Black River

by Will Dean

  ‘You did?’

  ‘I lasted exactly one month,’ he says. ‘On the last day of my probation I was told there was no capacity at Paradise Spa. They said it wasn’t me, it was a resource issue.’ He looks into the window of the beauty parlour with venom in his baby-blue eyes. Adverts for facials and manicures and pedicures and massage. An artificial bird of paradise plant behind the glass, its colours faded from this incessant June sunlight.

  ‘Can’t be easy selling beauty treatments in Gavrik,’ I say.

  Freddy snorts. ‘Paradise Spa makes a fortune,’ he says. ‘More even than the health-food shop, which in reality sells about a ton of muscle-building protein shakes and not much else.’

  We head past the liquorice factory but I can’t look the place in the eye, I can’t look at that right chimney, I doubt I’ll ever be able to.

  ‘When was the last time you saw Tammy?’ I ask.

  He ignores me. ‘Paradise Spa hired someone else the same day they let me go. The very same day. Wasn’t any resource issue, was a “me” issue. So now I go there once a month after payday for a pedicure and a foot massage, to show them I’m doing just fine without them.’

  We walk past the ruin of St Olov’s church and crest the hill. His bike wheels whirr. I’ve found this a good way to get information: side-by-side rather than face-to-face.

  ‘They shouldn’t have done that.’ I say. ‘They should have told you the truth.’

  He looks at me, his wide, smooth cheeks glistening with sweat after the hill climb, like he’s covered in a fine layer of margarine. ‘Thank you,’ he says.

  ‘Tammy,’ I say.

  ‘We matched on Tinder back in early March,’ he says. ‘We meet and it all goes pretty well I guess. But I could tell, you know.’

  ‘Tell what?’

  ‘The friend zone,’ he says, his large blue eyes rolling around in their sockets. ‘Did we date? Difficult to say. I’d call it hanging out. I really liked her, I thought she was pretty, but she just wanted to chat. A good friend of hers had moved away someplace south and she was lonely.’

  It’s like I’ve been punched in the kidneys.

  ‘She said that?’

  He stops his bike and turns to face me. He has a rocket-ship lapel badge pinned to his shirt and it shines in the sun.

  ‘Was it you who left town?’ he says.

  I nod.

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Sorry.’ But he looks like he’s suppressing a smile.

  ‘Yeah, me too.’

  And then I catch him staring at my ears. To be honest I can’t feel too bad about this as I’ve been staring at his tiny baby ears and his stubble-free cheeks.

  ‘You have hearing aids,’ he says. ‘You have two hearing aids.’

  ‘I can hear you pretty good,’ I say.

  He leans in real close and says loudly, right next to my ear, ‘I’ll talk clearer, I didn’t know.’

  I pull back almost stepping into traffic.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Just speak normally.’

  He scratches his ear and really it’s not much bigger than a white chocolate button.

  ‘Suburbia,’ he says, pushing his BMX over a speed bump. He’s right. We’ve entered Lena’s suburb, the start of it. Neat hedges and parked Volvos and people on ladders painting their timber cladding while the weather holds out.

  ‘You live around here?’ I ask.

  ‘Five minutes,’ he says, his face half in shadow, his features somehow good-looking again for a split second.

  The smell of barbecued meat wafts over hedges and through fences and makes my mouth water. I can judge the food pretty well. Spicy pork sausages from a semi-detached place with a carport, and then mackerel from a bungalow with a cat sleeping on a brick wall, sun washing over its ginger fur.

  ‘This way,’ says Freddy, turning right.

  He’s taking me to Lena’s house?

  ‘I live behind that big hedge.’

  Looks like a tightly-packed row of towering Christmas trees, a thick barrier of festive spruce except these have no angels or stars on their tops.

  ‘I should get it cut,’ he says. ‘It’s been too tall since Mamma passed on.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I lost my mother recently too.’

  He ignores this.

  ‘But it’s too tall for me to deal with myself,’ he says. ‘I need to get a man in. A man with tools.’

  ‘Freddy, do you have any idea where Tammy could be? Have you seen or heard from her in the past week?’

  He approaches the overgrown Christmas-tree hedge and it looks impenetrable. A green wall. A sample from Utgard.

  ‘I spoke to her a few weeks ago when I picked up my panang curry. Seemed okay then. Extraordinarily small feet. Quite beautiful. Had to order her shoes in specially. She was a nice person.’

  ‘Was?’ I say.

  ‘Is,’ he says, squeezing through scratchy overgrown branches and opening the barely visible gate and ushering me into his garden. The branches meet overhead so the gate itself feels like the opening of a tunnel.

  ‘I can’t…’

  ‘Come on,’ he says.

  ‘You want a glass of milk?’

  The house is pale yellow and there’s a large kidney-shaped sandpit in the corner of the lawn with a lid over it. A rock sits on top of the lid and a white cat sits on top of the rock. Everything on this side of the massive hedge is dark. Shady. I know I should look around, I should see if there are any clues, any signs of Tammy, but I do not feel at ease with Freddy.

  ‘You know if anyone was angry with Tammy?’ I ask. ‘Anyone following her, threatening her?’

  ‘Thing is,’ says Freddy, resting his blue bike against the wooden wall of the house. ‘Tammy spoke her mind real clear. Did she make people angry? Every single week of the year. If someone upset her she’d tell them so. If someone insulted her she’d insult them right back. With interest. Lots of people in Gavrik town have had run-ins with Tammy but they still order her Thai food, don’t they.’

  ‘Yes they do,’ I say.

  He unlocks his door and five cats run outside. I can’t see the street from behind this wall of trees. Like it’s a different realm back here. I can’t smell people’s barbecues and I can’t hear any cars or kids laughing.

  I should have a look inside his house. I must.

  ‘You want to come in for milk?’ he says. ‘Or whisky?’ He smiles and his face flashes to handsome again for a moment. ‘You’ll need to take your shoes off, no shoes inside the house.’ He smiles. ‘Mamma’s rules.’

  He stares down at my sneakers. Looks at one foot then the other.

  ‘I have to go,’ I say, and then I look past him into his hallway. I see a shoe rack and a shoehorn and then poking out from beneath his Ikea rug, arranged at an ungodly angle, broken, lifeless, cut-off.

  A pair of naked feet.

  9

  ‘Tammy!’ I scream, barging past Freddy to get to her.

  But the rug is flat. There is no person, no bulge. Just a pair of severed feet.

  I pull the rug.

  A Persian cat hisses from the foot of the stairs.

  Dust. Two feet. Two artificial feet.

  ‘What the fuck?’ I say.

  ‘You thought this was Tammy?’ he says. ‘What do you think of me?’

  I look around the room in one glance, checking exits, weapons. There’s nothing much here. A table. A stuffed bookcase. A staircase. Two more cats. The room is dark. All the curtains and blinds are pulled.

  ‘I thought it was Tammy.’

  ‘Well, it isn’t,’ he says, picking up each foot as if it were real, not applying too much pressure, holding each one gently. ‘These are high-grade silicon.’

  One has painted nails. Pale pink.

  ‘They’re normal. Common. I practice massage and other treatments. Don’t look at me like that.’

  I see his moon-shaped face with its button ears and its squidgy nose and its blond ringlets.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I
say. ‘I just want to find my friend. I’m very tired, I made a mistake. I’m sorry.’

  He places each silicon foot – they look so realistic with their arches and nails and heels – he puts them on his shoe rack like that’s perfectly normal. One has an artificial bunion.

  I retreat back out to the garden.

  He stands in the doorway holding a cat that’s purring so loud even I can hear it.

  ‘If she drops by I’ll let you know,’ he says, one side of his lip curling up again.

  I nod and retreat and now I’m on the path, in the shadow of his overgrown Christmas-tree hedge, mosquitos buzzing in the air between me and him, between my normal face and his toddler face. There’s the sandpit in one corner and it looks more like a double coffin, his and hers. King-size. And there’s a garage in the other corner, the door mottled with pollen, a brass padlock securing it shut.

  ‘Bye now,’ he says as I reach his gate.

  I walk fast and then I jog, my feet beating heavy on the path. Men are mowing their lawns wearing radio ear-protectors with tiny aerials, and others are lighting their charcoal grills. I can smell accelerants. Petrol and firelighters and lamp oil bought from ICA or the Q8 gas station outside town. It’s that time of year. People buy flammable stuff and set it alight even though the whole town’s as dry as a tinderbox, and then they incinerate the defrosted elk they executed and skinned and gutted and butchered last winter.

  Bertil Hendersson, the bee man with the limp, is up a ladder poking around in the space under someone’s roof. His truck is parked on the kerb with an oversize hive strapped down securely in the flatbed. Bertil has an army of kids and grandkids, his own hive of sorts, and if my memory serves me correctly, three of his kids teach at Gavrik Gymnasium School. Seem to remember his wife left him years back owing to his flirting with younger women. She moved to Copenhagen. Just upped and left overnight. Left all her belongings in Gavrik and nobody ever heard from her again. Good for her. Bertil’s wearing a beekeeper net over his head but his hands are uncovered. I can’t see the swarm but I can sense it. A furious cloud of armed, flying critters being attacked by an old man on a ladder. I give them a wide berth and reach Lena’s house. Her Saab’s in the drive.

  ‘You hungry?’ she says, opening the front door.

  I step up and place my hand on hers. I could cry. I could pass out with exhaustion and with the fear that is running through every branch of my nervous system right now.

  ‘We’ll go back out once you’ve eaten,’ she says. ‘I’ve got an order of flyers coming from our printers tomorrow, pulled in a favour, that’ll cost me, but we printed three hundred or so amateur ones in the office. We’ll plaster Storrgatan with them. Make everyone see.’

  I walk into the kitchen and sit down and Lena pours me a glass of water from a big glass jug. It has lemon slices in it.

  ‘You drink that and then take a twenty-minute power nap, you hear? Then the soup will be ready and I’ll be ready. I’ve made up your bed – it’s nothing fancy but you’ll rest okay out there. I’d have you in the house but Johan’s locked up the spare room. It’ll be fine – you’ve got a compost toilet in the friggebod, not five stars but it works.’ She throws me a blanket.

  I mouth, ‘Thanks’.

  The friggebod looks like a giant dog kennel. There’s a single wooden-bench bed with space underneath for suitcases, not that I have anything like that. There’s a fold-out Ikea table for breakfast or writing. There’s a lamp and two chairs and then there’s a cupboard-size room at the back with a compost toilet and a wash bowl. No plumbing.

  I lie on the bed and cover myself with the blanket. My hair still smells of smoke from that burning turquoise American car and I can hardly believe that was just yesterday. My life has changed so much from then to now. I lie staring at the bleached pine ceiling and I think back to the last time I saw Tam. Karlstad railway station. The briefest of hugs. Four months ago. Since then we’ve chatted, emailed, FaceTimed. We’ve sent texts and photos and stupid emoji flurries, but we haven’t actually seen each other. And now I can only imagine her in the worst possible places. I want to think of her in Stockholm in a café or in some lakeside summerhouse with a guy. But as much as I shake the images away I keep seeing her folded up inside a car boot, weighed down in a river, locked inside a meat freezer, trapped in a suitcase, alone in an Utgard forest grave. And with this Kommun as vast as it is, with the forests as big as capital cities, and the farms as sprawling as Midwest prairies, how can I ever search it all? How can I get more people to help me?

  There’s a box of matches and an Ikea lantern so I light the scented candle inside and try to focus on the flame instead of my fears. The light helps. The fire flickers and dances. Scent of cut grass. Soon my eyes are heavy and I’m thinking of Dad. Of the awful rock CDs he played on long car journeys, of the feel of his rough palms when he covered my eyes to show me my first full-size bike. The flame. My dad. Nothing else.

  I wake.

  Bolt upright. Tammy? News?

  ‘Tuva,’ says Lena from the friggebod’s door. ‘I let you sleep a while but I thought you’d want me to wake you.’

  I stretch and my mouth is as dry as a tennis ball covered in talcum powder.

  ‘Shit,’ I say, sitting up. ‘How long was I out?’

  ‘Twenty minutes. Just a power nap. Soup’s ready.’

  ‘Any news?’ I say.

  She shakes her head.

  We walk through, me rubbing my eyes, and the world, despite still being light at 7pm, is cool. That’s Swedish summers for you. The clouds left town hours ago and now the temperature’s dropped and I need more than just this T-shirt.

  ‘It’s my late aunt’s soup,’ says Lena. ‘She died a year ago and I’m still eating her soup.’

  My brain takes some time to process this. Lena ladles the thick, orange liquid into a bowl. It smells wonderful. Then she swirls cream into the soup and drops sliced chives on top.

  ‘Sweet potato and chilli. It’s what we need.’

  There’s bread on the table: an oven-warm baguette pulled apart into chunks, and a stack of Krisprolls.

  We dip our spoons and eat at the same time.

  The soup is hot and the creamy luxuriant texture coats my mouth with goodness. I get a kick from the chilli after the second mouthful, a welcome background heat that warms me up from the very soles of my feet. There’s something about home-cooked food when you’re not a natural homemaker. It’s the best thing in the whole goddam world. It’s the love and the domesticated nature of the thing. It’s the care. The effort. I’ve tried to cook in the past and it always makes me sad. Takes me straight back to my teenage years trying to cook for Mum, trying to compensate, trying to be an only parent of sorts. Failing. Her not eating what I cooked. But this is different. I adore other peoples’ home-cooked food. Such a pleasure. I’m warming up and I’d thank Lena but she can read it clearly all over my face.

  ‘I’ll be out of this soup by next month – why do all the good cooks die young?’

  I dip warm buttered baguette into the velvety liquid. The crust is cool but the cotton wool insides are furnace-hot and steaming.

  ‘Fuel,’ says Lena. ‘You’ll need fuel and you’ll need sleep later. Hopefully this’ll all be over soon but it may take a few days. We’ll go to the office in fifteen and get started with those flyers.’

  ‘I need to talk to my new boss,’ I say. ‘I’ve emailed saying I needed a day or two but I need to explain.’

  ‘Anders?’ she says. ‘He gives you any bullshit you tell him to call me.’

  We finish our soups, me scraping the last of it from the base of my bowl, and I take it all over to the dishwasher and load it. Lena lets me.

  ‘Take my truck?’ I say.

  ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘Here, wear this.’ She hands me a dark green fleece and I put it on. She puts one on as well.

  As we drive past Freddy’s Christmas-tree hedge I point and say, ‘Know that guy?’

  Lena says, ‘Shoe shop?�
��

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘Seen him around. Rumours he and his mother used to fight terribly. But no, can’t say I know him.’

  People are moving sprinklers around on their lawns because there will most likely be a hosepipe ban any day now. Grill smoke drifts over fences and walls. Gas heaters are warming decks and people are laughing and jeering, ignorant of the fact that my best friend in the world could be in mortal danger. Is she hurt? Bound and gagged? Please God let her be alive.

  We park at the office in my old space and go inside.

  ‘Well, look who it is,’ says Nils as I follow Lena past the biscuit-tin honesty box. ‘Tuva Moodyson herself.’

  ‘Hej, Nils,’ I say. ‘You’re here late.’

  His hair’s spiked and gelled. He has a deep tan with white patches where he’s been wearing sunglasses. Looks like a vain panda.

  ‘Volunteer number one,’ he says. ‘I’ve been helping with flyers. Listen, I’m sorry about your pal. She’ll turn up. Small town like this, she’ll come back real soon.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘I appreciate it.’

  ‘If I was home I’d be painting the south side of the house, my wife’s been real clear about that, so you’re doing me the favour. Now, look.’ He points to three stacks of A4 flyers, just black-and-white pages with a lo-res photo of Tam. I pick one up. It gives her name, height, hair colour, eye colour. It gives a number to call if you know anything.

  ‘We got tape?’ I say.

  Lena empties an ICA carrier bag onto my old desk. A box of pins and six rolls of tape.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ says Nils.

  We go out onto the street and the sun’s still strong and passers-by are wearing sunglasses with their lightweight jackets, and they’re swatting away mosquitos. There are plenty on Storrgatan but, and I am not exaggerating here, there must be a hundred billion of the bloodthirsty little bastards outside town where they can breed and feed in the forests and ponds and bogs. It’s bad here but it is a whole world of evil out in the wilderness this time of year.

  Nils takes Eriksgatan and Lena and I take Storrgatan; her on the office side of the street, me on the Björnmossen’s hunt-store side. We tape the flyers to every lamp post, garbage can, railing, parking meter and bench we can find. It feels good to be doing something real, something that people will notice.