Thin Ice

by Mikael Engström

  ‘Did you drink too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  There was a knock at the door and they looked at each other in surprise. They sat in silence. There was another knock, then heavy thumping.

  ‘If it’s Father Christmas we’ll rub snow in his face,’ said Lena.

  Mik opened the door and it was Father Christmas. Big and fat with a white beard, fluffy fur cloak and a hat.

  ‘Merry Christmas,’ he said. ‘Has everyone been good this year?’

  Santa held out a sack, and he smelled of pike.

  ‘I’m too old for Father Christmas,’ said Mik.

  Lena came and stood behind him in the doorway. She put her hands on Mik’s shoulders.

  ‘Exactly,’ she said, laughing. ‘We don’t believe in you.’

  ‘You can believe what the hell you like,’ said Father Christmas and handed over the sack. ‘Merry Christmas.’

  And he left.

  ‘Father Christmas smelled of pike,’ said Mik.

  ‘Mm,’ said Lena. ‘And I think he has trouble peeing.’

  They tipped the contents of the sack onto the floor and started rummaging through the parcels. Two were from Pi to Mik. A cushion she had sewn herself, embroidered with a heart, and a diary with sweet little rabbits on the front. He ought to have thought it was ridiculous, rabbits and a cushion, but he didn’t. The cushion smelled nice. From Father Christmas he had a fishing rod and fishing hooks and some sweets. Lena had bed linen and velvet pyjamas from someone called Liz.

  ‘Bought in New York,’ she said.

  It got late and Lena drank mulled wine and put more Hemingway in the stove. Mik fell asleep in front of the fire on the cushion he had been given by Pi. Lena carried him up to his bed, he was so light. She tucked him in and said, ‘It’s going to be empty and lonely when you’re not here any more.’

  She looked sad. That surprised Mik, because he wasn’t going anywhere.

  He told her, ‘I’m staying here. Parrot Earrings can say what she likes. It’s nice here. I want to live here. Can’t I?’

  ‘Yes, as far as I’m concerned you can stay here.’

  ‘Well, I live here then.’

  Lena smiled at him and stroked his cheek.

  ‘Yes, you live here.’

  ‘Promise I can live here.’

  ‘I promise.’

  THE ICE DRAGONS

  Bengt lay in his bed under a pile of covers, shivering. His cheeks were burning and runny snot dribbled from his nose. He coughed, sniffed and looked up at Mik with eyes that were bloodshot and too shiny.

  ‘I think I’m going to die,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve got a cold,’ said Mik.

  ‘A cold,’ rasped Bengt. ‘This is no stupid cold. It’s tuberculosis. I won’t be leaving my bed again. My head’s all dizzy. I’m freezing to death and I’m boiling hot at the same time.’

  ‘Exactly. You’ve got a cold. Lena said you got cold in the water. You’ve got a temperature.’

  Bengt stared at the ceiling and then shut his eyes tightly. ‘Damn. Can you check the lines and bring in the fish yourself? It’s got to be done. The fish will die and go bad … it’s got to be done.’

  ‘Alone?’ said Mik. Bengt looked at him. Tears streamed from his eyes, but he wasn’t crying. He was leaking water.

  ‘You know how it’s done.’

  ‘But I’ve promised Lena never to go out on the ice alone.’

  ‘You’ve got the knife. Show me you’ve got the knife.’

  Bengt propped himself up on his elbows. Mik lifted up his jacket. The knife hung from his belt.

  Bengt lay down again and pulled the sheet up to his chin.

  He sniffed and said, ‘Get Bertil’s too.’

  ‘No,’ said Mik.

  ‘He’s a blasted poacher.’

  ‘But he saved you.’

  ‘Oh hell, so he did.’

  The ice was shiny, the snow had blown away and the sledge glided easily and quickly. The runners crackled and swished and the headwind stabbed his face like a thousand nails. On the sledge seat was the pike box and in the box was the big axe that he would use to kill the pike. Bengt had told him that if he found the first hook he would find the rest, in a north-south direction from Tallåsen. And north was in the direction of the church steeple.

  It wasn’t difficult. He found it straight away even though the morning was still dark. He cracked the night ice layer with the axe and almost dropped it in when the ice broke open. Mik felt the line. It was heavy. And then it started to jerk and pull. The line rushed around the hole, scraping against the ice edge. He hauled up the line and a big pike floated up, its jaws working.

  Mik threw himself at it, hitting it on the head with the axe. The pike died. Mik laid it in the box and travelled proudly on to the next hole. Here comes the trapper travelling through the polar regions, he thought. No, Siberia, catching deadly ice dragons, seven times deadlier and bigger than Nile crocodiles.

  Mik looked down into the box. The pike’s mouth was open, its teeth bared. A Siberian ice dragon. Deadly. It spits out slime and you can be paralysed and die at the slightest touch of it on bare flesh. It would even make dragon Katla from The Brothers Lionheart run off and hide in her cave by Karma Falls.

  Three hooks in a row held ice dragons. Two were small, the third enormous and much bigger than any he had caught with Bengt. It wasn’t difficult getting it up onto the ice, just heavy, but then it turned into a battle. Mik lay on the ice and tried to hold it still. The ice dragon thrashed and squirmed, opening and closing its jaws. Mik aimed a blow, but he missed and the axe hit the ice so hard his hand went numb. He fought, wrestled and hit, sat across the pike and managed to strike it several times in the middle of its head. Blood ran onto the ice. The dragon stiffened, spread out its fins and shook as if it had received a ten-thousand-volt shock. It opened and closed its jaws one last time and finally slackened and died.

  Mik stood up and cheered across the ice with the axe raised above his head. But then he became anxious in case he had been affected by the slime and paralysis would come creeping, and there was no cure. That was the cruellest thing about dragon slime. Your body fell apart inside and the paralysis slowly set in. Would he make it off the ice in time? Would he get home in time? Would he …?

  Mik decided it hadn’t affected him and he carried on to the next hook. Numbers five and six were empty, but the rest held ice dragons. The box filled up and Mik’s gloves were wet with dragon slime which froze and turned stiff. It felt like his hands were in plaster, or was it paralysis? Perhaps the gloves had a hole somewhere? Cruel world.

  On the other side of the lake he saw Bertil gliding along on his sledge, checking his lines. What idiotic brothers, thought Mik. What could make him and Tony not speak to each other for thirty years? It was mental. There was enough room and enough pike for everybody. Complete madness, actually. But Bengt had told Mik it wasn’t madness. It was perseverance.

  Mik turned for home and for some reason which was inexplicable even to himself he didn’t take the quickest route. He came under the influence of some magic power and went where he shouldn’t, straight towards the ice hole. He knew what he was doing, but his will was not his own. Something tugged in his stomach and bubbled up his legs and into his testicles. Out there lay the black patch of open water. It was as if it was calling him. A black eye amid all the white. A black hole with enormous magnetism. There was something there.

  The sledge runners hissed. The ice became thin and dark. Trapped, frozen bubbles floated like planets in a black cosmos. Here and there were cracks like frozen lightning in the ice. He stopped the sledge and walked the last bit to the ice hole. The ice bounced under his feet and vibrations caused little waves on the surface of the open water. There was a faint crack. He stopped for a moment, listened. The ice whined, complaining quietly.

  One more step.

  And one more.

  He was close now. The water seemed oily, slow-moving. Small eddies and streams of current gl
ided on the surface. Tears in a single eye. A black, bottomless eye staring up into space, endlessly upwards, endlessly downwards. An entrance into another world. Upwards, downwards, inwards, outwards.

  One more step.

  How close is close?

  How close can you go?

  One more step.

  The waves lapped around the edge and in towards the middle, where they met and bobbed back again. He was allowed to go everywhere in the whole of Selet, anywhere at all. Apart from here. And this was where he was.

  Why was he here? Was it all to do with the bubbling feeling in his testicles? How close could you go?

  One more step.

  He stood on the edge. The ice wasn’t very thick, only a few centimetres. This was close. You couldn’t get any closer. Here he was alone. It felt good. Could you be any more alone than this? This was the edge and no one would follow him here. Mik thought he saw a shadow of something down in the water. Something drifted past. Perhaps it was the current; perhaps it was clouds passing across the dark morning sky.

  No, there was something down there. Something massive. Sliding his feet, Mik backed to the sledge.

  Bengt was still in his bed, hidden under the duvet. Mik took off the stiff, slimy gloves and brought out a bundle of notes and Bengt’s blue tablet box, which he laid on the chest of drawers.

  ‘Here’s the money from Konsum Lasse and the tablet box from Lena. I lied to her and said you’d been out on the ice.’

  ‘Keep the money,’ said Bengt from under the duvet.

  ‘No, I have money. My own job. Pi and I … find cats.’

  ‘What’s the time?’

  ‘Half past nine.’

  ‘I have to get up.’

  Bengt crawled out from under the duvet, sat on the edge of the bed and swayed groggily.

  ‘I saw the whale,’ said Mik. ‘It’s there in Lake Selet. In the ice hole.’

  Bengt looked at him with bloodshot, feverish eyes.

  ‘You’re not supposed to go there.’

  ‘I’ve got the knife. And I did actually see a whale.’

  ‘That’s impossible. And I don’t need those pills.’

  ‘Why? Why should everything be impossible? I saw it. In Loch Ness there’s a prehistoric monster. So there could be one in our lake too.’

  Bengt lay down in bed again. Sighed and pulled the duvet up to his nose.

  ‘The chances of there being a whale in Lake Selet are unbelievably small. Almost non-existent. Practically zero.’

  ‘You do believe me?’

  ‘No, but I’ll keep an open mind. There might be a one in ten million chance that there’s a whale in the lake.’

  ‘One in ten million. But you do believe it?’

  ‘What would it be doing in there?’

  ‘Magnetically lost,’ said Mik. ‘So you do believe in my whale?’

  ‘I believe your whale means something.’

  ‘So then you believe?’

  ‘Yes, in the meaning.’

  AN ICE BALL IN THE EYE

  The Christmas holiday came to an end. It had been good. It had been the best Christmas holiday ever. They had handed back six cats. He and Pi had built eight gigantic snowmen when the weather turned milder after New Year. One was four metres tall and was admired by everyone in the village. Mik felt as if he had helped create a masterpiece. Bengt’s temperature dropped to normal and he helped them put the top half of the huge snowman in place. Oskar thought they ought to ring the Guinness Book of Records so they could put the snowman in their next book.

  ‘It’s not that big,’ said Filip. ‘I bet they’ve built bigger in Alaska.’

  Parrot Earrings had phoned three times and spoken to Lena. Mik had told Lena to tell her he had moved for good, that he had left home and now had a new home. This was home and he had no plans to leave.

  The weeks passed and the days became longer. The sun did more than say a quick hello over the horizon. It hung up there, and some days there was no need to put on a thick hat at break. The school had sent for a whole box of hockey clubs and brand new goals. They played all break time and Mik was goalie on Pi’s team.

  She was best, but Filip thought he was best. He wasn’t. He was the moodiest. Oskar had a tooth knocked out by his own stick when he was about to shoot into an open goal. That was exactly the kind of thing only Oskar could do.

  Filip had been given a snowmobile that no one had seen. It was either being serviced or lent to a cousin or at the garage for tuning.

  It was evening and the hawk owl sat outside in the tree. Lena came up with milk and sandwiches. Mik had a peculiar pink shimmer in his brain. He didn’t know what it was. But he was happy and the happiness kind of ran out of his ears, nose and mouth like pink candyfloss. He bounced on his bed on his knees in his pyjamas and asked, ‘Why do you put your tongue in someone else’s mouth?’

  Lena laughed. ‘Well, because you like that person.’

  ‘The one whose mouth you put your tongue in?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Why can’t you ever hang up your clothes?’ said Lena and realised she was starting to sound like a mum.

  Mik’s clothes lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. He looked at the pile. Socks, trousers and jumper lay there just as if the person who had been wearing them had gone up in a puff of smoke or suddenly shrunk to the size of an ant. Lena hung the trousers over the chair and money fell out of the pockets. Coins and crinkly notes. She stood there, astonished.

  ‘Lots of money. Where did you get it from?’

  ‘Earned it.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘We’ve got a business idea. A cat factory. Pi and –’

  ‘Cat factory?’ said Lena, counting the money. ‘There’s six hundred kronor here.’

  ‘Yes, it makes them happy.’

  Mik felt the candyfloss flow out of his mouth. Everything was going so well. His body buzzed and he jumped around on the bed on his knees. She could know. She was all right.

  ‘They’ve run away. We look after them until there’s a good reward.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cat owners are really glad.’

  ‘You look after them?’

  ‘Yeah, until the reward is good.’

  ‘You kidnap cats? That’s …’

  Lena looked strange. Was she angry or what?

  He stopped right in the middle of his bouncing. The candyfloss shrivelled up and stuck all around his mouth. He shouldn’t have said anything. You should never say anything.

  ‘But the cat owners are so-o-o glad. They would never have been that happy if the cat hadn’t been lost and we’d returned it to them.’

  ‘That’s not right, Mik. But go to sleep now; we can deal with it later.’

  Lena went down the stairs. Mik pulled his duvet up over his head. Why did he have to babble on like that? You should never be that happy, because it only bubbles over. How bad was this?

  It took two days. Then he knew. It was bad. Shit, it was bad. It was crap bad. Vomit bad. It was as if a great big bulldog had wandered into the village and pissed on him. He needed a time machine. He needed to rewind and start again. Or else he needed a strong rope so he could go out into the forest and hang himself.

  Pi looked right through him now. He was so much thin air. She simply walked on by, as if she was walking right through him. It would have been much better if she had hit him, screamed and yelled, rubbed his face in the snow – murdered him. No, he didn’t exist, she didn’t see him. The only one who had spoken to him was Oskar, and he said, ‘I’m not allowed to talk to you.’

  And he screwed his mouth up tightly so it looked like a bumhole.

  Lena had spoken to all the cat owners in Selet and apologised on behalf of the children, but most of all for Mik, who, according to her, had only been talked into it. Obviously the thing with the cats became the talking point of the entire village.

  ‘Those kids have got a bloody nerve!’

  ‘It
’s got to be that problem child from Stockholm, coming up with such an idea.’

  But Bengt had laughed and told Mik they could be business partners and the idea could be developed a little.

  ‘No,’ said Mik.

  ‘Yes, we could sell insurance,’ said Bengt. ‘Cat owners can insure their cats with us. Anyone who refuses will soon find their cat has disappeared.’

  No one else had laughed. In school their teacher talked about right and wrong, about norms, rules and how people ought to behave towards each other. There was group work and Mik was the odd one out and did group work on his own. He wrote an essay about how the plague came to the Nordic countries:

  In 1349 a ship came drifting towards the Norwegian coast outside Bergen. It was towed into the town and searched. The whole crew was dead. The bodies were black and blue with boils that had burst. But the cargo was undamaged. It consisted of valuable cloth that was sold and spread across the Nordic countries and one person in three died of the plague.

  ‘Aren’t you in a group?’ asked the teacher.

  Mik looked up from his story.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like it.’

  The teacher looked around the classroom.

  ‘Mik has to be in a group.’

  It went silent. Someone giggled.

  Break times were lonely. The hockey game flowed backwards and forwards. Mik sat on the climbing frame. Pi scored a goal and cheered. Filip got angry, threw his hockey stick to the ground and told the goalie what he thought of him. The match continued with shouting, yelling and cheering. Pi knew he was sitting on the climbing frame – obviously, for how else would she have been able to stop herself from looking in that direction?

  The ball rolled towards Mik and came to a stop at his feet. He bent down and picked it up. Pi looked the other way. Filip came to get it. Mik held out the ball.

  Filip took it and said, ‘Your dad’s a wino.’

  And the game got going again.

  My dad’s a wino, thought Mik. The words tasted rotten in his mouth. The words tasted of sick. The words tasted sour. The words tasted Snake.

  Gustavsson’s dog was waiting for him. It growled, curled back its lips and bared its teeth. Mik took off his gloves and warmed some snow in his hands. He made a hard-packed ball of ice. Took his time. The dog started barking and steam poured out of its mouth as if at any moment fire would come spurting out.