by Will Dean
Drones fly over the water and for a moment I think they’re police issue, like the one Noora was operating, but these are smaller, more flimsy models. Drones operated by kids from the shore, most likely bought from ICA Maxi.
I walk past two teachers I recognise from the high school. Relatives of Bertil, the bee man. One smiles at me and the other frowns as if to say, didn’t you leave our town? And now you think you can just turn up back here on this day of all days?
The caravans are immaculate. People have been scrubbing them and trimming their grass and cleaning the transparent plastic windows of their awnings. You might expect long tables where dozens or even hundreds of locals can convene to share food and sit together. You’d be wrong. This is a mass of Swedes celebrating in small, distinct pods. This is a group of groups. I’m looking at the equivalent of a huge office floor in New York or Tokyo; an entire floor of a skyscraper, but where everyone has a walled cubicle. Individualists en masse.
People look suspicious as I walk past their caravans and their fold-out tables. Some are already eating and they chew and they look at me as if to say, ‘you are not welcome here, move along’. One young blond boy with a Ralph Lauren baseball cap and bright red hay-fever eyes looks at me as if to say who the hell do you think you are anyway.
I’ll make a complete circuit and then I’ll head back to McDonald’s for a ten-minute lunch. I need to eat. Lena’s right. I need to keep going.
My phone rings in my pocket.
I look down at the screen.
Oh, no. Why am I so bloody useless? I pick up and cringe.
‘Hi, Aunt Ida, I was just about to call you.’
‘Hello, Tuva. Happy Midsommar. We’re just about to bring out the food. How’s traffic? Will you be much longer?’
I grimace and a kid sitting in front of me eating a dill-speckled potato opens his mouth and the potato falls out onto his plate. I was supposed to be at Aunt Ida’s place in Bohuslän. I was supposed to be taking up a fresh strawberry-and-cream cake. Shit.
‘Aunt Ida, I am so sorry. I should have called. You see, my best friend, Tammy, she’s gone missing up in Gavrik. I drove up here as soon as I heard and now I’m searching for her.’
There is silence on the line.
The kid with the potato is watching me.
‘Aunt Ida?’
‘On Midsommar?’ she says. ‘You need to do this on actual Midsommar?’
‘Yeah, I do,’ I say, a little more curtly than I intended. ‘I’m sorry to miss your party.’
‘Well, I know the family will be disappointed,’ she says, and her voice is Mum’s voice. Ida is Mum’s little sister by three years.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say.
‘Can’t the police look?’ she asks.
‘They are.’
‘What about the strawberry cake? What should we do for desert, now?’
Seriously?
I rub my eyes with my free hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I’ll try to visit soon.’
‘Oh, you will, will you?’ she says and her voice has turned ice-cold.
‘I have to go,’ I say.
No response.
‘Hello?’ I say. ‘I have to go now, Aunt Ida. I really am sorry.’
‘So are we, Tuva. So are we.’
I walk into a clear space and kneel down. How can she do that? How does she have the power to do what Mum could do? She’s not my mother; she doesn’t have the right to wield that kind of weaponised guilt. I realise I must look like I’m praying and in a way I am. To Dad. For some support in all of this. Some guidance. I am doing what I think is the right and only thing to do and yet my new boss and my own aunt, they react in this way?
I head back to my truck, a vacuum pulling deep inside my ribcage. I feel sick.
‘Tuva,’ says a voice.
It’s Doc Stina from the Vårdcentral surgery.
I offer a limp wave.
‘Tuva,’ she says, pulling me over towards her family. ‘Happy Midsommar. Where are you eating? Do you have a site here?’
‘No, no, I’m heading back to town to eat.’
She frowns and pats my shoulder and says, ‘Would you like to join us?’ Nothing fancy, I’m afraid. Most of the plates are paper or plastic, but my sister’s Västerbotten-cheese pie is famous all over Värmland.’
‘No, I…’
But I am already being whisked to one side of the table and a folded chair has been retrieved from the flatbed of a dark red pickup, and a plate has been found, and a beer is being poured into a plastic glass.
‘No beer, thank you.’
A man to my right, a man with a full head of white hair and white eyebrows and a white moustache, a man pouring beer, he says, ‘It’s alright, it’s light beer.’
He means it’s 2.2%. The sort available in supermarkets.
‘Not for me, thanks.’
‘I’m Per-Ola,’ says white-haired beer man. ‘Stina’s uncle. Make yourself at home and help yourself to herring; the mustard and whisky is a family speciality.’ He winks to the kind-looking woman opposite and she smiles and wags her finger at this impenetrable in-joke, the kind of in-joke all families have, the kind of in-joke people never translate, they just assume others will understand or else ignore.
The food looks wonderful.
Real food, prepared in saucepans and ovens from scratch. Bowls of pickled herring, some with onion and juniper berries, some with a creamy wholegrain mustard sauce. There are herrings marinated in pepper vodka and herrings in shallot vinegar. I take flat Norrland bread, whisked butter so light it’s mostly air and a spoonful of avocado salad. I take three types of herring, a few slices of melt-in-the-mouth gravlax and some steaming, freshly-boiled baby beetroots. I hear a man on the opposite side of the table mention ‘cadaver dogs’ and I tense up. But he could be talking about a movie or a podcast. Probably nothing. Per-Ola passes me a heavy saucepan full of new potatoes with their skins still on. They are covered with cubes of melting butter and crystals of sea salt. They are garnished with fronds of dill and tiny rings of chive. The chives make me think of Tam’s spring onions. The spring onions on the ground by her food van. By her blood.
‘I can’t stay for too long,’ I say. ‘I need to help with the search.’
‘You need to eat,’ says Per-Ola. ‘This is Midsommar.’
We all chew and drink, and the long table – I think it’s three tables of varying heights all covered with a long cloth – is a good place to be right now. Doc Stina smiles at me from the head of the table and I sit here like some distant cousin eating her family’s delicious, creamy potatoes. Dad loved new potatoes. He used to crush them with his fork and eat them with a stupid expression of undiluted ecstasy.
A group of girls from a different caravan play around us and they look terrifyingly uniform. All with blonde plaits, all with flower krans, all with pale cotton dresses. I know this is traditional but when local women are going missing I can’t help question the parents. Then I realise that one of the girls, the tallest one, is teasing the smallest. They’re all about eleven or twelve years old, I’d guess, and the tallest is snapping the bra strap of the smallest. The victim of this prank looks appalled; not at the pain but at the fact that her bra strap is being made public for a split second, the fact that this new part of her life is now on show. When the tall girl runs past my chair to get to the smaller girl I stick out my foot and trip her.
Per-Ola raises a toast with his schnapps and even the hair on his knuckles is white. Everyone apart from me drinks from a small glass. I drink from my water tumbler. And then they all sing their fucking lungs out. Swedes do not talk much for the six dark months of the year. They are silent or they talk softly. Measured. Calm. Then the sun strengthens and they start singing at every opportunity. I hear other families start to sing all around us, almost competing.
‘Were you in the Utgard search?’ asks Per-Ola, a little breathless after his song.
‘I was.’
‘When the
y found the tree lady?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’
He licks his lips and says, ‘What I find strange is, well, I think you’ll know what I mean, it’s odd how the stealer doesn’t seem to have a type as such, now isn’t it?’
‘The stealer? What do you mean?’
‘The man who steals these young ladies. Well, we know Lisa Svensson a little bit, she helps us out at ICA with the till and all. We know her family. She used to get photographed in some of the magazines, or maybe it was catalogues. And now the other woman, I don’t recall her name, she’s an Asian.’
‘Tammy is her name,’ I say, looking straight into his eyes. ‘And what do you mean by ‘type’? This isn’t a dating profile. Two women have been abducted.’
‘Yes, well there is that,’ he says, forking a shiny slice of mattis herring flesh into his mouth. A blood-like globule of vinegar juice hangs precariously from his white moustache whisker. ‘The dating, I mean. They both used the internet sites, you know, speed-dating and apps, that new kind of thing. Well, I tell my granddaughters, you’ll never meet your Prince Charming on a laptop screen.’
A boy runs past the table to his mother and tells her he has a tick on his scrotum.
I ignore Per-Ola and turn my chair forty-five degrees towards the woman on my left.
‘Enjoying the potatoes, are you?’ she asks.
‘Delicious,’ I say.
‘Swedish,’ she says.
I sigh and chew.
‘Look at them,’ she says, pointing out at the reservoir itself. ‘I wouldn’t be out there if I was them, not today.’
There are two small plastic boats on the water, each one laden with bronzed teenage boys.
‘Too many on each boat?’ I say.
‘Näcken,’ she says.
‘Sorry?’
‘Näcken, she says again, louder this time. Then she sees my hearing aid and yells, ‘oh, God, I’m so sorry.’
Not this shit again.
‘Who’s Näcken?’ I say.
She leans close to me and shouts, with each word spoken twice as slowly as before, ‘Ancient water spirit. Luring men into the water and into leaky boats. Especially today.’
I back off from her and her shouting and almost collide with Per-Ola.
‘Thanks so much for the lunch,’ I say, standing and waving to Doc Stina. ‘I need to go join the search now.’
‘You must stay for the strawberries,’ says Per-Ola. ‘They’re Swedish.’
‘Happy Midsommar,’ shouts the woman to my left.
I brush past Doc Stina and tap my hand on her shoulder and she places her palm on my hand. An unspoken, uncomplicated kindness. ‘Thank you,’ I whisper to her, and she squeezes my hand.
I pass the Midsommar pole. This one is enormous, perhaps as tall as a mature pine or the centre mast of a Spanish galleon. It’s a fibreglass flagpole wrapped in birch leaves and cornflowers and there’s a horizontal bar up near the top complete with two rings. A Swedish flag flies at the very top, and cascades of yellow and blue ribbon fall from the birch twigs.
A couple step out of a caravan.
It’s Sally Sandberg from Snake River and her handsome Viking paramedic, the one with the tattoos, the one Tam used to fancy. They’re both smoking cigarettes. Real ones. I can see he’s wearing a belt and it is a complete snake, not a snakeskin. This is a stuffed snake of some kind, white belly and diamond pattern on its back, and hanging over the boyfriend’s crotch is the snake’s head and its jaws are open and it is eating its own tail.
‘Like it?’ he says, stroking the back of the snake’s head. I can see marker pen on the back of his hand. It says salt bin. ‘Sally’ll make you one.’
‘I can do that,’ she says.
‘Only trouble is,’ he says. ‘I can’t put on any weight. It’s not adjustable.’
They walk past me.
Sally turns her head and smiles and says, ‘Happy Midsommar, friend.’
She has an L-shaped bulge in the back of her ICA jeans. Could just be an e-cigarette and a lighter.
But I’d say it’s a gun.
31
The formal search will start at four because that’s what Lisa Svensson’s family have decided. I’m not annoyed that they get to decide things. Not really. They’re connected to the whole town so at least when they speak people take notice.
I text Thord asking about Sally’s guns. If she has a handgun registered.
He doesn’t reply.
I stand by the water’s edge.
A man-made lake. Horizontal mists forming as I look. There are boats out on the water: some full of teenagers flirting and jumping into the water, others tethered to divers in drysuits gazing down into the inky depths. Teens and divers pass by each other oblivious.
Cici Grimberg from the liquorice factory once told me her friends perished in these very waters. They died weighed down in their own bed when the reservoir was flooded back in the seventies. Under all this weight of water. The village at the bottom was evacuated but they snuck back and they died here together.
There are thirty of us. That’s all. Thirty women and men probing the thistle patches and the reed beds away from the water, checking the uneven land with sticks and ski poles. The majority will join later. We are the thirty with no family or friends.
I trudge and probe the ground. There is no litter whatsoever aside from a knotted condom. That’s the thing about Sweden. Safe sex and very little garbage.
As I walk towards the water through the thick grasses I see the whole Midsommar scene laid out in front of me like an elaborate open-air theatre set. Closest to us is the pop-up church: a temporary thing with a priest and fifty or so worshippers. He isn’t wailing and striding like you might imagine of a Southern baptist preacher, he is standing as still as a grandfather clock and the tempo of his voice is slow. His flock sit on fold-up chairs, the same lightweight plastic ICA chairs they were sitting on an hour ago eating their pickled herring. Some sit cross-legged on the dewy grass. Most are dressed in white and some have flowers in their hair. Then, wrapped around the curve of the reservoir, are myriad caravans and motorhomes, with hundreds and hundreds of Gavrik locals all sat out with their beers and their snus tobacco waiting to see the raising of the pole. I stop probing for a while to watch. A gang of men use long sticks to walk the birch-laden flagpole up to vertical. A cheer goes up when the mighty phallus points up towards the zenith and then people start to rise from their plastic tables. They walk towards the Midsommar pole as if it were drawing them closer. Families holding hands, children running, men pushing buggies with mosquito nets hiding their newborn babies, many of whom were born three months ago. You do the math. Everyone forms a circle. The sounds of violins and nyckelharpas start to drift across the misty water to meet my hearing aids. The whines of string instruments and the wheezing notes of an accordion being squeezed by a bald man. The circle of people start to dance around their bug-infested fertility symbol, the whole town hopping like frogs, teachers and counsellors and shopkeepers with their hands behind their backs, jumping around the pole singing the små grodorna Midsommar frog song.
The whole thing is unreal. Me watching from over here in this damp thistle patch, them over there squealing in delight, some dressed in white linens, some older locals in traditional Värmland costume.
I recognise a face.
Sebastian is out with us, he is one of our thirty. Cheekbones looks out of place with us in our zip-up ICA trousers and our fluorescent tunics. He’s wearing a red jumper and khaki shorts like he’s just stepped out of a Gap commercial. Doesn’t he have someplace else to be? He nods to me from afar and I nod back.
I circumvent the worshippers. Mrs Björkèn from the haberdashery store is in the congregation, and a stamper from the factory’s sitting right behind her. The priest turns to me and beckons me closer.
‘Yes?’ I say.
‘Join us, child.’
‘I’m twenty-seven, mate,’ I say, and walk back to my group, to my pe
ople, to my thirty.
As I probe nettles and areas of marsh grass I think about the summer evenings of my youth. Weekends I spent with my grandparents just outside Stockholm. That smell you get after a hot day when the temperatures plummet: the smell of tense, dry earth cooling down and easing. The smell of dew forming on parched grass. The relief of it all.
There’s folklore in Sweden this time of year and I’m wary of it. I was always told that on Midsommar girls should pick seven wild-flowers and place them under their pillow and then they’ll dream of their future husband. First of all: how come only girls? Also: how come children are expected to do this? Isn’t that odd? Me as a six-year-old supposedly dreaming of my husband? Then there’s the ‘why only husbands?’ issue. If I ever have a kid, which I won’t, I’ll tell them if they want to place seven flowers under their pillow then go ahead. Do it, kid. Knock yourself out. But dream of someone who will love you. That’s all. Happiness. Dream of that.
At four we’re joined by about two hundred more searchers. Some are drunk and they all look far too jovial and festive for my liking. We are looking for two missing women, shitheads. Separate the Midsommar you just enjoyed from the present moment. Leave all that behind. Focus on the task at hand.
Now we’re a decent number we venture in lines deeper into the scrubland and woods, away from the reservoir. We walk and traipse and we get eaten alive. Feasted upon. I have a mosquito bite right next to my wasp sting and the two inflammations are merging into one angry, red dome.
The sun comes and goes, one minute bright sunlight, the next gloom as thunderclouds pass overhead. I read once that clouds can weigh up to two hundred tons. Just imagine. A cumulus above your head like a hundred full-grown elephants just waiting to plummet.
The guy next to me is wearing a headlamp but it’s not switched on. When he turns his head in these long sedge grasses he looks like some Cyclops beast, his one oversize eye reflecting right back at me.