Anders’ skin felt as if he had been out in the sun all day. It was hot and painful all over, and he felt dizzy, as if he had sunstroke; he was afraid of tripping over a root, afraid of his hand becoming sweaty, afraid that what he was doing was out of order in some way.
There were couples in the gang. Martin and Malin were together now. Malin had gone out with Joel for a while. It was OK for them to lie there kissing when everybody could see them, and Martin said he and Malin had got as far as petting down by the boathouses. Whether or not it was true, it was OK for them to say—and do—that kind of thing. Partly because they were a year older, partly because they were good-looking. Cool. It gave them licence to do a lot of things, and to use a different language too. There was no point in trying to keep up, that would be embarrassing. You just had to sit there staring, trying to laugh in the right places. That’s just how it was.
Neither Anders nor Cecilia was a loser. They weren’t outsiders like Henrik and Björn—Hubba and Bubba—but they weren’t part of the clique that made the rules and decided which jokes were funny, either.
For Anders and Cecilia to be walking along holding hands was utterly ridiculous. They knew this. Anders was short and borderline spindly, his brown hair too thin for him to give it any kind of style. He didn’t understand how Martin and Joel did it. He’d tried slicking his hair back with gel once, but it looked weird and he’d rinsed it out before anyone saw it.
There was something flat about Cecilia. Her body was angular and her shoulders were broad, despite the fact that she was slim. Virtually no hips or breasts. Her face looked small between those broad shoulders. She had medium-length fair hair and an unusually small nose dusted with freckles. When she put her hair up in a pony-tail, Anders thought she looked really pretty. Her blue eyes always looked just a little bit sad, and Anders liked that. She looked as if she knew.
Martin and Joel didn’t know. Malin and Elin didn’t know. They had the feeling, said the right things and were able to wear sandals without looking stupid. But they didn’t know. They just did things. Sandra read books and was clever, but there was nothing in her eyes to indicate that she knew.
Cecilia knew, and Anders could see that she knew, which proved that he knew as well. They recognised one another. He couldn’t explain what it was that they knew, but it was something. Something about life, about how things really were.
The terrain grew steeper, and as they made their way up towards the rock the trees thinned out. In a minute or two they would have to let go of one another’s hands so they’d be able to climb.
Anders stole a glance at Cecilia. She was wearing a yellow and white striped T-shirt with a wide neckline that revealed her collarbone. It was just unbelievable that she had been linked to him for what must be five minutes, that her skin had been touching his.
That she’d been his.
She had been his for five minutes. Soon they would let go, move apart and become ordinary people again. What would they say then?
Anders looked down. The ground was starting to become stony, he had to watch where he was putting his feet. Every second he was expecting Cecilia to let go, but she didn’t. He thought perhaps he was holding on so tightly that she couldn’t let go. It was an embarrassing thought, so he loosened his grip slightly. Then she let go.
He spent the two minutes it took to climb up the rock analysing whether he had, in fact, been holding her hand too tightly, or whether loosening his grip had made her think he was about to let go, and so she let go first.
Regardless of what he knew or did not know, he was convinced that Joel and Martin never had this kind of problem. He wiped his hand furtively on his trousers. It was slightly stiff and sweaty.
When they reached the top of the rock, his head felt bigger than usual. The blood was humming in his ears and he was sure his face was bright red. He stared down at his chest where a little ghost looked out from a circle with a red line through it. Ghostbusters. It was his favourite top, and it had been washed so many times that the outline of the ghost was becoming blurred.
‘It’s so beautiful.’
Cecilia was standing at the edge of the rock looking out over the sea. They were up above the tops of the trees. Far below they could see the holiday village where almost all their friends lived. Out at sea the ferry to Finland was sailing along, a cluster of lights moving across the water. Further away and further out there were other archipelagos whose names Anders didn’t know.
He stood as close to her as he dared and said, ‘I think it’s the most beautiful thing in the world,’ and regretted it as soon as the words were out of his mouth. It was a stupid thing to say, and he tried to improve matters by adding, ‘That’s one way of looking at it’, but that wasn’t right either. He moved away from her, following the edge of the rock.
When he had walked all the way round, a distance of perhaps thirty metres, and was almost back with her, she said, ‘It’s odd, isn’t it? This rock, I mean?’
He had an answer to that. ‘It’s an erratic boulder. According to my dad, anyway.’
‘What’s that?’
He gazed out across the sea, fixed his eyes on the Gåvasten lighthouse and tried to remember what his father had told him. Anders made a sweeping movement with his arm, taking in the surrounding area. The old village, the mission, the alarm bell next to the shop.
‘Well…when there was ice. Covering everything here. The ice age. The ice picked up rocks. And when it melted, these rocks ended up all over the place.’
‘So where did they come from? Originally?’
His father had told him that as well, but he couldn’t remember what he’d said. Where could the stones have come from? He shrugged his shoulders.
‘From the north, I suppose. From the mountains. I mean, there are lots of rocks there…’
Cecilia peered over the edge. The top was almost flat, but it must have been at least ten metres deep. She said, ‘There must have been a lot of ice.’
Anders remembered a fact. He made a movement up towards the sky. ‘One kilometre. Thick.’
Cecilia wrinkled her nose, and Anders felt as if he had been stabbed in the chest. ‘Never!’ she said. ‘You’re joking?’
‘That’s what my dad says.’
‘A kilometre?’
‘Yes, and…you know how the islands and everything, they kind of keep on coming up out of the sea a little bit more each year?’ Cecilia nodded. ‘That’s because the ice was so heavy it kind of pushed everything down and it’s still…coming back up. Just a little bit, all the time.’
He was on a roll now. He remembered. As Cecilia was still looking at him with an interested expression, he carried on. He pointed over towards Gåvasten.
‘Two thousand years or so ago, there was only water here. The only thing that was sticking up was the lighthouse. Or the rock, I mean. The rock the lighthouse is standing on. There was no lighthouse then, of course. And this rock. Everything else was under water. In those days.’
He looked at his feet, kicking at the thin covering of moss and lichen growing on the rock. When he looked up, Cecilia was gazing out across the sea, the mainland, Domarö. She put her hand on her collarbone as if she was suddenly afraid, and said, ‘Is that true?’
‘I think so.’
Something altered inside his head. He started to see the same thing as Cecilia. When he and his dad had been up here the previous summer, the words had just gone into his head as facts, and even though he’d thought it was exciting, he hadn’t really thought about it. Seen it.
Now he could see. How new everything was. It had only been here for a short time. Their island, the ground on which their houses sat, even the ancient wooden boathouses down in the harbour were just pieces of Lego on the primeval mountain. His stomach contracted as if he were about to faint, vertigo from gazing down into the depths of time. He wrapped his arms around his body and suddenly he felt completely alone in the world. His eyes sought the horizon and found no comfort there. It was silent a
nd endless.
Then he heard a sound to his left. Breathing. He turned his head and found Cecilia’s face only a fraction away from his own. She looked into his eyes. And breathed. Her mouth was so close to his that he could feel her warm breath on his lips as she exhaled, a faint hint of Juicy Fruit in his nostrils.
Afterwards he would find it difficult to understand, but that’s what happened: he didn’t hesitate. He leaned forward and kissed her without giving it a thought. He just did it.
Her lips were tense and slightly firm. With the same inexplicable decisiveness he pushed his tongue between them. Her tongue came to meet his. It was warm and soft and he licked it. It was a completely new experience, licking something that was the same as the object doing the licking. He didn’t exactly think that, but he thought something like it, and at that moment everything became uncertain and strange and he didn’t know what to do.
He licked her tongue a little bit more, and part of him was enjoying it and thinking it was fantastic, while another part was thinking: Is this what you’re supposed to do? Is this right? It couldn’t be, and he suspected this was where you moved on to petting. But even though his cock was beginning to stiffen as his tongue slid over hers, there was no possibility, not a chance, that he was going to start…touching her like that. Not a chance. He couldn’t, he didn’t know how, and…no, he didn’t even want to.
Preoccupied with these thoughts he had stopped moving his tongue without noticing. Now she was the one doing the licking. He accepted this with gratitude, the enjoyment increased slightly, the doubts faded away. When she withdrew her tongue and kissed him in the normal way before their faces moved apart, he decided: that went quite well.
He had kissed a girl for the first time and it had gone well. His face was red and his legs felt weak, but it was OK. He glanced at her and she seemed to share his opinion. When he saw that she was smiling slightly, he smiled too. She noticed and her smile broadened.
For a second they gazed into each other’s eyes, both smiling. Then it all got too much and they looked out to sea once again. Anders no longer thought it looked frightening in the least, he couldn’t understand how he could have thought it did.
I think it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.
That’s what he’d said. And now it was true.
They made their way back down. When they had got past the stoniest part, they held hands again. Anders wanted to scream, he wanted to jump and smash dried-up branches against the tree trunks, something wanted to come out.
He held her hand, a happiness so enormous that it hurt bubbling away inside him.
We’re together. Cecilia and me. We’re together now.
Gåvasten (February 2004)
‘What a day. It’s incredible.’
Cecilia and Anders were standing by the window in the living room, looking towards the bay. The ice was covered with virgin snow, and the sun shone from a cloudless sky, eating away the contours of the inlet, the jetty and the shore like an over-exposed photograph.
‘Let me see, let me see!’
Maja came racing in from the kitchen, and Anders barely had time to open his mouth to warn her for the hundredth time. Then her thick socks skidded on the polished wooden floor and she landed flat on her back at his feet.
In a reflex action he bent down to comfort her, but Maja immediately rolled to one side and wriggled back a metre. Tears sprang to her eyes. She screamed, ‘Stupid stupid things!’ then tore off the socks and hurled them at the wall. Then she got up and ran back into the kitchen.
Anders and Cecilia looked at each other and sighed. They could hear Maja rummaging in the kitchen drawers.
Whose turn?
Cecilia winked and took on the task of intervening before Maja tipped the entire contents of the drawers on to the floor, or broke something. She went into the kitchen and Anders turned back to the glorious day.
‘No, Maja! Wait!’
Maja came running in from the kitchen with a pair of scissors in her hand, Cecilia right behind her. Before either of them could stop her, Maja had grabbed one of the socks and started hacking at it.
Anders seized her arms and managed to get her to drop the scissors. Her whole body was trembling with rage as she kicked out at the sock. ‘I hate you, you stupid thing!’
Anders hugged her, holding her flailing arms fast with his own. ‘Maja, that doesn’t help. The socks don’t understand.’
Maja was a quivering bundle in his arms. ‘I hate them!’
‘I know, but that doesn’t mean you have to…’
‘I’m going to chop them up and burn them!’
‘Calm down, little one. Calm down.’
Anders sat down on the sofa without loosening his grip on Maja. Cecilia sat down next to him. They spoke softly and stroked her hair and the blue velour tracksuit that was the only thing she would consent to wear. After a couple of minutes she stopped shaking, her heartbeat slowed and she relaxed in Anders’ arms. He said, ‘You can wear shoes instead, if you like.’
‘I want to go barefoot.’
‘You can’t. The floor’s too cold.’
‘Barefoot.’
Cecilia shrugged her shoulders. Maja rarely felt cold. Even when the temperature was close to freezing she would run around outdoors in a T-shirt unless somebody said something to her. She slept eight hours a night at the most, and yet it was rare for her to fall ill or feel tired.
Cecilia held Maja’s feet in her hands and blew on them. ‘Well, you need to put some socks on now. We’re going out.’
Maja sat upright on Anders’ knee. ‘Where to?’
Cecilia pointed out of the window, towards the north-east.
‘To Gåvasten. To the lighthouse.’
Maja leaned forward, screwing her eyes up into the sunlight. The old stone lighthouse was visible only as a vague rift in the sky where it met the horizon. It was about two kilometres away, and they had been waiting for a day like this so they could make the trip they had been talking about all winter.
Maja’s shoulders drooped. ‘Are we going to walk all that way?’
‘We thought we might ski,’ said Anders, and the words were hardly out of his mouth before Maja shot off his knee and raced into the hallway. She had been given her first pair of skis on her sixth birthday two weeks earlier, and on only her second practice outing she had done really well. She had a natural talent. Two minutes later she was back, dressed in her snowsuit, hat and gloves.
‘Come on then!’
They ignored Maja’s protests and made a picnic to eat out by the lighthouse. Coffee, chocolate and sandwiches. Then they gathered up their skiing equipment and went down to the inlet. The light was dazzling. There had been no wind for several days, and fresh snow still covered the branches of the trees. Wherever you turned there was whiteness, blinding whiteness. It was impossible to imagine that there could be warmth and greenness anywhere. Even from space the earth must look like a perfectly formed snowball, white and round.
It took a while to get Maja’s skis on because she was so excited she couldn’t stand still. Once the bindings were tight and the straps of the poles wrapped around her hands, she immediately slid out on to the ice, shouting, ‘Look at me! Look at me!’
For once they didn’t need to worry as she set off on her own. Despite the fact that she had travelled a hundred metres from the jetty before Anders and Cecilia had even got their skis on, she was clearly visible as a bright red patch in the middle of all the whiteness.
It was different in the city. Maja had run off on her own several times because she had seen something or thought of something, and they had joked about fitting her with a GPS transmitter. Not that it was all that much of a joke, really; they had given it serious consideration, but it felt like overkill.
They set off. Far out on the ice Maja fell over, but she was back on her feet in no time and whizzing along. Anders and Cecilia followed in her tracks. When they had travelled about fifty metres, Anders turned around.
Their house, generally known as the Shack, lay at the edge of the point. Plumes of smoke were rising from both chimneys. Two pine trees, weighed down with snow, framed it on either side. It was a complete dump, badly built and poorly maintained, but right now, from this distance, it looked like a little paradise.
Anders struggled to get his old Nikon out of his rucksack, zoomed in and took a picture. Something to remind him when he was cursing the ill-fitting walls and sloping floors. That it was a little paradise. As well. He put the camera away and followed his family.
After a couple of minutes he caught up with them. He had intended to lead the way, making it easier for Maja and Cecilia as they followed in his tracks through the thick covering of snow, but Maja refused. She was the guide and group leader, and they were to follow her.
The ice was nothing to worry about; this was confirmed when they heard a roaring sound from the direction of the mainland. A car was heading for Domarö from the steamboat jetty in Nåten. From this distance it was no bigger than a fly. Maja stopped and stared at it.
‘Is that a real car?’
‘Yes,’ said Anders. ‘What else would it be?’
Maja didn’t reply, but carried on looking at the car, which was on its way towards the point on the opposite side of the island.
‘Who’s driving?’
‘Holidaymakers, probably. Wanting to go for a swim.’
Maja grinned and looked at him with that supercilious expression she sometimes wore, and said, ‘Daddy. Wanting to go for a swim? Now?’
Anders and Cecilia laughed. The car disappeared behind the point, leaving a thin cloud of whirling snow behind it.
‘People from Stockholm, then. I expect they’re on their way to their summer cottage to…look at the ice, or something.’
Maja seemed satisfied with this response, and turned to set off again. Then she thought of something and turned back.
‘Why aren’t we people from Stockholm, then? We live in Stockholm, after all.’
Cecilia said, ‘You and I are from Stockholm, but Daddy isn’t, not really, because his daddy wasn’t from Stockholm.’
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