But here they were. The saddest boys in the world who had decided to carry out the bidding of the sea. Now they were coming to get him.

  Come on then.

  The moped's engine was racing, as if it were stuck in first gear. Perhaps he'd managed to damage it with the fire. The roaring engine drew closer to the house, and he waited for it to be switched off and the outside door to be opened. He was resigned, and placed one hand on top of the other on the table, waiting for whatever was going to happen.

  The engine didn't stop when it reached the house, but carried on along the outside wall and across the rocks until the revs slowed and it stopped outside the kitchen window, rumbling to itself. They were waiting for him. He leaned on the table and pushed himself up, with the blanket around his shoulders like a coat, and walked over to the window.

  He could see them down on the rocks like dark shapes. Henrik was in the saddle and Björn on the platform. Anders undid the window latch and pushed it open. Henrik cut the engine, down to a muted chugging.

  'What do you want?' asked Anders.

  'We may be dead,' said Henrik. 'But we will be right by—'

  'Stuff all that. What do you want?'

  'We'd like to smash some teeth—every single one in your head actually—because you're bothering us. You have to stop bothering us. If I were you I wouldn't bother. Really.'

  'Why?'

  'Because something bad could happen to someone you care about. Or put it this way...' Henrik went on with his manic paraphrasing, but Anders was no longer listening.

  He had turned away from the window and was looking for the torch. Björn had something in his arms, and it if was what Anders thought it was...

  The torch was in the drawer where all the rubbish was kept. He grabbed it and switched it on, hurled himself at the window and directed the beam at Björn as Henrik droned on with esoteric references to 'Girlfriend in a Coma' and how there were times when he could have murdered, on and on.

  The light fell on Björn. He was sitting cross-legged on the platform, and in his arms he was holding the body of a child dressed in a red snowsuit. The reflector strip along the side glowed white and it was Maja's snowsuit, the one she had been wearing that last day.

  Anders may have spent hours doing nothing but thinking, but now every thought was swept away in a second, and there was only action. He ran through the kitchen into the living room as the moped engine behind him began to race once again.

  The door to the veranda was stuck and he lost a couple of valuable seconds when it refused to open. He hurled himself at it shoulder first and stumbled out on to the veranda just as he saw the lights of the moped bouncing across the rocks, on its way down to the sea.

  Now I've got you, you bastards. You've got nowhere to go.

  If he had stopped to reflect for a moment he might perhaps have realised that Henrik and Björn weren't stupid enough to think that he would simply stand and watch as they rode off with his daughter. That the fact they were heading for the sea was rather strange.

  But he didn't stop to reflect. He had seen that Björn had Maja in his arms, he had heard Henrik threaten to harm her and he was acting in accordance with those two facts. With only his socks on his feet he took the veranda steps in two leaps and saw that Henrik and Björn were down by the shoreline.

  Anders' lips curled up in a predatory grin. They had nowhere else to go. Even if they were ghosts, the moped was an ordinary moped and a moped cannot travel across water. It didn't occur to him that he had met them before, that he had no weapons to use against them now either. The only thought in his head was: I've got you now, and the knowledge in his body, the wormwood's knowledge, that they couldn't harm him either.

  He was only five metres behind them when they rode out on to the water. Anders' body continued moving forward of its own volition until he fell over on the shoreline. The moped moved across the surface of the water past the jetty, and Henrik waved goodbye to him. Anders was left standing on the shore with clenched fists and the blood rushing through his head.

  That's impossible! They can't do that!

  'Stop, you bastards! Stop!'

  Henrik waved his fingers over his shoulder again, and in a blind fury Anders raced out into the water. Which was not water. He had travelled a couple of metres before he realised he was standing on ice. For a moment he stopped dead in sheer physical amazement. He was still holding the torch, and shone it around him, ahead of him.

  The sea had not frozen yet, but behind Henrik and Björn stretched a causeway of ice just wide enough for the moped to run along, a bridge of frozen water extending from the point where they had ridden into the water and set off.

  Anders ran.

  Under different circumstances he would have been astonished at the fact that he was running past his jetty with little waves lapping on either side of him, but the only thing he could see was the straight line between his body and Maja's, the distance he had to cover before he had her in his arms.

  He ran with long strides and with every step his wet socks froze on to the ice a fraction before they were pulled free, which give him an excellent grip, and he was gaining on them, he was gaining on them. Before he set off on the water they had been twenty metres ahead of him. Now the distance was shrinking a little with every step he took. The moped was not travelling fast, and he would be able to catch up with it.

  And then?

  He wasn't even thinking about that.

  The moon was high in the sky, creating a silvery path that fell diagonally across the causeway of ice. The beam of the lighthouse on

  Gåvasten was flashing direc
tly towards him. That was where they were heading, but they weren't going to get there. He would take them. Somehow he would take them.

  He had run approximately three hundred metres from the shore. He could no longer feel his feet, they were nothing but a pair of frozen lumps moving him forward. He was so close to the moped that he could see individual strands of Henrik's hair in the moonlight, and he was trying to urge his body to make one final spurt when something fell from the platform.