by Will Dean
‘Small world,’ he says.
It is up here, no shit. It’s an actual snow globe. Hermetically sealed.
I take a call from the woman who runs the water-sports place down by the reservoir. Reckons she’s seen an old homeless guy going in and out of the condemned black warehouse behind the Toyota garage. She reckons he ‘looks like a Ferryman’ and I ask her what exactly does a Ferryman look like and she tells me ‘like he’s bent double and he’s out to do harm’. I tell her it’s not really a story and that she should call Thord and maybe help the guy find some temporary accommodation.
The temperature on the window thermometer says minus sixteen when I leave. A kid wearing an all-in-one snowsuit crosses in front of me dragging a sledge and he looks like a shrunken astronaut. I pull my hood tight around my head to minimise the air gaps, to trap my stale heat, and then I start the Tacoma’s engine. Starts just fine. I complete all my pre-flight checks and scrape the polar crust from each window. Hotel Gavrik glows pink in front of me, all the ground-floor bulbs changed for red ones like a cut-price brothel from hell.
I get to Tammy’s flat. She has deluxe bathroom stuff whereas my shower is, was, stocked with ICA Maxi unscented budget shower-gels. To prevent both eczema and also bankruptcy. I turn up the heat and let my head loll on my shoulders, the water pummelling the bony hump at the back of my neck. I lather up with Tam’s scented fancy-pants shower cream and it feels good. I smell like a peach. I use the cream on my forearms and face so I’ll be able to enjoy the scent myself later. And then I regret it. What the hell was I thinking? I regret sending this signal to Viggo. I shouldn’t care, I know that. I shouldn’t have to think twice about what I wear or how I smell but still I rub at myself with the water, scrubbing the scent away, scratching it off my skin. But it’s there and it’s staying.
I pick out the least romantic thing I can see in my black suitcase: a pair of unwashed Mum jeans and a big, cotton sweater the size of a barbecue cover. I put on my least favourite bra, a non-underwired thing, lovely shade of grey, which manages to flatten my breasts into pretty much nothing. What a hideously distorted world this is where I have to be so conscious of all this nonsense, while he and every other man just lives their lives never having to worry.
The fire’s laid in the log burner but Tam won’t be back home till late because this is one of her busiest nights of the year. In Gothenburg or Jonköping, couples might be cooking something for each other, or meeting at their favourite brasserie, or sharing a delicious super-hot curry at the Kashmiri place down near the town hall. But not here. Tam works for hours to dish up plastic boxes of superb Thai food; and men, it’s usually men, pick up the boxes and shiver and maybe buy a red rose, fifty kronor each, she orders them from ICA every year, they reserve three-dozen just for her. Happy Valentine’s.
I park in McDonald’s, my bonnet almost touching a ploughed snow mountain. The place is medium-busy and they’ve put heart-shaped corporate balloons by the counter where you pick up your cardboard ketchup thimble and your drink straws. There’s a poster appealing for information regarding the murder of Per Gunnarsson, but no reward is mentioned. That’s what you get when you’re a loner. If someone stabbed me in the neck and implanted a canine tooth in my jugular vein I doubt anyone would offer a reward for that either. I order a coffee and choose a seat where I can observe the front door like some paranoid gangster boss in a movie.
Five past seven, no sign of Viggo. A young couple, both maybe sixteen years old, sit opposite me. He’s got two Big Mac meals and she’s picking at a McSalad and grazing through most of his fries. They’re wearing headphones, the airline-pilot kind, and they’re both watching their phones. But it’s not a bad thing. From the Formica upward it’s all ‘things aren’t what they used to be’ and ‘millennials have lost the art of conversation’ but beneath the Formica their feet are entwined, and their trainers, matching brand but different colours, are caressing each other back and forth. It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey at eye level but Brief Encounter down by the floor.
‘Happy Valentine’s,’ says a voice behind me. The words rustle the fine hairs on the back of my neck. Hints of stale coffee and breath mints. I turn around.
‘Where did you come from?’
Viggo’s smile collapses. ‘From there.’ He points to the unisex toilet and I notice the water in his combed hair. He reeks of supermarket cologne and his grey Taxi-Gavrik cagoule has been pressed or ironed.
He hands me a heart-shaped McDonald’s balloon attached to a small weight.
‘Take a seat,’ I say, pushing the balloon away to the next table.
‘I thought you might call eventually, before you move down south, but I never expected this.’
‘What?’
‘Valentine’s.’
He sits and his smile is back, his thin-lipped smile that I never saw that time in his parked taxi because he was in the driver’s seat with the tea-light candle on the dash and I was behind locked in the back.
‘I’d like to talk to you for a story, Viggo. This is not a date.’
‘Whatever you want to call it.’
‘Why don’t you get yourself a coffee?’
‘We’re not eating?’
‘I’ve eaten already.’
He licks his lips and looks over to the next table. A kid with curtain hair, quite long, is sitting in his ski gear and the tips of his hair, the ends which must have strayed out from under his hat, are wet and speckled with snowflakes. The rest, the hair on the top of his head, is dry. Curtain-hair kid is inhaling chicken nuggets.
‘Mind if I eat?’ he asks.
I shake my head.
He’s back within four minutes carrying a tray. Filet-O-Fish and carrot sticks and an apple juice. Says it all.
‘One of your family members used to work at the factory?’ I ask.
‘Six of my family members used to work at the factory,’ he says. ‘Uncle Sven was the quality-control manager at the start but he ended up as Ludvig Grimberg’s right-hand-man. He was smart with business, contracts, good head for figures. No need to pay a lawyer with Uncle Sven in the office, he must have saved them a fortune over the years. And then five more, two in production, one of them tasting them liquorice coins, and one cleaner back in the canteen. It’s fair to say the Grimbergs have been using the Svenssons for decades. And what do we got to show for it?’
‘How did . . .’
‘And then there’s my wife, you see,’ he interrupts, rubbing his knuckles against the side of his head. ‘Ex-wife. That’s the worst of it. Factory boss played games with my own ex-wife. Gustav Grimberg, I mean. Mind games.’ He taps his temple with his finger and then he grits his teeth and stares at me.
‘Your wife?’
‘Ex-wife,’ he says.
‘What kind of mind games?’
He shakes his head for a full ten seconds and then he pulls out a small Swiss Army Knife, the one that usually hangs from his rear-view mirror, and he cuts his burger in half. ‘Not going into the nitty-gritty, not digging all that emotion up again, no way. Old man Grimberg was never with his wife you see, not really. And Gustav was just like his daddy.’ He pauses to wipe the blade of his knife on a napkin. ‘And I’ll say this. If I saw a Grimberg on fire I wouldn’t even spit on him.’
I let him eat and cool off.
‘Can I ask you a few questions about the individual family members?’
He chews his fish and bun combination, a drop of mayonnaise lingering on his lower lip before he licks it back inside his mouth.
‘Fire away.’
‘I’ve heard from several people that there are more owners than just the immediate Grimberg family. Any idea who the outside shareholder is?’
He nods, his cheeks full of processed cod flesh and gherkins.
The ceiling lights flicker and dim but they stay on.
‘Who is it?’ I ask.
‘Mikey’s staying up, you know,’ says Viggo. ‘Babysitter’s taking care of him tonight. Older boy from the n
ext village. I told him you might want to stop by for coffee or ice cream, so he’s staying up just in case.’
‘Who’s the other owner, Viggo?’
‘You fancy seeing little Mikey?’
‘Let’s talk about the Grimbergs first, I’ve got deadlines. The minority owner, the investor, do you know their name?’
‘Investor!’ he says, laughing. I can see fish mush on his tongue. ‘He isn’t exactly an investor.’
I stick out my bottom lip like, ‘really? Tell me more’.
‘You seen the little guy, the caretaker so-to-say?’
‘The janitor?’
‘Ten per cent owner. My uncle Sven set the whole thing up.’
Viggo puts two narrow carrot sticks in his mouth and chews like a jack rabbit.
‘The janitor?’ I say again.
He chews and then he starts to talk and I can see unnaturally orange pulp swooshing around on his tongue.
‘Caretaker used to live out by the reservoir, big place with room for a horse, that kind of thing. It was his wife’s parents’ farm if I remember right and he sold it when his wife passed. Caretaker made a lot of money on the sale and had no place to go and no wife so Uncle Sven suggested he invest in the factory. And he did. Ten per cent, not sure what it cost him, probably everything he had, but ten per cent and he gets a dividend payment once a year.’
‘And he can—’
Viggo interrupts me, shaking his head again. ‘My uncle expected a bonus for arranging it all. Saved the company he did. Maybe thought he’d be able to leave some money to me and Mikey one day so I wouldn’t need to drive every hour of every goddam day, out in all weathers, but he didn’t even get a single extra kronor from the Grimbergs.’
I try to look understanding.
‘The janitor can live in the basement as part of the deal?’ I ask.
‘Don’t reckon that was part of it,’ Viggo says, crunching another stack of neon nuclear-orange perfectly-identical carrot sticks. ‘Too damp down there to live, or so Uncle Sven used to say, he should be living out someplace else. Sven reckoned the caretaker wasn’t too happy with how it all turned out, reckoned he got more bitter with every year that passed. Nobody likes being ignored. What are you wearing?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Your perfume, that roses or peaches?’
‘Not me,’ I say, dragging my sleeves further down my wrists, covering as much skin as possible.
Viggo pierces the little foil cover of his apple-juice carton and sucks through the straw, his thin lips puckered like he’s blowing me a kiss.
‘Smells real good,’ he says, slurping the last of his juice and sniffing the air between us. ‘Real sweet.’
I scratch my dry eyelid and try to focus on my job.
The caretaker isn’t the one pulling the strings,’ says Viggo. ‘He ain’t clever enough.’
‘Pulling what strings?’ I ask.
‘My ex-wife reckoned the caretaker has someone telling him what to do. Janitor was this close . . .’ Viggo pushes his thumb and index finger together, ‘to moving away someplace warm with palm trees instead of locking his money up with the Grimbergs for a measly ten per cent. My ex-wife reckoned it was some old man, she said she saw them in a truck out by the Toyota garage. Talked him out of moving abroad, made a case for being an industrialist.’ Viggo shakes his head and rolls his bloodshot eyes. ‘Uncle Sven explained all the risks in black-and-white but the caretaker’s mind was made up. Don’t know who that old man was, never did find out.’
‘Did your uncle ever mention the Grimberg summer house on Lake Vänern?’
‘The Herrgård?’
I nod.
‘One of the best houses in the Kommun. Five-hundred square metres even without the wings.’ ‘The wings that burnt down?’
‘Sure did, didn’t they. Uncle Sven reckoned. Say, what do I get in turn for all this information, ain’t no such thing as a free dinner, especially on Valentine’s.’
‘How old is Mikey now?’ I ask.
‘He’s almost eight.’
‘The Herrgård?’
‘Yeah, so my uncle reckoned a kid burnt the wings down, you know, the strange girl with the dyed-black hair. He reckoned she wasn’t messing around, wasn’t being bad. He said she heard about the insurance and she was trying to help out her dad.’
‘But she was so young back then,’ I say.
‘Never underestimate kids,’ he says. ‘My Mikey can do more difficult sums and writing than I can. He can do all that already. And he loves your friend’s Thai food, he can eat it even spicier than I can. Anyway, Uncle Sven reckoned the Grimberg daughter overheard her parents talking. Him about the insurance and her about how she always hated the place and how Gavrik was her home. I got my own theory, though, because people used to say the young girl was furious with her dad back then cos he let Gunnarsson stay in his job. My uncle saw them two, the young girl and Gustav I mean, he saw them have screaming rows over it. The girl reckoned Gustav put the factory’s interests ahead of the family.’
‘Karin Grimberg was the minor?’ I ask. ‘The girl Gunnarsson was talking inappropriately to?’
‘Never was proven,’ says Viggo, wiping his mouth on a paper napkin. ‘One of the stampers went to HR, went to the lawyer’s wife, but nobody lost their jobs over it, the Grimbergs never let anyone go.’
Karin was the girl?
‘The Grimbergs never stayed in the Herrgård lake house much after the big fire, that’s what Uncle Sven told me, so they sold it to the lawyer, Henrik Hellbom his name is, real good economy that one, even though he was born with nothing. Never knew his pappa, you know that? Ain’t nothing these days but back then it was a real scandal. Rumour is Hellbom bought a family crest a few years ago and commissioned someone to research his roots to see if his ancestors were nobility.’ He rolls his eyes again. ‘Hellbom knocked that lake house down and built one of them glass boxes. He always gets what he wants in the end, even if it takes him years of work. You just gotta look at his face. You know he gives himself the Botox? Him and his wife went on some kind of course is what I heard. They inject his face with the Botox needles, do it all from home. You believe that?’
My hearing aid beeps and I notice McDonald’s has emptied out. There’s one girl at the till and one couple at the table furthest away. I look back at Viggo and he’s watching me watch the room.
‘You think the Ferryman’s here?’ he says with a flat smile.
‘Why would you say a thing like that?’
Viggo shrugs. ‘Let’s go and say hi to Mikey, he’d really love to see you.’
‘I can’t do that, Viggo. But I really appreciate you talking to me.’
‘Listen.’ He looks flustered. ‘I’ve been working out, can you tell? Reckon I been pushed around long enough and now I’ve drawn a line.’ He straightens up. ‘I’m showing Mikey how to be a man and I’m making amends for the past. New rules. Now, why don’t I drive us to my place and make you and Mikey some ice cream, just the three of us, you’d make his day.’
‘I have a date,’ I say.
He looks at me like I’m cheating on him.
‘Who with?’ he says.
‘You don’t know him,’ I say. ‘He’s coming here in ten minutes, works up at the mill.’
Viggo half closes his eyes and points his fingertip down into the Formica until the flesh bends and his nail turns red.
‘You doing mind games?’ he says.
I shake my head.
‘Grimberg played those games with my own ex-wife and now your new job’s gonna take you away from me?’
‘Maybe I’ll stop by and say bye to Mikey this weekend before I leave for the south,’ I say. ‘How’s that?’
‘Saturday dinner, seven o’clock?’ he says.
‘I’ll call you and we can set something up. I’ll do what I can.’
This placates him.
I say goodbye and he stands up waiting for a hug but I stay seated and shake his hand. He walks over to
the door and pockets his Swiss Army Knife and then he glances back at me and flashes another thin-lipped smile and pushes the door open. Noora brushes past him and steps inside and the music changes and then it’s like he never even existed.
35
Noora’s wearing a hoodie and somehow her hat hair looks good. It’s been conditioned. Dried properly. She looks at me and then walks to the counter.
My stomach’s queasy. Her awkwardness at the cop shop and the truck crash. I walk to the counter and stand behind her and the back of her head pulls me closer. She smells of good things. In this ice-cold town. The sounds in the restaurant dim and Noora’s voice becomes crystal clear. She orders a Big Mac Meal. She has a coupon.
When she goes to pay, to place her card in the machine, her hoodie pulls tight across her back and I see the faint outline of her bra strap, the line of her back, the shape of her body underneath all this winter protection. I’m aware of my pulse. She takes her tray and thanks the server and walks off.
‘Next, please.’
I just stand there staring up at the back-lit menu that I know off by heart, my head a soft clump of overcooked pasta.
‘Erm.’
‘What’s your order, please?’
‘Big Mac Meal,’ I say.
‘Drink?’
‘Coke.’
‘Fifty-nine kronor.’
I pay and pick up the brown tray with its informative paper placemat. It’s wet around the edges and my fries look underdone. I fill up my Coke cup to half, because that’s what I always do, and then I peer around the room.
She’s reading a book.
I walk past her to make sure she sees me and then I sit down at the next table, my back a little straighter than it normally is, my chin a little higher.
She smiles.
My mouth dries out completely, zero saliva, a sandy desert. I see better than I have ever seen, the black crow outside by the bins, the couple in the corner looking away from each other, the faint waft of oily steam rising from my underdone fries.
I’m fifteen years old again.
I can’t fill my Coke cup here, not like I usually do, not with her right there. I want to but I can’t. I eat a handful of limp fries. Too salty. When I really was fifteen, without a dad, but with a mum who couldn’t cope, when I was fifteen I got crushes in newsagents. A lot. I’d go in after school to buy gum or a bar of chocolate. I’d see a guy or a girl over the central aisle looking through magazines and I’d fall in love in a fraction of a split-second. Properly in love. Powerfully. Forcefully. Mind, body, and soul. My stomach would sink toward my bladder and my heart would contract hard like an unripe avocado. I’d watch her or him from the corner of my eye, thrilled. Overwhelmed. Delighted. I’d be in love, watching their hair and their wrists and the way they blinked.