by Will Dean
They both make a ‘humph’ noise and Alice raises her eyebrows like I just told them I shit gold nuggets.
We drink up and they show me to my executive single for the night. They both check the front-door lock and feed the log burner directly opposite my sofa with moss-covered birch logs and then they go up to bed and I remove my aids and unclip my bra under my shirt and drag it out of my sleeve and pull the blankets up to my chin and stare at the fire.
When I wake up my eyelids are glued together and I smell bad. Sleeping in my clothes next to a fire under a heap of blankets will have that effect. Cosy but there’s a price to pay. I stretch and swivel and my neck aches from the penknife position I slept in. I switch on my aids and see things in the room I missed last night: knitted trolls and elves, a heavy wooden mallet that looks like it’s just been repainted, a family pack of Grimberg salt liquorice, a bowl of sanded-pine splinters, a rectangular mirror smashed in one corner as if by an air-rifle pellet.
‘Porridge?’ asks the kitchen.
‘No, I’m fine, thanks. Is your phone working?’
‘Nope. Come and have porridge, we made it for you so you eat it.’
I stagger through, rearranging my hair and rubbing my eyes as I join them. I feel like a wreck and I’m not even hungover. Alice and Cornelia are both wearing zip-up micro fleeces under fleece-lined overalls. Fleece on fleece.
‘You sleep good, girl?’ asks Cornelia, spooning some brown abomination into three bowls. What the fuck is this, Goldilocks?
‘Fine, thank you. Really, I’m not much of a breakfast person.’
They both look up at me.
‘Eat,’ says Alice.
I sit down. The porridge is wholegrain brown and it’s salty as hell. Like everything else around here. But I am grateful.
The sisters eat like they’re synchronised perfectly. It’s odd. They both drop two Grimberg salt liquorice coins into their porridge and stir, the heat softening the coins and staining their gruel grey. One will lift her spoon to her mouth and then I’ll look over to the other and she’ll be there too, spoon tipped, liquorice-laced rye porridge and oats slurped in. They’ll both chew in unison, staring down into their bowls, then take another mouthful. There is no talking while this happens. I eat half my portion.
‘How they doing up at the factory?’ asks Cornelia.
I swallow and say, ‘Managing. I think.’
Alice blows air out of her mouth at that.
‘Baby-face lawyer keen to buy it out from under their noses, ain’t he Alice.’
‘Yep,’ says Alice.
‘We knew that sort back in Norway,’ says Cornelia. ‘Factory never gave Baby Face any legal work. Baby Face don’t like that one bit. Never forgot it. Now him and his partners scheming to make a grand fortune.’ She snaps her head around and then scrapes the last of her gruel from the bowl. ‘Phone’s back in.’
‘How can you tell?’ I ask.
‘Cos I ain’t deaf,’ she says. ‘Receiver buzzes when the connection comes on, don’t it Alice?’
Alice nods.
‘You’ll want Magnusson, number’s in the book. Tell him you’re here.’
I make the call to some gruff old voice that never introduces himself or even confirms that he’ll come. I ask about the price and about time and he just huffs and puts down the phone.
‘He was friendly,’ I say.
Alice shakes her head at me and Cornelia says, ‘you don’t reckon he’s busy enough as it is after that blizzard, girl? You reckon he owes you something cos you drove around here with your fancy ways when the snow was falling like that? Well, I’m not sure you have any right to be upset with Magnusson. He’s coming ain’t he?’
Twenty minutes later I’ve washed my face and tidied the sofa and then an almighty noise rumbles outside. The window darkens. I open the front door and the sisters are already working at their benches, sanding and gorging, sewing God-knows-whose-hair through a patch of leather, a tiny scalp, and there’s a huge blue tractor parked outside with a snowplough bolted to the front.
‘You called on the telephone?’ he says.
‘Yes, thanks for coming.’
‘Follow me,’ he says, driving off slowly in the direction of my abandoned truck.
I thank the sisters and follow the tractor. The snow gets scraped away and the brilliant white daylight clears my head. I love this tractor rumbling and ploughing in front of me with its horsepower and its heft. It’s a goddam pleasure to walk behind it. It’s a privilege. There are fresh animal-tracks everywhere to my left and my right. He attaches his tow chain to the chassis of my truck and drags it out like an adult lifting a flailing toddler from a paddling pool.
‘Thank you so much.’ I could kiss this tall miserable farmer even with his his dangly-icicle nostril hairs. ‘How much do I owe you?’
He shrugs and mutters something and pulls off the chain and loads it into his tractor and drives off.
Hero.
I check my phone and I have twelve per cent battery and barely a bar of reception. Eight missed calls, seven of them from Tam. I hold my key close to the ignition and I cross my fingers. Maybe finger crossing counts as one of Karin’s ‘precautions’? Maybe we all take ‘precautions’? The engine starts which is a miracle. I scrape and brush snow off the roof and then I drive off down the ploughed hill. Creaking. The tyres squeak on flat compacted snow. On each side of the track there’s a ridge of ploughed powder as tall as a horse. I’m driving down a gulley, a gutter, a carved channel, a bowling alley, a bobsleigh run. My hand reaches down for the stereo but there is none. I pass Viggo’s house, the taxi diligently dug out by hand hours ago, and then Bengt’s house containing a town’s worth of hoarded crap. And then I swing a left onto asphalt.
The main road’s been ploughed and salted so it looks black again. Frosted, gritty, but black. I sync my phone to my hearing aid and call the office.
‘It’s me, I’m on my way, be there in twenty minutes.’
‘What happened?’ asks Lena. ‘You okay? Are you alright, Tuva?’
‘Blizzard. Snowed in. Nightmare. I’m really sorry I missed it all.’
There’s a pause. ‘Doesn’t matter so long as you’re safe. Everyone was worried about you. Your truck working?’
I miss her so much already and I haven’t even left yet. The fact that she asks these questions and she really cares. Every single time, she really cares.
‘Fine, actually.’
I drive up Storgatan between McDonald’s and ICA Maxi, and the twin chimneys of the factory look down disapprovingly from their high granitic plinth. The town’s full of snow, ploughed hills dotting the car parks and roundabouts. People look at me as my truck splutters up the street, exhaust gurgling, windows poorly scraped, hubcaps missing, and I feel as if I’ve let down the whole town. It’s like when I used to visit Mum in the hospice after a missed weekend. I suppose it’s just me being extra paranoid, extra sensitive, but I always got the impression from the nurses that Mum had been talking, that they thought maybe I could do a little more for my poor old mother, maybe a few more visits and some more enthusiasm, would that be so much to ask?
There’s new graffiti on the wall that separates the cycle racks from the road: a spiked upside-down horseshoe with a trademark sign at the top right-hand corner. When I get inside, Nils flies out of his office slash kitchen, the door banging against the filing cabinet where we keep Kommun news.
‘Hours they waited for you, hours,’ he says. ‘There was a bet going, that’s what Ronnie’s mate told me, was it a new fella or were you pissed in a ditch or was it some hot girl or was it the Ferryman or did the Grimbergs adopt you as a stamper?’
‘Ditch,’ I say, pulling off my coat, sweat smell hitting my nose. ‘Pissed in a ditch.’
Lena opens her door and gives me a thumbs up or thumbs down or thumbs sideways gesture and I reply with a thumbs up and she winks and shuts her door.
I make a note of what David told me last night and list questions I s
till have for Anna-Britta and Karin and Cici. Most importantly: how did the big fire start at the lake house? But also: who owns the minority shareholding in Grimberg Liquorice?
I walk up to the factory, snow already greying, already salted and grit-speckled, and walk through the arch. The stampers’ eyes are down but I can feel each pair flick up after I pass. I head upstairs and get to work interviewing Anna-Britta. She gives me short, unhelpful answers, and then she leaves to visit the bank and I go to the bathroom stuck between two offices, a tiny cubicle not unlike the bathroom at the Posten. I hear sirens. I hope it’s not another frozen body, another dead gaping mouth, and then I walk back through and Holmqvist is sitting there in a chair with his smartphone in his hand waiting for me. We talk about the blizzard and me sleeping at the wood-carving sisters’ place and how I should have stayed at his place on the sofa. He asks me if I can get him some more details about the Grand Room, about the furniture and the artwork, and then there’s a piercing scream from the staircase like someone just got stabbed.
32
I run out to the top of the staircase, Holmqvist close behind me.
‘Oh my goodness,’ he says.
I dash down the stairs with their frayed red-runner carpet. Cecilia Grimberg is lying at the bottom in the foetal position, completely silent.
She looks like a dead bird. A tiny, broken, fallen fledgling.
I turn to David and tap his arm, ‘Call an ambulance.’
Her long skirts, some multi-layered floral thing, are wrapped around her legs and splayed around her like wings.
I check her breathing.
‘Can you hear me, Cici?’ I almost shout at her. ‘Cecilia, can you hear me?’
She stirs.
I can’t see any blood but I don’t want to move her in case she’s suffered a spinal injury.
‘It’s me, Tuva. You’re okay. Stay with me, the ambulance is on its way.’
But it’s not on its way.
Holmqvist is trying to get through the locked arch door because the chimney base right next to us is too thick for him to use his mobile. He dashes over to the heavy canteen door and heaves it open and a hundred voices flood our staircase. He closes it behind him.
I’m holding Cici’s fragile hand, her bangles disarrayed, one of her beads smashed and hanging by a thread. She doesn’t say anything but she squeezes my fingers.
‘You’re alright, Cici,’ I say. ‘I’m here with you. It’s Tuva. Help’s on its way.’
I move grey hairs from her face and even though she’s been disassembled, she is still a piece of art, still a composition, still beautiful. It’s as if an installation has been air lifted from a distant gallery in some cosmopolitan place and then dropped from a great height.
‘Oh my God,’ shouts Anna-Britta, bursting through the canteen door, faces behind her, hats and hair nets and eyes on Cici. ‘Oh, no. Not again.’
‘She’s okay,’ I say with no evidence of this whatsoever apart from my gut instinct and the need to calm down Anna-Britta.
‘Is she? Is she conscious? Oh, God.’
Anna-Britta looks like she might faint.
‘David’s calling an ambulance,’ I say. ‘It’ll be here any minute.’
‘That man,’ says Anna-Britta, and then she looks up toward the top of the stairs.
Karin’s up there, her hand over her mouth, her feet teetering on the edge of the top step, the eyes of a hundred ex-workers watching her and watching me.
‘Karin, come down,’ says Anna-Britta.
We crouch around Cici like three protective elephants guarding a fallen elder. And then the sirens are here and the arch door unlocks and opens and it is bright and cold and Janitor Andersson’s standing there holding a length of steel pipe in one hand and his huge jailor’s ring of keys in the other.
‘Out of the way,’ says a paramedic, a guy I’ve seen late-night shopping in ICA Maxi a few times. ‘Give us space.’
We scatter. Karin and I climb a few stairs and Anna-Britta stays close to Cici.
‘Watch her neck,’ says Anna-Britta. ‘Her neck.’
‘What’s her name?’
‘Cecilia Grimberg.’
They work like medical ballerinas, probing and asking questions and checking Cici’s pulse and preparing a stretcher and fastening a neck brace.
Cici’s trying to speak now. She’s moving her lips and her eyes are both open.
‘Don’t worry Cecilia,’ the guy says. ‘We’re going to take care of you.’
The other paramedic, a Viking with a beard and tanned arms and a broad neck plastered with tattoos, says, ‘It’s okay’. He’s talking to us three, looking at us all in turn. ‘We’ll look after her now, you did the right thing not moving her. Who’s coming with us in the ambulance?’
Anna-Britta touches her finger to her collarbone and the paramedic nods and the two men lift Cecilia gently onto the stretcher like parents with a newborn. They lay blankets over her and walk out through the arch door. I follow them and the cat’s out here, the battle-scarred tailless old cat with one eye. He’s not hissing today, he’s just sitting in the snow watching us.
They climb into the ambulance. I put an arm around Karin and she’s as rigid as a rake handle, all shoulder blades and elbows, not ceding to me one iota.
‘I’m alright,’ she says. ‘And Granny will be fine. It’s Mother I worry about.’
Cici’s sitting up inside the ambulance now, her tall grey hair all over the place, her shirt splayed open. Their voices are raised. Cici’s pleading and the paramedics are pleading and Anna-Britta is pointing out toward Storgatan.
Karin and I step closer to the open doors of the ambulance.
‘I will not leave,’ Cici says, a lump and a bruise growing on her cheek. ‘I will not leave Gavrik.’
They’re all saying how she’ll be back in a day or two and how they need to get her to a hospital and have her X-rayed and keep her under observation and they say she has nothing to worry about.
Cici notices us. One bedraggled journo who slept on a sofa last night and smells like a dumpster, and one granddaughter as dark and stiff as her cabinet of life. She beckons us over.
‘Tell them, KK.’
‘Granny will not leave,’ Karin says. ‘She’s made a solemn pledge and she has precautions to take care of. You’ll need to treat her here.’
Anna-Britta’s shaking her head. Cici’s nodding.
‘I’ll call our doctor,’ says Karin.
She makes a call and there’s a small crowd outside the gates now: Ronnie, and Viggo Svensson in his Taxi-Gavrik uniform, and half a dozen more. If it wasn’t minus fifteen there’d be thirty of them.
The doc, Stina Johansson, my doc, their doc, most people’s doc, arrives and parks right in the arch under the big steel hook. She ignores me and talks to Cici and the paramedics. They come to an understanding after ten minutes that Cici’s too frail for the drive to Karlstad, which is nonsense but I guess it ticks a box, and Doc Stina will look after her at the factory residence. The paramedics look at each other and shrug and say they need to phone this in but Stina is not the kind of person you say no to. I can see that expensive Mercedes 4x4, Hellbom’s 4x4, parked over the road. The paramedics carry the stretcher upstairs and Cici looks quite bright now, save for the red bump on her cheek.
Karin and I walk up behind them and we go into the Receiving Room and Holmqvist is there by the door to the Grand Room.
‘We can take it from here,’ says Karin, to the medics. ‘Thank you, both.’
The paramedics look at each other like ‘what?’
Doc Stina says to them, ‘Tuva and I can carry the stretcher. I won’t leave until I’m satisfied that Mrs Grimberg is out of danger. Thank you both for all your help.’
The paramedics take Stina aside into a huddle and the three of them chat in whispers, Cici’s stretcher resting on the Gustavian chaise longue and Anna-Britta holding her hand.
‘Call us, any of you, if there are any changes,’ says th
e tattooed Viking paramedic. ‘We’ll pick up the stretcher later.’
They leave.
‘Thank you,’ says Anna-Britta to Holmqvist. ‘We need to be alone now, I’m sure you understand.’ She points toward the stairs.
Karin has her key in the door to the residence, and Anna-Britta and I each have an end of the stretcher. I can see a faint line of blood circling Anna-Britta’s gnawed index fingernail and it looks like a pink halo.
‘Go,’ says Cici to Holmqvist.
He does as he’s told, his eyes on the door to the Grand Room, the locked door, as he turns to walk down the stairs.
We pass through.
‘Excuse all this, excuse all this,’ says Anna-Britta to me. ‘Excuse the room, don’t look, just please don’t look.’
I stare down to the floor and we walk to the closest bedroom, Cici’s bedroom, the one by the chimney.
‘I want to see the family,’ says Cici. ‘If I’m to be in bed for days and I can’t reach my attics then I want to see the family.’ She looks to Karin, whose laser-straight fringe is covering her eyes. ‘Can I borrow your room, KK?’
Karin smiles a sad smile and nods.
We walk to the far end, to the corner bedroom at the rear. I glimpse Anna-Britta’s bedroom and see Gustav’s trousers and shirt hanging over the back of a chair. His brown-leather shoes are tucked underneath. I shiver and look away. We slide Cici carefully onto the bed and then the doc asks us all to leave so she can talk to Cici and examine her.
‘Don’t look at all this,’ says Anna-Britta, her eyes tired and red. ‘It’s not how it’s supposed to be, please just ignore it all.’
‘I won’t write about the residence,’ I say. ‘I won’t describe it.’
She closes her eyes tight shut, her hand on my arm, her other hand on Karin’s shoulder. She almost cries but she doesn’t.
Anna-Britta busies herself in the kitchen and then we sit at the long table with knives at our toes and we sip sweet tea from repaired china.
‘I hope she’ll be okay,’ says Anna-Britta.
‘She has to be,’ says Karin.
‘She will be,’ I say.