The Darkest Room

by Johan Theorin

  “I’d really like to live in those mountains,” he said.

  Fresh mountain air. He could have lived there with Katrine. But the island they had moved to was completely flat; there were no mountains. And no Katrine…

  Joakim suddenly found it difficult to breathe. He leaned forward, feeling thick tears welling up in his throat.

  “Don’t you feel… don’t you feel well?” said Miriam.

  He shook his head, leaned over the table, and began to cry. No, he didn’t feel well. He wasn’t well, he was suffering from lean bone fever.

  Oh, Katrine… and Ethel…

  He wept and sniveled uncontrollably for several minutes at the kitchen table, shut off from the outside world. Somewhere in the distance he could hear whispering voices and the gentle scraping of chairs, but he couldn’t stop weeping. He felt a warm hand on his shoulder, which remained there for a few seconds before it was removed. Then the outside door closed gently.

  When he finally blinked away the tears, he was alone. He heard the sound of a car starting up outside.

  The brochure with the people and the animals in the meadow was still on the table. When the sound of the engine had died away, Joakim sniveled in the silence and looked at the drawing.

  He had to do something. Anything.

  With a tired sigh he stood up and threw the brochure in the trash can under the sink.

  The house was completely silent around him. He went along the corridor into the empty drawing room and looked for a long time at the tins, bottles, and rags that were lined up on the floor. Katrine had obviously started cleaning the window frames the week before.

  She had had much clearer views on the décor than Joakim, and had chosen all the colors, wallpaper, and wooden detailing throughout. And the material had already been bought; it was lying on the floor by the walls waiting to be used.

  Joakim sighed again.

  Then he opened a bottle of cleanser and picked up a rag. He started working on the window frames, stubborn and focused.

  The sound of the rag rubbing against the wood sounded desolate in the silence.

  Don’t press too hard, Kim, he heard Katrine saying in the back of his head.

  The weekend came. The children were at home, playing in Livia’s room.

  Joakim had finished the windows in the big room, and this Saturday he was going to start wallpapering the room in the southwest corner. He had set up a table and mixed a bucket of wallpaper paste after breakfast.

  This was a smaller bedroom, that, like many of the others, had a 120-year-old tiled stove in one corner. The flower-patterned wallpaper in most of the rooms looked as if it dated

  from the beginning of the twentieth century, but unfortunately it was too badly damaged to be preserved. There were a huge number of damp stains, and in some places the paper had been hanging off in long strips. Katrine had pulled them away earlier in the fall and then smoothed down the walls, filled in the holes, and prepared everything ready for wallpapering.

  Katrine had particularly liked this little corner room.

  But Joakim wasn’t going to call up any more memories of her right now. He wasn’t going to think, he was just going to wallpaper.

  He picked up the rolls of zinc-white paper, a heavy English handmade wallpaper of the same type they had used in the Apple House. Then he picked up the knife and the long ruler and started cutting lengths.

  He and Katrine had always done the wallpapering together.

  Joakim sighed, but started working. It wasn’t possible to get stressed out when you were wallpapering, and so the work turned into something close to meditation. He was a monk; the house was his monastery.

  When he had put up the first four lengths and smoothed them down with a brush, Joakim suddenly heard a faint thudding noise. He got down from the ladder and listened. The thuds were regular, with a few seconds in between, and they were coming from outside.

  He went over to the window facing out from the back of the house and opened it. Bitterly cold air swept in.

  A boy was standing on the grass down below, perhaps a year or two older than Livia. At his feet he had a yellow plastic soccer ball. The boy had curly brown hair, poking out from underneath a woolen winter hat; his padded jacket was inaccurately buttoned, and he was looking up at Joakim with some curiosity.

  “Hi,” said Joakim.

  “Hi,” said the boy.

  “It’s not a good idea to kick your ball around here,” said Joakim. “You could break a window if your aim isn’t great.”

  “I’m aiming at the wall,” said the boy. “I always hit what I’m aiming at.”

  “Good. What’s your name?”

  “Andreas.”

  The boy rubbed his nose, red with the cold, with the palm of his hand.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Over there.”

  He pointed toward the farm. So Andreas was one of the Carlsson family’s children, out and about on his own this Saturday morning.

  “Would you like to come in?” said Joakim.

  “Why?”

  “You can say hello to Livia and Gabriel,” said Joakim. “They’re my children…Livia’s the same age as you.”

  “I’m seven,” said Andreas. “Is she seven?”

  “No. But she’s almost the same age as you.”

  Andreas nodded. He rubbed his nose again, then made a decision.

  “For a little while. We’ll be eating soon.”

  He picked up his ball and disappeared around the side of the house.

  Joakim closed the window and went out of the room.

  “Livia, Gabriel!” he shouted. “We’ve got a visitor.”

  After a few seconds his daughter appeared, clutching Foreman in her hand.

  “What?”

  “There’s someone here who wants to meet you.”

  “Who?”

  “A boy.”

  “A boy?” Livia opened her eyes wide. “I don’t want to meet him. What’s his name?”

  “Andreas. He lives on the farm next door.”

  “But Daddy, I don’t know him.”

  There was panic in her voice, but before Joakim had the chance to say something sensible about the fact that meeting new people isn’t going to make you ill, the outside door opened and Andreas walked into the porch. He stopped on the doormat.

  “Come on in, Andreas,” said Joakim. “Take off your cap and your jacket.”

  “Okay.”

  The boy took off his outdoor clothes and dropped them on the floor.

  “Have you been in this house before?”

  “No. It’s always locked.”

  “Not now, it’s open now. We live here now.”

  Andreas looked at Livia and she looked back, but neither of them said hello.

  Gabriel was peeping out shyly from his room, but he didn’t say anything either.

  “I helped bring our cows in,” said Andreas after a while, looking around the room. “From the enclosure out there.”

  “Today?” said Joakim.

  “No, last week. They have to stay in now. Otherwise they’d freeze to death.”

  “That’s true, everybody needs heat in the wintertime,” said Joakim. “Cows and birds and people.”

  Livia was still staring curiously at Andreas without joining in the conversation. Joakim had also been shy when he was little; it was a shame if she had inherited that particular characteristic.

  “You could kick the soccer ball around for a while,” he said. “I know a great room you could use.”

  He led the way into the house, with the children following along behind. They trooped into the large drawing room, which was still almost completely unfurnished; there were just a couple of dining chairs and few cardboard boxes on the floor.

  “You can play in here,” said Joakim, stacking three of the boxes in front of the window to protect it.

  Andreas dropped the ball, dribbled it tentatively, then kicked it across the wooden floor to Livia. Dust swirled up li
ke a fine gray mist.

  Livia kicked at the ball as it came speeding toward her. She missed. Gabriel scampered after it, but couldn’t catch up.

  “Stop it with your foot first,” said Joakim to the children, “then you’ll be able to control it.”

  Livia gave him a sour look, as if she could do without the good advice, thank you. Then she quickly turned and captured the ball between her feet in one corner of the room and kicked it back hard.

  “Good shot,” said Andreas.

  Little flirt, thought Joakim, but Livia was smiling contentedly.

  “Go and stand over there,” said Andreas, pointing to the other doorway. “You can be in goal and we’ll shoot.”

  Livia quickly ran over to the double doors, and Joakim left the room and went back along the corridor to his wallpapering. He could hear the ball bouncing across the floor behind him.

  “Goal!” he heard Andreas shout, and Livia and Gabriel shrieked before all three of them started laughing.

  Joakim loved the happy noises spreading through the house. Very good, he had sorted out a friend for his children.

  He stuck his brush in the bucket of paste, stirred it around, and made a start on the long wall. Length after length of paper went up; the room changed color and gradually became lighter. Joakim smoothed out the bubbles and wiped away the excess paste with a damp sponge.

  When only a couple of feet of the old wallpaper remained, he realized that the echoing children’s voices could no longer be heard from the drawing room.

  The house was completely silent again.

  Joakim climbed down from his ladder and listened.

  “Livia?” he called. “Gabriel? Would you like some juice? And cookies?”

  No reply.

  He listened for a while longer, then went out of the room and along the corridor. But halfway to the drawing room he looked out of the window into the courtyard and stopped.

  The door to the big barn was standing ajar.

  It had been shut before, hadn’t it?

  Then he saw that Andreas Carlsson’s outdoor clothes had gone from the floor.

  Joakim pulled on a jacket and a pair of boots and went out into the courtyard.

  The children must have pulled the heavy door open together. Maybe they had gone inside too, into the darkness.

  Joakim went across and stopped in the doorway of the barn.

  “Hello?”

  No reply.

  Were they playing hide-and-seek? He walked across the stone floor, breathing in the smell of old hay.

  They had talked about turning the barn into a gallery, he and Katrine, sometime in the future when they had cleared out all the hay, the dung, and all the other traces of the animals who had lived there.

  He was thinking about Katrine again, although he shouldn’t. But on the morning of the day she drowned, he had seen her coming out of the barn. She had looked embarrassed, as if he had caught her out.

  Nothing was moving inside the barn, but Joakim thought he could hear a tapping or creaking noise from the hayloft up above, like footsteps.

  A narrow, steep wooden staircase led up to the loft, and he grabbed hold of the sides and began to climb.

  Coming into the loft from the dark passageways and stalls down below was almost like walking into a church, he

  thought. Up here there was just a big open space for the hay to dry-an open-plan solution, as the agents liked to call it-and the roof arched high above him in the darkness. Thick beams ran the length of the loft several feet above Joakim’s head.

  Unlike the upper floor of the main house, it was impossible to get lost up here, even if it was difficult to pick your way through all the garbage that had been piled up on the floor.

  Heaps of newspapers, flowerpots, broken chairs, old sewing machines-the hayloft had become a dumping ground. A couple of tractor tires, almost as tall as a man, were leaning up against a wall. How had they got those up here?

  When he saw the untidy loft, Joakim suddenly remembered dreaming that Katrine was standing up here. But the floor had been clean, and she had been standing over by the far wall with her back to him. He had been afraid to go over to her.

  The winter wind was like a faint whisper above the roof of the barn. He didn’t really like being alone up here in the cold.

  “Livia?” he shouted.

  The wooden floor creaked in front of him, but he got no other answer. Perhaps the children had hidden in the darkness; they were probably spying on him from the shadows.

  They were hiding from him. He looked around and listened.

  “Katrine?” he said quietly.

  No reply. He waited in the darkness for several minutes, but when the silence in the hayloft remained unbroken, he turned and went back down the steps.

  When he got back into the house, he found his children where he should have looked in the first place-in Livia’s bedroom.

  Livia was sitting on the floor drawing, as if nothing had happened. Gabriel had obviously been given permission by

  his big sister to be in there, because he had fetched some toy cars from his room and was sitting beside her.

  “Where have you been?” Joakim asked, more sharply than he had intended.

  Livia looked up from her drawing. Katrine had never painted for pleasure even though she was an art teacher, but Livia enjoyed drawing.

  “Here,” she said, as if it were perfectly obvious.

  “But before…Did you go outside? You and Andreas and Gabriel?”

  “For a little while.”

  “You mustn’t go in the barn,” said Joakim. “Did you hide in there?”

  “No. There’s nothing to do in the barn.”

  “Where’s Andreas?”

  “He went home. They were going to eat.”

  “Okay. We’ll be eating soon too. But don’t go outside again without telling me, Livia.”

  “No.”

  The night after Joakim had been out in the barn, Livia started talking in her sleep again.

  She had gone to bed with no trouble that night. Gabriel had fallen asleep at around seven, and while Joakim was helping Livia to brush her teeth in the bathroom she had studied his head at close quarters with considerable curiosity.

  “You’ve got funny ears, Daddy,” she said eventually.

  Joakim put his daughter’s mug and toothbrush back on the shelf and asked: “What do you mean?”

  “Your ears look so… old.”

  “I see. But they’re no older than I am. Have they got hair in them?”

  “Not much.”

  “Good,” said Joakim. “Hair in your nose and ears isn’t exactly cool… or in your mouth.”

  Livia wanted to stay in front of the mirror for a while pulling faces, but Joakim gently led her out of the bathroom. He put her to bed, and read the story twice about Emil getting his head stuck in the soup bowl, then turned off the light. As he was leaving the room he could hear her wriggling further down the bed and snuggling her head into the pillow.

  Katrine’s woolen sweater still lay beside her in the bed.

  He went into the kitchen, made himself a couple of sandwiches, and switched on the dishwasher. Then he turned out all the lights. In the darkness he groped his way back to his own bedroom and switched on the main light.

  There it stood, the cold, empty double bed. And on the walls above it hung clothes. Katrine’s clothes, which by now had lost all trace of her scent. Joakim ought to take them down, but not tonight.

  He turned off the light, got into bed, and lay there motionless in the darkness.

  “Mommy?”

  Livia’s voice made Joakim raise his head, wide awake.

  He listened. The dishwasher in the kitchen had finished, and the clock radio was showing 11:52. He had slept for over an hour.

  “Mom-my?”

  The cry came again; Joakim got out of bed and went back to Livia’s room. He stood in the doorway until he heard her again:

  “Mommy?”

  He w
ent over to the bed. Livia was lying under the covers with her eyes closed, but by the glow of the light out in the corridor Joakim could see her head moving restlessly on the pillow. Her hand was clutching Katrine’s sweater, and he carefully released it.

  “Mommy isn’t here,” he said quietly, folding up the sweater.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “Go to sleep now, Livia.”

  She opened her eyes and recognized him.

  “I can’t sleep, Daddy.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “No,” said Livia. “You have to sleep here.”

  Joakim sighed, but Livia was wide awake now, and there was nothing else for it. This had always been Katrine’s job.

  Cautiously he lay down on the edge of the bed. It was too short, he’d never be able to get to sleep.

  He fell asleep after two minutes.

  There was someone outside the house.

  Joakim opened his eyes in the darkness. He couldn’t hear anything, but he could feel that they had a visitor.

  He was fully awake again.

  What time was it? He had no idea. He might have slept for several hours.

  He raised his head and listened. The house was silent and still. The only sound was the faint ticking of a clock-and the barely audible breathing in the darkness beside him.

  He sat up silently and carefully got off the bed. But after only three steps he heard the voice behind him:

  “Don’t go, Daddy.”

  He stopped and turned around.

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t go.”

  Livia was lying motionless, facing the wall. But was she awake?

  Joakim couldn’t see her face, just her blonde hair. He went back to the bed and sat down cautiously beside her.

  “Are you asleep, Livia?” he asked quietly.

  After a few seconds came the reply:

  “No.”

  She sounded awake, but relaxed.

  “Are you sleeping?”

  “No… I can see things.”

  “Where?”

  “In the wall.”

  She was talking in a monotone, her breathing slow and calm. Joakim leaned closer to her head in the darkness.

  “What can you see?”

  “Lights, water… shadows.”