by Will Dean
It could be the start of night, 4pm, it could be the end of night, 8am. I think it’s late or very early, the air feels that way. But what is this air down here? A stale ancient unmoving cocktail pressed under a hundred metres of chilled fresher air higher up. The air down here could be fifty years old. I start coughing at the thought of it.
I look around for other holes but there are none.
The bird’s over there, the dead carcass with the beak still gleaming and box-fresh. I decide I’ll do the decent thing and give it a burial. I mound up fifty or so heat-pack wrappers above it like some sick Viking burial and then I look up to the grey dot and stand there in silence until I get dizzy.
I finish the book and I finish another bar of chocolate. Both things make me sick. I scream again, a strategic series of volleys aimed at the chimney vent above my head and at the mouse escape-hole down by the ground. If it’s early morning this whole side of the factory, the old disused half, plus the residence above and the attics above that, will be silent. I scream more, yelling until my throat burns.
I take the red pen from my pocket. He gave it to me to make notes and editorial comments but I think I’ve done enough work, don’t you? So I pull random pages from his bastard manuscript and I turn them over and I rest them on the leather box.
I need to tell a few people some important things. In case I never make it out of here. I never told Mum so now I must say these things. I must.
I write my first to Tammy.
I tell her I’m sorry. That I love her. I cry as I write the ‘v’ in love. I tell her she can have all my things if she wants them and that I’d like to, I break down properly now, tears flowing as I write, I can taste them, my vision blurred and shaky, I’d like to be placed next to Mum and Dad, next to Dad if possible.
I lay down and look up. Tears cooling on my skin.
I think I can see clouds pass in the grey February sky but it might just be me. My lips are dry scabs of baked desert earth and my hands hurt every time I move them. Whose brain’s inside the skalle? How? I’m trying not to look through the ice lid or at the straw-colour ponytail stuck to the snow. Heat pads keep me going but my body is so cold it’s starting to shut down. I think it’s the darkness as much as the temperature. And the silence in these curved walls, this one curved wall, this cell.
If I had a match I’d burn the whole damn book and locals would say ‘that’s strange, isn’t that the old chimney, the disused one’ and ‘must be testing it or something’ and ‘maybe it’s another arson’. Someone might come.
But there are no matches.
I write a note to Noora thanking her. I write that I miss her. I write that if she needs allies in Gavrik she should turn to Lena and Thord and Tammy. I write that she made me feel wanted and warm. I write that I loved the time we spent together.
I write to Lena, a more upbeat letter, longer than the others, easier to write somehow, like it’s an assignment for the paper or something. I tell her how much I owe her, how much I’ve learnt from her. I write that she’s kept me whole these past years, especially during the weeks after Mum died and the weeks when Medusa coverage was too much to handle and the weekends when she let me stay at her place and she fed me meatloaf and mashed potatoes and hot tea and toast and fresh pancakes. She never asked me to speak. When I couldn’t do my job she stepped in and did it for me, she demoted herself and didn’t say a word. No complaints. She saved me. When I couldn’t feed myself she fed me. Lena shrouded me in a thick, warm blanket of silent love, an unsaid gift, an unasked-for kindness. She let me live on.
And then I get a burst of energy from all the notes I’ve written, a surge, a realisation of what I have to lose. I stand and yell at different pitches, low grumbling roars and high-pitched wailing, anything that might get detected, that might trigger Karin to sit up in bed and ask ‘what was that?’
I stop.
Nothing.
And then I realise Karin could still be in Karlstad and Anna-Britta’s probably out looking for her.
I open more heat pads and put two in my armpits and two in my knee pits and four fresh ones down in my boots. My pen ink’s frozen so I place that in my pocket with its own dedicated pad.
The bird burial-mound grows another centimetre taller like some hastily built memorial to a fallen mountaineer.
I take the printed bank-payment confirmation from my coat pocket and shred it and place the shreds on the burial mound.
The glass-like lid of the skull gleams in what little light there is and the brain sits beneath it like a body in a coffin or a sausage in a clingfilmed styrofoam packet.
I fall asleep but I don’t mean to. It’s the kind of shallow sleep you get on a long coach journey, heavy eyelids falling ever so slowly and then jolting open again, that numb sensation that you’re caught floating between two worlds.
I dream or think, some mixture of the two, of Dad and then of Noora. We’re watching TV together on a sofa, on Tam’s sofa, blankets and feet touching.
My dream shatters as snow starts to fall on my face. I feel flakes melt on my lips and on my eyelids, the grey dot above me a dull white now, the walls around me brightening and glistening with flakes. Must be snowing hard up there for any to reach me at the bottom of this place. I pull up my hood.
I pass in and out of sleep. My body and my soul, they’re both shutting down. Giving up. I didn’t ask for any of this. I should be on a heated train. I should have gotten out of this town by now.
A spider uses my head as an anchor point for its thread and I just let it.
When I wake again my eyes are frozen shut and my hands are so cold I can’t feel my fingertips. I panic, rubbing the skin together but it feels dead. Like rubber. Like a latex hand transplanted onto me as some sick joke. I gulp for breath. How long did I sleep for? I try to clear my eyes and then there’s a vibration. It’s not a sound, I can’t hear anything, but something moves or the floor shakes in some way.
It’s the metal doors.
‘Help!’ I scream. ‘I’m locked inside, help me!’
The doors move slightly and I try to push them open but my fingers won’t work as I want them to and the doors just rattle.
‘Help me! Get me out of here!’
And then the right door swings open.
53
I can see her lips, her tangerine lips. She’s trying to tell me something.
‘Cici,’ I say, my voice weak.
I pull my balaclava off. I can’t hear anything but I can just about read her.
‘I thought . . .’ she says. ‘I thought I heard something in the chimney. Why were you . . .’ I can’t make out the last words. Too dark. And then her candle flares and she says, ‘Come on, let me help you.’
‘Don’t look at the snow skalle,’ I say as I crawl out through the brass doors and into the old furnace. It’s big enough for us to crouch and shuffle through the ash and the century-old soot. We climb out through the doors and into the old factory, the disused half, the Ferryman’s half.
She places the grave candle down and puts her hands around my face and I can smell lemons.
‘Come here,’ she says. ‘Let me look at you, you’re frozen solid.’
‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘How’s Karin?’
Cici smiles and her face comes alive and her teeth shine in the dim industrial, winter light. ‘She’s doing well,’ she says. ‘She’s talked to the police and she’s doing well far away from this place.’
‘She’s not home yet?’
‘I’m home alone,’ she says.
My legs start to come back to life and we walk slowly past the old stirring vats, discoloured and hazy with cobwebs. The area where Gunnarsson died is clear. Bleached. Cici has a stick in one hand and me in the other.
‘Let’s get you something hot to drink,’ she says. ‘And then I’ll call Stina to check you over.’
‘I’m okay,’ I say.
She’s wearing a vintage fur coat with a hood and it’s as moth-eaten as a mangy cat
. She has a silver centipede brooch pinned to her lapel and it gleams as we walk past the old stamping tables, their surfaces warped with age and damp.
‘I’ll make sure Karin manages,’ says Cici. ‘I swear it on the granite we’re built on. If I need to enrol myself at her art school for a semester I will, you know. I will.’
We hold onto each other for support and make our way slowly to the arch door.
‘You have a key?’ I ask.
She pulls a long iron relic from her pocket.
‘I’m the elder around here. I have copies of all the building keys up in my attic resting on dried grapefruit-zest and beetle wings. Safest place for them.’
Snow’s blown in under the arch but it’s patchy. Frosted cobblestones shine and the veins of sand in between them lock the ground together and keep it all whole.
As Cici comes into the light I see her bruises from the fall and they’re purple like elephant hide.
‘What time is it?’ I ask. ‘Which day?’
‘Six am on Wednesday the nineteenth of February,’ she says. ‘We thought you’d left town.’
‘Cici,’ I say, still shivering. ‘What’s your secret? You said you had a secret?
‘Never mind,’ she says, flicking it away with her fingers. ‘Let’s get you some sweet tea.’
‘What did you want to tell me?’ I say.
She steps closer to me, holding my arm for support. The heating pads up my sleeves are cooling down but I can still feel them. Cici opens her eyes wide and says, ‘That you’ll find your own way through life.’ She rubs my arm as if to warm me but her touch is too light. ‘That you alone will shape your future and you have every right to be happy.’ She swallows. ‘And that even though you didn’t tell your mother you loved her she still knew deep down. Because you were there. She knew, Tuva.’
I mouth ‘Thank you’. Then I almost collapse with it all.
‘I need to tell the police,’ I say, turning left out of the arch.
And then I see his boots.
Swinging.
Swaying in a liquorice breeze, Storgatan out of focus behind his chinos.
I release her and run through the snow to the boots and then I look up.
‘Help!’ I yell. ‘Help! Someone!’
I try to support Holmqvist’s weight, my hands pushing up into the soles of his boots, my arms weak, pathetic, useless.
‘I’m coming!’ shouts Andersson.
‘Quick!’ I scream, and others join us, two clipboard guys on their break. I’m aware of passers-by, people on their way to work or out walking their short-legged dogs, dragging them through deep snow.
‘I’ll cut him down,’ says Andersson, suddenly at my side with a stepladder and a pair of bolt cutters. ‘Mind yourself.’
The two men and I prepare to catch David Holmqvist, as Andersson cuts through the rope just above the noose knot. He’s swinging from the iron hook beneath the Receiving Room window and the window’s open and its flapping on its hinges. He has a bound version of his manuscript tied around his neck and he has a cross of duct tape covering each eye like two Xs.
Red runs out and she doesn’t say a word she just throws her bag down into the snow and positions herself shoulder-to-shoulder with me under Holmqvist’s feet. They’re all talking but I can’t hear the words. The body comes down and Red and the two men do most of the catching. I’m too weak, too cold.
‘An ambulance is on its way,’ says Cici from the archway, her lipstick catching my eye.
He’s wearing a suit jacket and chinos and the hairs on his shins are bristling in the wind.
We rest him down on the snow.
One of the clipbopard guys takes off his coat and folds it and pushes it under Holmqvist’s head and then I sense sirens. A crow passes over me on its way to St Olov’s churchyard. Andersson’s checking for a pulse and narrowing his eyes like he might be detecting something.
I look at this man: ghostwriter, liar, imprisoner, monster. He lies in the exact same spot where Gustav Grimberg died. Red sand under cobbles under snow under Holmqvist. Red from two weeks ago. This was Holmqvist’s escape, his final strategy to make the book sell, to make his name live on forever. Snowflakes fall. The climax, his climax, wasn’t me dying in a chimney it was him dying with the saviour manuscript hanging from his neck.
Thord and Noora run through the gates from Storgatan.
I rip the tape from his eyelids. Each one has a liquorice coin attached. I look at Holmqvist’s hideous bulging eyes and I want to scratch him. For killing a lonely man and for hurting all of us. Karin, especially. I believed in him when nobody else did and he betrayed my trust. People are gathering around us and I suppose he’s a victim too in all this. A town full of victims. Victims of each other.
I crouch down and swallow hard and my cheek brushes the powder snow and I put my dry, cracked lips close to Holmqvist’s ear. I take a breath and close my eyes. It’s like it was with Mum. My chest tightens and hardens. His chest convulses. I move my lips closer to his ear and I try to whisper but no noise comes out. It’s too difficult. His face is dark red and his skin is cold and a piece of tape that’s still stuck to his temple flaps in the breeze. He reminds me of Mum in her final moments. He’s slipping. I know what I have to do. My breath catches in my chest and I move closer and my lips brush his ear and I force myself to whisper, ‘I forgive you’.
54
The taxi smells of pine-tree air freshener.
There are about twenty cardboard trees hanging from the rear-view mirror. The driver’s called Linda. Hair shaved at the sides and long on top.
We pull up to Karlstad train station.
I thank her and pay and she helps drag my three black bags to the platform. Lena had offered to drive me but I wanted the headspace of a taxi after what happened. I wanted to leave the way I’d always dreamt about, a taxi on the E16 headed south, everything I own in the car, a deep breath and a new life.
There’s a truck in the station car park getting jump started and the red jump-lead looks like a thick cord of Valentine’s liquorice against the dirty, grit-laden snow. Behind it is parked a Volvo taxi. Viggo’s taxi, I recognise his number plate. It’s in long-term parking.
The screen tells me my train will be one minute late and it tells me the temperature is seven below.
I haven’t slept since the chimney. Not much, anyway. I try to think of Aunt Ida, of the things we might do together later in the year, the bonding time, the new relationship. Those thoughts soothe me but I keep waking as soon as I drift off, panic attacks in the middle of the night. Like I’m trapped. Frozen. Suffocating.
The train approaches in the distance and I see its lights in the gloom growing brighter, growing larger. I can’t hear it yet. I still need to see Tammy. She’s away in Stockholm, some kind of family emergency, her cousin’s in trouble.
The train comes closer, its snowplough front edge slicing through fresh powder, and then it slows and stops and about thirty people shuffle off, collars raised, wheelie suitcases dragging salted snow and depositing it near the taxi rank. I am hollow. This was always going to be my moment. I’d played it out in my head: the send-off, the new job, the dream of an apartment not too far from the sea. The act of moving on. But I feel empty and twisted inside. Too many deaths too close to me. Too much hurt.
Karin’s note was apologising for an argument she’d had with her father the week before he killed himself. And for not clearing Gunnarsson’s name because all he ever did was chat to her. He was lonely, that’s all. Karin felt guilty all that time. Especially about her dad. Sometimes you don’t get to choose the last words you say to someone.
I step up and in and pull my bags one at a time and store two of them in the train luggage area. One bag doesn’t quite fit so it sticks out like a crooked tooth ruining a smile. I find my sleeper berth. I have it to myself and I am so completely grateful I could cry. I need to be cradled to sleep by this thousand-ton locomotive, I need to be held by it and soothed to a proper slumb
er.
The snow skull contained a cow’s brain. Smaller than a human brain but I didn’t know that. I still recoil every time I see a snowball or a snowman in a front garden.
The goodbye with Noora was a disaster. I’d given my official police statement to Chief Björn and Thord, and when it came for me to leave, my taxi waiting outside the cop shop, Noora and I had to do everything, say everything, in front of them. Thord turned away, bless him. But the Chief just stared at us. I tried to communicate through my eyes and I could tell that she tried as well but we had too much we wanted to say and it was not what it should have been.
There’s an announcement. Two minutes until departure.
I offered to donate the money Holmqvist paid me to Karin, for a holiday or a break for all three of them. But Anna-Britta said no. She said the Samaritans and the Swedish Childhood Cancer Foundation needed it more than they did.
A loud whistle and someone enters my little sleeper cabin and for a moment I think they have a reservation in here with me, but no, their mistake.
The police found the murder weapon in Holmqvist’s house. A 7cm German-made chef’s paring knife. And a granite pestle.
My guts are a mess. I feel like I shouldn’t be leaving like this but I can’t stay. I need to survive my own life, to thrive, to find a way. I need to.
Police discovered that Holmqvist had applied for an emergency passport. David knew the net was closing in on him and he knew he’d never survive prison. He’s not the type to do time. So he took the only other option available to him.
There’s a blur at the window.
I pull off one hearing aid and put it in its plastic overnight jar. As I reach up to remove the other aid I see Tammy at the train window holding a blanket.
Tam?
‘Tam?’ I say.