by Will Dean
Karin says something, her lips move a little, but it’s a whisper of a whisper.
‘What?’ I say. ‘You’re okay, Karin, the ambulance will be here in minutes.’
‘Tuva,’ she whispers.
‘I’m here,’ I say, tears glazing my eyes.
‘Help me,’ she says.
My tears come stronger and time slows to the point where I know I must say the right words now. It may be the last thing she hears, God forbid, or the thing I’ll forever remember saying to a dying girl, or the thing that brings her back.
‘I’ll help you,’ I say, swallowing hard. ‘Karin, I’m not leaving you.’
Her head lolls to one side and I hear a commotion from the other end of the Grand Room, Anna-Britta screaming like I’ve never heard anyone scream, the paramedics’ boots stamping on the floorboards.
‘In here!’ I yell. ‘Bathroom.’
A man and a woman open the door and edge me out of the way. They work on Karin but they speak to me.
‘When did you find her?’
‘Ten minutes ago.’
‘Has she said anything to you?’
They bandage her wrists and the guy gives her a shot in her leg.
‘She asked for help.’ I take a huge breath in, the shock entering my body through my mouth, my heart too big for my chest.
‘It’s okay,’ the woman paramedic says. ‘We’ll look after her now.’
‘Karin!’ screams Anna-Britta in the open door. She’s staring down at her with that Edvard Munch face, absolute horror, the worst of all nightmares come true. She has the look of a woman who lost her husband and her son and is now watching her daughter lying flaccid and pale and naked and red.
‘Johan,’ says the woman paramedic. He takes Anna-Britta out of the room and sits her at the refectory table. I watch her stare at us through the open bathroom door, her face in her hands, her eyes wet through splayed fingers. She’s quiet for a moment and then she wails.
‘She’s lost a lot of blood,’ the woman paramedic tells me. ‘But she’s strong. Can you help us, can you unlock the archway door so we can get to the ambulance.’
‘Yes.’
I run out of the room – Anna-Britta watching me go – and pass Cici, who’s leant up against the cabinet of life, and I sprint through the Receiving Room and down the stairs.
‘Door’s open,’ says Andersson. ‘Unlocked. Snow’s clear. What can I do?’
‘Nothing, that’s good.’
‘The old lady?’
I shake my head and run back up. By the time I get to the Grand Room Karin’s strapped to a stretcher, with a blanket and some kind of monitor attached to her. The roses I bought are scattered all around the table, some loose petals balancing on knife blades, other stems intact and closer to the kitchen, the pigment from their stamped-on petals bleeding into the bleached floorboards.
‘Lilla Karin,’ says Anna-Britta, her palm to Karin’s cheek as the stretcher passes by. ‘I’m with you.’ The princess torte cake sits pristine in its clear plastic box atop the table, the fresh cream sweating beads of moisture which cling to the inside of the plastic.
Karin’s mother follows the paramedics and the stretcher through to the Receiving Room. There’s no ‘don’t look’ this time.
I go to Cici.
She’s sobbing and squeezing her rabbit foot in her palm, like it could burst at any moment.
‘She’ll be alright,’ I tell her. ‘They say it’s not as serious as it looks.’
‘It’s more serious,’ she says. ‘It’s got to her.’
Cici smacks her hand against the side of the huge cabinet of life, but it doesn’t move or shake. I help her back into bed. She’s sobbing, but she looks more angry than sad. I tell her I’ll be back, and then I run down to the ambulance. Its roof lights are strobing off the glistening underside of the brick archway, but its sirens are silent.
‘We’re going to Karlstad General,’ says the male paramedic.
They drive away, the ambulance’s studded tyres throwing up chips of salty ice in its wake as it speeds down an empty frozen Storgatan toward the E16.
A car pulls up.
‘I came as soon as I heard,’ says Stina Johanssen, the family GP. ‘Where’s Karin?’
‘They left,’ I say. ‘Karlstad General.’
‘Dammit.’
‘But Cecilia’s up there and she’s not well, I think she’s in shock. Could you check on her?’
We walk upstairs. Stina calms Cici, she’s very good at that, and tells me she’ll give her a pill to help her sleep.
‘I might go to Karlstad,’ I say. ‘To the hospital.’
‘I’ll stay here,’ she says. ‘My daughter’s skiing with her school. I’ll stay here all night with Mrs Grimberg.’
I go back to the bathroom and much of the scene has now been washed away. Bottles of shampoo and cardboard toilet-paper tubes lie discarded near the sink. Plastic needle-wrappers and latex gloves. Gauze wrappers flap open and shut in the draught from the ill-fitting window. The colour’s still there in the old bath. And in the towels. So much blood. A wasp sits drowsy on an old-fashioned bar of soap and another buzzes close to the ceiling. I look into her bedroom and see the envelope on the bed. I pick it up. It’s not addressed to anyone, not to her mother or grandmother, and it’s not sealed. I open it. Inside is a compliment slip. It’s a Henrik Hellbom Advokat compliment slip. I read Karin’s writing.
‘I’m so sorry. It was me.’
46
Karin? Did she kill Gunnarsson? What did he do to her seven years ago? Why didn’t anyone listen? I can’t believe she’s a killer. She must be apologising for something else. I cannot let my guard down. The Ferryman could still be on the loose.
I walk out through the curtained door, each squeak of the floorboards putting me on edge, every draught from the rotten windows making me stop and look around and look up.
I unlock my truck, and open the passenger side and then lean over to the driver’s side and pull the handle and nothing. Dead. I try it again from the outside but the door is completely unopenable now, unlocked yet unopenable. Snapped inside and out. I have to scoot over the gearstick and plant myself in the driver’s seat and then switch on the engine and then clamber out the way I came so I can scrape.
The E16 is a windswept ghost road. I call Thord and tell him to get to the factory, tell him about the note, tell him how Karin may have been angry with both her father and Gunnarsson, tell him how she was probably frustrated with Cecilia for allowing Gunnarsson to keep his position, how she might have pushed her down the stairs.
I’m the only vehicle here, my tyres skirting over ice and through snow gusts blowing diagonally across both lanes. I hope to God that paramedic was telling the truth. I hope Karin’s okay, because we still need her story.
A lumber wagon drives north past me and its pine load looks like giant liquorice-roots stacked in a long bale. It’s weaving. I’ve scrubbed my hands but my nails are still red with Karin’s blood, the skin dark and crusted, her haemoglobin deep under my cuticles.
This isn’t something I’ve ever lived with. Suicide, I mean. Mum was depressed but that manifested in her living within herself for years on end. She imploded when dad died, collapsed, shrank, turned inside out. I’d try to coax her into hobbies, even just reading a book, but she shut down her whole life. She left it on standby mode until the cancer took her years later. I hate the idea of someone I love dying by suicide because I hate the idea that someone I love could be in that much pain. But the suicide itself, once it’s been done, once Gustav jumped – I think you have to accept it. Cici’s right. If they go through with it then there can be no talk of ‘selfish act’ or ‘didn’t think of the relatives’ or ‘took the easy way out’. Hell, no. It’s never selfish when someone loses all hope. It is never not thinking about the relatives, it’s despite how much this will hurt relatives and friends, I have no other option. It’s never the easy way out. It must be the hardest thing in the world.
I’ve seen Karin bathing in her own blood and I know that’s not a decision she made lightly.
A snowplough up ahead takes up both lanes, scraping back fresh powder and dumping salt crystals on the asphalt. Must have joined at the last exit. Now my speed’s limited to its speed and I feel like a parasitic cleaner-fish enjoying the protection of a larger species. A Mercedes jeep drives close behind me and its headlights aren’t working.
And then I start to question why. Not why did Karin do it, but why didn’t I spot any warning signs? Any hints she was weighed down with guilt? Any clues? Why didn’t her mother spot them? As a journalist I need to see signals. Things other people miss. And as a deaf person I read body language all day long without even realising it. It’s essential. It fills in the gaps.
The E16 turns into the E45 and the Mercedes is still there in my mirrors. I get to Karlstad and follow a familiar route to the hospital. Mum was here for about six months on and off. She almost died here but she didn’t.
Parking’s a charade. Me climbing over and through the truck twice and locking it and kicking it as I leave to walk through the big rotating front door; hot stale air blowing my hair and drying my already dried-out eyes.
Reception tells me where she is. I follow the blue stripe all the way to her ward and it’s not intensive care so that must be a good thing, right? I catch a glimpse of myself in a window and I look like a corpse. I find the ward. It’s sat between maternity and geriatric care, between the start and the end, the sapling and the final acorn produced before the oak comes crashing down.
It’s a private room. Thank the lord for high Swedish taxes. I knock and Anna-Britta’s by her side, her pink hand on Karin’s white hand, her strength laying on Karin’s needle-punctured weakness.
Anna-Britta smiles as I walk in. It’s relief and appreciation and despair and exhaustion and terror and sadness all in one.
‘She’s okay,’ she mouths to me silently.
I smile back at her. I want to tell her about the note but this is not the right moment. Karin’s unconscious and medicated. She’s not going anywhere. And Anna-Britta is a mother first and foremost, I need to remember that. I don’t know anything for sure.
Anna-Britta breaks down crying. We hug each other, awkwardly at first, by Karin’s blanketed feet and then she squeezes me, really squeezes my body in her arms. And I squeeze her back. We hold on to each other.
‘They gave her new blood,’ she says, pulling back from me, dabbing her eyes. ‘And something to sleep and something else for the pain. They stitched her.’ She cries again, her hands rubbing the tears from her cheeks. ‘Her arms. Her poor beautiful arms, they’re . . .’
‘We can help her now,’ I say, my hand on Anna-Britta’s shoulder. ‘Now we know, we can help.’
She nods. It’s the nod of a woman who’s lived with too much of this, too much for anyone to endure. It’s the nod of a woman that says, ‘yeah, we can help, but we can never be completely relaxed when she gets low, we can never let go of this when she goes back to college, we can never leave a hundred goddam knives under our dining table ever again’.
A nurse with red hair, she looks like an older version of the stamper, comes in and says there’s a man downstairs and asks if we’re expecting a visitor. We say we’re not. She checks Karin’s dressings and her heart monitor and asks if we’d like coffee.
We walk out into the waiting area. It’s three long black-leather sofas and a flat-screen TV on mute and a stack of magazines. There’s a shelf on the wall with well-thumbed novels, science-fiction tomes four fingers thick and romance novels with curled front covers. These are well-read books. These are stories that have helped loved ones to escape for a few pages, to offer some safety. I read a trilogy of fantasy novels waiting for Mum to die and those three books helped me more than I can say.
Two coffees arrive in plastic disposable cups with inappropriately small handles.
‘I just don’t know why,’ says Anna-Britta cradling the cup in her hands. ‘She could have come to me with her problems. I thought she was okay. I would do anything for my daughter.’ She rips a sliver of flesh from her index fingernail. ‘Absolutely anything.’
‘It’s been such a tough month for all of you.’
Anna-Britta looks up.
‘They say you can’t see it coming,’ I say, and then I immediately regret those words, some nonsense from a magazine or a long-forgotten TV show. ‘They say . . .’ I’m sat in front of a woman whose husband just killed himself and I’m preaching about what ‘they say’ about suicide?
‘I didn’t see it coming,’ says Anna-Britta, chewing at a hangnail. Biting it. ‘She’s only twenty. And she’s the brightest of all of us, so much to live for, so much ahead of her.’
‘She’ll pull through,’ I say, imagining Thord’s handcuffs around her bandaged wrists. ‘You can get her some professional help. She’ll manage.’
‘She’s scared,’ says Anna-Britta, sipping her coffee, blowing into the cup. ‘Of our home, of the business, of old evil, of what might happen to our family.’
I smile a flat, crimped smile and wonder if what she’s really scared of is justice. Punishment. Jail time. I remember the courses she’s taken: Pathology and Taxonomy. The knife with the G stamped on the end. The fact that she’s a sculptor. The finely-detailed snow skulls. And her access to the factory in its entirety.
‘I feel like one of those tourists,’ says Anna-Britta, her eyes on the TV. ‘You know the ones you read about who drift out to sea on an inflatable lilo. They have no say what direction they travel in or if they live or if they die. The winds, the currents, they take them wherever they’re going to go and all they can do is just hang on.’
She looks at me again.
‘Or slip off.’
‘Is there anyone you can speak to?’ I say. ‘About what you’ve been through? The Gunnarsson trauma? The factory business? Maybe not a sale, but a loan or an investment?’
‘It’s the book,’ she says, eyeing the paperbacks on the shelf. ‘That’s our last hope. It’s what Gustav told me, he was very insistent. The book has to be a success. It has to be gripping, to find a wide audience. It’ll be out next year and we’ll receive our royalty cheques quarterly.’ She sips again. ‘That’s the difference, that’s the key: ongoing income, a “revenue stream” as Gustav explained it to me, something to keep us afloat.’
‘Okay,’ I say.
A doctor in an ill-fitting white jacket walks out from the lifts and he must have a bad ankle or something, he’s not walking straight.
‘It’s difficult to explain,’ Anna-Britta says, crossing her legs the other way. ‘We have a debt to pay. We were not always such a good employer.’
A patient gets wheeled through on a bed by two orderlies and he has his head bandaged. It seems like he winks at me but it could just be a blink because one eye’s covered.
‘In the early days, the mid 1800s, the first owners, the founders, we’ve taken down their portraits now, they exploited the locals. They worked them too hard and paid them too little, even by the standards of the day. The fatality rate in the factory was unacceptably high. The first year of the factory they paid high rates and then the worker’s families relocated to Gavrik, which back then was just a new church and a ruined church and the factory and not much else. Then management reduced wages year on year.’
‘It was different back then,’ I say.
‘Not really,’ she says. ‘The family became rich. They added to their wealth and expanded and we were the number two producer of salt liquorice for many years. They built the Manor on Lake Vänern with the profits and we’ve never been as successful since.’
An exhausted-looking junior doctor walks past us and nods to both of us, his stethoscope swinging from his neck, his white crocs squeaking along the rubberised floor.
‘We’re paying for their greed,’ Anna-Britta says. ‘They went too far and the town knows it. My father-in-law.’ Her eyes darken. ‘He went too far. Ludvig was a thug
and he thought he was above the law, above the normal rules. The hurt that man caused. The kids he never acknowledged. We’re still trying to make amends, and the factory reminds us every time we draw up the annual accounts.’ She points in the direction of Karin’s room, tears in her eyes, and says, ‘I hold her grandfather completely responsible.’
We both watch as the elderly doctor, the man with the bad ankle, shuffles into Karin’s room.
47
The doctor checks Karin’s vitals and I drive north from Karlstad hospital in a trance. Too much to process. Karin. Her confession. Her broken skin. Her anguish.
I have a short text from Thord saying they’re dealing with Karin’s note. Thanking me.
It’s too late to visit Cici so I park and lock up and there’s someone standing outside Hotel Gavrik. It’s a figure in a long padded black coat with a big hood. The figure’s back-dropped by the hotel façade with its off-centre sign, and the hotel’s backdropped by the dark factory and its chimneys.
Warily, I walk over.
The hood comes off and there’s a balaclava underneath.
I stop walking, my heart booming in my chest.
‘You got a key?’ asks Noora, pulling off her balaclava.
The pressure I’m feeling inside my head, in my sinuses, bearing down on my shoulders, lifts a little at her words. I step closer and slip on an ice patch and she reaches out to steady me.
‘Yeah,’ I say, finding my key card and opening the front door of the hotel. No night porters here, no bellboys with brass luggage-trolleys or night managers to say goodnight and call the lift for you. Just a key.
We step inside and the door locks behind us.
‘Come,’ she says, pulling off her duvet coat. She’s wearing mascara and it’s clumped a little on her thick lashes and her breath smells faintly of white wine.