The Living and the Dead in Winsford

by Håkan Nesser

  The two remaining messages were from Eugen Bergman and from G. I waited with G and read what Bergman had to say – I needed to write to him today as I hadn’t replied to his previous message.

  My dear friend, I hope you have arrived safely and that everything comes up to expectations. Stockholm is grey and miserable: I must say I’m a bit envious of you. Any old halfwit should be able to cobble together something readable while spending winter in a nice warm place like the one you two have ended up in. The only news from the publishing world is that we’ve got our furry-gloved hands on a couple of so-called celebrity memoirs – an ice hockey legend and a reformed murderer – but they’re not the kind of thing you’d want to hear more about.

  Do keep me informed: if nothing else let me know that all is going to plan.

  All the best, Eugen B.

  PS – by the way, some woman by the name of Gertrud something-or-other is keen to get in touch with you. Can I give her your e-mail address?

  Before replying I tried to trace some previous messages Martin had sent to his publisher, but as I was doing everything via the internet this wasn’t possible. Old messages are kept for such a short time, and as usual I hadn’t taken our own computers with me this time either. Anyway, I bashed out a few lines to Bergman to say that we had indeed arrived, that all was well and that he didn’t need to worry. I was writing six to eight hours every day, and everything was proceeding as it should. The nearest town of any size was Rabat. I also said he was welcome to give my e-mail address to Gertrud, and that I thought I knew who she was.

  When I was satisfied with this basic stuff and had sent it off, I opened the message from G.

  Where are you? What are you up to? No reply to my last message, it’s a week and I’m getting frustrated. Please contact me. ASAP. G

  ASAP? That meant ‘as soon as possible’, unless I was much mistaken.

  ‘What are you up to?’

  I felt a little bit worried, but just then two young girls came in through the door. They greeted Alfred Biggs politely, glanced at me and Castor, then each of them sat down at a computer with their backs towards us. Alfred Biggs got up and went to help them with something.

  I took a drink of my tea, and tried to concentrate. Stared at G’s message and did my best to convince myself that there was no need to worry. Without much success. I cursed the time we lived in, when it was possible for people to contact each other whenever they felt like it, no matter where they were in the world and what the circumstances were. And that people seemed to think they had a right to expect a reply no matter what. That you could contact anybody at all and demand a response more or less immediately.

  And that you could even do so anonymously. Things used to be different, I thought. In the old days you could batter somebody to death in Säffle or Surahammar, or indeed in both those places, and then escape to Eslöv where nobody would be able to find you.

  No doubt this G wasn’t anonymous as far as Martin was concerned, but that didn’t make the situation any easier. There was no mistaking the threat in the background, and if I didn’t reply it would presumably only make matters worse.

  Or was I making a wrong judgement? I went back and looked at G’s previous message.

  I fully understand your doubts. This is no ordinary cup of tea. Contact me so that we can discuss the matter in closer detail. Have always felt an inkling that this would surface one day. Best, G

  That was hardly any less worrying. I sat there thinking and trying to formulate something for at least twenty minutes before managing to produce the following response:

  No worries. Everything is fine, trust me. I am off to a secret place to work for six months. Will not read my e-mail on a regular basis. M

  I sent it off, and just after my index finger had pressed the send-key – or perhaps just as I was doing so – I had a sudden impression of having done something rather different. That it was not a question of a centimetre-square button on a keyboard, but the trigger of a gun. It was such a totally surprising and disorientating image that for a few seconds I was not sure whether or not I was awake.

  But then one of the girls laughed in front of her computer screen, and everything rapidly became normal again. Castor raised his head, looked at me and yawned. I switched off the computer and resolved to steer well clear of all inboxes for at least a week.

  Just as I was about to leave the premises something occurred to me. I turned to Alfred Biggs and asked if he was well acquainted with Winsford and its surroundings.

  ‘I certainly think I can claim that,’ he said with his usual faint smile. ‘I wasn’t born here, but I’ve lived here for nearly forty years. Why do you ask?’

  I hesitated for a moment, but couldn’t see that there was anything presumptuous in what I had in mind.

  ‘It’s just that I went past a house the other day, along the path that goes from the top of Winsford Hill down into the village – on the other side of Halse Lane, that is – and I saw a boy, or maybe a young man, standing in a window. A few hundred metres before you get to the pub – do you know which house I’m talking about?’

  ‘Just below the waterfall?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘An old, dreary-looking stone house standing all by itself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He sighed. ‘Ah yes. You must be referring to Heathercombe Cottage. It belongs to Mark Britton, poor chap.’

  ‘Mark . . . ?’

  ‘Mark Britton, yes. He lives there with his son. It’s a sad story, but I don’t want to spread gossip.’

  He fell silent, evidently feeling that he had said too much already. If he didn’t want to spread gossip. I hesitated once again, but decided not to ask any more questions. Not to allow Pheme her say here as well. Instead I thanked him for the tea and the internet and said I would no doubt be putting in an appearance again a week or so from now.

  ‘Remember that you only need to knock on my door if there’s nobody here,’ he said again. ‘The red door, with the name Biggs on a plate.’

  I promised not to forget. And so Castor and I left the Winsford Computer Centre with another question mark in our pockets.

  Mark Britton, poor chap?

  22

  ‘I think we ought to talk a bit about Rolf. What do you think would have happened to the pair of you if he hadn’t died?’

  A year or so had passed. We had a nanny for Gunvald, and Synn was on a waiting list for a day nursery place. I had started working again, and generally met Gudrun Ewerts on Thursday evenings at her surgery near Norra Bantorget.

  ‘Rolf? I don’t know . . . Why should we talk about him?’

  ‘If he hadn’t had that accident and died when he did your life would have been quite different. Do you never think about that?’

  I thought for a moment, and realized that I had occasionally thought along those lines, but decided that life was life. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But isn’t that always the way it is? If this or that hadn’t happened, things would have been different . . .’

  ‘That’s not what I was wondering about. Did you have visions?’

  ‘Visions?’

  ‘Yes. Did you sometimes imagine you and Rolf having a family? Having children, and living together for the rest of your lives?’

  ‘Yes . . . No . . . I don’t know. I don’t see the point of dragging this up.’

  Gudrun leaned back in her soft leather armchair and her face took on that expression indicating she had something important to say. That it was time for me to sit up and take notice. I had had a long working day – perhaps she was assessing my ability to cope with things. She clasped her hands under her chin as well: that was usually a definite sign.

  ‘It’s because this is a characteristic of yours that it worries me. You have no vision of your future.’

  ‘No vision of my future?’

  ‘No. You sometimes give the impression of not caring about your future, and I think that has been the case for a very long time.’

  I thou
ght again, and said that I didn’t really understand what she was talking about.

  ‘I think you do,’ said Gudrun. ‘It has to do with the way you switch off. That was how you reconciled yourself to the death of your sister, and that was how you managed to survive Rolf’s death. And those of your parents. What you really felt on each and every one of these occasions when somebody close to you died was so overwhelming that you couldn’t cope with it. But when you switch off your emotions you unfortunately short-circuit other things that you ought to continue dealing with. Would you say that you love your husband, for instance?’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘I asked if you love Martin.’

  ‘Of course I love him. What has that got to do with it?’

  ‘Do you keep telling him you do?’

  ‘Of course. Well . . . no.’

  ‘Do you often cry?’

  ‘You know that I don’t often cry.’

  ‘Yes. And I also know that you ought to do so.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be better to laugh?’

  Gudrun smiled, but soon became stern again. ‘If you can’t do one, you can’t do the other. Not properly. But you’re extremely good when it comes to smiling on the television.’

  I said nothing for a while, and she waited for my next move. The intention was that I should become angry, that was part of her method and I understood that; but I felt too tired to offer her any resistance on this occasion.

  ‘Why did you want us to talk about Rolf?’ I asked eventually.

  ‘Because I’m interested in when it started.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘If it was there before he came along. If it began with your little sister, perhaps.’

  We sat there in silence again, and I suddenly felt an urgent need to burst into tears. But I also knew that she was right: it was buried so deep down inside me that I couldn’t possibly get near to it. An iceberg of tears.

  ‘I cried a year ago,’ I said. ‘When I had my depression. When you began treating me.’

  Gudrun nodded. ‘I know. And it passed after two weeks. Think now: have you ever cried again since then?’

  I suddenly felt most unwell. There was a sort of suppressed panic inside me that was trying to break out, like an itch in a leg in plaster, and it was stuck so fast underneath that iceberg that all I could do was to grit my teeth and confirm that she was quite right.

  ‘Not that I can remember,’ I said.

  We talked about a lot of things during those years, Gudrun Ewerts and I. About Göran, for instance, my brother, and my relationship with him. Why hadn’t we supported one another when our little sister died? she wondered. Why hadn’t the family closed ranks and mourned as a unit? Why had my mother and my father slowly succumbed, one after the other?

  They were horrendous questions. Gudrun wondered if I was scared of the answers, and that was why I preferred to keep them under wraps. I said I didn’t know, and she suggested that perhaps it was the imagined answers that I was afraid of. By now I already had a considerable collection of dead bodies in my emotional baggage – but it had all begun with just one. Isn’t that the case? she asked. Isn’t that the case?

  I said yes, of course it was. It had begun with Bengt-Olov the Football Star backing his bus over Gunsan in that car park, and since . . . well, since something like that could happen in just a second, then . . . then goodness knows what else could happen in the same way. Just as quickly and with just as little warning. You could lose your grip and fall off a cliff face, for instance. Darkness and death were lurking on all sides, she knew that as well as I did, and asking unpleasant questions simply created openings for them to force their way through.

  Was that how I saw the circumstances in the lives we live? my therapist wondered. Was that why I was unable to lift up the lid and look more closely at the relationship between me and my brother, if we were to restrict ourselves to that particular question for the time being?

  ‘I sometimes find it more or less impossible to listen to your exaggerations,’ I recall protesting on one occasion when we were discussing such matters. ‘You are fishing in murky psychological waters. Göran and I are very different fish, and you’ll never be able to catch us using the same hook. The fact is that some siblings simply are that different.’

  The imagery was nothing special, but I sometimes tried to counter-attack her in that way and Gudrun always used to smile at my faux pas.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I think, in order to save some time,’ she said on another occasion. ‘One shouldn’t really take this kind of shortcut in therapeutics – after all, it’s the patient who should find the answers, discover them deep down inside and all that . . . But I wonder if the basic fact is simply that you loved your little sister above all else, and that after she was snatched away from you, you have never dared to love anybody else. Not in the whole of your life. You just haven’t dared to take the risk.’

  ‘That sounds rather banal to me,’ I said.

  ‘Who on earth has ever suggested that life isn’t banal?’ asked Gudrun Ewerts.

  We never got very far in questions associated with my family relationships. They cropped up, we talked about them, I agreed that there could well be a fair amount of truth in her suggestions – but even if that was the case I had no idea what I could do about it now, so long afterwards. She pointed out, of course – the way therapists do – that we needed to sort out the past in order to cope with the present, and that it was essential if I was going to be able to deal rather more successfully with crises in the future. My post-natal depression was a clear sign, but I was the only one who could decide whether I was going to take it seriously or not. Surely I wasn’t so naive that I thought this was the last of the crises?

  And so on . . . Towards the end of our conversations, the last three or four months, we only met every other week, and Gudrun admitted that our sessions were beginning to be reminiscent of chats between old friends rather than some kind of therapy. Old friends who had different points of view on some matters, and who liked to discuss them now and again in congenial circumstances.

  ‘I can’t accept payment from you any longer,’ she said at our last meeting. ‘It would be unethical.’

  We didn’t meet again after that. Those friends with the different points of view went their different ways, and I assume that’s the way it is as far as therapists are concerned. They meet people who have lost their footing, help them back to their feet, support them, then take the props away – it can take time, months and years, but when it’s over the patient staggers off and the therapist goes to the waiting room where other lost souls are sitting and suffering.

  I could have done with Gudrun Ewerts after that business with Magdalena Svensson at the hotel in Gothenburg, I know that. But she died at the beginning of 2006; I actually attended her funeral. There were at least three hundred people in the church, and I wondered how many of them were former patients.

  Anyway, I have thought quite a lot about my relationship with Göran, my elder brother: that was a button Gudrun often pressed. If siblings don’t have much in the way of contact when they are young, they are not going to have much when they are grown up: that is not exactly a contentious conclusion. And when I occasionally manage to transport myself back to my young days, to the feelings and moods that might well have possessed me at that time, they are as elusive and unreliable as feverish dreams; but if I try to penetrate them even so, all these years later, the only conclusion I can draw is that I didn’t like him. No, I didn’t love my elder brother, I really didn’t.

  But that is all there was to it. There is nothing more sinister behind it, he never did me any harm, he never bullied me. He was just irrelevant to me. Presumably because I was irrelevant to him. I have no special memories of him, nothing we did together, nothing he said on a particular occasion, nothing at all. He was present more or less like those distant relatives who usually appear on the fringe of old family photographs. He was always there, he was always
in the vicinity, but nothing he ever said or did or got up to is preserved in my memory. I realize that it is a bit remarkable. Perhaps it is even most remarkable, which is what Gudrun always used to say.

  Anyway, nowadays he is a secondary school teacher with two children and a wife he will never leave. She might leave him, but I don’t think that will happen either. In May, when those headlines had started appearing, he telephoned me and stressed that I knew where to find him if I needed him.

  He rang again when Magdalena Svensson withdrew her allegations of rape, and expressed the relief of both himself and his family.

  That was a bit much.

  It’s understandable that Martin and Göran have never had much to say to each other. We celebrated Christmas twice with his family when the children were small, once at our place and once at theirs.

  The experiment was never repeated.

  And if Rolf hadn’t died? If I’d never become pregnant with Gunvald? I don’t know, how could I know?

  When I ask myself just what it is that has gone so wrong, I can find no answers. Perhaps it’s just that things were meant to be that way. Maybe it’s as simple as that. Martin once said that the main reason why human beings have been provided with such big hearts is so that they can feel unhappy.

  I contemplate Castor as he lies stretched out in front of the fire and think that on that point – for once – I’m inclined to think that my husband was right.

  23

  The seventeenth of November. Eight degrees. Rain and wind in the morning.

  Several days have passed now. And more especially nights, as it’s getting darker. Light can’t manage more than eight hours per day in these parts at this time of year, while darkness holds sway for sixteen.

  It’s the anniversary of Gun’s death. I sat for a while with a burning candle this morning, thinking about her. It all seemed very distant, almost an old illusion. I don’t know if I really remember her now, or if it’s no more than images of my remembering her in the past. Copies of copies.