Soon after that, the fire brigade dug out Gerard’s body. Maybe they came across the merman’s corpse in there as well. In my mind’s eye I could see some firemen discovering the remains of something that appeared to be a small whale, half-charred at the bottom of a flooded root cellar, with the body of a fifteen-year-old boy on top of it; they wouldn’t have had a clue.
Neither the paper nor the local radio station mentioned anything about it. But maybe there wasn’t enough of him left for them even to guess what it was? That’s how I imagined it: his body must have been bloated with water in there, or charred. Or his remains ended up buried further down underneath the stuff that had caved in and so were not discovered.
Ola told me what happened during the last few moments while my brother and I were running for our lives. How Gerard poured petrol over the creature, and the creature yanked him quick as a flash into the cellar as it burned. Everything was ablaze, and finally the cellar collapsed.
Presumably they were in a state of shock, I thought. They didn’t even try to dig Gerard out, just ran off.
It was strange to be standing there with him in the shopping centre, listening to his story. I should have hated him, I thought, for everything they’d done to me and my brother. But I did not feel any hatred. Just a sort of resignation, a sense that we were born to become who we are and never had any real choice. In the end there was something that linked us: the merman. There were only a few of us who knew of his existence. Ola was one of them, and in some strange way it tied us together.
Later that spring I found out what had happened to Dad. It was via Tommy. I hadn’t had any contact with him since I left Falkenberg. I wasn’t up to it. But finally I rang him up.
It was in mid-May and he sounded overjoyed to hear my voice again. He asked me a million questions about how I was doing and when we would see each other again, and I couldn’t answer any of them. We were heading in different directions, I thought, and maybe we would never see each other again.
Tommy told me what he was up to, about life in Glommen, how things were at school and that he could hardly wait until school was over. He was going to get a permanent job on a boat that summer, he said, not his brothers’ – he didn’t want that – but on a neighbour’s. He told L.G., who seemed sad I had moved away, about Jessica and Carro who had been shocked about Gerard’s death for several months, about Ola and Peder who got sent to borstal in Växjö after New Year. He said he’d bumped into the Professor in town. He’d got a new temporary job at the library and was still living with his mum.
It was towards the end of our conversation that he suddenly mentioned Dad. My suspicions about that junkie guy who was at our place one evening turned out to be right. It was him and Gerard who had forced Dad to leave town. According to what Tommy had heard from his brothers, they had taken him up to Gothenburg. In the car, Gerard suddenly held a slaughterman’s bolt gun up to Dad’s head and pulled a woolly hat over his face, and they drove off with him to a flat somewhere. Tommy didn’t know what they did to him there, but at any rate it was nasty enough to make Dad realise Gerard was capable of doing absolutely anything. Soon afterwards he cleared off. Gerard and the junkie guy took over some of his business dealings, including a whole distribution network for black-market cigarettes.
I was only half-listening to what Tommy was saying. I couldn’t take in any more pain. And Dad was basically already gone from my life. Maybe he was in Gothenburg, where he knew loads of people, or maybe he was back in Falkenberg now that Gerard was gone, or maybe he was in prison? I hoped he was all right wherever he was – he was still my dad.
‘Don’t you want to know what happened at the abandoned cottage?’ I asked when Tommy stopped talking. ‘With the merman?’
Tommy hadn’t said a single word about the creature, and that seemed strange after everything we’d been through.
‘I don’t know,’ he said, ‘but I figured you were there when I heard about Gerard.’
‘He died saving Robert’s life.’
Tommy was silent, and I realised he didn’t want to talk about it any more. Maybe he was scared; maybe it had something to do with his brothers. I didn’t know. But that’s how it was, I thought: we would never mention what happened again. He wanted to move on with his life there in Glommen. So one story had come to an end and a new one had begun – one that no longer included Tommy.
The sounds from the house were growing stronger as his voice faded out, as if he was gradually fading and disappearing from my life. Lars-Inge calling to Gunnar from the basement. Annie rattling around in the kitchen. I had no idea how long I’d be staying here. There was just over a month until school would be out, and after that everything was up in the air.
There was only one thing I was afraid of, I thought as I sat there with the phone pressed to my ear, and that was that I might not get to see Robert again. It was so typical of my brother to forget to write his return address on the letter or to enclose a phone number where I could reach him. I was afraid that little mistakes like those could have huge consequences. That life would lead us so far apart that we’d never find our way back again. That was what terrified me. That there was no real beginning, and no real ending either.
I dreamt about my brother every night that spring, and whatever I did reminded me of him. He was the one I would choose before anyone else in any situation; he was like the whole meaning of my life. At the abandoned cottage I wouldn’t have wavered for a second if I really had been faced with a choice. I would have given up the creature for Robert without batting an eyelid.
But I didn’t have a chance. The creature did it for me. The merman made the choice. He was the one who got them to let Robert go; he was the one who lured them to him, even though he must have known how things would turn out.
Sometimes it was as if I didn’t trust my own memories. As if I’d just imagined everything. But of course that wasn’t true. The merman had existed; I’d met him and got to know him, and I was thankful. He had taught me something that could not be put into words, and I would never be able to explain that to anyone in an ordinary language.
As I lay on my bed in my room I could hear him within me. The voice that flowed through me and comforted me. And when I closed my eyes I could see him, luminescent in the water in the old root cellar... how he did tricks for me, reached out his arm and touched my hand. I could feel the warmth from his body as he floated a few inches below the surface, the warmth that filled the space, spreading into me like an ancient force. I saw the smile in his eyes, his big dark eyes, his gills, claws and that powerful tail fin... and I knew those images would be imprinted in me for the rest of my life.
THE MERMAN
Pegasus Books LLC
80 Broad Street, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10004
Translation copyright © 2013 by Ellen Flynn
Original copyright © 1988 by Carl-Johan Vallgren
First Pegasus Books hardcover edition December 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole or in part
without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers who may quote
brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine, or electronic
publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or other, without written
permission from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-60598-912-9
ISBN 978-1-60598-913-6 (e-book)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
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The Merman Page 22
