by Will Dean
38
The wall of St Olov’s glows pinkish yellow and there’s nobody down at ground level to witness the fire.
It’s just me up here. Me and a hundred comatose wasps.
I drop the clothes and the beads to the floor, one set breaking, marble-sized balls scattering over the floorboards and rolling up the linoleum catwalk. I run down the stairs two at a time.
Cici can’t help.
‘Anna-Britta,’ I yell, trying not to sound alarmed. ‘Karin.’
Nothing.
I run past the cabinet of life, its heavy doors still open, past the table with its lamp adorned with bindweed, past the rabbit, past the knives, and I look inside Anna-Britta’s open door and Gustav’s clothes are still there. But there’s something else on the chair. A photo. There’s a photo of me on Gustav’s chair.
I pause, startled at seeing myself, and then run again, past the tile stove and the corner bedroom. I get to the Receiving Room.
‘Anna-Britta!’ I yell, louder now. ‘Fire!’ and then I’m at the top of the stairs. I find the ‘Fire: break glass’ alarm above the light switch and push it with my finger. I’ve had my finger hover over these things a dozen times before, at school mainly, when others were busy playing hockey or handball and I was hiding in some dark corner ready to press the button, for help, for attention, for an exit, but never actually doing it. The glass cracks and the alarm sounds. I get pain in my ears, like dentist-drill pain, and pain in my finger, like a knife slipped slicing a pear. There’s blood. I hold the wall. A red smudge on the faded wallpaper. And then I reach up and reduce the volume in both aids to almost nothing and the blood wets my cheek as my fingers brush past.
‘Tuva,’ shouts Anna-Britta from the bottom of the stairs. ‘You’re hurt.’
She runs up but I shake my head and point to the residence. ‘I’m fine, but Cecilia’s still in there.’
She looks at my bleeding finger and sees Cici’s amber bracelet on my wrist, the one I tried on in the attic just minutes ago, and she stares at it and then back up to my eyes.
‘Help me,’ she says.
We run through to the Grand Room.
‘Don’t look,’ she says as we pass the cabinet and the knife table.
We get to Cici and she’s propped up in bed but her covers are off and I can see her orange leggings and her striped knee-length ’80s socks.
‘What is it?’ Cici asks.
‘Fire in the root barns,’ says Anna-Britta. ‘Fire brigade on their way. We need to get you out.’
‘Where’s lilla Karin?’ asks Cici.
Anna-Britta looks at me.
‘I don’t know,’ I say.
We lift Cecilia using what Anna-Britta calls a fireman lift. It’s a mess, we can hardly walk straight, but we get her out to the top of the stairs where two real firemen take her down like she’s a pigeon feather.
The workforce is huddled at the fire assembly point aka the car park of Hotel Gavrik. A few have ski jackets but most ran out in their aprons and their hairnets, and now they’re bunched together like emperor penguins enduring a storm at the South Pole. The authorities will have to send them someplace warm soon or else people will start turning blue.
Anna-Britta’s talking to the fire chief. Two guys are making sure all the buildings are empty and an army of overfed rats are screeching and scurrying over each other to get away from the heat.
‘The upstairs residence is clear, Tuva and I checked,’ Anna-Britta says to one of the guys about to run through the unlocked arch-door. ‘No need to check it, all clear.’
The guy ignores her. Two women are tackling the blaze. The fire truck can’t fit through the arch so it’s parked on the Storgatan side and its powerful lights bathe the scene with white light and the hoses attached to the water mains are snaking back to the yard.
I think about the rodents caught in the traps. Not so humane now, are they: the see-through boxes affording each imprisoned rat a widescreen view of its own downfall, a last supper already consumed, a clear trap from which to watch relatives flee in terror.
Heat on my cheeks. The fire is leaping higher and higher, fed by stacks of stored delivery-truck summer tyres and vats of sugar waste. The air smells like burnt pans and hot rubber and it sticks to the roof of my mouth. The night air is thick with it.
‘Medics!’ yells one of the firefighters, pointing to the wall of St Olov’s.
Two paramedics approach the fire hesitantly and together with a firefighter they manage to pull out a burning body from the flames.
It’s a woman.
Someone behind me gasps.
Most of her clothes have blackened and her hair has burnt away. Her arms look like overcooked hams. The paramedics rush with the stretcher, past us, past the crowds, toward the ambulance. She’s moaning. Her skin is smoking into the cold, dark air. The Chief leaps into action and starts to move people back, to allow the ambulance space. I see paramedics put an IV into the burnt arm of the woman. Morphine? Her charred arms are bent like claws but her teeth are still bright. I recognise them. It’s Great White. It’s the taster.
I don’t have my real camera so I take photos and video with my phone.
‘Search it all again,’ yells the fire chief.
They can get closer to the heart of the fire now and it’s clear there are no more victims. They continue to pump ice-cold water onto the flames.
‘Everything’s bone dry this time of year,’ says the fire chief. My aids are back up to normal levels now the sirens and the alarms are off. ‘No humidity,’ she says.
Flames are jumping and flicking up every now and then like white snake-tongues and I can hear faint non-human screams. It’s distant and it’s at ground level. Mice or spiders or hibernating hedgehogs. Insects maybe. Or trapped rats.
‘It’s under control,’ the fire chief tells Anna-Britta. ‘You can send your people home now. Don’t want them getting frostbite.’
Anna-Britta leaves through the arch and I see Karin greet her and touch her shoulder, their two bodies framed by the brickwork. Storgatan is grey and twinkling behind them.
Noora and Chief Björn join me and the fire chief.
‘Under control now?’ Björn asks.
The fire chief nods. ‘Looks worse than it is,’ she says. ‘Thirty minutes and it’ll be out to nothing. That woman was unlucky.’ She coughs into the smoky air. ‘We can liaise with Constable Noora here. No need for everyone to be out in this cold.’
Chief Björn nods and then says, ‘Gut instinct: accident or design?’
The fire chief shrugs. ‘My guts don’t work that good no more.’ She sniffs the air and flares her nostrils. ‘Must have had a big nest in there. Had calls from all over town of rats running around scaring dogs and cats. Big nest, I’d say.’
I look at Noora and mouth ‘Okay?’ and she stiffens up and straightens her back and turns to Chief Björn. ‘I’ll collect witness statements,’ she says to him. ‘And I’ll photograph everything once the fire crew gives me the thumbs up.’
Björn’s teeth are chattering. He nods to her and then to the fire chief and ignores me completely and walks back to talk with Anna-Britta.
‘Hell of a fire,’ I say to Noora.
She says nothing. The water jets stream from the hoses and the two firefighters stand bracing each other. The flames are different now, smaller, smokier, blues and greens splitting the yellow.
By nine the fire is out and the red truck’s left the factory yard. Noora’s taken statements from seven or eight people and she’s photographed every angle of the scene but she’ll have to do it all again tomorrow with proper light. She doesn’t look at me during all this, she just makes her notes.
‘Damn ink’s frozen,’ she says, pulling a spare pen from her uniform pocket.
The arch is cold now. The heat from the corner, where the root barns have stood for over a hundred years, is gone.
‘You saw the fire start?’ she asks.
‘Yes. Are you okay, Noora? Ha
ve I . . .’
She looks straight at me, her eyes wide, her lips pursed, and then she looks around.
‘Just tell me what you saw, please.’
My stomach feels wrong like I’ve screwed something up and I don’t even know how.
‘I was in the factory attics, above the old part of the building. I was helping Cecilia Grimberg with her clothes, because of her fall.’
I think about the rat traps again. Perspex. The plastic boxes melting onto the rats like some awful pre-cooked vacuum-packed delicatessen nightmare.
Noora writes something down then looks up at me. She’s looking at my mouth.
‘Will that woman be okay?’ I ask.
‘What did you see?’ she asks.
‘I was facing the yard and the windows up there aren’t very clean, and the glass is wavy, that old rippled glass, and I thought I saw a person running from the root barns. They ran behind one of the vans carrying a container, like a plastic can.’
‘Did you recognise the person?’
I shake my head.
‘A man or a woman?’
I look over to the smouldering cobbles, the snow gone, the tyre stacks melted down to liquorice-coloured stumps.
‘I couldn’t see them clearly. Looked normal-size but could have been anyone. I think the box was a small petrol tank like they sell in the Q8 petrol station outside town.’
‘What did you see them do exactly?’
‘Run away. And then I saw the flames start.’
‘What time was this?’
‘Maybe three minutes before I set off the fire alarm. About five-ish. Can we chat after your shift is over?’ I ask.
She shakes her head slightly. ‘Who else was in the yard? Who else did you see?’
‘Nobody,’ I say. ‘There were factory workers leaving just before that, but when I saw the figure run from the root barns there was nobody else around.’
Two firefighters check the ash in the yard to make sure the thing is completely extinguished. Then they allow Cici and Anna-Britta and Karin to enter their archway door. Ten minutes later, once my chat with Noora is over, forty or so people march up to the archway and queue underneath it.
‘What’s this?’ Noora asks Anna-Britta.
‘It’s called a night shift,’ she says.
Noora frowns.
‘I’ve got orders to fill, suppliers who are relying on me. There’s a chain. I can’t just break it.’ She points to the smouldering corner. ‘Cordon off the root barns, tape it all up if you need to, but we have a night shift to work.’
39
‘What a February this is,’ says Janitor Andersson as he helps support Cici up the broad staircase, his ring of keys rattling on his belt. I assume he’s talking about Gustav’s suicide and Gunnarsson’s murder and now the fire, but he says, ‘Never known one like it, not this cold.’
Cici cringes with pain as she hobbles up the stairs, Andersson on one side and me on the other. She insists on walking. Karin runs ahead to open doors and move furniture out of the way. We’re a wide load.
‘It was bad in ‘82,’ he says, coughing. ‘More snow than this, the drifts and all, but not as cold,’ he says, as if performing a monologue on stage. I can see he’s wearing some kind of bright orange Hawaiian shirt under his overalls. ‘Well, at least the fire dealt with some vermin.’
We shuffle into the Receiving Room.
‘We can manage from here, Andersson,’ says Karin.
‘I can help,’ he says.
‘We can manage,’ says Karin.
Andersson looks disappointed to be left out. He nods solemnly and then he leaves.
‘Are you in pain, Granny?’ asks Karin.
Cici shakes her head and takes the rabbit foot hanging round her neck and rubs its fur along her upper lip. ‘I’ll live,’ she says. ‘Until I won’t.’
Karin looks at me and then we start to help Cici past the door and through the velvet curtain.
‘Does Andersson come back here?’ I ask. ‘When you need things fixing, I mean.’
‘One day I dare say he’ll need to come through that door,’ says Cici. ‘But so far he hasn’t.’
‘But he’s been the janitor for decades,’ I say.
Cici bares her teeth at me. ‘I’m pretty nifty with a cordless drill, you know.’
Anna-Britta’s moving bedding and pillows from Karin’s corner room.
‘I’m not dead yet,’ Cici says to her.
‘Chief Björn says it’ll get down to close on minus thirty tonight,’ says Anna-Britta. ‘I can’t have you in a room with two exterior walls, you’ll perish.’
‘When I go,’ Cici says. ‘I’ll go with a flash-bang, not a whimper.’
Anna-Britta heads to Cici’s bedroom – the one closest to the tiled fireplace and closest to the Receiving Room.
The bedroom looks normal on one side but on the interior wall the edge is missing. Instead of a corner it’s a convex arc, one part of the huge chimney hidden within, bulging, pushing itself into the room.
‘Karin, can you put the kettle on, please,’ says Anna-Britta. ‘Tuva, feel free to head home, otherwise I can order up an extra supper tray for you?’
There’s no way Tammy wants to eat with me tonight. And I need to dig. I need more information.
‘A tray would be good,’ I say. ‘If it’s no bother.’
‘What’s one more mouth to feed when I have four-hundred and thirteen?’ She’s not wearing mascara and I can hardly see her eyelashes. ‘And it’s good to keep the kitchen busy. The more work around here the better it is for everyone.’
There’s a lot of duvet throwing and sheet shaking and then Karin comes to collect Cici, who looks deathly tired now. Anna-Britta takes her into the bedroom and shuts the door. I’ve noticed commodes or ‘piss-pots’ as Dad used to call them, close to all the bedrooms, and in some ways these three women live like they’re locked away securely in the past.
‘I’ll order your tray,’ says Karin. ‘Mother’ll just forget.’
Karin calls down to the canteen.
The rabbit, the poor limping rabbit, is hobbling around in his wire hutch with a piece of lettuce hanging from his ear fur.
‘Take him out,’ Karin mimes to me, the phone to her ear, but I can read her better than she realises.
‘Really?’ I whisper.
She nods.
I open the wire gate and the rabbit, it’s the size of a small dog, lollops out. I guess the Grimbergs do this, they let it run free around the Grand Room for exercise. I see it head toward the knives under the long refectory table so I plant my foot in its way to make it divert. The white rabbit with its long floppy ears and its ridiculous tail brings some hint of the human, the normal, the familial, to this vast mouldy place.
Karin boils the kettle and lights a thick church candle with seven wicks. This is not like Tammy’s flat, it is the polar opposite of Tam’s flat; there are no cashmere throws or deep sofas full of unnecessary cushions, there are no fancy branded scented candles or dimmer switches on the lights, there’s not a single photograph or piece of art. The family are the art, I suppose, the way they live is some absurd installation piece in an industrial gallery. There’s a knock at the door.
Karin runs past me, her long black dress sweeping the floorboards as she goes, almost hovering, to the far side of the room. She unlocks the door and walks through and closes it. A moment later she brings through one tray.
‘Can I help?’ I ask.
She shakes her head.
The process is almost comic. She brings through a second tray and closes the door behind her and places it down and then opens the door and collects a third tray and closes the door and places it down near the others and then retrieves the final tray and closes the door and locks it shut.
‘Now we’re all in,’ she says.
I help her carry the canteen trays over to the knife table. Each one is covered in cling film and beaded with moisture. Karin peels off the cling film from one and I see
the Falukorv stew: slices of anaemic sausage in overcooked cabbage. There’s a glass of water and a knife and fork and one paper napkin. She takes it to Cici’s room.
The rabbit’s looking at me from underneath the cabinet of life. Its eyes are bright red and it’s eating the piece of lettuce that was stuck to its ear.
‘Let’s keep the wraps on our trays until Mother comes out, else they’ll get cold and then they’ll taste even worse.’
‘Are you ever tempted to get Thai from the van near ICA? Or a burger?’
She looks at me like I’m insane.
‘Father always said, “if it’s good enough for our workers, then it’s good enough for us”. We don’t really cook as a family, never have. This is what we live on.’
‘What a dreadful night,’ says Anna-Britta walking toward us. ‘Who’s hungry?
‘Sausage stew,’ says Karin.
‘Delicious,’ says Anna-Britta. ‘I’m pleased you’re joining us, Tuva. Now you’ve come through the door you’re almost a Grimberg.’ She straightens her back. ‘I’m sure you can understand why we’re very private people, but now you’re through the door you are very welcome.’
We sit down. Anna-Britta at the head of the table, me opposite Karin, the tips of my toes curled under my chair to prevent injury.
‘Can I just ask, it’s probably nothing, but I noticed you have a photo of me in your bedroom, Anna-Britta.’
Karin’s eyes widen.
‘I do?’ says Anna-Britta, glancing over at her bedroom door. ‘Ah, yes, I do. It’s from the police, that’s all. CCTV images from the clocking-in area the day Cecilia was pushed.’
‘Am I a suspect?’ I ask.
‘Goodness me, no,’ she says, gesturing for us to start eating.