by Will Dean
‘To romance.’
I raise my mug but say nothing.
When I get to Tammy’s she isn’t there. What is there is a huge graffiti tag on the side of her food van. Bastards. It’s a picture of a brown face with large black eyes, each one with a G motif.’
‘They did that with me inside the van.’
I turn around and Tam’s there and she looks small in her ski jacket with her bobble hat.
‘What?’
‘I think there were two of them, I’m not sure, might have been just one. They pushed something heavy against the door of the van and the hatch was already locked up for the night.’ She swallows hard. ‘And my phone was in my car.’
‘They locked you inside?’ I say.
Tammy looks at her food van. Her face says ‘I never want to be in there again’.
‘It was all over in five minutes. But yeah, someone locked me inside. I screamed and hollered. Nobody came. Maybe it’s the same ratshit that’s been following me these past few nights. Maybe it’s the Ferryman.’
‘Following you?’
She shrugs. ‘Some guy I keep seeing, huge hood, can’t see his face, he’s always some distance from me but I keep seeing him. I’m not imagining it.’
‘Why didn’t you—’
‘Think it’s best if you spend your last nights in the hotel if you don’t mind, Tuva. I’m not feeling too well right now. Might take some time off.’
‘Is it because I brought someone home? They didn’t stay over, you know.’
‘Do you mind?’ she says.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, reaching out for a hug. But she folds herself tighter and steps back. The air is ice cold and the sky’s as white as Karin’s antique cyanide pill. There’s nobody else around this early, just one stooped guy in the distance walking his dog and both he and the dog look like they want the walk to be over as soon as possible.
‘Tam, please.’
‘I can help you pay for the room if that’s a problem. I need some time alone and I need to know there won’t be strangers in my flat.’
‘I can pay,’ I say. ‘I’ll be gone this afternoon.’
‘Okay then,’ she says, and then she walks away to her car.
A deep pain in the pit of my belly. A rip. Half of me is love, or maybe just infatuation, warm and at peace. The other half is fire and ice at the same time, winded at the thought of hurting Tam, of losing her.
Maybe she just needs time. How would I feel if after a tough, freezing workday, when some pinhead locked me inside my own truck, how would I feel if I got home in the middle of the night and my part-time no-rent lodger was hooking up with a stranger at the exact moment I needed safety and a hug and tea and for my home to be my sanctuary. How’d I feel? I’ll talk to her later and patch things up. She’s my one real friend here and I’m not leaving with things sour between us. I can’t.
I walk fast up Storgatan, my cheeks burning in the swirling wind. There are corpses in the salted snow, deflated pink balloons and red hearts with ribbons attached. Some are on top of the slush but some have been churned into it by this morning’s plough like raspberry ripple ice-cream. When I walk past Ronnie’s Bar I’m careful to step past the frozen puddles of Valentine vomit, irregular ice sheets of half-digested hot dog and cheese toasty and beer.
The death factory looks dark today against the sky. Its chimneys are moving toward me just like they did on the day Gustav died, the wind blowing from the east, the clouds passing over me, the bricks leaning. There is smoke billowing from the one working chimney, the left one, and I can see trucks queuing under the arch to be loaded with crates of salt liquorice coins.
I walk through the factory floor. I recognise everyone and nobody. And then the dazzling red-haired stamper sees me and she stamps even harder, her instrument punching down repeatedly, powerfully, flattening the liquorice coins and imprinting each one with a capital G.
Karin’s sitting on the top step of the staircase.
‘Hi,’ I say.
She smiles but her eyes are red and her mascara’s run down her alabaster cheeks in grey lines.
‘What I wouldn’t give for your life,’ she says.
‘How’s your grandma today?’ I ask.
Karin stands up and wipes her eyes with her sleeve.
‘She’s fine, but Mother . . .’ The mascara streaks look like insect legs cupping her cheeks. ‘Soon it might just be me left.’
I step up and touch her arm but she recoils.
‘Don’t say that,’ I tell her.
She points to the portraits and photographs on the staircase walls.
‘Mother has to walk past them all every day. Grandfather Ludvig, who loathed her, who never wanted her here, who thought she wasn’t even qualified to be an owner’s wife.’ The painting she’s pointing at shows a man with grey hair and a twisted torso and small, neat moustache. ‘I can’t even imagine what he’d have thought about Mother running it all. Don’t you see?’ She looks at me, blinking, agitated. ‘They’re the problem.’ She points to the photos lining the staircase, her voice louder now. ‘And them, the untouchable workers. We can’t let them down even if it means we all wither in the process. Father couldn’t stand it and now Mother has to walk past all of them; each pair of eyes, a family still dependant on us keeping this place alive.’
‘Did Gunnarsson make inappropriate advances toward you, Karin?’
She looks at me, her teeth gritted.
‘No comment.’
37
The Receiving Room is an airlock between the public and the very private: a staged portal connecting two worlds. Karin unlocks the door to the residence and pulls aside the curtain. We step through. The Grand Room is lit by shallow afternoon sun and the brightness doesn’t do it any favours.
It’s white light this time of year, dental-surgery light, near-death-experience light, and it is bleached of all warmth and nuance. The cabinet of life has its doors wide open and it’s glaring at me. Like it’s making a threat. My hearing aids lose some of their power because of the high ceilings. The wet wall has a darkness. There are more knives under the long refectory table than last time I visited: carving and bread and filleting and butchers and grapefruit and steak. There’s the one made from antler with a capital ‘G’ stamped or engraved into its base. In some places the blades are spread double-height, knives on top of knives, all pointing out at the world.
‘You don’t leave home much, do you?’ I say.
‘There’s a maniacal killer on the loose,’ she snarls. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
I don’t say a word.
‘I go out when I leave town,’ she says. ‘But I can’t exactly hang out at the local café in Gavrik, like you people.’
There is no café, not unless she means the seating area in ICA Maxi.
‘Why not?’ I ask.
Her eyelids appear heavy beneath her fringe. ‘Because we’re not like you, Tuva.’
‘I have to ask you again, Karin. Did Per Gunnarsson scare you when you were a teenager? Did he make advances towards you?’
‘Who told you?’
‘I heard he was almost fired,’ I say. ‘Almost,’ she says.
I want to ask her more questions but she knocks on the door of Cici’s convalescence room and then she turns and walks off.
‘Come in, you,’ says a faint voice.
I look back toward Karin but she’s gone so I pass the three-legged rabbit and step into the bedroom.
‘It’s just me, I’m afraid,’ I say.
‘I know who it is,’ says Cici. ‘Come inside and let me have a good look at you.’
I walk in self-consciously. Why the hell didn’t I bring flowers or grapes like a decent human person? Noora would have brought flowers. Peonies.
‘You look radiant,’ says Cici, pushing down with her palms flat to the bed sheet to lift herself, just like Mum used to do. ‘Have you taken a new lover for Valentine’s?’
What? She doesn’t know. How could she know?
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‘Hearty breakfast,’ I say. ‘That’s all. Can I get you anything? Water? Sweet tea?’
Cici shakes her head.
‘These are our last days together. Will you come back and visit?’
I nod and straighten her blankets and then I see the mirrors.
‘For your make-up?’ I ask.
She smiles but this is a smile I haven’t seen before, it’s paler, it has more patina, she isn’t baring her teeth at me. It’s an older thing altogether.
‘Come here, darling.’
I crouch beside her bed and she still smells of fresh lemons somehow, she must rub the zest into her skin.
‘Now, look.’
The mirrors, there are six of them, are arranged in such a way that Cici can watch the street from her bed. She can look at a mirror, a big one, at a comfortable angle; she uses her opera glasses but I can see fine, and there’s Storgatan, people heading to ICA to pick up sweets for their Saturday-night TV marathons. And if Cici looks at the other mirror, an oval-shaped antique with ornate gilt frame, she can see the churchyard of St Olov’s. The mirrors on the window are angled down, and Cici can look at where her in-laws and her son and her grandson rest in sub-zero silence.
‘Isn’t it magic?’ she says. ‘Dear KK set it all up for me this morning, she’s such a little bug.’
‘It’s wonderful,’ I say, regretting to the very depths of myself that I never thought to do something like this for Mum in her final weeks. I never told her I loved her or liked her, or told her I’d be alright on my own and I never rigged mirrors so she could see Lake Vänern, beautiful Lake Vänern, the frozen sea with its dozens of ice skaters scratching smooth lines all over the frosted glass surface. She’d have liked it, I think. And I never even thought of it.
‘Can you tell me what happened to your lake house?’
She nods and looks wistful, her gaze turning from me to the mirrors set up to view the graves.
‘It was a good home to us all, that place. Like a shield. It was mouldy in places but nothing like this old sponge. We had cows nearby, not ours of course, and the marshlands were buzzing with dragonflies each August.’
‘You must have been sad to see the house go.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘No regrets. I may have a hundred years left to live or a hundred seconds. No regrets whatsoever.’
My eyebrows rise up into my forehead.
‘I mean it,’ she says. ‘It was time for the house, so the house went. When it’s your time you shuffle off and it’s the same with houses and it’s the same with all my treasures upstairs. I gave away a lot of it, everything made of wool or silk, I gave it all away to the people who needed it, you know, the Kosovans, the Syrians, and whoever had just arrived. They come here and it’s so incredibly cold. They’re the ones who needed it not some bony, old thing vogueing about in her attic. I gave away half of it all. Gone. No regrets.’
‘You’re stronger than me,’ I say. ‘I have regrets and they follow me everywhere.’
‘Oh, I’m not strong,’ she says, tapping my wrist with her index finger. ‘I am terrified. This is the only way I know how to live and I’m eighty-two so I hold onto what works. It helps me. No regrets works. When you lose a father-in-law and a husband and then a son and a grandson and you’re still alive, you need a shield of granite. When a man gets slaughtered in cold blood, mere metres below where you lay your head each night, you need that shield even more. Me believing that your time is your time, that is my granite protection.’ She looks through the mirrors to the family plot in St Olov’s. ‘I’m behind granite right now.’
‘I lost both my parents,’ I say, the words pouring out of my mouth like water from a tap. ‘In a way I lost them both when I was just a girl.’ I look out at Storgatan through the other mirror. Still crouched by the bed. ‘I thought both deaths could have been prevented. They were taken from me. Snatched. A shield like yours would have helped me to move on.’ I think about Aunt Ida and her scar and the fact that she made the effort to send me a good-luck card. I look at Cici. ‘You might not think you’re strong but you are. I think you’re . . .’ But my breathing stops and I can’t get the words out.
She smiles and her teeth are there like last week and it fills me up from the very bottom of my feet with pure distilled happiness.
‘When you’re better,’ I say. ‘Perhaps you and Anna-Britta and Karin could go away on holiday for a week or two. If you come to the south this summer we could meet up for lunch.’
‘Holiday!’ she says, like I just suggested we drink weed killer on the moon. ‘We’ve never taken a holiday, never, not once. My honeymoon was spent in Turkey sampling roots and signing import agreements. What would our employees think if we took a leisure holiday?’
‘They take holidays.’
‘Of course they do, and they bloody well need them and deserve them. But we’re different, we’re needed here to keep this place in check. And what with this maniac covering a dead man with our liquorice, we’ll need to work harder than ever.’ She rubs the rabbit foot around her neck. ‘If we went on a holiday we’d come back to a heap of sodden bricks and liquorice pouring down Storgatan like a thick black river, and four hundred people out of work.’
I’m quiet for a moment, that image in front of me, that river, my eyes on the mirror pointing down Storgatan. It’s getting dark.
‘Tell me about Karin and Per Gunnarrson.’
She narrows his eyes. ‘Oh, so you know, do you?’
I nod.
‘Peculiar,’ she says. ‘But no harm done. He was a loner and he had no social skills, Gunnarsson, but really he was just chatting to KK out in the open in broad daylight. We handled it internally and no one lost their jobs, thank goodness. KK was upset with her pappa, and Gustav was upset with the stamper who made the complaint in the first place. Her grandparents helped resolve the whole thing. They mediated. No harm done in the end.’
No harm done? Really?
‘Can I ask you, Cici. Have you ever been pushed down the stairs before?’
‘No,’ she says.
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘Not here,’ she says.
I bite my lip.
‘Back at the lake house. I was pushed, must have been six or seven years ago. But I was stronger back then I suppose because I only fell a few steps. Hit my head on the banister. No permanent damage. To this day I have no idea why I was pushed.’
‘Do you have any idea who pushed you?’ I ask.
She looks up at the ceiling. ‘There is one thing you could do for me, if you have the energy,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘Would you mind trotting up to my attics? I’d be so happy if you could grab a few huge armfuls, pot luck, Russian roulette, game of chance. Take from different racks and hat boxes, bring jewellery and the most colourful sneakers you can find. Two big armfuls, and bring them down to me, would you mind?’
I stand, my legs numb from crouching, and leave the room and open the attic door and peer up. I don’t really want to go up there all alone. It’s too big and too shadowy. There are a hundred corners for a Ferryman to hide in.
A sprig of dried rosemary is pinned to each riser. The air cools. I see the bees and moths sleeping on the roof joists and I feel wary but also privileged to be up here alone with them.
Which racks? The space is a cathedral nave, as long as a football pitch and almost as broad with just those two huge circular chimney-stacks breaking the space. Radiators hum under windows.
‘Hello?’ I call out.
Nothing.
I walk to the front of the building and the sun’s setting over Utgard forest in the far distance. It looks like an infected eye closing slowly and painfully for the night. People are walking into the Posten to buy their weekly copy and drop twenty kronor into the biscuit-tin honesty box and then they’re heading over to Björnmossen’s gun store to check out the discounted bowie knives.
I head to the far end of the attic. My footsteps echo into the roof
space. The grave candle’s here and it’s still flickering next to Cici’s sewing machine. It has a weatherproof lid with vent holes and it looks like it might go on burning for days. There’s a rotary cutter like the one Mum used to trim fabric, back when she still had hobbies, and next to it rests a stack of spare blades and a pair of dressmaking shears. I keep walking. I’ve never been this far into the attics before. There are stacks of round hatboxes arranged like towering wedding cakes, and there are piles of loose fabric and embroidery work. A mannequin with black eyes and peeling plastic skin watches me, her body just a metal pole beneath her mink stole. Shoe racks line one wall. I pull down a dusty pair of trainers and they’re patent red leather and I think they’ll fit Cici’s requirements.
The floor creaks beneath my feet and I stop and turn on my heels and look into the dark places behind the clothes racks. My heart pounds and I force my breathing to be shallow and quiet.
I move on.
Necklaces are draped over the long stiff necks of three gloved mannequins and they’re also looped over steel nails that have been driven into the walls. I can see puppets hanging from their strings. Some have beards and some have rosy cheeks and some have their strings tangled so badly they look like they’ve hung themselves. I can see one that looks like Lena and one that looks, ponytail upturned nose and all, a little too much like me.
I gather up a mid-length dress with growling wolves stitched on the base, each wolf chasing the next, and I take ten or twelve necklaces with different-sized beads and crystals and amber nuggets. I think they’re all plastic. There’s a chair near the linoleum catwalk and I drape everything on it and head over to a rack of trousers by the back wall. Looking out of the windows here you’d think it was night already. The snow glows grey underneath me and stirrers and tasters and quality-control supervisors leave work from their one exit in their ugly ski jackets and oversize moon-boots, trudging back through the arch and round St Olov’s ruin with their hats pulled tight around their faces. There’s a mannequin on my left with her head too far round and it’s like she’s in pain. The shadows that she and her lifeless colleagues cast are not okay. They move. They glide over the walls as I walk. A bluebottle stirs and buzzes a lazy buzz and then settles on a window. The rear yard is quiet, but then I see a figure run out from behind a truck carrying a plastic can or box. And then I see light. I see flames.