Stallo

by Stefan Spjut

  ‘Leave that,’ Edit said, with a wave of her hand.

  ‘As I already explained,’ Susso said, as she put on her boots and hat, ‘if it gets cold the batteries won’t last very long, so you’ll have to check that. Otherwise the memory card will be full in about three weeks. It all depends. Do you get many animals running about the place?’

  Edit shook her head.

  Susso walked outside and down the steps, looking for her car key. She turned round.

  ‘I’ll be in touch,’ she said, and nodded at Edit, who was standing in the darkened hall with her hand on the door handle.

  ‘Will you write that it was me who saw it? Will you put “Edit Mickelsson”?’

  Susso took a deep intake of breath while she considered what Edit meant.

  ‘Not if you don’t want me to. Absolutely not.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I do.’

  ‘I don’t have to write anything at all. Not yet.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s best. For the time being.’

  ‘Okay,’ Susso replied, walking towards the car.

  ‘Are you sure you have to go?’ Edit exclaimed. ‘In the dark, with the spray from the snow and everything? I’ve got an extra bed, if you want to stay the night.’

  Susso smiled.

  ‘Thanks, but I really have to get back. My sister,’ she said, ‘it’s her car. She’ll kill me if she doesn’t get it back. And I’ve probably got to work tomorrow.’

  Edit nodded.

  And then before she closed the door, she said:

  ‘Drive carefully.’

  *

  The light on a nearby mobile-phone mast glittered like a ruby-red star in the night, and way ahead another red dot blinked in and out of the haze. A car with its rear fog light on. Susso adjusted her speed to match, to have something to fix her eyes on. She held both hands on the cold plastic steering wheel. The fan heater roared at full pelt. The tarmac was scraped in dark, uneven streaks, so the snow plough could not be too far ahead of them.

  In Porjus she had to stop for a pee. She had drunk far too much coffee at Edit’s. Now her bladder was so full it was making her left leg vibrate. She reduced speed, threw a glance over her shoulder, swung off the road and parked by a viewing point overlooking the power station.

  The facility lay far down below in the river valley, a burning fortress that filled the night sky with a dusky blue sheen. The pylons rose up like many-armed giants with straddled legs and handfuls of cables in their fists. The power cables rose in loops up the slope, from giant to giant, running over the tops of the birch trees and hanging over the road. Susso could hear they were making a noise.

  They were speaking.

  She wondered if it was caused by the snow or if in reality it was the sound of high voltage, of fast-travelling electrons. Did electricity make a sound? She had no idea. She pulled her hands up inside her jacket sleeves and walked closer to listen. They were emitting a humming noise, a secret song. She could not decide if the hissing came from snowflakes landing on the cables. All she heard was the song. Dark and strange.

  It got to be four o’clock, then five and then five thirty, and still Ejvor had not returned. Seved thought it was odd. His hunger always meant a lot to her. She ran her life according to it, always producing food or asking questions about food. But perhaps she thought he had already made himself something to eat because he had been looking in the larder earlier. But he really could not be bothered. Beef soup would have been perfect. It only needed warming in a saucepan.

  He sat by the window and looked at the pale facade of the building looming out of the darkness on the far side of the yard. It was still snowing but now strong winds were pulling the flakes along with them, lit up by the powerful lamp on the barn.

  On the rare occasions she went in there during the evening she used to put a kerosene lamp on the draining board and the beam from her head torch would flash over the walls. But now the windowpanes were completely dark and shiny as steel.

  He must have stood there waiting for fifteen minutes, but the ray of her head torch did not appear, and that could only mean she had gone downstairs. Probably because Lennart had forbidden it.

  He looked at the clock again. Nearly six. Now he simply had to get himself something to eat. He opened the fridge and found a ring of Falu sausage. A tube of mustard. Margarine. He got out a slice of bread, spread it with the margarine, cut a few slices of sausage and lay them on top. He decorated the sausage with mustard, coarse-grained and strong, and ate while standing at the window, his hand cupped beneath his chin to catch the crumbs.

  Shouldn’t Börje and Signe have been back by now? He was still chewing his last mouthful as he went to the telephone hanging on the wall. Both the flat receiver and the wall mounting were made of the same ivory-coloured plastic, which had turned a shade of yellow. The spiral flex had coiled itself into a hard tangle.

  He licked mustard from his thumb before tapping in the number.

  ‘We’re on our way,’ Börje said. ‘We’re just passing the flooring factory.’

  ‘Ejvor went into Hybblet and she’s been there for almost three hours.’

  ‘Then she’s probably doing some cleaning. She said she was going to do that.’

  ‘No, she went in because they called. She’s already done the cleaning.’

  Börje mumbled something that Seved did not catch. It was probably to Signe.

  ‘We’ll be home soon. Don’t do anything until I get there.’

  ‘I’ll go in and have a look.’

  ‘All right, do that. But stay in the hallway.’

  Cecilia was sitting in a corner of the sofa wearing jogging pants and watching television when Susso stepped through the door, cold and out of breath. She dropped the car key onto the small, round glass table in the hall, making a demonstratively loud clatter. Ever since she left Vaikijaur she had been longing for a tissue, so she went straight to the bathroom and blew her nose. At the precise moment she flushed the paper away she remembered no one was allowed to make a noise because Ella woke up at the slightest sound.

  ‘Don’t flush!’ demanded a voice from the sitting room.

  All she could do was shut the bathroom door quietly and pull an apologetic face, which her sister did not even notice. With the tips of her boots on the metal strip between the hall floor and the parquet flooring of the sitting room she stood leaning against the door frame, looking at the TV screen.

  ‘I’ve left the car in the square.’

  Her sister nodded without taking her eyes from the screen. It was obvious she was pissed off. Susso tried to think of something to say to soften her up, but could think of nothing.

  Finally she said: ‘Have you spoken to Mum?’

  Cecilia picked at the hem of her trousers and sighed.

  ‘Not today.’

  With a tug she removed a piece of thread, which she rolled between her thumb and forefinger. On the table stood a thick purple candle on a pottery dish filled with shells.

  ‘I don’t think she’s well.’

  ‘Not her as well?’ Susso said. She breathed in through her nose, making a sniffling sound. Cecilia looked at her with interest and asked:

  ‘Can you work in the shop on Saturday?’

  Susso knew they were negotiating the loan of the car and the cost of the fuel, which she had not even mentioned yet. There was no way out.

  ‘I think so,’ she said, wiping a cold knuckle under her nose. ‘If I don’t get any worse, I mean.’

  ‘Because Ella’s going to some dressing-up thing. A friend from pre-school.’

  Susso nodded.

  ‘I’m sure it’ll be okay,’ she said, getting out her mobile. She did this quite unnecessarily, looking at the digits of the clock without registering the time. She turned and walked towards the door but was halted by Cecilia’s question:

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  She took a deep breath, wanting to avoid this part.

  After a few seconds she said:
<
br />   ‘I went to visit an old lady.’

  ‘An old lady?’

  ‘She saw something.’

  ‘Where?’

  It was pointless lying. She would see the mileage counter anyway.

  ‘In Vaikijaur.’

  There was a momentary silence.

  And then it came:

  ‘And where’s that?’

  Now she was really going to get it in the neck because she had driven the car more than five hundred kilometres. Her sister was enjoying dragging it out.

  ‘A little village just north of Jokkmokk.’

  Cecilia slowly tucked her feet beneath her as she reached for the silver-coloured plastic snus tin on the coffee table. She looked at her little sister with narrow, glittering brown eyes. A square of oily skin shone on her forehead where her fringe had parted.

  ‘How did it go then?’

  ‘She seemed pretty sound,’ Susso said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘So I set up a camera. The Reconyx.’

  Cecilia inserted a snus pouch.

  ‘Tell Mum’, she said slowly, ‘that you’ll work instead of me.’

  *

  Not a day went by without Susso looking in on her mother. It seemed natural because they lived in the same block of flats on Mommagatan 1, Susso on the second floor and Gudrun on the third. It was a shabby concrete three-storey building with a dirty-pink facade, situated opposite the big hotel with its dark-brown brick permanently covered with expanding frost patches.

  When she opened the door the dog started barking and thrashing its bushy tail. Susso crouched down and was forced to grab hold of a coat hanging in the hall to stop herself from being knocked over by the eager dog. He was part terrier but also part Spitz, as was evident from his curled tail. In the spirit of irony he was called Hound of the Baskervilles, but was also known as Basker. Her mother claimed he was registered with the kennel club.

  ‘Hasn’t he had a walk today?’ she called into the flat.

  ‘I’m not well!’

  ‘So I heard.’

  Susso removed her jacket and hung it from the hall cupboard handle. Through the doorway she saw half of her mother sitting at the kitchen table reading the paper. Her sleeve was pulled up, revealing her watch with its thin strap of blue leather. The radio was on, the volume turned to a pointlessly low level. There was a smell of burnt coffee.

  When Susso sat down at the table Gudrun looked up and smiled quickly, wrinkles radiating out from the corners of her eyes. There were beads of mascara on the tips of her eyelashes. Had she been working in the shop anyway? Either that or her boyfriend Roland had looked in.

  Susso pulled off her hat, put it on the table and kept her hand inside it, playing with the wool.

  ‘Do you want coffee?’

  ‘Coffee? What, now?’

  Gudrun folded the newspaper and looked at her.

  ‘Wine then?’

  Susso shrugged: why not? She took out a stick of lip salve and rubbed it over her lips. They were always dry when she was out in the cold. There was something wrong with her, some gene that made her unsuited to the subarctic climate. Gudrun stood up, took two glasses out of the cupboard and walked over to the worktop, where the wine bottles lay in a cast-iron rack next to the microwave. She was wearing a loose-fitting apricot-coloured viscose top, the fabric so thin her bra was visible.

  The glasses arrived on the table and Gudrun sat down, one foot beneath her, the way she always did when she drank wine: it was her relaxed mode. There was a short clucking sound from the bottle, then streams of red poured into the glasses.

  Susso tucked a greasy strand of hair behind her ear.

  ‘The woman I was with today might have seen something, I think,’ she said slowly. ‘The one in Vaikijaur. Edit, she’s called.’

  Gudrun pulled at her top but said nothing.

  ‘It came sneaking into her garden. A little old man, or that’s what it looked like, about a metre tall. She said he had cat’s eyes.’

  ‘Cat’s eyes?’

  ‘You know. Horizontal pupils.’

  ‘That sounds strange …’

  ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘But you believe her then? Has she got any evidence?’

  ‘Not evidence exactly, but she saw him in full daylight, at a distance of about two metres, maybe less. Through the window. That makes it an absolutely unique observation.’

  Gudrun placed the tips of her thumbs and index fingers on the foot of the wine glass and turned it a half circle.

  ‘Did you set up the camera?’

  Susso nodded.

  ‘So in a few weeks’ time I’ve got to borrow your car so I can drive up and collect it. I don’t want to ask Cecilia again, she gets so shitty about it. She lives to lend me her car and then make me pay her back somehow.’

  Gudrun nodded.

  They sat without speaking for a moment, and then Susso said:

  ‘I was thinking about something when I stopped in Porjus. There are cables there, running above the road, coming from the power station. And they kind of sing. Why do you think they do that? Does electricity sing?’

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought so.’

  ‘But think if it is because of all the electricity streaming through them, and the trolls felt it. I’ve heard they disappeared when electricity came to the countryside. They must have felt the current really strongly, everywhere, in every single wire. Do you think that could have been why?’

  ‘Susso …’

  ‘But don’t you think that sounds logical?’

  Gudrun pushed up her sleeves and looked at the clock.

  ‘Are you working tomorrow?’

  After he had replaced the receiver on the wall he remained standing in the unlit kitchen, hesitating. He had detected an undisguised tension in Börje’s voice and it made him uncertain. He regretted saying he would go in and look. Now he more or less had to.

  He pulled on his boots and went out, but turned back immediately to get his torch, which was attached to the fridge door by a magnet. There was no lighting in Hybblet. There had been too much playing about with the switches.

  The snow was biting cold against his neck and he stopped to zip his jacket all the way up to the top. As he walked across the yard he recognised a feeling of resistance.

  The beam from his torch swept over the netting of the dog compound and met eyes suspended in a row. The dogs were uneasy, not surprisingly. The previous night had made them afraid.

  Why had they never told him before what had happened in the dog pen? Why had no one told him they were capable of such meaningless cruelty? Börje and Ejvor had always assured him they were entirely safe. But if they could set on the dogs, where did they draw the line? Was there a line?

  It is like some bloody frenzy.

  That was all Börje would say when Seved asked him what had happened. He realised it was serious all right – more serious than Börje and Ejvor let on. Lennart had turned up no less than three times during the last month, and on one occasion he had been accompanied by a couple of people Seved had never seen before. A bearded man who had walked with a limp around the outside of the building and an older woman in a wheelchair. He had only seen her back. There was also a girl, pushing the wheelchair. Seved had not dared to ask who they were.

  *

  Now he had reached the veranda, and he stopped to listen before pulling down the door handle. It was so silent he could hear the snowflakes floating in and landing on the black sacks.

  Because he knew the door was warped and difficult to open, he tugged it hard.

  The stench hit him, a warm, sickening blast from the dark interior. It was a smell of rotten meat, rancid dry fodder and old piss, blended with fumes from a strong alkaline cleaning solution. And excrement. What it had smelled like when Ejvor had gone in to clean up he did not want to imagine. By then no one had cleaned in there for almost three weeks. All they had done was carry in plastic bags and boxes of food.

  With his left hand covering his nose and mouth
he stepped over the threshold and carefully kicked the snow off the soles of his boots. Not too hard – he did not want it to sound as if he was knocking.

  He shone the torch on the circular pattern of the cork matting and then over the faded floral wallpaper on the narrow wall that separated the two doors on the opposite side of the hall. There was a rustling of small clawed feet in one of the rooms. He stood listening, feeling anxious, and after a while was forced to let go of his nose and draw in air.

  Christ, what a stink! He twisted his face in disgust and fought as hard as he could against the impulse to run out.

  Perhaps he ought to let them know he was here after all? It went against his instinct, but the big ones did not like people creeping up on them. They were exactly like bears in that respect. It could get dangerous.

  ‘Ejvor?’ he said.

  He waited a few seconds and then he said:

  ‘Mum?’

  There was no way he would shout. Even sudden noises could irritate them, and it would almost certainly upset the little ones.

  He could not see her, so she must have gone downstairs, as he thought. Because she couldn’t be upstairs, surely? He shone his torch up the staircase but quickly lowered it. He did not know which of them was in the house, and considering Ejvor was hardly likely to be on the upper floor it was unnecessary to disturb them.

  He looked into the kitchen. They had already made a mess. A real mess.

  On the floor lay polystyrene trays with remnants of minced meat long turned grey. There were half-eaten packages of black pudding and liver pâté and bacon, and an upturned paper carrier bag from the supermarket with its contents of apples and potatoes strewn across the floor. It looked as if they had amused themselves by trampling on it.

  Around the buckets lined up under the draining board the cork matting was black with pellets of dry fodder. Someone had dug down deeply to see if there was anything else at the bottom.