by Will Dean
The town is churned slush and it’s sparkling in my headlights. I drive past ICA Maxi and on through the underpass beneath the E16. There’s always graffiti under here but now there’s new art joining the old and this is fluorescent yellow so it leaps out at me as I drive. CALL HOME it says. I catch it in my rear-view mirror as I drive up and out toward Utgard forest. CALL HOME.
The world darkens but the snow becomes whiter out here, untrodden and ungritted, pure white nothingness in every direction. I see the sign to Mossen village and turn right onto the gravel track. My truck shakes.
I rev past Hoarder’s caravan and past Viggo’s red cottage. There’s a half-finished building project in his garden, maybe a new shed or garage, and his taxi’s in the driveway with the ‘Careful, Kids on Board’ sign up on the roof. I accelerate up the hill and my tyres slide around a little but then they get caught in the grooves. Above this point is just the wood-carving sisters and then the man himself. With so few cars driving up and down the track, there are two deep grooves carved into the hardened snow and I may as well be driving on goddam train tracks because I have no capacity to turn whatsoever. I skid on the top of the hill and drive through the boggy section. It’s pretty up here in winter. It’s all sparkly ice, perfectly flat on top of the water; uniform, with clumps of reeds poking through, their heads like spiked Swarovski baubles.
The smoke from the sisters’ workshop smells good. When I drive around in wintertime interviewing sources or watching ice hockey finals I smell woodsmoke every day. People keep their fires on. Even those with modern fully-insulated houses need to light their log burners in February and it makes the town smell better. The sisters aren’t working as I drive past their open-fronted workshop, must have packed up carving for the night.
I brace myself for a confrontation with David’s German shepherd or Alsatian or whatever it is when I park up but it’s not here, and neither is the chain-link fence spanning each veranda post that used to keep the beast penned in. It’s just the house with its mirrored windows, and David’s car plugged into the socket on a stick so his engine stays fully charged. An orange dog-collar hangs from a hook. I wrap my scarf around my neck and over my mouth and pick up the bottle of screw-cap Pinot Grigio I bought with me and head to the front door.
Opera music. I knock and wait, shuffling from side to side and blowing into the scarf over my mouth to try to keep my face from frostbiting off.
‘You’re here,’ he says, opening the door, a blast of warm air meeting me like entering H&M in December. Honestly, these temperature variations are ridiculous. Can be twenty-five below outside and twenty-five above inside. Passing through fifty degrees in less than a metre. It isn’t normal.
‘Thanks for the invite,’ I pass him the screw-cap bottle and he takes it like it’s a soiled nappy but then forces a kind of kinked smile and ushers me inside. There’s a new carpet, a circular grey one right inside the entrance. ‘This is nice,’ I say, pointing to it.
‘Hate the thing but I bring it out each winter to absorb boot drips and save my oak boards.’
I take off my coats and hang them up as neatly as I can. I slip off my boots and place them on his rack.
He leads me into the stainless steel kitchen.
‘Didn’t see your dog outside?’
He looks at me with genuine sadness. ‘It didn’t work out I’m afraid. But the good news is that he’s living on a farm outside Munkfors and from what the farmer tells me, he’s jolly happy to be there. Might even father some pups. All for the best. Wine?’
He shows me a bottle of white Burgundy that looks like it costs more than my ski jacket. Must have ordered it from Systembolaget. They probably had to get it sent over from Stockholm or Karlstad and I reckon my pinot will probably end its short life in a sauce if it’s lucky.
‘Just one glass.’
He pours me half a glass and tells me he’ll give me half a glass of red with the main course because I really ought not miss the red, it’s a respectable Bordeaux, very respectable, so I agree and then I notice the penis on the chopping board.
I point to it.
He smiles.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I knew you’d be cooking something exotic but I’m not sure I can eat that.’
‘You’ve probably had it before.’
What’s that supposed to mean?
‘Braised ox-tongue is a winter favourite, a must-eat at this time of year. Would you at least try a little?’
‘Tongue?’ I ask.
‘Tongue,’ he says, and then he licks his lips in the way I’ve seen before, his own tongue, licking to the left like a lizard, then back to the scar in the centre of his lip, then to the right.
‘My grandma used to cook it for us,’ I say. ‘Sorry, I thought it was . . .’ I trail off. ‘My mistake.’
He passes me a half-full glass of white wine and gestures over to the expensive designer furniture in the living room. We sit opposite each other and his trouser leg lifts a little to reveal a strip of leg so hairy it’s hard not to stare. Maybe he gets hairier at winter time? I know I do.
‘I asked you all the way out here because of what you said in the churchyard.’
He stops talking and I anxiously try to remember what the hell I said.
He just looks at me.
‘Sorry,’ I say.
‘Exactly,’ he says.
‘Sorry?’ I say again.
He nods.
I open my eyes wider and take a wasabi pea from the bowl on the table between us.
‘Nobody has ever said sorry or that they feel sorry for what I’ve endured,’ he says. ‘The police didn’t apologise for arresting me twice for the Medusa murders. Nothing. But you actually felt bad for me. For me thinking about ending it all. You actually made the effort to tell me in the churchyard. You made me feel like I am not alone.’
I wasn’t expecting this level of openness and now I feel even more awkward. Out here in this house in this forest, I feel exposed.
‘I meant it,’ I say.
He nods and looks up at the ceiling and I stare at the mole on his Adam’s apple. Best view I’ve ever had of it.
‘I have an exciting book deal,’ he says, changing the subject.
‘That’s great, congratulations.’
I’m pleased we’re not talking about feelings anymore. I don’t do that sober. I can hardly do it drunk.
That crooked smile appears for a moment and then leaves.
‘First book to be released in my own name, it’s what I’ve been waiting years for. Its working title is The Liquorice Factory and it’s really a kind of family saga crossed with some post-industrial history mixed with a little misery memoir.’
‘Okay.’
He sounds happy but he looks sad.
‘I got the green light from the publisher months ago and Gustav and I have been hard at work ever since, me interviewing him and reading through archive material and so on. Gustav had a lot to get off his chest. He told me once that if you look up toxic masculinity in the dictionary you’d see a photo of his father.’ Holmqvist snorts. ‘Gustav felt belittled and, what with the childhood I endured, I could sympathise. And then the unthinkable happened.’
I think back to the watermelon crack.
‘It was dreadful.’
‘Yes, well anyway, now my book’s proving rather more challenging.’
I remember being upstairs in this house last year and checking out the guest room, the one with hundreds of white box files, all organised in alphabetical order, all containing reams and reams of graph paper and intricate handwritten notes.
‘A book must be the last thing on their minds now,’ I say.
‘That’s as maybe,’ he says. ‘But there are deadlines. Contracts.’
‘They seem to be a closed shop.’
‘Oh, you have no idea,’ he says. ‘You have absolutely no idea. There’s a code of silence, you see. The workers in the factory, on the floor, in the canteen, in the trucks, in the office, they a
ll owe a debt to the Grimbergs and the Grimbergs owe a debt to them.’
I frown and he uncrosses his legs and then recrosses them and his oven beeps and he looks over to it and then back to me.
‘The average stamper or quality-control taster has been working in that factory since school and maybe their mother was a stamper or worked in the canteen and maybe their father and their grandfather was a delivery driver if he wasn’t up at the pulp mill. It’s a generational business in the same way as a large coal mine or steel works. It’s codependency, if you understand what I mean, they need each other. Excuse me a moment.’
Holmqvist stands up and walks over to the tongue that looks like a T-Rex cock. He gestures to the dinner table, a glass-topped thing, and then he puts a tea towel over his arm and brings out two plates that look like they don’t contain any bull tongue. I grab a fistful of wasabi peas and stuff them in my mouth because who knows how much of this guy’s cooking I can stomach tonight. The burn in my mouth is pleasing.
I sit down at the table and he pours me San Pellegrino fizzy water and places a bowl down in front of me. Salad leaves with shiny little chicken livers and I can handle that, it’s offal and it’s very David Ghostwriter Holmqvist, but silently I thank him for not making everything so out of my comfort zone that I go home hungry.
‘Duck tongues,’ he says.
I look down and yep, they’re tongues alright, my mistake, apologies. How many life decisions did I balls up to be in Utgard forest right now staring at a bowlful of duck tongues.
‘Quite delicious, don’t worry. A gamey, delicate preamble before the main event.’
I cut into one and it’s small enough to be unintimidating although the texture is unpleasantly muscular and I get flashbacks to the troll locked in my basement, the pine shin-high figure with its animal tongue, now probably shrivelled to nothing, and a surprise in his pants. I’m still not comfortable with the wood-carving sisters or their creations. Expensive carved trolls with human fingernails and human hair and human eyelashes.
‘Delicious,’ I say. I’m not lying actually, they’re tasty in their star-anise sauce, but that texture. ‘Maybe the Grimberg daughter will speak to you?’
‘She won’t even look in my direction,’ he says, swallowing a whole tongue.
There’s something disturbing about swallowing a whole tongue. Tongue sliding down tongue. It’s against nature.
‘The family are generous to a tee, it is their downfall. Each successive generation is taught from birth that they owe the community everything they have. The company was built on the hard work of the great-grandparents of today’s workers and the family would be nothing without Gavrik’s residents, they actually tell their children this.’
‘I guess it’s true,’ I say, slicing a tongue in half.
‘Quite so, but you see it’s a dreadful burden to carry. Gustav and his father refused to modernise the factory beyond that add-on at the back because machines and processing plants would have cut the workforce by as much as sixty per cent. But the company is unviable at current levels, or pretty much unviable. The Grimbergs are accustomed to life’s luxuries, you only need look at their Receiving Room to see it. So the book deal is their saviour, one of several windfalls that have helped them over the years.’
‘Oh?’
‘You’ll have to read the book for all the details,’ he says with a glint in his eye. ‘From now on I’ll have to do my best to fill in the blanks without the Grimberg women helping me. The deadline can’t be moved, you see.’
I sense an opportunity.
A chance.
10
This will be my last big Gavrik story and I might just have found a way in.
‘I can help,’ I say eagerly, the offer crystallising and clarifying in my head as the words pass my lips.
‘I don’t see how.’
I take a sip of the wine and the oven beeps again so he excuses himself and clears our bowls, mine with three complete tongues, the largest three, hidden deftly beneath a romaine lettuce leaf. He pulls on a pair of thin latex gloves, the transparent kind, I can see his knuckle hair through them, and gets to work with his knife.
Holmqvist brings over two hot plates of ox tongue, his hand protected by a tea towel, and places them down. Mine is sliced thinly and covered in jus and sprinkled with flat-leaf parsley and sea-salt crystals. His is whole.
‘Where were we,’ he says, savouring his meal, sticky taste-buds clearly visible on the top of his whole tongue like the nubs of some hideous Lego brick.
‘I can help you,’ I say again.
‘No, sorry. I work alone. I don’t think anyone can help me except the Grimberg women. I’ll have to keep pushing.’
‘The more you push the more they’ll push back,’ I say.
‘We have a contract,’ he says.
‘They’ll give you the bare minimum, then. The book will be dull.’
He looks agitated now, squirming on his chair and scratching the back of his hand.
‘Let me talk to them,’ I say, and he’s shaking his head before I’ve even finished the sentence.
‘What makes you think . . .’
‘It’s what I do,’ I say. ‘Let me talk to them. Listen to them.’
He squirms and scratches the palms of his hands. ‘But I have a routine, a ritual. I can’t write with another person. I write alone. Always have.’
‘You still can,’ I say, working out the details in my head. ‘I’ll research for you. Freelance. I’ll give you all my research notes. You pay me. You write the book.’
‘A short-term research contract?’
‘Exactly.’
He scratches his neck and then his ears.
‘So, in return for you interviewing the three remaining Grimbergs – Cecilia, Anna-Britta and young Karin – I would, rather, my publisher would, pay you?’
I nod.
‘I’d have to talk to my editor.’
‘Twenty-thousand kronor,’ I say. ‘Up front.’ I feel like a movie gangster but really I need to uncover if Gustav had enemies, anyone with enough leverage to force him to make that fatal jump.
‘I’ll have to check,’ he says.
‘I’m leaving town soon,’ I say. ‘And I am good, David. Very good. I can start on this right away. I’d work on it alongside my Posten reporting. And I’ll work in the evenings.’
He chews on his lip and looks at me and then looks up at the ceiling and then looks at me again.
‘Twenty-thousand kronor,’ he says. ‘Half on completion of the interviews. Half on publication.’
‘All up front,’ I say.
‘Take it or leave it,’ he says, half filling my glass with red wine.
I feel hot in my socks. This is my way in.
‘I’ll take it,’ I say.
He looks at my plate. ‘Excellent. Now, eat up, it’s getting cold. Bon appetite.’
I have one week left in Toytown and I still have to move out and return my truck and attend a ‘surprise’ leaving party at Ronnie’s Bar, and I have to complete a final print for the Posten, one I can be proud of. This time it’ll be fixed Friday and distributed Saturday. Only the second time it’s ever happened. Industrial action at the printers in Gothenburg; they’re striking over working hours. Good for them. Now I’ll need to juggle all that with researching Holmqvist’s book but at least I can ask the Grimbergs about Gustav’s jump. I can dig.
‘I’ll do a good job,’ I say, but he’s lost in the art of slicing through his slab of tongue. It’s black at the licking end and thick and pink at the throat end and it looks as tough as a saddle. I drink a little of his red wine and keep it in my mouth and then I fork in a thin slice of bull tongue. Tastes a bit like rare, fillet steak, at least when it’s masked by wine. I chew and then hesitate, my throat asking me if this is something I really want to swallow, and then I force it down.
‘After what we went through with Medusa and all, I trust your instincts,’ he says. ‘I’m not liked in this town, everyon
e thinks I’m strange and really I don’t much care anymore as long as I can write up here in peace, but I do take this project very seriously indeed. I’m putting my faith in you.’
I’m flattered.
‘Email me your bank details so I can prepare the transfer.’
He takes a business card from his pocket and slides it across the table to me.
‘Do I get a deadline?’ I ask.
His upper lip bulges as his tongue moves up over his top teeth.
‘Next Sunday.’
That suits me because after that I’ll be living in a hotel by the sea overlooking a clear horizon, near a city with an art gallery and excellent Indian and Lebanese food and a department store and a decent airport. I’ll be waiting to move into a nice little apartment and I’ll have already paid the first month’s rent.
He has a thick wedge of tongue on his fork, the taste buds glistening with sauce, and he places it back down on his plate.
‘The Grimberg women don’t like me,’ he says with a wry laugh.
‘They’re mourning,’ I say. ‘Their world has shattered.’
‘They need this deal, Tuva. And so do I. You should also speak with the janitor and a few other long-serving employees, they don’t open up to me either, and then submit your typed notes and we can all walk away happy.’
‘I’ll do my best.’
He smiles and rolls up his sleeves and my God this man is half ape. He clears away the plates of tongue and I’m relieved, my stomach unclenching at the prospect of dessert. You can’t serve offal for dessert, not even he would do it.
‘Raspberries, basil, cracked black pepper and vanilla mascarpone.’
He says mascarpone like it rhymes with Al Capone and I snatch the plate from his hand greedily, happy for something to enjoy rather than endure.
‘How was your Christmas, Tuva?’
‘Didn’t celebrate,’ I say, images of Mum’s grave in my mind, candleless, weeds working their way up from deep underneath the snow and earth. I think back to the fish fingers I ate for Christmas lunch in front of the TV. Then in bed. Bottle of vodka. No glass. The fish fingers coming back up. The dread that I didn’t do enough for her, that I was the one person that could have let her go with a kind word in her ear and I did not. I could’ve whispered, ‘don’t worry Mum’ or even just, ‘I’m here, it’s okay’ but I did not.