by Will Dean
I open the door to Gavrik Posten and the bell rings.
Lars and Nils are gone. Nils will be at his summer cottage in Dalarna with his kids, playing kub in the garden and drinking beer and maybe taking a sauna. Lars will be in his apartment. Cheekbones is here at my old desk doing what I used to do.
‘Sebastian,’ I say.
‘Why don’t you call me Seb,’ he says.
‘Alright if I go through?’
He nods like I don’t have to ask. Like I’m entitled to go through or do whatever else I want to do here. I approve of the look in his eyes.
‘Hej,’ I say, opening Lena’s door.
‘Come look at this,’ she says.
I stand behind her facing the oversize Apple screen. Tomorrow’s front page. Missing in type larger than I have ever seen her use, even for the Medusa murders. Photos of Tam and Lisa taking up the whole front page. Side by side. Both in high definition. Equals.
‘Looks good,’ I say.
She turns to face me and says, ‘I’m increasing the print run by a thousand copies. Those will be freebies to be distributed to non-subscribers, to Gavrik bus station, to the Vårdcentral doctors surgery, to the factory canteen, to the SPT Pulp Mill. I want as many eyeballs on this front page as possible.’
‘Great idea,’ I say.
She doesn’t respond to that.
‘Tammy’s mum’s on her way back from Central America, or at least making the arrangements. Will take her a few days.’
‘Good,’ I say.
‘And we’ve had trolls all over the Facebook page.’
‘What?’ I say, thinking back to the wood-carving sisters, their cruel pine dolls with human toenails and eyelashes and transplanted chest hair.
‘Idiots saying bad things about Tammy and Lisa. Talking about Tammy’s nationality. Talking about Lisa’s dating history. Saying she was involved with a married man, some older guy who travels a lot on business.’ She uses speech marks fingers around the word ‘business’. ‘They’re just trolls,’ she says. ‘Cowards. I’ve got Sebastian monitoring it every hour, running our Facebook campaign, deleting any posts he thinks are malicious. He’s taken a very keen interest in Tammy’s case. He’s here to help.’
‘Tam would call trolls ratshits,’ I say.
She turns to look at me and nods. ‘Ratshits.’
‘We’d usually be eating her food right now. That’s what should be happening on a Thursday print night.’
‘Go home,’ she says. ‘I still have work to do so you go take a shower and get some sleep. Midsommar tomorrow. Big searches, you’ll need your energy. Go home.’
I like the way she implies it’s my home too, at least for the time being.
‘I think I will.’
She gets back to work.
On the drive to Lena’s I see people erecting small IKEA marquees and folding tables in their gardens. One man is mowing his lawn wearing what looks like a beekeeper’s mask and I do not blame him one bit.
I park and the friggebod’s hot after being shut up all day so I open the door to get some air inside. Too small not to have fresh air. Too suffocating. There’s more blood on the window: evidence of brain injury. Small rust-coloured feathers. Why is this bird doing this? How is it still alive? It saddens me, this pointless self-annihilation. Death by a thousand miniature collisions.
After my shower at the house I walk over to the friggebod. The sky is a grey slate crossed by cirrus clouds and contrails. They cross each other up there like markings on the limestone ceiling of some cave from long ago. Two rival tribes meeting in peace. An attempt to communicate.
I place my stun gun on the pine bedside table and put my shoes in the empty suitcase space beneath the bed. Could squeeze five suitcases down there. Perhaps it’s another guest bed? I suppose it’d work with a thin mattress although there’s no way I’d be able to sleep down there in the dark.
I close the latch on the door – a simple metal stick pivoting on a screw, the kind of thing you have on a bathroom door or a built-in wardrobe. Then I tape the curtains to the glass to eliminate gaps and hide the blood spatter. I remove my aids and fall asleep thinking of Noora.
When I wake there’s a fly buzzing around my face.
The whole friggebod is shaking around me like I’m caught in a storm.
I can’t see in the darkness.
Another bang.
Two more.
Someone’s trying to break through the door.
28
My heart starts thumping and I reach out for a hearing aid – cannot be without it now, I cannot. Then I pick up the stun gun, my hand shaking.
Who’s out there?
Do I call out? Has Lena come home? She’s never tried the door before. She wouldn’t pull it that hard. She’d just call out to me.
Has Johan arrived back early from his hydro conference? Is Noora here?
The door heaves on its hinges.
I climb out of bed, the stun gun out in front of me like a stunted sword. I approach the door and the pine floor squeaks under my weight and then the door stops shaking.
Everything goes still.
‘Hello?’ I say, my voice cracking. ‘Lena?’
I can see a shadow through the window so I open the door, my finger on the trigger button of the stun gun. There is nobody there. They’ve fled. I run out into the street in my airline freebie T-shirt and joggers. Nothing. Idyllic suburbia. Not a herbaceous plant or a grass verge out of place.
I look everywhere, my eyes probing the murky places around the house, by the recycling bin, the dark narrow passage next to my friggebod shed.
No sign.
I go back inside and call Lena and she tells me she’s still working and it was probably just the wind. She says the friggebod door rattles on its hinges sometimes. The carpenter and his assistant weren’t professionals. She promises she’ll screw two security bolts to the inside of the door tomorrow to make me feel better.
The calmness of her voice, the lack of alarm, it helps. My blood starts to run smooth in my veins and my breathing slows. I try to lie on my pillow with one aid in, the one facing up, but I cannot do it. I can’t sleep that way. Too uncomfortable and too weird. I have to sleep with them out.
I wake. My stun gun’s right there next to me. I check the door. No banging.
Then I check my phone.
4:45am.
I try to sleep some more but it’s like the sun is warming this shed up through the blood-speckled glass. An involuntary brain trauma-sauna.
The newsfeed on my phone is all picturesque Midsommar photo stories, but the real news, the two missing women, the women who are clearly in danger or worse, the unpalatable ongoing fact of their disappearance, is nowhere to be seen. It’s been buried. This is a day off for Swedes. It’s a time to enjoy the sun and eat fresh strawberries, to come together in song and to forget the long, freezing winter when the sun never really rises and the people of Toytown never really thaw out.
It’s never easy to judge the right time to enter a host’s kitchen in the morning. I don’t want to look like I’m sitting there waiting for my breakfast like some entitled asshole, but equally I don’t want to delay Lena’s breakfast. I step into the garden at seven and she’s there in her robe at the kitchen window making coffee.
‘Any more weird noises?’ she asks.
‘It wasn’t the wind,’ I say.
‘I’ll fix the bolts today. One at the top and one by the handle. Maybe then you’ll sleep better – you look like you stayed up all night and I feel like the worst host in the world.’
I pour myself coffee.
‘You’re the best,’ I say. ‘I’m the shittiest guest, that’s all.’
‘Happy Midsommar,’ she says.
I smile a semi-smile and she looks out the window and says, ‘We’ll get to them. The whole town will be out in the fields and the meadows today. Don’t give up hope.’
We eat toast, thick-cut with burnt edges, just the way it should be, with
salted butter and bitter Seville marmalade.
‘I even feel guilty eating this, doing anything that isn’t actively searching,’ I say. ‘I feel bad for an hour in bed at night or a quick burger at lunchtime. I know I have to eat and sleep, but it’s like I can’t search hard enough, you know?’
She takes a swig of coffee.
‘If you knew you’d find her within twenty-four hours, you wouldn’t stop. But this may take a few more days, so keep on eating and resting when you need to. No guilt, Tuva. None whatsoever. If everyone had a best friend like you the world would be a better place.’
I pick up my toast and the charred crusts shatter in my mouth and the soft fluffy inner parts dissolve on my tongue in a muddle of melting butter and sweet, sticky orangeness. Then Lena offers me a multivitamin.
‘I look like I need it?’ I say.
She smiles. ‘Oh, yeah.’
I stare at the Tetra Pak ICA milk carton on the table. They always show missing people on these in the movies but this one is blank. How are you Tammy? Are they hurting you? Do you have food? Where the hell are you?
We leave half an hour later, Lena in her Saab and me in my truck. The neighbourhood is coming to life, people out mowing lawns that don’t even need mowing. Others are packing up their cars with folding chairs and cold boxes full of herring and sausage and sour cream and nubbe schnapps and beer and fresh whipping cream. I pass one man with a grey moustache and no shirt. He’s in his front driveway, armed with an electric screwdriver and a rusted hammer. It’s Bertil Hendersson, the bee man. Blood-red paint stains on his trousers, a grey T-shirt or rag tucked into the waistband. He’s constructing his Midsommar pole. It’s basically a large cross made of scrap timber. The people of Gavrik are constructing crosses to be erected later on in their gardens. Like the whole damn town’s getting set to crucify their youngest children as a sacrifice to some unthinkable deity in return for a fruitful harvest.
A woman rides past me on her bike and it is laden with birch branches. She looks happy. The green leaves camouflage the rear end of her bicycle and she rides off with the sun on her face without a care in the world, oblivious to the person or people who are removing Gavrik women from their own lives and their own Midsommar-night dreams.
The town centre, as much as one exists, is completely deserted.
The liquorice factory does not smell of liquorice today. The Grimbergs give their four hundred or so employees the day off for Midsommar and Christmas. It’s not that the town smells of anything particular today, it does not. It’s more that the aniseed tang is lacking. Toytown feels incomplete without it. Deficient.
I drive past empty shops. Benny Björnmossen has a closed sign in his window but he’s stood right behind it, some kind of electrical gadget in his hand. A microphone? Dictaphone? I can see his face watching me through the glass in his door.
Only McDonald’s and ICA are open. They are the places modern people cannot live without. They don’t close and their employees don’t get Midsommar off to frolic on lake shores or dance around the Midsommar pole. They both serve customers as per usual, like beacons showing unfortunates the way to a safe harbour. Open sea should be the place you avoid in a storm but open sea has nothing on us. You see Gavrik town from the E16 and you make damn sure you keep on driving. Do not stop. Looks innocent enough from the safety of the motorway, but you get here and your life goes to shit. More perilous than the open ocean you arrived from. Turn around, traveller. Go back the way you came.
Flyers not strapped down to lamp posts flutter in the scentless breeze.
Lena and I step into the Gavrik Posten office and the bell above the door tinkles. She walks to her office at the rear and I reclaim my old desk. Sebastian’s desk. There’s a Q8 gas-station lighter, the powerful mini jet-engine kind, and a sauna catalogue with an invoice stapled to one of the pages. Cheekbones has actually bought one. Some kind of miniature two-person sauna to fit inside his Gavrik bathroom. Looks too small in the photo. One woman and a boy, each wearing swimwear, folded double on a hot, pine bench. I can see from the invoice it was delivered just over a month ago. More like an XL coffin than a sauna.
I check the Facebook page. There are two really, one for Tam and one for Lisa Svensson. Tam’s has 782 followers. Lisa’s has almost 9,000. Lots of chat on hers about some reality-TV show she’s due to appear on. Some posts are linked and shared. Lisa’s Facebook page says messages are generally replied to within an hour. Tam’s says within a few days. I’ll talk to Sebastian about that. I want both women to be found, alive and well. Both of them. But when the resources behind each woman’s search are so blatantly unequal it makes me want to walk out onto Storrgatan and scream at the world.
An old woman with dyed blue hair comes in off the street. She’s called Freya. We used to chat sometimes. She smiles as she opens the door and steps over to me using her stick like I never even left town.
‘Hello there,’ she says.
You see, the only people left in urban areas on Midsommar tend to be the anxious, the disabled, the loners and the elderly. The best people, basically. All my favourites. My team.
‘Hello, Freya,’ I say. ‘How’s the hip?’
‘Aches like a bitch,’ she says, pulling a tissue out from her sleeve. ‘But I’m alive. Shouldn’t complain. You back to look for your young friend? I’m so sorry about all that. Cruel world.’
‘It can be,’ I say.
‘It wasn’t perfect back in my day,’ she says, adjusting the grip on her stick, checking her blue hair is still in place. ‘But it was better than this.’
‘It still is your day,’ I say.
‘Bullcrap.’
I could tell her that for lots of people, me included, today is generally better than yesterday. For people moving forward from a trauma, today and tomorrow can look more promising. But she knows that, she probably knows it better than I do. How can I tell what she’s lived through? I could also tell her how technology, for me and other deaf people, means today is better than yesterday. How the hearing aids I used as a child didn’t fit properly, how the pitch didn’t work for my ears, how the new Bluetooth ones have improved my quality of life. People say ‘it ain’t like it used to be’ and they think they speak for all of us. The way I hear at the cinema, the way YouTube is captioned these days, the way I can use FaceTime and Skype. My today is better than my yesterday. It ain’t like it used to be and thank God for that.
‘Tell me about it,’ I say, because she means well.
Freya takes a copy of the Posten from the pile and deposits her kronor in the biscuit-tin honesty box. Then she looks at me like she’s deciding whether or not to tell me something.
‘You know my niece used to be a travel agent, don’t you?’
I nod. ‘On Eriksgatan? “Leave It All Behind”, wasn’t it? Closed down a few years back?’
‘Internet killed it off,’ she says. ‘Almost killed her too. And it did kill her marriage. Stone dead. You know people buy their holidays on the internet now and don’t even need to pick up a brochure or get someone to book their airplane tickets? All on a home computer. Well, my niece couldn’t compete with that, could she? She went for a whole year after the shop closed where she wouldn’t use her own computer to buy things. It was the principle of the thing. Now she books her trips to the Canaries on the internet at home just like everyone else.’
Freya tuts, and I look at her as if to say, ‘my sympathies, but what is your point, please?’
‘Anyway, she told me…I don’t know if I should even be talking about it.’
I smile at her. ‘Go on.’
‘She told me that, and I’m not one to gossip, not like Mrs Björkèn down at the haberdashery, you ask anyone, you ask Chief Björn or Priest Kilby at the Lutheran church.’
‘I know you’re not a gossip.’
She nods at that and pulls another tissue from her sleeve and holds onto it. How many can there be up there?
‘My niece, she told me that the gentleman from the S
nake River car yard, you know the one I mean, she said he takes them specialist singles trips to Siam, Thailand they call it now, two or even three times a year. I mean, have you ever heard such a thing?’
I clear my throat.
‘Holidays?’ I say. ‘Karl-Otto Sandberg, Sally’s son, the eBay trader?’
‘No, no, no,’ she says. ‘Karl-Otto’s a good boy, my cousin used to babysit him when he was just a little apple pip. I mean Axel. His company makes them box houses out of metal containers. You know the gentleman I mean?’
‘Sure. Axel, works with his cousin Alexandra.’
‘Cousin,’ says Freya, giving me some well-practiced side-eye. ‘As if anyone would want to live inside a sardine can. Can you imagine anything more claustrophobic? But word is they sell well.’ She looks at me. ‘Germany.’
‘Germany?’
‘Sells them to the Germans,’ she says. ‘Wealthy, aren’t they.’
‘Germans?’ I say.
‘Germans,’ she says.
‘What’s your point, Freya?’
She takes half a step back.
‘It’d be distasteful to spell it all out, but Axel goes to Siam a lot. Thailand, I mean. Now, you know the kind of men who go to Thailand all the time, don’t you? Specialist trips. Find it distasteful anyone taking advantage, that’s why I’m telling you. I heard men travel there to take advantage. This Axel fellow goes all on his own, I should’ve mentioned that. Goes on so-called holidays all on his own to Thailand. Young women, isn’t it? Lots of very young women. And your friend from the noodle van, she’s from Thailand if I am not mistaken?’
‘She’s Swedish,’ I say. ‘But, yes, her parents are Thai.’
She nods solemnly.
‘Thanks, Freya. I’ll look into this.’
‘I’m not one to gossip, mind,’ she says. ‘I do detest a rumour-monger.’