A river – more of a stream, really – runs lazily through the village along the bottom of the hollow, with the railway running parallel to it. A ten-metre-long bridge is enough to connect the west part of Reftinge with the east.
At the bottom of the slope, at the start of the main street – called, of course, Main Street – you pass between two almost identical signs: PIZZA – KEBAB – SALAD. When she was at school the larger of the two pizzerias was owned by the family of her classmate Lidija. Lidija was really too plain and overweight for the boys to be interested in her, but she was cocky and quick-witted enough to stop anyone teasing her. And she had a video recorder, a SodaStream and a popcorn machine at home, which, along with the free pizzas her dad always provided, made Lidija one of the most popular kids in the class.
She wonders what Lidija is doing now, if she’s one of the ones who stayed or left. Probably the latter.
A bit further on, past a three-storey block of council flats, is the centre of the village. The council offices, police station, health centre, library and school. Then the square, with the pub, the florist’s and the only remaining grocery store. She’s fairly sure it’s still run by Aunt Berit and Uncle Sören. She can’t really imagine them doing anything else. The shop looks a lot smaller than she remembers as she drives past. Maybe her memory’s playing tricks on her, unless they’ve actually decreased the floor area, slowly winding down in line with the rest of the village. The bank and post office disappeared in the early nineties, the photographer who took the family photograph in her grief-box has gone, and the furniture store had to close when IKEA opened in the nearest city. The squat building now houses a flea-market run by the sports association, open every other Friday, according to the printed sign in one of the windows.
She winds the side window right down and leans her elbow on the door. The street in front of her is deserted apart from an old man who’s cycling so slowly on a woman’s bike that it ought really to be physically impossible. There isn’t much going on in Reftinge on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of summer. Nor any other time, to be honest.
Almost at the end of Main Street – before you go past the railway station where the trains haven’t stopped since the seventies – is the fast-food kiosk which is the real hub of the village. Here at least there are signs of life.
On the patch of gravel in front of the kiosk she can see two tractors and three pick-ups, all the same green colour. The logo on the doors is familiar. ARONSSON FARMING. Uncle Harald’s business, given that name after he went on a research trip to the USA in the late eighties. It’s been a recurrent topic of conversation ever since. In America, you know, they . . .
A few men in flannel shirts with the sleeves rolled up are standing in the shade of the projecting roof. They’re staring at her car. Uncle Harald’s employees are working in the heat even though it’s Saturday. The crops don’t distinguish between the days of the week. Out here summer and autumn are one long sequence of harvests, from strawberries and new potatoes in June through to the sugar beet in November.
She drives across the bridge, past the small fire station and carries on through the residential district. Rows of matching single-storey houses built of the red Reftinge bricks that are no longer produced, and beyond them split-level houses from the seventies with darker, gloomier façades. Around half of her old classmates lived here. The rest were fairly evenly distributed between farms and council flats.
The road to the church leads her back up to the plain. The little white church balancing on the eastern edge of the hollow dates back to the twelfth century, the authoritative junior-school teacher’s voice in her head says, and she quickly turns the radio up before it has time to go on. She finds herself listening to Laura Branigan’s ‘Self Control’, one of her favourite songs.
They used to go to church every Sunday, the whole of the Nilsson-Aronsson clan. Her, Mum, Dad, Mattias, Billy, even Uncle Harald. Smartly dressed up, the way Mum wanted. No one ever dared object. So she and Mattias would sit through the hymns and sermons, glancing up at the little painting on the ceiling that could only be seen from the first few rows. A goat’s head with curved horns. The creepy little head had probably been left uncovered by one of the workers who painted over all traces of Catholicism in the 1700s, possibly as a joke. That’s what she and Mattias chose to believe, anyway. But that grinning head could just as easily have been a warning. A reminder that even if you could hide the past away, it was still there.
Dad stopped going to church soon after Billy went missing, so she’s only been there a couple of times since then, for Mum’s funeral and Mattias’s wedding. Different ceremonies, but equally horrible.
She thinks about the ice again, about Mum. And turns the radio up even more to drive the thoughts away. For a few moments she’s back in the comforting darkness under the spectators’ stand. In the feeling of being young and optimistic. Immortal.
Halfway round the S-bend by the church she realised that she should have stopped to visit Mum’s grave. But before she has time to ease her foot off the accelerator she decides to put that off until tomorrow.
She passes the vicarage and parish hall at the top of the rise, leaving the village behind as she emerges up onto normal ground-level again. The road narrows, loses the line running down the middle and slowly straightens out, becoming what feels like an endless long straight between the fields of grain and giant wind turbines.
Here and there gravel tracks lead away from the road, marked by green mailboxes that prove there are other houses between the village and their own farm. There were ten mailboxes when she was a child, seven when she left home. Now there are four. She sees several combines and tractors at work. Almost all the same colour and bearing the same logo as the vehicles at the kiosk. Uncle Harald’s empire is evidently still growing.
A little more than three kilometres from the village she sees the crooked post of the familiar mailbox and slows down. Even so, she turns off unnecessarily quickly and the car skids slightly on the loose gravel. The roof of the main house is just visible through the trees a few hundred metres away. These days the roof is the highest point at Backagården. The silo where she and Mattias found the goshawks’ nest was dismantled a long time ago.
On the way to the farm she passes yet another green pick-up. The driver is wearing a trucker’s cap, aviator sunglasses and is talking on a mobile phone. He nods to her as the vehicles pass each other with barely any gap between them. She recognises him vaguely. Patrik something. One of Mattias’s former classmates, and now another teenage memory pops up. A party, a slow track on the record player. A taste of saliva, tobacco and alcohol, hands fumbling over her body. She has quite a lot of memories of that sort, and forces her mind to change track before it summons more of them up.
The fields between the road and the farm have already been harvested. Large round bales lie scattered across the sharp stubble. The heat is making the horizon hazy, and two kites are circling on the thermals in the sky. Round and round, as they stare down at the ground looking for prey. She thinks about the goat’s head again and stifles a shudder. High time she pulled herself together. She’s starting to get wound up, the way she does before a therapy session. Apprehension, anticipation. Possibly even excitement. She’s doing this for Dad’s sake, she tries to tell herself again.
She drives into the shade of the avenue of chestnut trees that leads to the farm. One of the trees looks almost dead, its dry, bare branches reaching up towards the sky.
The buildings are laid out in a U-shape around the yard. The main house on the little hillock is flanked by buildings that used to be cowsheds and barns, but which have stood empty for the past twenty-five years, with the exception of the cart shed, where Dad parks his car, and the workshop behind it. She looks at the buildings. The door to the cowshed has a new steel bar across it, and a shiny, heavy padlock. She can’t help thinking about the little milking parlour in there. The smell, the darkness, the raw smell. The panic when she realised
she couldn’t open the door.
The roof of the old cart shed seems to have sunk even lower. The tiles are grey, and the overall impression makes the building look tired and resigned. Grass and leaves are sticking up from the gutters, and there are tall weeds and nettles growing beside the buildings.
A large green diesel tank bearing the Aronsson Farming logo catches her eye. It wasn’t there the last time she was home. The metal tank annoys her, it doesn’t fit in, it’s far too industrial and modern. Another sign that Uncle Harald is everywhere.
The front door to the house is locked. She knocks a couple of time without anything happening, which worries her slightly. Her dad knows she’s coming, she called him from the motel this morning. He usually leaves the door unlocked when he’s home.
The spare key is in the usual place, in the front of the window box hanging under the nearest window. She unlocks the door and is met by the familiar smell. The one which transforms her in a fraction of a second from Veronica Lindh to Vera Nilsson. The smell of home. She hates it, or at least tries to. And today that’s even harder than usual.
‘Dad? Hello!’
No answer. She goes inside, closes and locks the door behind her. Despite the heat outside, the old stone house is cool and the sudden change in temperature gives her goosebumps.
To the left is what used to be the gentlemen’s room, where the smell of Grandfather’s cigars still clings to the wallpaper. Behind that is the best parlour, with its heavy furniture and Mum’s piano, which has stood silent for twenty years. She turns right, through the dining room and into the kitchen. The newspaper is open on the kitchen table, and beside it is a half-drunk cup of cold coffee. No sign of Dad.
The house is almost silent, the only sounds the ticking of the clock on the wall of the dining room and the buzzing of a large fly in the kitchen window. The fly keeps hitting the glass without understanding why it isn’t getting anywhere. Every so often it falls to the windowsill and lies there exhausted until it summons up the energy to make another vain attempt to escape.
She goes and looks in the study. The desk is covered with papers and documents. Most have the Aronsson Farming logo on, but some are from an energy company and the council. Some seem to be contracts and documents relating to planning consent.
The battered leather sofa is still standing along one wall, but the bulky television is new. A big screen, in that new widescreen format that she still isn’t used to. She wonders when her dad got that? Beside the sofa is a pile of blankets and pillows, and there’s a medicine bottle on one of the armrests. She can’t resist the temptation to take a closer look. Sleeping pills, prescribed little more than a month ago. Odd, because as far as she knows, Dad’s never had any trouble sleeping. She tries to remember how it was just after Billy, but she can only remember Mum. She was the one everyone tiptoed around. Mum, who couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed and for whose sake they all had to whisper when they were in the house. They carried on doing that for weeks after Mum had been taken off to the home, which was the word they absolutely had to use. The home. Not the description everyone in the area usually used for that sort of institution. The mental hospital.
The window is slightly ajar and she hears an indistinct sound from the garden. The tall poplars that edge the garden are hardly moving at all. Even out here on the plain there’s unusually little wind. She hears the sound again, a bit louder this time. A metal tool hitting soil and stones.
She goes back out into the kitchen, opens the door and walks out onto the raised terrace that runs along the rear of the house. She leaves the door open to give the fly one last chance of freedom.
From here she can see most of the garden. The overgrown lawn, the fruit trees, the treehouse she and Mattias built, and the hollow elm the blond man mentioned in the therapy session. She’s having trouble thinking of him as Isak, but she isn’t yet ready to start calling him anything else.
Beyond the fruit trees is the wild shrubbery that reaches all the way to the boundary, and beyond she can see the field of maize. On the horizon are the tops of two wind giants, the first ones in the village, which Uncle Harald put up just a few months after Billy went missing. She steps down from the terrace so she doesn’t have to see them.
To the right is the walled rose garden. It faces south, and if she remembers rightly it was established as a kitchen garden by her great-grandfather. Dad restored and replanted it the spring after he and Mum got married. He raised the height of the wall to provide better protection against the wind, built the cold-frames and summerhouse, set out the paths and, not least, planted all the beautiful roses as a belated wedding present. Mum loved roses. And this way she would be able to see and smell them simply by opening her bedroom window.
Veronica used to like that story, the idea that the rose garden was a symbol of Dad’s love for Mum. After Billy went missing and Mum died, the garden became Dad’s sanctuary. Somewhere to hide. Perhaps she’ll be able to change that now?
The wooden gate in the wall is closed, but there are noises behind it and it isn’t locked. She pushes it open and peers in. The heavy scent of roses hits her, bringing her up short. This was just how Mum’s bedroom used to smell.
Inside the tall walls there’s no sign of the decay that reigns in the rest of the garden. In the neatly edged beds, expertly pruned roses climb either up the wall or metal frames. There’s no hint of any weeds between the slabs in the path, and along the short side of the garden, closest to the house, the summerhouse sits almost entirely enclosed within perfectly maintained foliage. The little building has no solid roof, but the roses are twined tightly across the cross-beams.
Beyond the summerhouse, in the corner below Mum’s bedroom window, Dad is on all fours, half covered by one of the biggest rosebushes in the whole garden.
She stands and watches him for a few moments. He’s only fifty-eight, but ever since Mum’s funeral his movements have been slow, deliberate, as if everything took an immense effort of will. But right now he is moving quickly, almost nimbly. His gloved hands move back and forth, pulling out tiny weeds and tossing them on the rug beside him. He runs a small rake over the shingle. Smooths it out until the small stones are lying perfectly. They’re gleaming almost as white as the roses above his head.
She pushes the gate open a bit further and takes a step into the garden, and opens her mouth to call to him, but before she can do that one of the old hinges makes a creaking sound.
The sudden noise makes her dad turn round sharply. His eyes are open wide, but the look of surprise on his face vanishes the moment he realises it’s her, replaced by the gentle smile she knows so well.
‘Hello, Vera, are you here already? I thought you weren’t getting here till this afternoon?’
He gets up onto his knees and then, with some effort, to his feet. He brushes off his trousers and walks towards her along the narrow path. His movements are once more heavy and deliberate.
‘It’s almost two o’clock,’ she says, hugs him and kisses him on the cheek. He smells of soil, aftershave and something else, something that makes her sad. The smell of an old man, maybe.
‘Really? I must have lost track of time. Have you eaten, would you like me to get you something?’
‘No, thanks, just coffee would be great.’ As usual, her accent changes without her even thinking about it.
He puts his arm round her and guides her slowly towards the door. But she doesn’t want to leave, not just yet. She stops in front of the bush covered with pink flowers that’s planted next to the summerhouse and covers the whole of the roof.
‘How beautiful it is now,’ she says. ‘Big, too.’
She looks at the little brass sign that’s stuck in the ground beside the plant. MAGDALENA. Mum’s very own rose, bred by Dad. A rose he’s spent the last twenty years nurturing.
‘That white one’s lovely, too.’
She points at the big bush he has just been weeding so carefully. She knows he’s proud of his garden, and compl
imenting him on it is an easy but perfectly legitimate way of getting him in a better mood.
‘That’s one of yours as well, isn’t it?’
‘Mm.’ Her dad nods happily.
She’s been able to feel his grief from a distance, she could feel it from the gate, maybe even from the other side of the wall. It doesn’t give her any sort of kick, because his grief is also hers. Dad has let his grief become his whole life. Screening it behind garden walls where he nurtures it tenderly, as carefully as the roses. She prefers other people’s.
All of a sudden she realises that she misses the group therapy sessions. It’s like a sort of withdrawal, and it only grows stronger as she stands there beside her dad breathing in the scent of the roses. She looks away, shuts her eyes, tries to shake off the feeling. His hand pats her back rather feebly. It helps, at least a little. She opens her eyes, leans her head against his shoulder and surreptitiously studies him.
He seems the same as usual. But there was something about the look on his face when he turned round, just before he realised it was her standing by the gate. She can’t recall having seen it before, but perhaps the shadows under the rose bush were playing tricks on her.
They start to walk towards the house, and by the time they reach the kitchen door she’s almost managed to convince herself that it was all just an illusion, a figment of her imagination.
Because if she didn’t know better, she would have said that the look she saw on his face was fear.
Chapter 28
Summer 1983
M
End of Summer Page 13
