Savage Spring

by KALLENTOFT MONS

  Dare I do it? he thinks.

  Sell up.

  Who knows what’s going to happen once the will is read out today. Is Malin going to go mad, is she going to push me away, is she going to forbid me to see Tove? He knows she’s been longing to know the truth, that she’s felt that there’s been a secret in her life, and she’s asked him, several times, straight out, to tell her what it is.

  But that wasn’t my responsibility, Åke Fors thinks, sipping the hot coffee as the wind moves the treetops outside the window and the yellow-green buds seem to wave at him, telling him that today is the start of something new.

  I’ve missed Malin. Tove. But I don’t miss you, Margaretha, he thinks.

  For all these years you got me to do what you wanted.

  I went along with you, denying Malin the chance to be whole, and she’s going to hate me for it, isn’t she?

  Am I going to be forced to run away to a lonely life in the sun on Tenerife? Do I even have the right to demand to be part of their lives?

  I wonder if she’s remembered the meeting with the solicitor today, I ought to call her, and Åke Fors goes out to the phone on the wall in the hallway, dials his daughter’s number and waits.

  One ring.

  And even though Malin never lived there when she was little, he can see her as a six-year-old running across the floor, the beautiful little girl with her hair flying around her head, and she’s crying and bubbling and howling with laughter as she runs through the rooms.

  Then she stops in the hall. Right in front of him. Looks at him, wants to ask him something, but can’t seem to find the words, and then she runs off again, and he sees her looking for something in the living room, intently, lifting the rug, the cushions on the sofa, saying: ‘Where is she? Where is he? Where is he?’

  And Åke Fors wants to run over to his six-year-old daughter and help her, and now she’s saying: ‘Where’s Mummy? Where’s Mummy?’

  And he wants to answer, but he knows that none of what he can see really exists except as electrical impulses, created by memories and dreams inside the meandering pathways of his own brain.

  The phone rings several more times.

  No answer.

  Åke Fors hangs up.

  Hopes that everything isn’t already too late.

  She hadn’t had time to fall asleep. And she sees her dad’s name on the screen but doesn’t feel like answering.

  But it makes her remember the meeting with the solicitor.

  The will.

  Today.

  She’d completely suppressed it, but she has time to get a bit of sleep and still get there in time.

  Try to sleep now, Malin. You need to rest. Even if you don’t want to.

  Concentrating on the present moment, that’s the only way to survive.

  Malin.

  You’re asleep in your staffroom now, with your phone switched on, but no one seems to want to disturb you. You’re lying there, Malin, and you’re missing your mummy, even if you don’t realise it, even if you don’t feel it.

  Our mummy isn’t here. Even though she ought to be, and you, you still don’t know what happened to her, and maybe you’re never going to find out.

  Maybe the old man who’s just been cutting into her broken, dead body in a room in the hospital won’t find anything odd about the way she died.

  Be careful with it all, Malin.

  Tove likes you, your daddy likes you.

  Don’t be scared of what’s about to happen, try, try not to get angry, not to judge people for not being able to control, or understand, their feelings.

  Deep down, you know better than that, Malin.

  As for us, we’re afraid, because it’s lonely here, and dark and cold and it’s like we’re in one of those nightmares you used to have when you were little. You used to dream you were all alone in the world, that there was no love for you.

  When your mummy left you she was sad.

  Because she was leaving you.

  Just like our mummy left us.

  We know that now.

  And she ought to be here. With us, but she isn’t here and nor is Daddy, and we want to be together again. Sleep next to each other in a big bed with white sheets, snuggling under white sheets that can shut out anything nasty, anything cruel.

  The other children’s mummy keeps to herself, maybe she’s trying to be there for them, like we are for you, Malin? And if she is, then she’ll hear them breathing now, see them banging on the door, scared of the anger, scared of getting out, scared they’re never going to get out.

  The boy is crying. The girl hugs him, says: ‘Don’t be sad, don’t be sad.’

  The monotonous whistling.

  It’s started again.

  Stop that fucking noise. I want to sleep. I want to stay in my lonely darkness.

  Sleep comes to an abrupt end and she opens her eyes, feeling with her hand over the sofa for her mobile.

  There it is.

  And by mistake she dismisses the call, but hardly has time to switch on the tablelamp before it starts ringing again.

  She doesn’t recognise the number.

  What the hell is the time? How long have I been asleep? Fuck.

  She sits up, answers.

  ‘Malin Fors.’

  ‘Ah, hello. My name is Johan Strandkvist, I’m a solicitor. We’re waiting for you here at my office. It’s ten past two, and we had a meeting that was supposed to start at two, so I just wanted to see if you . . .’

  ‘I’m on my way,’ Malin says, and ends the call.

  Got to get the meeting out of the way. It can’t take more than half an hour.

  Then it will all be done, she thinks.

  I don’t have the time, or the energy, for any more worries.

  29

  She’s driving too fast.

  Not long awake, yet her head feels strangely clear.

  Malin accelerates.

  Djurgårdsgatan is shut for roadworks.

  The car sweeps past the edge of the old cemetery, where small leaves are starting to blur with the buds on the trees, and on one grave a solitary woman is laying a large bouquet of what look like red and white roses.

  She thinks about the case.

  She’s sure Jonathan Ludvigsson is telling the truth. He is, and will remain, an activist who went too far, but he’s no murderer. The Economic Liberation Front is an invention. He’s the sort who would travel the length and breadth of Europe to protest outside meetings, and demand the nationalisation of the banks, and the firing-squad for their greedy directors.

  But the guns? The explosives in the caravan?

  Romantic revolutionary dreams.

  Like the Italian anarchists in the USA in the early years of the last century.

  But she’s convinced Jonathan Ludvigsson hasn’t used any weapons. That they caught him in time. So who’s the man with the bicycle? Where does he come from? What are his motives?

  Malin stops at a red light beside the old fire station. A car pulls up alongside her.

  A young family, dad driving, mum and two children in the backseat.

  Green.

  Malin puts her foot down again, then she hears an earth-shattering bang and feels like crouching down behind the steering wheel, feels her stomach clench, and she thinks that it’s happened again, but she can’t see any smoke, can’t hear any real silence.

  How far away?

  Where has something just been blown up? Who? Are there going to be body parts raining from the sky?

  She stops again. The car with the family has braked beside her, the children are screaming in the backseat, and the woman is comforting them.

  Then the father points ahead and starts to laugh, pointing and laughing and pointing.

  At the bus stop fifty metres away, beside the shiny multi-storey car park, stands a bus, its bulk leaning to one side like a badly listing ship.

  The bus driver is inspecting one of the front tyres, the one with no air in it, the one that just a few second
s before must have exploded.

  Malin pulls open the door of Johan Strandkvist the solicitor’s office after knocking, but without waiting for a ‘come in’.

  Sleepy, out of kilter again now.

  The solicitor, about forty years old, greasy curls reaching his collar, dressed in a blue blazer and a bright red shirt. His drink-swollen face is lined with deep wrinkles, and Malin thinks he must have done some serious drinking the night before, this is just a routine meeting for him, a meeting he needs to get over and done with, and that’s how I see it as well, don’t I? This needs to be done so we can all move on. In purely legal terms there’s nothing to discuss, Dad’s going to get everything, and then I’ll inherit everything from him when the time comes.

  The deep wrinkles aren’t the only thing that makes her feel uneasy. There’s also a tension in the solicitor’s face, and he looks as if he’d prefer just to run away. Maybe this isn’t merely a routine meeting after all, and she looks at her dad, sitting in an armchair by a wall covered in bookcases full of legal volumes.

  Dad isn’t looking at me.

  His back is straight, and he’s looking the other way, like Mum used to.

  He’s looking at the solicitor. Or is he looking out of the window, at the cloudless blue afternoon sky? Is he thinking about Mum’s ashes, wondering where to scatter them?

  Malin knows what he’s looking at.

  She realises now, from her instantaneous scan of the room, yet she somehow, within a fraction of a second, managed to suppress the sight, because she doesn’t even want to try to understand this scenario. Because who’s this woman in her sixties, sitting in another armchair and looking at me, smiling a friendly but strangely businesslike smile?

  Malin takes a step into the room, holds out her hand to the woman in the armchair, as if they both require politeness and respect, and says: ‘Malin Fors. And you are?’

  ‘Take a seat,’ the solicitor says. ‘Welcome.’

  ‘Yes, sit down,’ her dad says, she doesn’t remotely feel like sitting down, damn it, no one tells her what to do, then the woman nods, gives her a look that seems to want to say: ‘It’ll all be fine, but you should probably sit down’, and Malin recognises that look, it’s the sort of look she adopts when she has to pass on news of a death, or give people some other really bad news.

  She sits down.

  Allows her buttocks to be abused by the hard wooden chair positioned between the two armchairs, and she looks at her dad, but he refuses to meet her gaze. His shoulders are slumped now, as if weighted down by shame and a secret that has unjustly remained a secret for far too long.

  The solicitor.

  He’s steeling himself, and Malin can see how hungover he is now, recognises it, knows how much effort he is having to make to take command, become the master of the moment and do what is expected of him.

  A tequila, she thinks.

  What I wouldn’t give for a tequila now, and she digs the nail of her forefinger hard into her thumb, and then he is there as an image inside her, the faceless boy she has been dreaming about for so long, so many times over so many years, the boy she has perhaps been looking for without understanding what it was she was looking for. Is this my real mum, sitting there in the armchair, was that why you were never there for me, Mum, why you turned away from me, and why I had to search for your love?

  No. That’s not it.

  Mum. I’ve seen pictures of you with a big stomach when you were carrying me. Pushing my pram. So who is this woman? What’s she doing here?

  ‘Who are you?’

  And Malin realises that she sounds aggressive, doesn’t want to sound aggressive – but I feel threatened now, something’s attacking me, attacking what might be my very core, and if darkness is the only thing you have, you cling onto it.

  Don’t you?

  That’s what you do.

  ‘This is Britta Ekholm from Norrgården Care Home in the village of Sjöplogen in Hälsingland.’

  The woman nods.

  Malin nods back, and then she looks at her dad, and asks: ‘What’s she doing here? Who is she?’

  Tove is sitting in the garden of Janne’s house, hoping to get a bit of a tan in time for the end of the school year.

  Mum.

  I love you, Mum, no matter what nonsense you get up to. But I think what you need most of all is someone to cuddle up to, someone who likes you for who you are.

  Sometimes I get the impression that you’re not going to manage, that you’re going to let the darkness take over, and start drinking again, that you’re just waiting for an excuse to start knocking back the tequila again.

  I’ve seen it in some of the boys at school.

  They drink the way you sometimes did.

  Like there’s no tomorrow, like it’s in their genes to destroy themselves.

  I love you, Mum, you need to know that, I’ll never give up on you.

  Even if I move away, go somewhere else.

  Janne can see Tove sitting with her head turned towards the sun. Her body slumped on the plastic chair.

  He’s standing on a rickety ladder down in the garden’s small orchard, working his way through the branches of an apple tree with a pair of secateurs. He knows he ought to employ a gardener to get the most out of his fruit trees, but who can afford to get a professional in to do the pruning?

  Tove.

  It’s as if she got the best of both of us.

  Malin’s intelligence and determination.

  My calm, but not my restlessness. Nor has she inherited my inability to cope with responsibility, the way I feel like turning and running the moment things get tricky in any relationship.

  She’s going to forge her own way through life. She’s meant for greater things than the two of us. That much is obvious. Malin and I aren’t the sort of people who have grand visions. We might be good at what we do, very good, even, but that’s as far as it goes.

  A few seriously large branches fall to the ground.

  The grass beneath them is pale green after the sunshine of recent days, but without any real life-giving warmth or moisture.

  We won’t leave any trace.

  Your mum didn’t either, Malin, but she couldn’t even manage to show her own child any love, didn’t even take that responsibility, and we’ve always managed that, even if I know you sometimes think that we didn’t, that we didn’t show our love to Tove, that we somehow managed to let her down with our own indecisiveness, our own inability to sort out our own love.

  But she’s fine.

  She’s stronger than we have ever been, or ever will be.

  Janne drops the secateurs.

  Shit, he thinks.

  Climbs down from the ladder.

  Kneels down beside his tools. Sees her, the other woman’s face, in his mind’s eye, and he daren’t even imagine how Malin is going to react if things go far enough for it to become official. Tove doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t think she even suspects anything, she’s so preoccupied with her own life, blind to certain things in that way only teenagers can be.

  The secateurs in his hand.

  Maybe she ought to become official.

  Malin.

  Maybe that’s the only way we can cut our ties to each other, the grown-up ties of love that we still carry.

  They need to be cut. After all, we’ll always be connected through Tove anyway.

  She is us, she is the best of us, she is the person we have made.

  30

  We see you, Malin, in the solicitor’s office. You’re about to find out something, you’re upset and scared and you feel like you’re about to explode, that all the feelings in the room where you’ve gathered are going to make you burst.

  The solicitor has introduced the woman.

  She’s asked him to let her explain who she is. Stay calm, Malin, she isn’t your mother.

  Calm down.

  She’s about to start talking, and even if you feel the world quake, you should know that she’s bringing an
opportunity, a present, the most beautiful present of all.

  Malin’s nostrils flare, and she feels them develop a nervous twitch, and looks at the painting – or is it a photograph? – behind the solicitor’s head.

  She recognises the picture. Can’t quite place it. It’s a photograph of people in a hammock, but they’re just silhouettes, as if they’ve abandoned their lives. Didn’t it used to hang in Skogså Castle? The castle where they found the IT millionaire murdered in the moat?

  Malin feels like sinking into the picture, but the present wants her here.

  Dad.

  He hasn’t said a word and it’s as if Mum’s spirit is floating in the room and once more turning him into the wimp he so often was in her presence.

  But now she recognises what it is. He isn’t in control here, and this drama, written and directed by another force, is to be played out to its end.

  The woman, this Britta Ekholm, is facing Malin, looking her in the eye, as she starts to talk.

  ‘As Mr Strandkvist has just said, my name’s Britta Ekholm. For more than thirty years I’ve worked at Norrgården Care Home in Hälsingland, the last fifteen years as manager. Norrgården isn’t a home for the elderly, we’re mainly a home for children whose parents can’t quite manage to look after them, children who were either born with a severe handicap, or developed one early in life. Some of them have been with us for a very long time, and Norrgården has become their home.’

  Fuck.

  She has an idea of where this is going, doesn’t want to hear any more, or does she? The woman’s voice, a gentle narrator’s voice.

  ‘For over thirty years I’ve been Stefan Malmå’s legal guardian.’

  Malmå.

  She wants to turn to her dad, but can’t, wants to yell at him and ask what the hell is this? What have you done? What did you do? But she stays silent, lets Britta Ekholm carry on.

  Malmå.

  Mum’s maiden name, and the rest of the stories told by the woman and the solicitor are like a long exhalation, as if someone’s been holding Malin’s breath for her throughout her life, and now she’s free and can breathe again.