Majvor is about to go and speak to Molly, but stops in mid-movement. Molly is there, outside the caravan, her eyes wide open, staring at the four figures on the ground. Her hands are folded over her stomach, a smile is playing around her lips, her cheeks are flushed and her whole appearance conveys an impression of rapture.
‘I wonder…’ Olof says. ‘I wonder what she sees.’
*
The wound in Stefan’s shoulder is not deep, and a compress and a few strips of surgical tape from the First Aid box in the boot of the car soon stem the flow of blood. While Carina is fixing him up they talk about the field, agreeing that there is some kind of pull, something drawing them outwards, but that they will not allow it to separate them again. From now on, they will stick together.
Emil crawls onto Stefan’s knee, fishes out his Darth Maul figures and shows them to Carina. When she leans forward to take a closer look, Stefan notices the swelling on her cheek for the first time. ‘What happened to you?’
‘I had a fight. With Isabelle.’
‘Why?’
Carina sighs, and she glances over to the four figures, still lying face down on the grass. ‘It’s a long story.’
‘We’ve got plenty of time.’
‘I’ll tell you later. If I’m feeling brave enough.’ Carina admires the Lego characters and hands them back to Emil. ‘Listen, I don’t want you to play with Molly any more.’
‘Why not?’
Stefan looks at Molly, whose eyes are fixed on the middle of the camp, a blissful expression on her face. She is taking no notice whatsoever of her injured mother; her attention is totally focused on the figures on the ground. She is glowing.
‘Do as your mother says. And I agree. You’re not to hang out with Molly.’
‘I don’t want to hang out with Molly. But why?’
Carina gently puts her hands on Emil’s cheeks and looks into his eyes. ‘Because she’s evil, Emil. She’s evil.’
‘Hang on,’ Stefan says. ‘That’s a bit…’
Carina lets go of Emil’s face so that her hands can move. With uncharacteristically jerky movements she underlines her words.
‘No! It’s not going too far! There’s something about her and this place. And those…things. I don’t understand it, and I don’t need to understand it, but you are not to hang out with her, Emil. She’s dangerous!’
Carina is getting louder and louder, and Stefan realises that Emil is frightened. Carina rarely raises her voice, and the element of panic in her tone is making him nervous too. He rubs Emil’s back and asks Carina as calmly as he can: ‘What do you see? When you look at… them?’
Carina’s body is tense, alert as she looks across. She shakes her head, and there is an uncomfortable silence. Stefan tries to change the subject. ‘They follow a line. I’m just wondering…’
Before he can finish the sentence—what’s at the end of the line—Carina has clamped one hand to her mouth and is waving towards the field with the other.
‘What is it?’ Stefan asks.
‘I saw…When I was walking around the camp before, I thought…’
She starts the car and slams it into reverse. When she has shot back twenty metres, she puts it into first and swings to the right so that they drive past the three caravans in an arc. Carina edges forward, her eyes fixed on the field.
‘There!’ she says, braking and pointing in one of the directions the figures came from. ‘Can you see it? You can see it too, can’t you?’
Stefan peers through the windscreen, searching for something that is sticking out, sticking up, but he can’t find anything. He is about to say so when Emil shouts: ‘I can see it! It’s in the grass, isn’t it?’
Carina nods, and Stefan lowers his gaze. He starts by the car, then gradually moves outwards. And there it is. The grass has been trodden down along a faint track leading from the horizon and into the camp. Presumably it comes out the other side and continues, because it follows exactly the same line as the white figures he saw. Even though the outline of the track is unclear, it has obviously been used by several pairs of feet over a fairly long period.
‘It’s a track,’ Stefan says as the thought strikes him. ‘And it was here before. They always follow this route.
‘Yes,’ Carina says, putting the car into gear once more and continuing to circumnavigate the camp. ‘But that’s not what I saw.’
When she has completed ninety degrees of the circle that began at the track, she pulls up again and points. ‘There.’
Now that Stefan’s eyes have acclimatised and he knows what he is looking for, he sees another track leading either to or from the camp, at right angles to the one they have just discovered. It is not unreasonable to assume that this track also runs through the camp and out the other side. He peers towards the horizon; nothing has come this way, and there is no sign of anything now.
But something walks here. Something…tramples down the grass.
‘Do you understand?’ Carina asks.
‘Yes,’ Stefan says. He feels as if a door has opened behind his back, letting in a blast of ice-cold air. He holds on tightly to Emil.
‘We are exactly where the tracks meet,’ he says. ‘At the crossroads.’
*
Carina is pointing almost directly at Peter. She doesn’t know it, because he is beyond her field of vision, but if you drew a straight line from Carina’s index finger, it would miss Peter by only twenty metres or so.
He has stopped the car, but dare not get out. In front of him is a wall of darkness so high that he has to lean forward and twist his neck to see the top. In the rear-view and wing mirrors he can still see blue sky, but the windscreen is covered by a darkness so compact it is as if the glass has been painted black.
Ahead of the car there is still green grass, but it covers only a couple of hundred metres. Then the darkness takes over, and it is not a dark wall, but a wall of darkness; in spite of its dense appearance, it has a living quality, a depth. If he put his foot down, he wouldn’t collide with something; he would travel into it.
His body is urging him to do just that. The pull of the darkness is so strong that he decides to stay in the car; he is afraid that if he gets out, he will be physically dragged forward. It is as if thousands of invisible threads are attached to his skin, trying to haul him in with inexorable force.
Peter sits there clutching the wheel, feet braced on the floor as he stares into the gloom. The darkness stares back, and gradually Peter is able to make out textures and nuances. It is warm, it is moist, it is soft. And it smells of shower gel. Shower gel and disinfectant.
Anette.
Yes. It smells of Anette.
When Peter was seventeen, he was given a trial by the national youth team. By that stage his father had found a new woman, but he had abused her so badly that he had been jailed for four years, which meant that for the first time in ten years, Peter and his mother could walk down the street without feeling as if he was watching them.
Peter had found it remarkably simple. Only a couple of days after his father was sentenced, Peter was able to shake off the potential threat, and he felt free. This was partly because he already knew that he was capable of outrunning his father; he was no longer so vulnerable.
It wasn’t so easy for his mother. When she was informed, having not heard from her ex-husband for five years, it was less of a reassurance and more of a reminder that he still existed and was just as violent, if not more so. He became a reality once again, an evil colossus sitting in his cell and thinking about her, sending his hatred out into the ether and touching her. This made her so weak that she had to take time off work. She was signed off due to ill health for a long period, and eventually took early retirement. His father’s violence was so effective that it transcended time and space.
When Peter went away on his first training camp with the national youth team to Stockholm, he couldn’t help feeling guilty because he was leaving his mother alone with her demons. She persuaded him
to go, although her words didn’t hold much conviction. There was so little strength left in her that she was incapable of saying or doing anything with conviction, but he went anyway.
Because football was his life. Things weren’t going too well in school because he trained three evenings a week, and he usually had a match at the weekend. It would have been easier if he could have attended a football academy, but that would have meant moving away from Norrköping, and given his mother’s condition that wasn’t an option.
He turned up at school, but he wasn’t really there. He was well-built and good-looking, and to his embarrassment had been named one of the five ‘hottest guys in school’. Fortunately he was narrowly beaten into second place by Patrik Schmidt, who later became a model. But of course Peter received plenty of female attention too.
Lots of the girls would have liked to get it together with Peter, but there wasn’t really anywhere to go. He hardly ever went to parties because he didn’t drink, and on the rare occasions when he did go, he felt as if the conversations were entirely concerned with a world he hadn’t had time to be a part of. A couple of times some drunken girl had thrown herself at him and tried to snog him, but the smell of her breath put him off from the start.
He didn’t think he was gay. He would jerk off over his mother’s Ellos catalogues while fantasising about a world of slim, clean women with perfect figures, and so the ground was already prepared by the time he met Isabelle.
But football was the real focus of his existence. It was a language he understood, and a social environment with clear goals: to win the next match, to progress in the competition. As long as he belonged there, he didn’t need any other company.
He was a reserve with the A-team by the time he was sixteen, and had a permanent place at seventeen. Of course it wasn’t long before he was spotted by the national youth team, so one weekend in September he went off to Stockholm to show what he could do.
The training camp was held at Zinkensdamm sports ground, which Peter quickly learned to refer to as Zinken. They trained, ate and stayed in the area, and all Peter saw of Stockholm was Tantolunden and Hornsgatan. On the other hand, he had no desire to see any more. Because of Anette.
She had played for the national women’s team, but had been forced to give up three years earlier due to a cartilage injury. She now worked as an assistant coach with the various youth teams, among other things. Anette had medium-length blond hair, a square face, and she had put on a few kilos since she stopped playing. She was thirty years old, and looked just like anyone else, in the widest sense of the concept. She could have been on the checkout in a supermarket, a support teacher in a school sports department, or a local government politician. She was the kind of person you pass on the street without paying any attention.
‘Hello…Peter,’ was the first thing she said to him on the Friday afternoon after consulting her list. ‘It’s going to be hard work for the next couple of days—are you up for it?’
When she shook Peter’s hand, something happened. Her hand was slender, her grip was firm, and in a way that Peter didn’t understand he had a sense of here, now as they touched. It was as if he was holding something he had missed, but without knowing it. Perhaps she felt the same right from the start, perhaps not. She didn’t show it, anyway.
Saturday’s training went well, and Peter had no problems fitting in with the team, from both a technical and a social point of view. By the afternoon he had already acquired the nickname Hammerhead after crashing into a goalpost and getting up as if nothing had happened. Hiding his pain was something of a speciality for Peter.
That evening they all had dinner together, and Hammerhead ended up sitting next to Anette. They chatted about this and that, mainly her time with the national team and the goings-on at IFK Norrköping, but even though it was a perfectly ordinary conversation, there was also that undertone of here, now, just like when they first touched.
Peter assumed that the feeling was entirely one-sided, that he had developed some kind of fixation that he could neither control nor define. Surely he couldn’t fancy Anette; she was so much older than him, and bore more than a passing resemblance to his Swedish teacher, and he’d never given her a thought.
During dessert, which was ice cream with chocolate sauce, they were both chatting with their neighbours when Peter became aware of a sensation on the skin of his forearm; it was like a faint charge of static electricity. When he glanced down he saw that Anette’s arm was right next to his on the table, and that the hairs on his arm were standing up. But that wasn’t all. The fine, downy hairs on Anette’s arm were doing exactly the same.
He said something to his neighbour. Anette said something to hers. They looked at one another. Peter’s expression was completely open, searching, a question mark based on the electricity that she too must be feeling. In Anette’s eyes, however, there was a tinge of sorrow as she looked down at her arm, then back at Peter.
It would be a few years before Peter understood that sorrow. Understood that it was about age, about the fact that things can happen at the wrong time, when it’s already too late, but that you still have to pretend that it’s not too late. They looked at one another and a decision was made, even though they had no idea how to carry it through.
The group started to break up, and Peter got to his feet, his mouth dry. Some people were going into town, but not for long; they had training in the morning. Others were going to play cards or watch TV. Peter turned down a couple of invitations, said he was going to do a few laps of the pitch, which of course led to comments such as ‘Looks as if Hammerhead can’t get enough’, ‘Going back for a rematch with the post?’ and so on.
However, when he got out onto the pitch, faintly illuminated by the odd floodlight, it felt right. Because he had just eaten he could only jog, but it was nice to exercise in the semi-darkness, concentrating only on the movement of his body. Round and round, the fabric of his tracksuit bottoms flapping against his legs.
He was halfway through the fifth circuit when he noticed Anette, leaning against the wall by the players’ entrance. A tingle ran up through his belly from his crotch, then dissolved in his chest. He cut across the pitch and jogged up to her.
Her hair was wet; presumably she had just showered. A few damp patches were visible on her tracksuit, which was identical to his, as if she had got dressed in a hurry without drying herself properly. Peter took all this in, interpreting the signs as the tingle started up again and grew.
He was starting to get a hard-on, and pushed his hands deep in his pockets. Under cover of darkness he grabbed hold of his cock with one hand and held it against his body so that the situation wouldn’t get any more embarrassing than it already was.
‘Hi,’ he said.
‘Hi. How’s it going?’
‘Good. It’s a bit chilly, but…’ He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
‘Yes, it does get quite cool in the evenings.’ Anette’s voice sounded strained, as if her throat had closed up. She blinked and shook her head. When she spoke again, she sounded regretful. ‘Peter, I…’
Perhaps it was the fact that she used his name, confirming that this was really happening to him; it gave him the courage to act. He moved forward, took his hands out of his pockets and kissed her.
For one terrible moment he thought he had got it wrong; her lips were tense and didn’t respond to him. He was standing here trying to force himself on the assistant coach with his erection poking her in the stomach, and apart from the fact that it was so embarrassing that he wanted to die, it would mean that his career in the national team was over before it had even started.
A second later, everything changed. He had kissed a few girls, those half-hearted snogs at parties. But this was something different. When Anette relaxed, softened and kissed him back, she did so with her whole body, and all the warmth that was within her came pouring out through her lips.
‘Come with me,’ she said.
They walked along
the corridor to the changing rooms, side by side and so close that the fabric of their tracksuits rustled as they touched. Everything was in darkness as they moved away from the faint light on the pitch. When they were halfway along the corridor they could see nothing but the gleam of each other’s eyes, the faint shimmer of the reflective band on their clothing. And yet it wasn’t enough. Anette opened the door of one of the changing rooms and they went inside. When she locked it behind them, they were in pitch darkness.
The room was warm, and the moisture from the showers hovered in the air. The lack of light intensified the sensory impressions, and Peter was aware of the strong scent of shower gel, which he thought was Axe, plus the smell of disinfectant from the toilets. A tap was dripping, he and Anette were breathing, and he knew that now, now, but he didn’t know how. He groped for Anette and found her hip, squeezed it, but she moved away and said: ‘No. Get undressed.’
As he took off his tracksuit he could hear her doing the same. There was a faint crackle as she pulled her top over her head and the polyester reacted with her hair, sending a shower of tiny sparks into the darkness. The smell of Axe mingled with her shower gel, a girl’s gel, a woman’s gel that he couldn’t identify.
He heard her voice: ‘Lie down.’
This wasn’t how he had pictured his first time, this wasn’t how he had pictured any time, but when Peter lay down on the damp floor in the total darkness it felt better than he could ever have imagined, it felt right.
His penis was throbbing and burning so much that he thought he ought to be able to see it, that it ought to be glowing, but when he looked down there was only blackness, and he felt a breath of Anette’s scent as she straddled him, guided him inside her and began to rock.
It was so glorious that he stopped breathing. The concrete floor beneath him disappeared, the walls of the room dissolved, and it was only when flashes of yellow began to dance before his eyes that he realised he was feeling dizzy due to lack of oxygen. He gasped and thrust into her as deeply as he could; it was as if he was screwing the darkness itself. The warm, engulfing, all-forgiving darkness. His hands fluttered over her far from perfect body, with flabby skin here and there, but to him it was the perfect body, the body of the darkness.
I Am Behind You Page 27
