It’s nine o’clock, and I have been at work for several hours – which is how the days usually unfold, now. I get up early and I have a cup of coffee, then I go upstairs to what used to be the spare room and is now my workroom. I don’t call it a studio, because that isn’t what I do. I’m not an artist, like Mother: I’m a map-maker. I don’t deny that my maps are shown in galleries, or that people buy them, but I never think of them as art. I consider them to be functional, though not in the usual way: they are maps, but you can’t use them to drive from one end of the island to another – not unless you go very slowly – and their scale is such that you are more likely to get lost in the detail than to use them to find your way home. They also differ from other maps in the way they accommodate time. Every map has a limited lifespan, of course: roads are replaced and buildings are demolished, what was once woodland or meadow is now a supermarket or a car park. Maps provide snapshots of places, pictures that can last for weeks, or centuries, depending on how detailed they are, but nothing about them is truly permanent and there are times when what they leave out is crucial. My maps leave nothing out, though: they are so detailed that they are immediately obsolete, at least as navigational tools and, in that respect, I like to think of them as a commentary on how carelessly we look at the world. I’ve been making them for eight years now, in various forms: I began with this island, working outwards, one metre at a time, from Kyrre’s hytte, in an infinitesimal charting of every object I found, every rock and pebble and bird’s nest, searching – square by square, coordinate by coordinate – for the unseen, adjacent space that the stories unfold in. It sounds odd, no doubt, to suggest that the unseen could be mapped, but that is what I am attempting to do, not as fantasy, but as invention – invention, in the old sense, which is to say: revealing what there is, seen and unseen, positive and negative, shape and shadow, the veiling and the veiled. Some things can only be seen in negative, some bodies only become perceptible in the interference they create. About some – Kyrre Opdahl, say, or the huldra – the only location I can propose is what is not present in the map of where they do not occur. No one else knows this, but that doesn’t matter. People buy the maps to hang on a wall, as if they were pictures, but they also suspect, even when they don’t know why, that they are buying something that could be used. And that is what my maps intend – they try to give a sense of the world beyond our illusory homelands. Not for navigation, but for seeing. Because there are two ways of looking at the world and two kinds of seeing. The first is the way we learn from infancy onwards, the way of seeing what we are supposed to see, building the consensus of a world by looking out for, and finding, what we have always been told is there. But there’s another way – and that is what I am after. It’s the way we see when we go out alone in the world, like a boy going out into the fields, or along the shore, in some old story. When he’s at home, he sees what he is supposed to see, but as soon as he leaves the safety of the farmhouse, or the village schoolroom, everything is different. He tries to go on seeing what he expects to see, but something creeps in at the edge of his vision – and he begins to realise that, out here, anything can be the huldra. Every thing he knows, every illusory detail of home, melts away, leaving him alone with a world too strange to witness. The huldra’s world – the real world – that the farmhouse and the village schoolroom try so hard to conceal.
I have never discussed this with Mother – or rather, I have never told her what it is I am attempting to do – but even if she doesn’t know what I am trying to create, she seems happy for me. I am her equal now, not so much in her eyes, but in what she thinks is my own estimation, and that has made a big difference in how we live together. I am her equal, not because I have found something to do with my life, but because I have been permitted a terrible privilege. I have been allowed to witness something that could never have happened, and this event is always with me, like an invisible companion or a scar. I am her equal, in a way that doesn’t matter in the least, because I have seen through the fabric of the world that everyone else agrees upon, and I have been obliged to start again, with measurements and pencil marks and blocks of colour on the finest paper that money can buy – and that simple, absorbing work has given Mother permission to stop worrying about me, once and for all. It wasn’t something I would have thought of before, but now I can see that she was very worried about me, when she didn’t know what I was going to do with my life – not because it mattered to her, but because she knew it mattered to me. Now she feels she can relax – maybe we both do – because she knew, all along, that I needed something, so I wouldn’t just be her daughter.
I’m not making some grand claim to happiness or fulfilment here, though. I’m not saying I have a happy life, in the way someone else might understand it. I don’t have any other life, in fact, outside my work. I don’t need what other people seem to need, and I never miss what I have never wanted, but once a week, I take the track through the birch woods where Kyrre and Maia vanished, then I follow the Brensholmen road to the point where Kyrre’s track veers off, on the shore side. The house was never locked when Kyrre was here – he didn’t have anything anyone would want to steal, he’d say, though that wasn’t strictly true – and I keep it just the way he left it. If he ever comes back, it will be as it always was: the cluttered kitchen, the old pots and pans, the spare room full of engine parts and old clocks, the wide alcove off the hall that was nothing but shelves, like some troll-child’s secret library. I go once a week, and I keep the place clean, but I don’t tidy up, and I only move what I have to move, when I’m dusting or using the vacuum and, afterwards, I put it all back exactly as it was.
Usually, I go on a Wednesday, first thing after breakfast. I let myself in and I make coffee – strong, the way he used to make it – then I give the place a bit of a clean, and make sure it’s all sound. I work for a couple of hours – it doesn’t take much – and I keep it brisk. Sometimes, there are small repairs to attend to, and occasionally, when I’m in a sentimental mood, I bring out Kyrre’s old books and albums and flick through the pages, trying to make out who is who, or who might be who, in the photographs and clippings. Mostly, they show local events and family gatherings, but sometimes there are old stories out of the newspapers – local mysteries that kept people guessing for a while, thirty or fifty years ago, then got forgotten at summer’s end. I sit for a while and look at the photographs, trying to make out which of the young men might be Kyrre, and who, among the people standing round, could be relatives of his, or maybe a sweetheart. I’m sorry, now, that I didn’t ask him more about those pictures. Who was who, when and where they were taken, what the occasion was. I suppose I just took him for granted – though when I look back, I see that I was longing for answers to all those questions; it was just that I didn’t know how to ask.
I miss him, of course, even though I don’t wholly think of him as gone. Every now and then I turn round, or I look up from one of those picture books, and I half expect to see him coming through the door, or sitting in his big, creaky chair, surrounded by cogs and flywheels. There will be times when a thought passes through my head and I almost hear him listening in. ‘Akkurat,’ he will say, in that way he has. Or that way he had when he was living. I don’t think of him as gone, but I don’t think of him as living any more, and I know, if I ever do see him, it will be something other than a man that I will see – which is odd, because I don’t really believe in ghosts. I know he is dead, I am quite certain of it, and I don’t believe that the dead come back to haunt us, yet I still expect to see him, one day, back home and safe in his own house. It’s a kind notion, for me at least. I like to think there is something that he was working on, something he needs to come back and finish, and I like to think that I’ll be there when he returns, drawn home by the smell of coffee and a last promise to keep. I always think I’ll see him here, in the house – and I suppose, if the dead ever did return, then this would be the place they’d choose: low and set back from the road among it
s own stand of trees, Kyrre’s house is almost invisible, and though I have spent my entire life going back and forth between this house and my own, I never noticed, before, how isolated Kyrre was. Isolated – and safe.
I go to the hytte too, and I do my best to maintain it. I don’t like being down there for too long, though. I don’t really understand why, but I feel uneasy. It’s ridiculous, I know, but I can’t help thinking that I am being watched. Like you do in the woods sometimes, or when you’re walking out on the beach in the middle of the day, and you can’t see anybody, but you can’t quite shake off the notion that someone is watching, either. Of course, that’s natural – it’s far more exposed there and, sitting out front, on the lawn by the shore, I know I am visible to every single passenger on the big boats that chug up and down the Sound, just as I know all too well that I can be seen from the landing outside my room. Though I also know that there is no one there to spy any more. As always, Mother is hidden away in her studio and, without me, the house might as well be empty. Sometimes, sitting there on the old elmwood chair looking out across the water, or away along the shore, it feels as if the whole world is empty. All except for me, and whatever ghosts I choose to entertain – and I don’t entertain ghosts very often. Yes, there are times when I half expect Kyrre to come driving down the track in his old van; if I’m not careful, I can even imagine that Maia is about to return, walking across the meadows, looking for another boy to drown – but, mostly, I stay away from those thoughts because, to be perfectly honest, I am not sure which of them I think I will see. Or which of them I hope to see. In the summertime, when the nights are white and long, I might go down and read for a while, the way the visitors always loved to do, sitting in a deckchair at three in the morning with a book and a cup of coffee under the midnight sun. When I do, I read old myths and legends, fairy stories and cautionary tales, to keep the ghosts at bay. They need somewhere to be, though, and if you don’t find a home for them out in the wind somewhere, if you don’t bed them down safely at the edge of the sea or the once upon a time, they spill back into this world and turn into ghosts and monsters, resentful and neglected and intent on doing harm. I am no more of a believer now than I ever was, or not, at least, in the way people usually imagine. I just need to know where everything is, and then, when I am sure, to make a little space for the mystery. I have no better word for it than that, but it’s not a bad word, when all is said and done. I’m not crazy – I know enough, after all, not to talk about these things to the living – and I’m not an old-time believer, like Kyrre, but I am getting used to the fact that, in my house, there are shadows in the folds of every blanket and imperceptible tremors in every glass of water or bowl of cream set out on a table – and, some days, there are tiny, almost infinitesimal loopholes of havoc in the fabric of the given world that could spill loose and catch me out wherever I am. I know this – and I spend the best part of my time making such maps as I can, maps of the world as it is between one moment and the next, charging myself with the impossible task of finding, among the pencil marks and shading, some cold angle of meadow or fjord where old Bieggaålmaj, or some other restless and hungry god, gathers them all in, one after another, Mats and Harald, Martin Crosbie and Kyrre Opdahl, the girl Maia and the huldra she became, hidden away in the folds of the wind, where only the most careful of storytellers could find them.
NOTES AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank the Scottish Arts Council and the Creative Scotland Awards for their invaluable support at the research stage of this novel.
Acknowledgements are due to Dag Andersson and Harald Gaski, in particular, for their advice, stories and suggestions, much of which informed the writing of this book, and to all my friends in the north, for their profound generosity of spirit, immense hospitality and quiet encouragement.
Tusen takk!
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A Summer of Drowning Page 31
