by Håkan Nesser
‘And you’re going to live there all this winter?’
‘Yes, that’s the plan. I have a piece of writing I need to work on.’
She laughed. ‘Well, if it’s being left alone you need, you’ve come to the right place. But forgive me. What would you like to drink? I sometimes forget that I’m working in a pub.’
‘You’ll get used to it eventually,’ said the man. ‘You’ve only been working here for thirty years.’
‘Thirty-two,’ said the woman. ‘We do a very good shepherd’s pie, if you fancy something to eat. That’s right, isn’t it, Robert?’
‘Not bad at all, it has to be said,’ replied Robert, eyeing his portion intently. He had only just begun eating it. ‘I’ve tasted worse. I can’t quite remember when and where, but I think it might have been in—’
He was interrupted by somebody else coming in through the door.
‘Good evening, Henry,’ said the woman. ‘Pretty rough weather out there.’
Robert shrugged and started eating. The newly arrived customer – a short, slim man aged about thirty-five – nodded a greeting to all three of us, and smiled when he noticed Castor, who had already stretched himself out on the floor in front of the radiator. ‘A nice dog. Yes, winter’s on the way.’
‘Can you wait a minute, Henry,’ said the woman. ‘I must just see to our new guest first. Would you like to try the pie? There’s steak and kidney as well, of course. And a few other things.’
‘Shepherd’s pie sounds good,’ I said. ‘And a glass of red wine, I think.’
‘Excellent,’ said the woman. ‘My name’s Rosie, by the way. It’s always nice to have a new face around.’
‘What’s wrong with our faces?’ asked Robert, his mouth half-full. Henry, who actually looked as if he might be Robert’s younger brother, or even his son, took off his jacket and hung it on a hook on the wall. I received my glass of wine and sat down at one of the four empty tables in the bar. Castor raised his head and wondered if he ought to move a little closer to me, but decided it was more comfortable by the radiator.
‘Anyway,’ said the man called Henry. He seemed a little more shy, somewhat more introvert than the other two, Robert and Rosie. ‘Mrs Simmons managed to get away to the hospital after all.’
‘Thank God for that,’ said Rosie.
‘And not a day too soon, if you ask me,’ said Robert.
‘Nobody’s asking you,’ said Rosie. ‘How’s George?’ she added.
‘I don’t really know,’ said Henry. ‘But at least he said he was going to take the opportunity of throwing out that sofa.’
‘About time,’ said Robert. ‘The cat’s been pissing on it for the last ten years.’
‘George is the nicest man I’ve ever met,’ said Rosie as she poured out a glass of beer for Henry.
‘Except when he’s watching football,’ said Robert. ‘Then he’s like a male gorilla with toothache.’
Henry sat down on one of the barstools. They continued talking about Mrs Simmons and George, the sofa and the cat, for a while. All the time they avoided using Mrs Simmons’s first name, whatever it was, and I wondered why. But I didn’t ask. I sipped my wine and started leafing through my Exmoor guidebook. I thought that if I really was going to stay here for the winter I would eventually discover all kinds of connections and contexts that I didn’t have a clue about just now. Perhaps Robert and Rosie and Henry had spent the whole of their lives in this village. Mrs Simmons and George as well. And the cat and the sofa. For several minutes none of the others seemed to pay any attention to the fact that I was sitting there, and I wondered if it was up to me to make some kind of move. To ask about something or other – but before I hit upon something a young girl appeared with my food. She was dark-haired and pretty, twenty-five at most, and somehow or other it was obvious that she didn’t really belong here.
‘You can take out those bottles when you’ve finished with the rest of it,’ said Rosie. The girl curtseyed, and returned to the inner regions.
‘It’s hard to get good staff,’ said Rosie to nobody in particular.
Robert cleared his throat and looked as if he was about to say something, but nothing came of it. Rosie switched on the television, which was attached to the wall high up under the ceiling. All four of us gaped at a sports quiz for half a minute – not Castor, he was asleep – then Rosie switched off.
‘Does it taste all right?’
I had eaten only two mouthfuls so far, but assured her that it was absolutely delicious.
‘She’s good in the kitchen in any case,’ said Robert.
‘Not only there, unfortunately,’ said Rosie, and I gathered that she had other sides in addition to the rose-tinted one.
I stayed at The Royal Oak for nearly two hours, and drank a second glass of red wine. While I was sitting there three other customers arrived. A young couple only stayed long enough to drink whatever it was they had ordered, but soon after they left a man of indeterminate age came in. He was tall and lanky with dark, slightly tousled hair, and sat down at the table next to mine with a pint of ale and a portion of cod and chips.
After a while we engaged in a conversation.
8
I once had a childhood.
A mum and a dad who were a dental nurse and a dentist. An elder brother who was called Göran and still is, and a younger sister called Gun. We lived in a little town in central Sweden full of small businesses, Free Churches, and spoilt youngsters who were cosseted and pampered but couldn’t wait to escape into the real world. Our house had a garden with currant bushes, a mossy lawn, an old apple tree and a swing that nobody swung on any more after Gunsan, as we called her, was run over and died.
We also had a sandpit that became overgrown with weeds, and a cat that kept coming and going. Not just one cat – there were several, but only one at a time. They were all called Napoleon, even if they were female and had kittens that we either sold or gave away.
Gunsan was only eight when she died: both Göran and I were at secondary school – he was in his third year and I in my first. Some families cope with a catastrophe, but others don’t. Ours didn’t.
The bus driver who ran over Gunsan didn’t get over it either. He had a mental breakdown after backing over a little girl and killing her in the car park outside the swimming baths; his wife left him the next year and shortly afterwards he hanged himself in a forest in quite a different part of Sweden. His name was Bengt-Olov, and much earlier in his life, before he started a family and became a bus driver, he had been the best centre forward we had ever had in our local football team. Big and strong, but nevertheless fast and unpredictable. He even played twice for Sweden juniors. At the end of the forties, I think that was.
Göran took his school-leaving exam and flew the nest, and I followed suit two years later. Mum and Dad were left on their own with their dental practice, their lovely old house, and each other. By then Mum had stopped working as a dental nurse – she didn’t have the strength any more.
But before Gunsan died – and before she was born – that’s when I had a childhood. That’s the period I’ve been trying to forget about for many years. It is also astoundingly good at disappearing again the moment it crops up. It was somehow so straightforward, so full of hope and light that I am blinded. Indeed, I have often been blinded and made to feel rather ill by that mirage that manifests itself for a fleeting moment and then fades away.
And nowadays, much later in life, when I unexpectedly bump into my old schoolmate Klasse, or Britt-Inger – or even Anton come to that, the first boy I ever kissed and the one who once massaged my pudendum in a people’s park that no longer exists – on such occasions I suddenly get a lump in my throat, and feel an urge to turn round and run away. Whatever happened to you? I think. I can’t bear seeing you. Surely you can’t be Anton Antonsson with that lovely laugh and those warm, gentle hands: whatever happened to him? Where does this miserable-looking middle-aged creature with a pot belly and a strained expression on
his face come from? And then Gunsan comes into my head, as I am lying in her bed under the sloping ceiling and reading Astrid Lindgren stories to her and I think – have always thought – that I don’t want that bloody childhood any more, that damned romantic glow; I don’t want to recall her half-closed eyes and her arms around my neck when I lift her out of the water and onto the jetty down by the lake and she half sings, half whispers the old Swedish folk song ‘Who can sail when there is no wind’ into my ear.
Or my mother’s and father’s funerals, I can do without them as well – there was barely a year between them and I am well aware that you can create cancer inside your body at any time if you try hard enough. That’s what my mum did as she sat at home in that melancholy house: she created cancer in her own body by thinking hard about it – it took seven years but she managed it in the end. And since my dad was buried – cause of death: a broken heart – I have hardly ever set foot again in that central Swedish town. On the very rare occasions when I have done so, I have always found it difficult to breathe, and thought that it’s like eating breakfast in the evening even though you don’t want to.
We set off shortly after midnight. It was Martin’s idea that we should start with a night drive, get to a favourite hotel in Kristianstad, have breakfast there and then take the ferry from Ystad. And that’s what we did, from a geographical perspective at least. But for some reason or other we began talking about Gunvald.
‘There’s something I’ve never told you,’ said Martin.
We had just filled up with petrol at that garage near Järna that never closes. Ahead of us was four hundred kilometres of the deserted E4, then diagonally down through Småland and northern Skåne along various numbered roads. It was the night between a Thursday and a Friday in October, dawn was light years away, and we could equally well have been in a space capsule on the way to a dead star. Aniara.
‘What? What have you never told me?’
‘I didn’t think he was mine. In the beginning I simply couldn’t believe it.’
I didn’t understand.
‘Gunvald,’ Martin elaborated. ‘I was convinced that somebody else must be his father.’
‘What the hell do you mean?’ I asked.
He laughed in that good-natured way he had been practising ever since he was forty.
‘Well, like in that play of Strindberg’s, The Father . . . It’s the kind of thought that crops up in every man’s mind. Just think! What if the father is somebody else? How could you be certain? And you can’t very well ask, can you?’
He tried to chuckle. I had no comment to make. I thought it was best to let him go on. I started to toy with a very special thought, but it was too early to mention it yet. We had the whole night in front of us after all, maybe six months in fact: there was no hurry. No hurry with anything at all.
But as things turned out I never took up that thought.
‘Anyway, please don’t misunderstand me,’ he said after a few seconds of silence, drumming lightly with his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘It was nothing more than one of those obsessive thoughts, but it’s remarkable how they can take possession of you. And the fact is, he wasn’t anything like me at all – surely you have to agree about that? People commented on it, don’t you remember? Your brother, for instance.’
‘If there was ever a person who was like his father, that person is Gunvald,’ I said. ‘Not in his appearance, perhaps: but if you look inside him, you must realize that you . . . that you are looking into a mirror.’
Martin thought that over as we covered a kilometre of deserted motorway. I knew that I had offended him. That he thought it wasn’t worth the effort of trying to conduct a sensible conversation with me. That he had overlooked that fact, as usual. He was a level-headed and discerning man, an optimistic person who actually believed that language could be a tool rather than a weapon; but I was a woman who swam and sometimes drowned in an irrelevant sea of emotions. Yes, irrelevant is the right word for it.
Or perhaps I am being unfair to him. That’s not impossible, and I reserve the right to be so.
But I couldn’t understand what he was fishing for. Did he want me to agree with him? To confirm that it was perfectly reasonable for him to have suspicions about how our first child came into being? That this was a new and interesting insight into what it was like to be a man? That it perhaps was somehow connected with his need to rape – or at least to have sex with and spray sperm onto – an unknown waitress in a hotel in Gothenburg many years later.
‘I’m pretty sure he’s yours,’ I said.
‘What?’ said Martin.
The car swerved slightly.
‘I said that he’s yours,’ I said.
‘You didn’t say that at all,’ said Martin. ‘You said something quite different.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at,’ I said. ‘How was it with Synn, did you have similar thoughts then?’
Martin shook his head. ‘Not at all. It was only in connection with Gunvald. I’ve actually spoken to a few friends about this phenomenon. Or I did so several years ago. They admitted that they’d had similar thoughts.’
‘When they had their sons?’
‘Yes.’
‘But not when they had their daughters?’
‘Come off it!’ said Martin. ‘None of them have any daughters, incidentally. But if you don’t want to talk about this, we can drop it. I just thought it might be worth mentioning.’
‘Were they academics?’
‘Were who academics?’
‘Those others who had problems with being a father. Were they university people?’
‘Why do you ask that?’
‘Because it needs a special sort of mind to come up with something so bloody stupid. Anyway, he is yours. I didn’t have any other men at that time.’
I hadn’t really intended to make a response as cutting as that, but it kept Martin quiet for several minutes. For several more dark kilometres along the E4. Further out towards that dead star – for some reason I found it difficult to shake off that image.
‘How do you think he is now?’ he asked in a somewhat more normal tone of voice as we passed the first turn-off to Nyköping. It was a couple of minutes past one.
I thought that was a justified question, at least. Gunvald had never been in good shape, not since puberty at any rate. He had difficulty in making friends, and started having sessions with psychologists and therapists while he was still at school. We suspect he tried to commit suicide a couple of times, but that has never really become clear. He was legally of age on both occasions, and hence everyone involved was bound by secrecy. If the patient gives permission then of course the veil of secrecy can be lifted: but Gunvald refused to do so. He lay there in his hospital bed, glaring apologetically at us, and pretended he had fallen by accident from a balcony on the fifth floor. What could we say?
On the second occasion he also spent time in hospital, but by then he had already moved to Copenhagen – it was when Kirsten had left him. It was labelled food poisoning, and he refused to receive visitors.
Kirsten had taken the children with her – my grandchildren – and moved back to her parents’ home in Horsens. And announced that if Gunvald made any claims on them, she would report him to the police. She wrote that in an e-mail to me.
I don’t know what she would have reported him for, she didn’t explain when I spoke to her a few days later. Neither did Gunvald, of course.
As we sat there in the car, driving through the night, it was exactly two years since that had happened, and Gunvald had moved into a flat of his own in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen – he had evidently got it through a colleague at the university. Martin had visited him twice in Copenhagen, and I had met him once in Stockholm when he gave a lecture at Södertörn. That was all. It occurred to me that if Martin doubted whether he was Gunvald’s father, I had as much justification for doubting that I was his mother.
I had met my grandchildren, the twin
girls, once after their father’s food poisoning. I went to their home in Horsens on Jutland, and stayed for three days. I spoke a lot more to Kirsten’s parents than to Kirsten herself: they were pleasant and I had the impression we were on the same wavelength. But then, I don’t have anything negative to say about Kirsten either.
Which makes the equation somewhat problematic.
‘Maybe he’s sorting his life out now, despite everything,’ said Martin. ‘It’s not up to us to pass judgement.’
I knew they were in occasional contact by e-mail and on the telephone, but Martin never said anything about what they had discussed. Work, presumably. The academic duckpond, both here and there. Stockholm and Copenhagen. Probably not as you would expect between father and son, but more likely between two colleagues – one young and ambitious, the other old and experienced. An arts assistant lecturer and an arts professor. Linguistics versus literature history. Yes, I’m pretty sure they restricted themselves to that neutral playing field.
On my part I endured so many sleepless nights for Gunvald’s sake, from puberty and for about ten years thereafter, that it very nearly drove me mad. That was probably when I lost my good looks – that quality that first fitted the bill for television screens, but then no longer did. And over time I had also developed a thick skin, hard and effective, and I had no intention of peeling it off. Certainly not. The day Gunvald comes of his own accord and asks me to, I might consider it: but not off my own bat. The impotent, misdirected primeval powers of a mother: I’m not going through that again.
But I still wondered what Martin was after, and couldn’t resist pressing him a little harder.
‘Have you ever mentioned it to him?’ I asked.
‘Mentioned what?’
‘That you didn’t think you were his father.’
‘Bloody hell!’ barked Martin, smashing his hand hard on the instrument panel. ‘Are you out of your mind? I only raised it for a bit of fun. Let’s forget it.’
‘A bit of fun?’
He didn’t respond. What the hell could he have said?
