‘Have you seen your uncle?’ Aunt Berit asks.
She shakes her head. ‘Not yet.’
‘No, I don’t suppose he’s got time, he’s so busy with all those new windmills.’
Veronica doesn’t say anything, just waits for her to go on, as she’s bound to.
‘Ninety metres tall, did you hear? We didn’t say anything when he built the others, but these new ones he’s planning are almost twice the size. Great eyesores that’ll be seen and heard everywhere. They’ll spoil the whole area.’
Aunt Berit shakes her head, then looks around quickly as if to make sure no one’s listening.
‘And I’m not the only one who thinks that. There’s talk of trying to get planning permission withdrawn. Has your father mentioned it at all?’
Veronica shakes her head again.
‘No, well, I don’t suppose that would be the first thing Ebbe would want to talk to you about. Seeing as you’re not home that often, I mean.’
‘No.’ Veronica swallows the poorly concealed reproach as she tries to find a way of steering the conversation to where she wants it to go.
Aunt Berit seems to be waiting for some response that would give her a reason to carry on talking about Uncle Harald’s wind turbines, but when nothing comes she drops the subject. Her voice grows milder.
‘You’re looking more and more like your mother, Vera. Just as beautiful.’
Veronica knows it’s a compliment, but she still doesn’t like it.
Aunt Berit sighs and tilts her head to one side. ‘Magda was also an unsettled soul. You’ve got that from her.’
To Veronica’s surprise, the woman reaches out and gently strokes her hair. She sees an opportunity, and decides to grasp it.
‘Was that why Mum ran off to Copenhagen?’ she says. ‘Because she was an unsettled soul?’
The question seems to catch Aunt Berit by surprise. She purses her lips and tugs at her cardigan, but can’t resist the temptation to carry on playing the best friend.
‘Your grandfather . . .’ Aunt Berit hesitates, then starts again. ‘Assar and your mother didn’t always see eye to eye. Magda wasn’t happy on the farm. She wasn’t . . .’ Another pause. Aunt Berit probably doesn’t know much more. The fact that she calls Veronica’s mum Magda is enough for her to realise that. She hated being called that. Veronica decides to nudge the conversation in the right direction.
‘But then Mum came home,’ she says. ‘Got married to Dad.’
Aunt Berit nods, and the anxious look on her face vanishes. ‘Ebbe had been in love with Magda ever since school. Most of the boys were infatuated with her. Apart from my Sören, of course,’ she adds, slightly too quickly for it to sound believable. ‘Unlike the other boys, Ebbe never even tried to ask her out. He was too shy, mostly kept in the background. But you only had to see how Ebbe looked at Magda to understand the situation. He worshipped your mother, he’d have done absolutely anything for her.’
Veronica murmured in agreement. The fact that Dad worshipped the ground Mum walked on was hardly news. But she had to have patience, and very gently nudge the conversation towards the summer of 1983.
‘Everyone was surprised when Magda was suddenly home again,’ Aunt Berit goes on. ‘Everything happened so quickly. The engagement, the wedding, Mattias being born . . .’
Berit gives a knowing smile and Veronica can feel her blood start to boil. She’s heard this rumour before as well, that Dad might not be Mattias’s father. That Mum got pregnant with someone in Copenhagen and that Grandfather and Uncle Harald went to get her and made her get married to avoid a scandal. She can even understand where the rumour came from. Mattias is a head taller than Dad, has broad shoulders, big hands, and the same prominent features as Uncle Harald. You really have to exert yourself to see anything of Dad in him. All the same, she knows it’s there.
She sticks her hand in the back pocket of her jeans, finds a piece of paper and realises that it’s the photofit picture. A few seconds of silence follow.
She’s fumbling in the dark, she understands that. She still doesn’t know who or what she’s looking for. But there’s at least one key figure in this story. Someone who, one way or another, must know the truth about Billy. So she decides to get straight to the point.
‘Tommy Rooth,’ she says. The name provokes precisely the sort of alarmed reaction in Aunt Berit as she expected, and it makes her feel slightly mischievous. ‘You knew him, didn’t you?’
Berit tugs at her cardigan and looks around again as if she’s worried someone might be listening. The shop is still empty, and after a couple of seconds her predilection for gossip gains the upper hand.
‘I don’t know if knew is the right word. We were at school together, him and me and Magda. Sören, Ebbe and your uncle, too, come to that. Tommy was good-looking, but no one liked him. You never really knew what he was thinking. He was an unpleasant sort, drank a lot and kept getting in trouble.’
She purses her lips, making her wrinkles deeper.
‘He broke a bottle over my Sören’s head once, down in the park. We must have been sixteen, seventeen, something like that. It could have been really nasty. Tommy was being a bit pushy and Sören intervened. He had to have eight stitches, but we didn’t involve the police.’
‘No?’
Aunt Berit shakes her head. ‘Tommy’s father came over with a whole deer for Sören’s parents to make up for it. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to smooth things over for his son. Not long after that Tommy went off to sea. There were rumours that he’d beaten up his father.’
Veronica tries to look serious and sympathetic at the same time. She thinks about the photograph of Tommy Rooth in the paper. That dark, slightly dangerous look in his eyes. She tries to imagine him trying it on with a seventeen-year-old Aunt Berit, but it isn’t easy.
‘Wasn’t Uncle Sören the last person who saw Rooth after . . .’ She lets the rest of the sentence hang in the air.
Aunt Berit takes the bait at once. ‘Yes. Heading south on the main road, the same night the police let him go. Straight to Trelleborg and a ferry out of the country. Driving that terrible old Volvo as if the devil himself was after him.’ She lets out a derisive snort. ‘It’s a scandal that Månsson couldn’t keep Rooth locked up. That he never got punished for what he did to little Billy.’
Mention of his name makes Aunt Berit’s torrent of words dry up. She looks uncomfortable and starts fiddling with some cartons of coffee on a shelf. She suddenly seems extremely concerned about the layout of the goods. The topic clearly unsettles her, and Veronica can tell that Aunt Berit is about to make her excuses and get back to work any moment.
‘Didn’t anyone in the village use to spend any time with Rooth?’ she tries, in a last attempt to find out something she doesn’t already know.
Aunt Berit shakes her head, adjusts the packs of coffee once more, then straightens up.
‘Only that other drunk.’
‘The other drunk?’
Aunt Berit turns round. Brushes the front of her cardigan a couple of times, hard, as if she was trying to get rid of something unpleasant. Something that’s clinging to her even though it’s invisible.
‘Kjell-Åke Olsson,’ she mutters. ‘Most people call him Sailor.’
Chapter 35
V
eronica stops outside the shop and angrily tears the cellophane off the packet of cigarettes, and is about to light a Prince when a big black BMW with tinted windows pulls up in front of her. The door opens and a curvy woman around the same age as her gets out.
‘I thought it was you, Vera!’
It’s Lidija, someone she went to school with and hasn’t seen for at least ten years. Longer, possibly, they don’t quite agree on how long. She doesn’t seem to have aged a day. She’s attractive, well dressed in high heels and a trouser suit. Her hair has been blow-dried, she’s got long nails, perfectly manicured. She and her expensive car both look out of place in the village, but that doesn�
��t seem to bother Lidija in the slightest. She talks loudly, and laughs even louder.
‘Look, have you had breakfast, Vera?’
‘Er, no . . .’
‘I was just on my way to see Dad. Tag along, he’d love to see you.’
Veronica begins to formulate an excuse, but Lidija interrupts before she has time to get going. Besides, she forgot to buy anything to eat in the shop, so she gets in her battered old car and follows Lidija’s huge BMW. She’s surprised at her own spontaneity. It isn’t like her. On the other hand, this morning is proving to be altogether rather out of the ordinary, to put it mildly. The strange feeling she had in the churchyard is still there, and she isn’t entirely sure how to handle it.
They park outside one of the pizzerias, the one with the sign saying FULLY LICENCED by the door. She remembers Lidija’s dad as a big, noisy man, one of the many who were bussed here from Yugoslavia in the sixties and seventies to keep Swedish industry going. These days he’s considerably smaller but no less noisy.
‘Gastric bypass,’ he laughs, patting his stomach. ‘I lost forty-five kilos. Forty-five, that’s half a Lidija.’
‘Stop it, Dad!’ Lidija rolls her eyes, then kisses her dad on both cheeks.
He gestures to them to sit down and, even though it’s so early in the day, serves up plenty of food.
‘There’s no point objecting,’ Lidija whispers. ‘Just have a little bit and he’ll be happy.’
Veronica helps herself to the food, to Branko’s evident delight. He says something she doesn’t understand to his assistant, then sits down at their table with them.
‘It’s good to see you, Vera,’ he says. ‘How’s your dad doing? He hasn’t been in here for ages.’
‘Fine, thanks,’ she says, surprised. Her dad eats pizza? He always says he prefers to cook for himself. And he’s good at it, too.
‘Has Lidija told you? She’s a real Rockefeller these days . . .’
‘Stop it, Dad!’ Lidija says. She tries to cover his mouth with her hand.
They play fight for a while until Veronica’s strained smile starts to ache. She tries to imagine her dad in here.
‘What he’s trying to say is that I’ve set up a few businesses that are doing pretty well. Hair care products, lotions, perfumes.’
‘Here in Reftinge?’ Veronica says, hearing the astonishment in her voice.
‘Why not? Reftinge’s perfect. Cheap premises, plenty of workers. We have a website where customers can order our products. My girls pack them up and post them out. We have customers all around the country.’
Lidija’s dad shakes his head. ‘I’m still getting to grips with the Internet. Lidija says I have to, but I don’t know. You can’t teach an old dog new skills.’
‘Tricks, Dad. And of course you can, unless the old dog wants to drive all the way to the city to do his banking.’
They cheerfully start to squabble again and Veronica looks away. She spots some photographs on the wall and stares at them instead. Pictures of customers, and to her surprise she sees her dad in one of them. He’s got more hair and the colour in the picture is a bit faded, so she guesses it must be at least ten years old. He’s sitting at a table with another man, raising his beer glass in a toast towards the camera. The man with him is partly hidden by her dad’s raised arm. She doesn’t recognise him.
‘. . . nail bars,’ Lidija says, and Veronica realises she’s missed the start of the sentence. ‘I’ve already got two, but within a few years I’ll have franchises in every shopping centre in the whole of Skåne. Fast Nails, it’s going to be really big, I swear.’
‘Great,’ Veronica says. She can’t help glancing back at the picture of her dad. He looks reasonably happy, but as usual his eyes are sad.
*
‘By the way, Branko,’ she says when they’re about to leave. ‘Do you know Kjell-Åke Olsson, Sailor?’ It’s a spur-of-the-moment question and she doesn’t really know what sort of answer she’s expecting.
‘Of course. Sailor was a regular here before he went doolally. He got expelled from the pub . . .’ Branko waves his hand in the air, as if he doesn’t like what he’s saying.
‘Expelled?’
‘Yes, how do you say it?’ He looks at Lidija for help finding the right expression, then finds it on his own. ‘Frozen out, that’s it. No one wanted to drink with him. Sailor said they used to spit in his beer.’
‘Because he knew Tommy Rooth?’
Branko grimaces. ‘Probably. People round here never let anything go. I don’t agree with that. Life’s too short. If your dad doesn’t have a problem with Sailor, then neither do I.’
‘Dad?’
She notices Lidija tugging gently at her father’s arm, but he doesn’t let her put him off.
‘Ebbe and Sailor were friends. They used to have a drink or two together. Take a look at this.’ Branko goes over to the photograph on the wall and points to the man beside her dad. ‘There,’ he says. ‘That’s Sailor.’
Chapter 36
E
khagen Care Home is on the eastern side of the village, not far from the church. Veronica hasn’t been there since her grandfather was alive. At least fifteen years ago, probably more, she can’t be bothered to work it out. She’s got other things on her mind. The photofit picture is still in her jeans pocket. She reaches back with her hand and touches it gently.
Inside the home a smell of coffee hangs in the air above the grey linoleum floor. Heavy, old-fashioned wooden furniture lines the corridors where they’re wide enough. Like the paintings of farms on the walls, the furnishings all come from bequests, battered leftovers from another age that no one cares about anymore. Which would also be a fairly accurate description of Sailor.
Veronica can tell from the nurse’s tone of voice that he isn’t one of the home’s favourite residents. He’s sitting in a wheelchair in his room with the door closed and a blanket over his knees, even though it must be at least twenty-five degrees. His body is shrunken and wasted. His nose and cheeks are lined with tiny broken blood vessels, a pattern she recognises from her therapy groups for alcoholics.
‘You’ve got a visitor, Kjell-Åke. That’s nice, isn’t it?’
The nurse, Marie, a schoolmate whose name Veronica remembers even before she sneaks a glance at her name badge, recognised her at once. She ostensibly accepts the explanation that Sailor is an old friend of her dad’s, even if the look in her eyes says otherwise.
Sailor stares at Marie, then Veronica. One corner of his mouth is drooping down, and a blob of white saliva has gathered there. His lips move slowly, making weak, wet sounds.
‘My name is Vera Nilsson,’ she says.
It feels odd to say the name, which is hardly surprising seeing as she hasn’t used it for a very long time.
‘Ebbe and Magdalena’s daughter,’ she adds when he shows no sign of recognition. ‘From Backagården. You know my father.’
The name of the farm makes Sailor raise his head a little. Veronica sees a spark ignite in his eyes, but he still doesn’t say anything. He looks between her and the nurse again. She turns and indicates to Marie that she’ll be OK on her own, but the nurse misunderstands.
‘As I said, Kjell-Åke has dementia. There’s not much left. He drifts in and out most of the time.’
‘OK.’ She goes on looking at Marie, and after a few seconds the nurse finally gets the hint.
‘Well, I need to get on. I’m sure you’ll be all right on your own, Vera.’ She sounds slightly annoyed, as if she’d have liked to stay a bit longer. ‘Kjell-Åke can get a bit loud and swear a lot sometimes, but don’t mind that. Ring the bell if you need anything. If not, we’ll be back to fetch him for lunch.’
Veronica waits until the sound of Marie’s wooden-soled sandals has faded away before pulling up a chair and sitting down next to Sailor. He smells faintly of urine and something more cloying which she’d rather not think about.
‘You used to be friends with Tommy Rooth,’ she s
ays, without bothering with any small talk.
Sailor’s eyes narrow. ‘You’re Aronsson’s daughter.’ The words are half hissed, half slurred.
‘Niece,’ she says. ‘Harald’s my uncle.’
‘Fucking cunt,’ he says. Then his eyes grow vacant and the mean look on his face vanishes. His fingers pick at the blanket.
‘You and Tommy used to do business together. Hunting,’ she says.
That last word seems to click. Sailor’s eyes grow clearer again and the angry look returns.
‘None of your fucking business. No one else’s either. Nosy fuckers. I’m not saying a word. Our business. Mine and Tommy’s. Aronsson’s a fucking cunt.’
‘You didn’t like my uncle?’
The old man looks up. ‘Fucking cunt, Aronsson.’
‘Yes, so you said.’
She sits and waits for him to go on, but he presses his lips together.
‘You and Tommy Rooth used to hunt up in the Northern Forest, didn’t you? Even though my uncle had the hunting rights,’ she prompts.
Sailor leans forward with a smirk. ‘Maybe. Maybe Tommy. Maybe the forest, maybe . . .’ The light in his eyes fades again and his fingers feel for the blanket once more.
Veronica sighs. The old man’s impossible to talk to, this is completely pointless. What was she actually expecting from this visit? That the old man would be able to tell her who was creeping around her dad’s garden, who put that stone on her mum’s grave? An old man who never goes further than the dining room.
Outside she hears the church bells ringing to announce the service. The old folk evidently have lunch very early on Sundays.
She tries in vain to think of something else to say. Just as she’s about to stand up she has an idea. A familiar feeling that makes her gasp for breath. She leans back in the chair and stares at Sailor intently. The look on his face, the way he’s picking at the blanket. The tiny movements in his face.
‘You’re grieving,’ she says gently. ‘You grieving for your friend, aren’t you, Kjell-Åke?’
Sailor doesn’t answer. He goes on staring down at his lap, but his fingers have stopped moving.
End of Summer Page 17