by Will Dean
‘Me, too, Freya. Me, too.’
She leaves and the bell above the door tinkles and I go back to scanning Facebook and answering messages. There are threads about today’s search. One of Lisa Svensson’s cousins wrote a post about how the whole town will be up at the reservoir today so that will be base camp. Says those who want to eat and prepare festive food can stay, and the searchers can fan out after lunch once the raising of the main Midsommar pole is over. There’s a post by Priest Kilby saying there will be an open-air prayer service for the missing women beside the waters of the reservoir. And then there are a thousand posts about recipes and who’s bringing what drinks and barbecue equipment. One comment catches my eye. In amidst the strawberry-cream cake recipes and requests for someone to bring an XL carbon dioxide mosquito trap is a short post by Viggo Svensson. He writes that his thoughts are with the missing girls. They’re not girls, shit-head, they are women. He writes may the Lord Jesus Christ Our Saviour look over them and protect them. This makes my hackles rise. How come it’s the exact same men who threaten and intimidate and scare women who get to write this pious nonsense? A man who once, when I was tired and asleep, locked me in the back of his taxi and parked up and lit a fucking tea light candle and refused to let me out. Sure, he didn’t touch me, he didn’t crawl to the back seat. But he scared the hell out of me. I can’t take taxis anymore without thinking about that night. Without being hyper-aware. I had a panic attack one night at a taxi rank outside Malmö station. Last train. Almost midnight. Three taxi drivers all wanting my business. All men. No choice. And now this walking mollusc, this excuse for a human being, he gets to post his supportive, innocent post on our Facebook page so the whole town will view him as some kind of saint. Makes me want to vomit.
I say bye to Lena and drive to ICA. It’s empty save for last-minute shoppers buying extortionately overpriced Swedish strawberries and mid-alcohol beer, 3.5%, strongest you can get outside of Systembolaget, the state monopoly shop, which is closed, of course, because this is a red day. I buy one bouquet of flowers. Peonies. Tam’s favourite. I walk outside into the hot morning sun and approach her van. I pass the heaps of wilting flowers left for Lisa. I can’t look at them wilting and browning in this heat; I can’t because they are a timekeeper of sorts. A yardstick. The flowers are dying and that means we haven’t found them yet. It’s too close an image. Too haunting. It’s not how I want to think of Tammy or Lisa. So I focus on the fresh, healthy peonies in my hand and walk on.
Nothing outside Tam’s van.
Not one thing.
I place the peonies down under her service hatch. How many times have we hugged through this hatch? She reassured me in my early Gavrik days. She made me smile. We talked about or childhoods here, munching leftover prawn crackers on hot July nights. I’ve lent her cash and she’s lent me cash. How many times have we laughed together right here? I’m about to take a moment, some kind of secular prayer that I do more and more since Mum died. I’m ready to stare at the flowers, then at the van, then up at the cloudless blue sky. But my phone rings.
It’s Noora.
‘Possible sighting of Tammy,’ she says. ‘Where are you?’
29
Noora pulls up in her white police Volvo and I climb in.
‘Sighting?’ I say.
‘Don’t get your hopes up. Possible sighting made by a lost motorist this morning trying to find his way to his in-laws’ summer cabin. We’ll visit the location now. And then we’ll check a detail I found reviewing recordings of the drone footage. Probably unrelated but I want to check, and your input will be valuable.’
On the right-hand side as I pass my old apartment building I see a troop of children with bikes and scooters and they’ve weaved birch leaves and wildflowers through their handlebars. We head out of town towards the sewage-treatment plant, then head north. Fields. Parched crops hanging on to life on low-grade farmland. Noora slows down past a derelict farmhouse and I watch as a family wrap their own birch leaves and yellow ribbons and blue ribbons to a huge timber cross. Noora slows to almost a stall and I see teenage girls wearing white cotton dresses and crowns of cornflowers. They attach Swedish flags onto the Midsommar pole. It’s lying down so I can’t see clearly but when it gets erected, later after the family’s herring lunch, it’ll stand like a towering penis over the farm scape; a vertical pole wrapped in foliage and insects with a horizontal pole three quarters up to form a cross. Then two huge rings, one hanging from each side of the cross. A pagan phallus wrapped in thorns and bloodsucking deer ticks and poisonous weeds.
I saw maypoles in the UK when I studied there and let me tell you they are nothing like these. Supposedly we Swedes used to erect our poles in May but we changed all that on account of the late snow we sometimes get. We now erect in June and it’s not all pretty ribbons and Cotswolds cream teas. Hell, no. Later this evening most of Sweden will be drunk on aquavit, and grown men will be hopping around our cock-shaped poles pretending to be frogs. There will be aggressive tug-of-war matches. Wet slabs of pickled herring will be served and crayfish brains will be sucked from their boiled, red skulls. We’ll drink until we don’t know what day it is. And nine months later, as if my magic, we’ll have a baby boom. Go figure.
‘What are you thinking about?’ asks Noora.
‘London.’
‘Miss it?’
‘Sometimes I do,’ I say. ‘What did you see with your drone, Noora?’
‘Let’s focus on the first location, then worry about that.’
I frown at her. ‘What did you find?’
She looks at me then rubs her eyes and sprays the windscreen to clear away the mosquito corpses.
‘Not a hundred per cent sure, but we think it’s a recycling bin, a big one with wheels.’
‘What’s so weird about that?’
‘It’s in the centre of a field of fallow farmland. It has a brick or a stone securing the lid.’
No, no, no, no.
‘Let’s go there right now,’ I say. ‘Noora, where is it?’
‘We’ll do that one last,’ she says. ‘There’s a greater likelihood of a positive result with location one. It’s about two minutes away.’
We drive on and my skin is cold with fear. Tam is not in a wheelie bin, she is not inside a fucking bin, there is no way that is possible. I will not allow it.
Noora parks and checks the GPS and hands me some roll-on insect repellent.
There’s a ditch and where the farmer’s track crosses over it they’ve placed a large concrete pipe underneath to allow ditchwater to drain through. The ditch is empty, lines of crisp marestail browning in the sun. Metallic flies buzzing. The pipe’s large enough to drive a go-kart through. We cross over the top and head into the field.
‘This way,’ says Noora.
A pungent odour hangs heavy in the air.
We walk into the field and wasps or hover flies – I’m not sure of the difference – they start bothering me, flying too close, brushing past my hair like fighter jets testing the airspace of a hostile neighbour state.
‘Don’t mind them and they won’t mind you,’ says Noora.
‘Bullshit,’ I say.
‘They can smell fear,’ she says.
I run like an idiot to escape the half dozen wasps and then I see it.
A cross in the centre of the field.
But this is not a Midsommar pole, either from years gone by or fresh for today. This is a much smaller structure. Man-size. Woman-size. It stands with loose hoops of knotted ivy still hanging from its horizontal bar. I walk closer and there is a curling scrap of paper on the cross. A glossy photograph flapping in the wind. Blank. Bleached. Image-less. It is not tied to the wooden cross. It is nailed to it.
‘Over here,’ says Noora, walking away to the edge of the field.
No, I think. Over here.
‘Here,’ she says.
We are surrounded by the buzzing of insects too large and too threatening for their own good. I don’t see these big bugs in town and cer
tainly not down in Malmö. A dragonfly hovers around me like an attack helicopter. Its royal-blue thorax is spectacular. Like I’m staring through fairground crazy-glass.
I jog to Noora.
She’s pointing to the far corner of the field. I see something low in the bindweed and thistles and docks. Fifty metres away. A shirt. A grey cotton shirt.
We run.
Noora is five times fitter than me but I keep up with her. Sweat makes my shirt stick to my back and the arches under my feet start hurting.
‘Tam,’ I shout, suddenly with no control over my voice. My knees go weak. There is a person in the corner kneeling as if praying. She is covered with leaves and bracken. Her head is down on the ground and her back is bent.
‘Wait,’ says Noora.
We approach from the side and there are flies buzzing around her head. Oh, dear God in heaven, no. Not this.
The head is covered with pale straw and specks of seed and pollen.
I don’t want it to be Lisa, either. Part of me does but that is not a part of me that I am prepared to entertain or forgive.
Noora clears away some brambles.
More flies.
A foul smell.
Her head comes into view. Dark matted hair.
I take a deep breath.
My shoulders fall and I look up to the sky, to Dad, and I thank him although I’m not sure what for or why. It doesn’t matter why.
This thing is a fallen scarecrow. A stuffed, clothed effigy of a person that was once nailed to that small execution cross at the centre of the field, and now, by way of beast or storm, is praying for its hollow soul in the corner facing a hedge of hawthorn and immature wild raspberries.
It has trousers. Old jeans. It has a grey shirt and a black wig and its sleeves have been tourniqueted sharply with twine to prevent the straw that makes up its flesh from leaking out.
‘This was the sighting,’ says Noora, looking at me. ‘We have to check them all.’
She kneels and pushes the shoulder of the fallen scarecrow as if it’s a drunkard on a kerb. It’s heavy so I help her. We push it over onto its back. Something dead underneath. Something rotting. The scarecrow’s face stares back up at us.
‘Oh, God,’ she says.
It had a face once.
The face was modelled from stuffed sackcloth but a community of wasps have made their home in there. They live inside the face – a grey, papery tumour hanging from the scarecrow’s cheek. They fly in and out of the base of the nest and they fly in and out of the mouth slit of the sackcloth. More and more of them.
‘Run,’ says Noora.
We both run. I have not run this hard since school. Well, I ran harder one time, to Mum that awful day, but I cannot bear to remember it. Still too raw. I run and trip and I get stung twice on my arm and Noora gets stung four times. We start wailing, both of us, with the heat and the distance and the pain and the fear that what if we both end up like that scarecrow but on the opposite side of this abandoned field? I’m wearing a grey T-shirt; will the venomous flying wasps make a nest in my head? Will they?
Noora unlocks her police Volvo and we get in and slam the doors shut.
‘Motherfucking wasps,’ says Noora, inspecting her stings.
‘We bothered them,’ I say. ‘So they bothered us.’
Noora looks at me with an expression that says don’t try to be funny, my blood is ninety per cent wasp venom. Her expression says I should be on an island meditating right now and, by the way, why didn’t you answer my damn texts or emails the first six weeks after you left Gavrik?
She gets her breath back and starts to drive.
‘Where now?’ I say.
‘Another field,’ she says, scratching at a sting on her arm. ‘Far side of Snake River.’
My chest is tight as if someone has their fist inside my ribs squeezing my heart like their very own stress ball. I am wheezing. And all this after I pledged to get fit after that awful day. I pledged and I have failed. Even though when the nurse called and told me to come to Mum’s room right away I ran there from the car park along those long squeaky corridors and up the stairs and I had to pause. My eyes start watering just thinking about it. I knew Mum had maybe seconds to live and I had to stop running to her because my heart and my lungs couldn’t take it. You think you can do anything in that situation, run ten kilometres if you have to, but you can’t. I had to stop for a twenty-second rest and in those twenty seconds I stepped aside from myself and looked back and I was ashamed. I saw a person not running to her dying mother. I saw someone who’d rather pause for breath than run so hard her lungs burst. When I ran again a pregnant woman was wheeled past me on a bed gripping her swollen belly. Arrivals and departures. The coming and going of life. I made it, though. I was there when Mum took her last breath. I was holding her crêpe-paper hand. She was calm and still. The machines had been wheeled away. Her hand was free of its cannula. I was wheezing and crying and spluttering and looking around for someone to do something. I should have spent the last thirty seconds of life by her side instead of just the last ten. Forgive me, Mum.
Noora’s driving under the E16 and I’m looking away from her, out my window towards Utgard forest, tears dampening my cheeks. I cannot feel the stings. They are nothing to those lost twenty seconds. Noora knows I’m crying but she lets me be.
We pass by the entrance to Mossen village, that slightest of cracks through the sky-high pine trees, and we pass by Snake River Salvage with the containers stacked one on top of the other. Noora turns right up a farm track and parks.
‘You alright?’ she says.
‘Yeah,’ I say, not looking her way, cleaning my wet face with my arm, feeling the swollen stings as my wrist passes over my cheek.
She places her hand on my knee.
‘Let’s go.’
We walk up a dry mud track, the mud so uneven and rucked it looks like a brown sea frozen in an instant by some biblical force.
‘That it?’ I ask.
Noora puts her flat palm to her forehead to shield the sun and she says, ‘Yeah, I think so.’
We do not run.
There is a wheelie bin in a field with a heavy stone on its lid. It’s not the kind of thing that could possibly yield good news. It’s a thing we walk towards in respectful silence.
It’s dark green.
As we approach it I can see the Sellotape covering the top, strips of clear tape diligently securing the lid to the base. And the block on top of the bin is a breeze block, the kind of building material the walls of Karl-Otto’s eBay warehouse-home is made from.
‘I’ll do it,’ she says.
Noora walks up to the bin and looks at it. It’s almost the height of her shoulder. She peels the Sellotape from the base and looks back at me and then peels off the rest. She pushes the block off the lid and it hits the baked earth on the far side with a dull thud.
She lifts the lid.
30
Noora’s face contorts and she recoils.
I can smell something inside the bin.
Something rotting.
‘Noora,’ I say, my voice breaking halfway through the word.
She covers her mouth with her hand.
‘Noora?’
She turns her head to face me and says, ‘No.’ And then louder, more assertively, she says, ‘No, Tuva. It’s okay.’
I close my eyes and thank someone. Whoever. Everyone.
Then I step up to the stinking bin. A woodpecker is hammering for weevils in some nearby tree. A fly buzzes over my head and keeps on flying.
I look inside the wheelie bin and a malformed version of my face peers back at me. Rippling. The bin’s full of water. Nettles. Three dead mice floating on their backs. And dozens of headless plastic dolls.
‘What?’ I say.
‘Looks like they’ve been here a while,’ says Noora, tilting the bin to disrupt the doll heads so she can see all the way down to the bottom. ‘And if you were to touch the water I bet it’s hot and it’
d scold you. Closed up in this dark plastic bin under the sun, all sealed up. It’s like someone’s been brewing this mixture. Like they’ve been simmering a stew.’
‘A stew?’ I say. And she’s right. Hot water and nettles. Rodents. Tangles of plastic arms and legs and torsos, all unclothed. The dolls with hollow bodies have sunk to the bottom, their neck holes staring up at me like lifeless eyes. The other dolls, including the Barbie types I used to play with as a girl, they’re layered two or three deep, floating, twisted together and part covered with rotted nettle leaves. Something about jagged stinging-nettle leaves touching skin, even plastic skin.
‘What is this?’ I ask.
‘Probably just broken toys and off-cuts, and then the rain got in.’
I look at the Sellotape strands flapping in the breeze like my own hair. At the stone sitting on the mud by my feet.
‘Rain doesn’t get into these bins,’ I say. ‘Rainproof.’
Noora photographs it all and then says, ‘I need to get back to the station.’
We drive to Gavrik. The police Volvo is in shadow for the first fifteen minutes as we drive through the cool shade of a pine-tree cliff. The town is empty. Not a single dog walker or pedestrian. No bikes. No cars. Something’s wrong. The left chimney of the liquorice factory is without its steam. There is no scent in this town. Nothing.
Noora goes back to work and I tell Lena I’m heading up to the reservoir. I tell her that as most Toytown residents will be there, assembled as if to call upon some higher power, to appeal for mercy and rain, I should be there too. To watch. To check underneath motor homes. To ask awkward questions.
The reservoir site is a flat blue sea with a thousand white specks next to it. Caravans and camper vans and large stand-up tents. Most of the caravans have awnings and extensions. Some even have timber decks with steps and red geraniums. I park up next to a group of raggare cars.
It’s an odd mix.
There are more girls in white cotton dresses skipping around the place picking wild flowers for their Midsommar krans – crowns of ragwort and moon daisy and clover and cow parsley. Headdresses made from flowering weeds. They skip and laugh. I was never one of these girls; my deafness was so isolating at that age that I stayed indoors much of the time. Out and about I always stayed close to Dad’s leg. When I was the same age as these weed-clad carefree girls I was still trying to make sense of the world. Nothing much has changed.