Not invisible.
People can see her, but consciously or unconsciously they don’t want to see her. As if she were something that shouldn’t be here, a smelly junkie—best to ignore her. Otherwise why is no one looking at her? People always look at Isabelle.
She rakes her nails over her forearms. They’re itchy. When she looks more closely she sees two long, narrow cruciform scabs, running from her wrists to the crook of her arms. She scratches a little more and fragments of scab come away and get stuck under her bitten nails as one of the wounds begins to bleed.
Slowly she spins around in a complete circle. There is a track running towards the kiosk, another in the opposite direction, into a grove of trees. The track leading down to the sea passes through the spot where Isabelle is standing and continues further up into the campsite, at right angles to the first. She is standing at the crossroads and her wounds are itching.
*
Carina, Stefan and Emil are sitting very close together, hunched around the kitchen table. The rain hasn’t yet penetrated the alcove with its layers of insulation, but the far end of the caravan is in a bad way. The roof has been perforated in countless places, and the rain is dripping or rather pouring down on their belongings.
Stefan has stopped shining the torch over there because it doesn’t make him feel any better to watch the coffee machine melting or to see the rug his mother wove disintegrating from the inside as it absorbs the liquid. He sits with his arms around Emil and Carina’s shoulders. Emil is curled up in a ball, his cuddly toys pressed close to his tummy. Carina’s cheek is resting on Stefan’s shoulder, the top of her head nestled into his neck.
Sometimes, just before he falls asleep, Stefan is haunted by terrible images. When he was young they were primarily of the white figure and what would have happened if he had obeyed the call. Since Emil was born the focus has shifted to his family, and what could happen to them.
His brain tortures itself as he lies awake for hours, unable to shake off scenes of concentration camps, being separated from his wife and son on the platform at some dirty, wintry train station, or being dragged through mud by people who wish them harm. He forces himself to watch, while at the same time he is ashamed of the fact that he is putting Emil and Carina through such horrors, even though they’re not aware of it.
His only consolation as he lies there, his throat constricting, is that perhaps there is a purpose behind it all. Perhaps this is happening so that he will be prepared if the day ever comes—God forbid—when something similar actually does befall his family. However, in spite of all the variations on fire, water, and evil individuals with which he has castigated himself over the years, the current situation has never featured in his personal chamber of horrors. Nothing has prepared him for this.
‘I love you,’ he says into the darkness, and hears a clatter as the knives crash down onto the draining board; their plastic rack has been eaten away. ‘You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me.’
Carina nestles closer and Emil says: ‘Daddy, I’m scared.’
There is a moment in certain films that makes Stefan absolutely furious. A terrified child in an apparently hopeless situation expresses his or her fear, and someone says: ‘It’s gonna be okay. I promise.’ How the fuck can you promise something like that? Stefan certainly can’t. He tightens his grip around Emil’s shoulders, pulls him closer and says: ‘We’re here, sweetheart. We’re all in this together.’
The movement nudges the torch, and its beam illuminates Emil’s fortress, which is still on the table.
‘Emil?’ Carina says.
‘Mmm?’
‘How did you know? How did you know those creatures were going to come?’
Emil doesn’t say anything at first, and the only sound is the patter of the raindrops and a protracted hiss as yet another object dissolves
soon it will be us
and Stefan thinks he can feel a slight change to the burning pain in his back; he imagines that the rain has penetrated the alcove and that the fatalistic calm he has fought to achieve is about to be destroyed
we’re going to die, we really are going to die, all three of us are going to die, slowly and in agony, we won’t exist any more
He wants to run, to fight, he wants to sacrifice his life, he just wants to do something, anything at all.
‘Molly told me.’
‘Molly told you they would come?’
‘Mmm.’
‘Did she say the rain would come too?’
‘No. She said…’ Emil’s voice changes, shrinks from scared to pathetic as he breaks off, then says: ‘We took the hoses.’
The first drop falls from the alcove and lands on a loose piece of Lego, which collapses in on itself as the plastic softens. Stefan clenches his fists and swallows hard.
The gas cylinder.
What will happen when the rain reaches the fuel? It doesn’t matter. The metal cylinder is thick, and before the rain manages to eat through it all three of them will be dead, melted away like the piece of Lego, which is now a shapeless clump of plastic.
Emil must have realised this too, and wanted to unburden himself before it was too late. He is hanging his head in shame, and there is absolutely no need for him to feel like this now. Stefan strokes his hair and says: ‘It doesn’t matter, sweetheart. It doesn’t matter at all. Was it Molly’s idea?’
A faint hint of light passes across Emil’s face and he nods. ‘She said it was a good thing to do, but I knew it wasn’t.’
Stefan looks at Emil. Blinks. Looks again. The hint of light was nothing to do with a brightening of his mood. Emil still sounds just as pitiful as he makes his confession. But the interior of the caravan has got lighter.
‘Stefan…’ Carina whispers.
He sees. He hears. The rain is no longer hammering on the roof of the caravan, and as if a roller blind is slowly being raised, the room begins to fill with daylight.
*
It may be an old wives’ tale, but they say you can pinch yourself to find out whether you’re dreaming or not. But has anyone ever been in the middle of a dream, pinched their arm and woken up? As a testing strategy it’s probably about as effective as checking for radiation with a barometer. However, it has had some impact on Donald.
He hasn’t been pinching himself, but as the rain punches holes in the kitchen worktop above him and more and more scalding droplets land on his head and body, he has begun to reassess his previous conviction. He is in so much pain that he is ready to crawl out of his skin, and the experience is so physical, right down to the bone, that it is impossible to believe the body being subjected to this torture is only a dream.
However terrible it is to admit it, and however meaningless it might be as he stands at the edge of his grave, he is actually here. This is happening to him. He is sitting at a table next to his disloyal wife with two gay dairy farmers, and he is about to be killed by acid raining down from the sky. You could almost die laughing.
He can just make out the shape of Lennart and Olof as they sit there slurping each other’s faces; it’s the most disgusting thing Donald has ever seen. He doesn’t really have anything against dykes and queers, but he does think they should keep it to themselves! Normal people shouldn’t be forced to look at what they do.
But here he is, with Lennart and Olof snogging right in front of him. If he needed any further proof that this is not a dream, there it is. He would never dream something so repulsive; such images do not exist inside his mind. Unfortunately, however, they do exist in reality. And they are getting clearer and clearer.
Donald is about to yell at them, tell them to pack it in for fuck’s sake, when he realises that his night vision has not in fact improved; the light is returning. The darkness outside the window is fading, changing from black to grey to pale grey. It has stopped raining.
Lennart and Olof move apart, and Majvor opens her eyes, looking as if she has just woken up. Donald clenches and unclenches his hands, which look
as if he has stuck them in an open fire, because he used them to protect his head. The skin is blistered and broken, and some of the nails have been partly eaten away, exposing the angry red flesh beneath.
‘Fucking hell,’ he says. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.’
‘Donald!’ Majvor snaps. Her face is disfigured by long sores running from her temples and down her cheeks. A few clumps of her permed hair have come away, and are lying on the table in a pool of liquid.
Donald looks at the pool, at Majvor’s hair. The acid that has corroded the metal roof of the caravan ought to consume the hair in no time, but nothing happens. Donald cautiously touches the liquid with his index finger, but it has obviously lost its potency; all he can feel is a faint warmth.
‘Good God,’ Donald says, gripping Majvor’s shoulders and bringing his face close to hers as he emphasises every syllable: ‘Good. God. Jesus. Mary.’
A lingering, harmless drop falls from the makeshift ceiling onto his bald head. He pulls a face and emerges from the shelter. The roof looks like a colander, and through the holes he can see a pale blue sky. Donald turns to face the table, where Lennart, Olof and Majvor are huddled like three injured crows.
He has been a good husband to Majvor; he has always put her safety and wellbeing first. In spite of the fact that he worked his fingers to the bone to provide for his family, he was never an absent father. He has also helped out around the house whenever he had the time. Majvor is a lucky woman.
Now that he has cast aside the dream theory, he finds her disloyalty utterly atrocious. It is the real Majvor, the woman he has spent almost fifty years taking care of, who has rewarded him in this way. She has stood in his way, injured him, and finally bound his wrists! He looks at her, with tufts of hair sticking up all over the place. She is nothing to him from now on.
‘Donald,’ Majvor says. ‘Stop that.’ She frowns. ‘Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine,’ Donald says, rubbing a particularly sore patch on his forearm. ‘I’m going to go and fetch our caravan. Are you coming?’
Majvor glances at Lennart and Olof, which infuriates Donald. It’s as if she wants to see what they think, check if it’s okay. What do you think, my dear arse-bandits? Should I go with my husband? Donald swallows his anger and says calmly: ‘I no longer believe I’m dreaming. Come and fetch the caravan with me, Majvor.’
Puffing and sighing in the way that makes Donald grind his teeth, Majvor extricates herself from beneath the shelter. If he can just get her in the car, she will soon see that he has plans for her, oh yes indeed. But until then he will just take things slowly. Very slowly.
Donald has just turned to open the door when he hears something scrabbling at the metal. Then the sound of banging. A brownish-black hand is fumbling at the kitchen window, while another is hammering on the window above the sofa. The door handle jiggles up and down as someone or something tries to get in.
*
The rain has stopped. The light has returned. Peter is sitting with his knees drawn up to his chin beneath the mattress through which no moisture has penetrated. He is virtually unharmed. Molly has brought out a small mirror and is contemplating her face.
Isabelle is dead, she must be. And if she’s not dead, Peter doesn’t want to see the state she is in. He just wants to sit here and wait. Wait for this to end. For the hand that picked them up and placed them here to decide that it is time to put them back. He has no intention of praying for anything; there is no one to pray to. He is just going to wait. Look at Molly.
You belong here, don’t you?
I don’t know. Not yet.
There are pink lines where the rain trickled down Molly’s face, as if she has raked her nails down her cheeks. She contemplates herself doubtfully, touching the lines with her fingers and shaking her head.
‘I don’t understand,’ she murmurs.
Peter has spent all day racing from one task to another, on and on, as he always does. Now that he has given up, surrendered his will, it is possible to think simple thoughts, do simple things. Molly said something. Now he is going to say something.
‘What is it you don’t understand?’ That is what he says.
‘It’s not supposed to be like this,’ Molly says, tossing the mirror back in the drawer.
Peter considers whether he has anything further to ask, a comment to make, but nothing occurs to him. Instead he says: ‘Isabelle must be dead. Mummy is dead.’
‘Perhaps,’ Molly says absently. ‘Or perhaps not. Perhaps both.’
It is obvious that the question does not interest her. This could be regarded as peculiar, not to mention horrific, but Peter is incapable of summoning up such emotions at the moment. He just looks at Molly, as she flings her arms wide and says, with a despair he believes to be genuine: ‘I don’t know what to do!’
‘No,’ Peter says. ‘That’s just the way it is sometimes.’
There is a knock on the door, and it takes Peter a few seconds to work out how he is supposed to react to such a thing. Someone knocks on the door, you go and answer it. Before he has time to convert this knowledge into action, there is a knock on the window. And the wall. Then the sound of scratching. Scratching and tapping. Molly looks out of the window and her eyes widen. She crawls into the shelter, presses herself close to Peter and clutches his arm.
‘Daddy,’ she says. ‘I’m scared. I really am scared now.’
*
A pallet of herring. Herringpallet. Palletherring.
When the burnt creatures start tapping on the caravan and trying to get inside, Stefan can’t even manage to be afraid. He has already been so frightened, so convinced that he and his family are about to die, that he can’t do it any more. As he gets up to fetch the gun, he thinks about the herring order that he hasn’t managed to cancel. In a way it is a relevant thought.
The same thing happened in the summer of 2010, although on that occasion it involved potatoes. An extra zero had crept into the order, and instead of a thousand kilos of new potatoes, they ended up with ten thousand kilos. It was their mistake, and they just had to try to get rid of them.
They ran an advertising campaign with big colourful posters, customers got free potatoes when they bought other things, and in the end they dropped the price to fifty öre a kilo. They still didn’t manage to shift all the potatoes, which is where the relevance comes in. Saturation. Everything has a saturation point, when the pain receptors switch off, fear becomes ordinary, and no one wants potatoes, even if they’re free. Enough is enough.
That’s how Stefan feels right now. The bodies he can see through the window are horrible, but he merely registers this as he would register a seagull flying across the sky. He picks up the gun and discovers that the butt and other parts look as if they have been attacked by woodworm, crumbling away when he touches them.
The metal is largely intact, apart from certain areas which are corroded and discoloured. He pumps the slide backwards and forwards a couple of times; he thinks the gun should still work.
He hears the dog barking, and looks over at Carina, who is still sitting on the sofa with her eyebrows raised. For a moment he thinks her eyes are wide with fear, but then he sees that her lips are twitching as if she is trying not to laugh. She feels the same as he does.
‘It’s too much, isn’t it?’ he says.
‘Mmm,’ Carina says with a nod.
‘It’ll be the same with the herring.’
‘The herring?’
‘Yes, there’ll be too much. Too much herring.’
Emil looks anxiously from Stefan to Carina.
‘Stop it!’ he says, pointing at the window with a trembling finger. ‘Stop talking like that! They’re dangerous!’
‘Sorry, sweetheart,’ Stefan says, running a hand over his face; tears have sprung to his eyes without his even noticing. ‘It’s just that…we’re alive!’
‘And what if they get in? Do you think we’ll be alive then? Mummy! Stop laughing!’
*
Children are dependent on their parents. Not only for food, a roof over their heads and love, but also as a touchstone when it comes to interpreting the world, both intellectually and emotionally. As Emil looks crossly from his mother to his father, and they carry on laughing, it just happens somehow; eventually he starts laughing too.
He really ought to carry on being terrified, because the zombies are trying to get in, but with Mummy and Daddy laughing like that it all seems a bit silly and kind of pretend. Pretend zombies pretending to try to get in! And after all, that’s how it is. Almost.
Once when Emil was at his friend Sebbe’s house, Sebbe’s older brother was watching a zombie film, and the two younger boys sneaked a look. The zombies were super horrible—rotten and fast and strong, and the people didn’t stand a chance.
The zombies outside the caravan aren’t like that at all. Admittedly they look horrible, but they’re just scratching and tapping, like a cat that wants to come in even though it’s not allowed. It’s actually quite funny, but Emil’s chest still hurts when he laughs, because their screams are so awful. It’s like laughing at someone who’s broken their leg. Emil stops laughing and shuffles over to the window on his knees.
The zombies are moving away from the caravan, and Emil is so pleased that he can’t help smiling, in spite of the dreadful screams. He looks up and his eyes narrow. He saw what the rain did to his father’s back, and to the things in the kitchen. So how come the four white figures, who now only almost look like stormtroopers, are still standing in exactly the same spot as when the rain started? Surely they should have melted away completely?
The rain has left the window pane pitted and buckled, and Emil moves his head until he finds a point where he can see more clearly. He is thinking about stormtroopers; what do they actually look like underneath their armour? Will we ever find out?
I Am Behind You Page 33
