The Summer House

by Philip Teir

  ‘Over there,’ Alice said now.

  She pointed at a big pool of water that had formed on the ground in a glade in the woods. Nearby stood an old trailer, grey and mossy, covered with a green tarp.

  They went over to the pool and looked closer. The murky water was filled with leaves. Alice leaned down and touched the water.

  ‘It’s warm,’ she said. ‘Find me a stick.’

  Anton looked around. Everywhere he saw blueberries and lingonberries growing. The trunks of the slender pine trees shifted from grey to reddish-brown where animals had gnawed away the bark. He picked up a branch from the ground, broke off two twigs, and handed them to Alice.

  They leaned over the water, surrounded by the smell of old leaves. The bottom of the pool was black, and Anton could see his own face mirrored in the water. His blond hair looked darker than usual. He looked like his mother. When Alice used the stick to stir the water, the leaves whirled up and shredded.

  ‘I don’t see anything. This is boring,’ she said, disappointed. She kept swatting mosquitoes away from her forehead as she stuck her foot in the water.

  ‘I don’t understand why they sent us out here to walk around in the woods. There’s nothing but a bunch of mosquitoes.’

  ‘Maybe they’re hiding under the leaves,’ said Anton, feeling a certain tenderness at the thought of the tadpoles swimming away. Occasionally he had this sort of feeling, though he didn’t know why. It was almost enough to make him cry, so he’d try to think of something else. Often he’d think about his classmate Amin, who liked to wear a wrestling mask in gym class. Amin was a serious boy, just like Anton, and they spent a lot of time together, even though they hadn’t really established that they were best friends. Anton would also think about Oona, and how soft she was when she hugged him, and how nice she was when they played Monopoly. She was stern yet nice.

  He stepped into the water, wearing his rubber boots and dragging his stick along the bottom. At first he didn’t see anything, but out of the corner of his eye he noticed a swift movement.

  ‘There!’

  When he leaned closer, he saw tiny black tadpoles. There were a lot of them, and they swam away when he moved his stick towards them.

  ‘We need something smaller to catch them. Go back to the house and fetch a cup,’ said Alice.

  ‘No. I don’t want to,’ said Anton, looking up from the pool. He had no desire to walk back alone.

  ‘But there’s nothing to be scared of,’ said Alice. ‘You can run the whole way. I want to take some nature photographs, and we’ll be able to see the tadpoles better in a cup.’

  He’d been nervous enough walking back from the beach alone yesterday, and that wasn’t as far. The whole time he’d told himself that he’d be seeing his mother very soon, and that had helped.

  ‘No. You go. I’m the one who found them,’ he said now.

  Anton felt a wild fury surging inside him, as often happened. It was a sense of injustice that came from his gut and made him want to shove his sister.

  ‘So you’re too scared?’ she said. ‘If we’re going to be here all summer, you’ll have to learn to walk around alone. You can’t be hanging on to me all the time.’

  In the end Anton agreed to go. The whole time he had a feeling that he was being watched, that someone was following him. He paused about halfway and thought he heard someone stepping on a twig in the woods, but when he listened closely, he heard only a rushing sound from the sea.

  Then he picked up his pace, almost running, with a feeling that fear must be visible on the outside of his body, that anyone who looked at him would see it.

  When he got close to the house he met his parents, who were on their way down to the bay. Julia was carrying two tennis rackets.

  ‘Mamma, I found some tadpoles,’ he called.

  ‘Can I see?’ she said.

  ‘They’re in the woods.’

  ‘Where’s Alice?’

  ‘She’s waiting for me. I have to fetch a cup.’

  ‘Okay. Then come down to the tennis court later. We’re going to play a game.’

  ‘Can’t you come with me?’ asked Anton.

  ‘No. You can go up to the house yourself. There are plastic cups in the kitchen cupboard. On the left when you go into the kitchen.’

  ‘But it’s creepy in there. I don’t want to go alone.’

  ‘What do you mean, it’s creepy? I stayed here for weeks at a time when I was a kid. It’s just an ordinary kitchen.’

  Anton thought about Alice in the woods and the fact that he needed to fetch a cup and then head back the same way he’d come. He had to go back and find her in the glade.

  He gathered his courage and walked up the path towards the house. After opening the door he stepped inside cautiously, as if trying to avoid frightening any potential intruders when he went into the kitchen. He quickly found the cups and didn’t waste time looking around. He focused all his attention on the task at hand and then dashed out of the house.

  As he headed for the road he thought about Amin again, and how hard it was to know whether they were best friends or not, because it wasn’t something they ever talked about. The afternoons simply slipped by without them making any decisions. In fact, maybe it was Iiris who was his best friend. She lived across the street and was in his class, but they never spent time together in school. Instead, they saw each other in the evening, or whenever their parents invited each other over for dinner. He felt closer to Iiris than to anyone else. Only a few days ago they had been sitting in his room, both of them with a solemn feeling because he was going to be gone all summer. They’d talked about how practical it would be if he had his own helicopter. Then he could fly back and forth and land on the roof in Tölö if they were going to meet. He’d wondered if he might be in love with Iiris, but something told him that was a different sort of feeling.

  One time he’d gone to his room to cry because he could hear in her voice that she didn’t want to play with him. He’d cried for a while, until finally he found himself thinking more about the fact that he was crying than about Iiris, because disappointment was something new for him. That night his mother had come into his room, as if she knew what was going on, and they’d sat there together, under the posters on his wall, and he’d thought it had been one of the best days ever because he’d been able to feel so much.

  Alice was gone when he returned to the glade in the woods. He made a few attempts to find her, walking around the pool of water where he’d left her, but after a while he felt a growing uneasiness and decided to leave. He walked purposefully back, quickly passing the empty summer houses along the road and heading for the bay to find his parents.

  When he reached the tennis court, there was Alice sitting on the grass.

  ‘Where did you go? I went all the way back there for nothing,’ he said.

  Alice had her headphones in and merely stared at him.

  Anton was out of breath after walking so far, but he forgot all about that when he heard a low rumble coming from the other side of the bay. It sounded like muted trumpet blasts at ten-second intervals. Alice didn’t react. Anton looked up at the tops of the pine trees in the direction of the sound.

  His parents also stopped playing to listen to the rumbling.

  ‘That’s odd,’ said Erik.

  ‘Maybe it’s a boat horn?’ suggested Julia.

  ‘It sounded closer than that,’ said Anton.

  After a while the sound stopped. Then all they could hear was a flock of seagulls somewhere near the shore, shrieking and screeching, as if they’d found an easy catch.

  His parents kept playing tennis all morning. Anton played with his mother for a while but tired of the game. Then he bounced a ball off his racket into the air. He managed to bounce the ball nearly fifty times before dropping it.

  The grown-ups were good at playing tennis. Julia hit ball after ball and ran around the cracked asphalt like a nimble deer.

  Anton sat on the grass, watching her. He saw
how light on her feet she was, and he noticed the way she pushed her hair back when it fell over her forehead. Clearly tennis was one of the things a person could learn somewhere, because he hadn’t known that his mother could play. His father moved more stiffly, and he had an annoyed expression on his face, even though he was trying hard to look happy. It was like when Anton visited his paternal grandmother and they were given some strange-looking food with a bunch of weird vegetables and he tried to be polite. That’s how his father looked right now, maybe because he was losing.

  ‘Shit,’ his father called from the court. ‘I need better shoes.’

  When his parents finished their game, they sat down on the grass and drank some water from the bottles they’d brought along. They were just about to head back to the summer house when a man came walking over to the tennis court from the beach. He had close-cropped hair, a flat stomach and a smile that seemed suntanned.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Do you speak English?’

  Julia nodded. ‘Of course.’

  ‘That’s great. We’re staying down there near the beach,’ the man said, pointing towards the bay. ‘We’ve been here a few weeks now. I apologise for the noise. We’re making preparations. I thought I’d come over and invite you to the party on Midsummer Eve. There’ll be food and wine, a bonfire and maybe some politics, if you can stand that sort of discussion.’

  ‘That sounds interesting,’ said Erik.

  ‘Uh-huh. It usually is. I’m Chris, by the way,’ he said, shaking hands with all of them, including Alice and Anton. He had a firm handshake. He smiled again and remarked on how wonderful the weather was, although the weather wasn’t especially wonderful.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ he said. ‘You’re welcome to join us next Friday.’

  ‘Thanks. We’ll give it some thought,’ said Erik.

  The man looked at Julia, who nodded and tucked a sweaty strand of hair behind her ear.

  part two

  the others

  1

  JULIA WALKED ALONG, carrying two bottles of wine in a sack. The heels of her shoes sank into the soft sand. It was five o’clock on Midsummer Eve, and the weather was now a little warmer. A fleeting warmth interspersed with cool breezes from the sea. They had driven into town earlier in the day to shop for groceries.

  ‘We won’t stay long,’ she said. ‘I want to write in the morning.’

  ‘You can’t work all the time. Let’s just see how the evening goes, okay?’ said Erik.

  He’d dressed up for the occasion. A sport coat, jeans, black socks, black shoes. Julia hadn’t said anything to him, although she had the impression these were not the sort of people they needed to dress up for. The man they’d met was older than Julia and Erik, but he had that type of carefree air about him that could be found among physically fit men of a certain age.

  She wished she’d worn sandals instead of heels.

  ‘We don’t need to both leave at the same time,’ she said. She was thinking how nice it would be to go home earlier and sit on the terrace or in the kitchen, and have a glass of wine all alone.

  ‘How long do you think we should leave the kids on their own?’ asked Erik.

  ‘They have their phones. They can always ring us if something comes up. And they can come over to fetch us if they want.’

  ‘Maybe there will be other children,’ he said, as he turned on his mobile.

  Julia had noticed that Erik had been looking at his phone more often the past few days, as if he couldn’t quite tear himself away from his job. She’d told him it was okay if he wanted to answer any emails. Maybe he should spend a few hours each day working, if he needed to. But then he got defensive and muttered that he was on holiday and was just checking Facebook. Maybe she should have been suspicious and wondered if he had another woman, but Erik wasn’t like that. He was too distracted, maybe even too childish.

  Julia felt depressed at the thought of having to meet new people right now, just as she sometimes felt depressed before a publishing party in the city. Social events always required effort. Yet she was a little curious about the man who had introduced himself to them. She wondered what these people were like, especially since they seemed to be staying in the Segerkvists’ old house, where her friend Marika had lived. Erik might be right, maybe a break was exactly what she needed after writing for a whole week.

  ‘Do you think they invited other neighbours?’ asked Erik.

  ‘What other neighbours?’

  ‘Surely there must be other people around here. I can’t believe all the houses are empty,’ he said. ‘What about that man, for instance? The one who plays tennis?’

  ‘Who knows,’ said Julia.

  ‘He mentioned they were serving food, right? I’m starving,’ said Erik.

  The house was one of the most beautiful on the shore. Julia had been there often as a child. Marika’s father was a paediatrician in the city. Marika was a year older than Julia, and she talked like a grown-up, as if she was trying to imitate her parents. She had thick, curly hair. That was what Julia remembered most about her, how her hair had looked when they went swimming or lay on the floor inside the house and played. Everything was always on Marika’s terms, because she had taken on all her parents’ attitudes and opinions about how the world should be organised. In Julia’s first novel, she had given Marika a different name, but many of the scenes were taken directly from her own memories, which often were about following around after Marika and doing what she wanted. Julia hadn’t personally analysed what she’d written, but when the book was published, several critics said the novel dealt with the sort of co-dependence that was typical for young girls. Julia had never dared oppose Marika. She’d spent all her free time with her, even though there were occasions when she didn’t really want to. She’d often had a feeling that she would have preferred to be alone. But then she would have had to explain to Marika what she’d been doing instead, and that would have given rise to lies that would lead to more lies, which would make Julia feel so guilty that she thought it was simpler to play with Marika. And they often did have fun, although Marika was given to strange outbursts of anger and jealousy, and then Julia had to suffer the brunt of her moods. One critic had described her novel as an allegory for the relationships that many women have with men who are no good.

  The house was a low, one-storey building, painted brown, with big windows facing the beach. Elegant sixties-style architecture, nothing lavish, but Julia had always liked this type of house.

  The new owners had put up a yurt in a clearing closer to the woods. It looked monstrous and yet childish next to the summery functionalism of the house. It was rather like an oversize Indian tepee.

  A man in his thirties with dreadlocks and dressed in baggy shorts was walking around the yard talking on his mobile on speaker. A younger dark-haired woman stood in the sand, using a towel to dry herself off.

  Julia and Erik were greeted by an older couple who emerged naked from a sauna and waved hello. Julia tried not to look at Erik because she knew if she did she would start laughing.

  ‘Nice to meet you,’ said the woman.

  ‘Julia,’ said Julia, stepping forward.

  ‘Ylva. And this is Roger,’ said the woman, giving him a light pat on the arse.

  They shook hands. Ylva had long grey hair that lay in wet coils over her breasts. She was suntanned and plump and looked to be between sixty-five and seventy.

  ‘Are you the ones who have rented the summer house?’ asked Julia.

  ‘No, of course not. This is Marika and Chris’s place. They live here. Roger and I are just guests. We’re from Borgå.’

  Julia felt the hair on her arms stand on end. Marika?

  Ylva looked Erik up and down, taking note of his jeans and shoes.

  ‘Are you city folk? Or do you live here too? Are you part of the movement?’ she asked.

  ‘We’re staying up in the woods in the summer house that belongs to my parents,’ said Julia. ‘I spent a lot of time here as a child.�
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  Marika looked older but otherwise much the same, with thick curly hair and eyes that seemed to regard other people with amused curiosity, as if she were speculating about what function they might serve in her life.

  They were standing inside the yurt, which was hot and dark. Oriental rugs covered the floor, and there were benches against the walls.

  Marika wore a tiny ring in her nose. She had the same freckles she’d had as a child. She gave Julia an enthusiastic hug, with an affected fervour. Julia thought to herself, maybe Marika has become religious. She wondered whether Marika had read her first novel. She tried to recall specific sentences she’d written, but found it impossible.

  ‘You recognise me, don’t you?’ asked Marika.

  ‘Of course I do,’ replied Julia.

  They all turned to look at her husband, Chris. He was barefoot, with an open and welcoming expression on his face. When he shook hands with Julia, his handshake was firm, just as it had been a few days earlier.

  Marika went to stand next to Chris, leaning against him.

  ‘I can’t believe you’re here, Julia,’ she said. ‘When Chris told me he’d invited a couple our age, I wondered if it might be you.’

  Julia hadn’t thought about Marika in such a long time, and it had never occurred to her that they might run into each other here. As far as Julia knew, Marika’s family had stopped spending summers in Mjölkviken sometime in the late nineties.

  ‘Julia and I used to play here as children,’ Marika went on. ‘She was always so much smarter than me.’