The Merman

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

‘You can’t have young kids working for you, Jonas, what do you think would happen if the police nabbed them?’

  ‘They won’t squeal. They’d just laugh at the rozzers. They know their rights.’

  ‘I’ll let you buy fifty cartons, no more. My stock’s starting to get low and I’ve got too many orders. We’ll have to go back out in the boat again soon.’

  I now saw that the guy who came in first was Jens, the one who’d been there when they brought up the trawl net outside Anholt. At a sign from Tommy’s brother, he went to fetch more cartons of cigarettes.

  It was quiet again. Dad took his wallet out of his back pocket and started counting out banknotes.

  ‘How’s your brother doing?’ he asked.

  ‘No better. That fucking sea monster broke his arm. Twisted it so the bone looked like a bit of spiral pasta on the X-ray.’

  ‘Can I have another look at him?’

  ‘You starting to fancy animals, Jonas?’

  The others laughed, but there was, like, no joy in their laughter. Or maybe that’s just how it seemed to me up there, crouching on the platform above them, nearly in shock that my dad knew something about this.

  ‘I’m just intrigued. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  Tommy’s brother took the banknotes and put them in his inside pocket.

  ‘Do you want to see him now?’ he asked. ‘I can’t guarantee he’ll be awake. He’s ill, it seems. Refuses to eat. We don’t even need to tranquillise him any more. I don’t think he’s got long to live.’

  The double doors to the chiller room were wide open. They had switched on the lights inside. The men were standing in a semicircle around him. One of them prodded him with their foot. His tail fin moved slightly. There was some laughter. Dad’s hoarse voice sort of rose above the others, like a voice in a choir. Tommy’s brother, who was grinning with chewing tobacco in between his teeth. They were talking downstairs, but it was impossible to make out what they were saying. Renewed laughter blended in among the murmurs, such that you could nearly feel their excitement.

  The fear had returned, like an old friend who didn’t want to leave me in the lurch. I wasn’t afraid for my own sake, but for the creature down there.

  The men were standing close by him. Between their bodies I could see him moving, now awake, panic-stricken. There was a strange sound, panting in fear and confusion. The bloke who had come in with Jens stepped back slightly, leaving a gap where I could see the creature’s face. It was like seeing my brother in the woods when they were feeding him grass and leaves. Or other times when they rubbed snow in his face or shoved his head in the toilet and flushed it. The creature’s eyes were wide open, he was turning his head this way and that, opening his mouth wide as if he wanted to scream or was having trouble breathing. The men were laughing louder now; somebody prodded him with their foot again, gently at first and then a bit harder. I could see Dad down there, doing that weird thing with his mouth, the way he bared his teeth in a grimace. And then the creature on the tiled floor: the merman... twice as big as the others, but now defenceless. There was a crashing sound of something breaking. It was bleeding from fresh wounds on its body, water was mixing with blood on the floor: they’d done something bad to him but I couldn’t tell what. My view was obscured all the time by bodies moving round and round in the room, like a strange dance. Then I saw Jens, who was holding a broken bottle. I realised that was the sound I’d heard: glass being shattered.

  Slowly, as if everything was happening underwater, he bent over and struck with the bottle like a fencer or a villain in a movie knife fight, and stuck the shards into the creature’s flesh. It flinched silently in pain. Tommy’s breathing quickened next to me, and then I heard a howl. But only when I felt Tommy’s hand over my mouth did I realise it had come from me – I was the one who screamed. Nobody heard anything down there; they were shouting just as loudly themselves, roaring and surging back and forth in the room as if they were a single entity. Jens had started kicking him. Like I’d seen Gerard kicking the caretaker’s head in the common room. He swung with his leg and struck the creature full in the face. The wound in his mouth split open again, and more blood flowed across the floor. Then the silent screams that we could only hear inside our heads, and maybe it was those screams that were making them kick and hit even harder, all together now; their feet and fists seeming to strike him in a rhythm.

  I couldn’t watch any longer. I covered my eyes with my hands, the way I used to in front of the TV when I was frightened of something in a movie. And now there was a different noise. The creature filled its chest with air and let out a huge cry of agony. It was unlike any sound I’d ever heard before, a sort of bellow, like from a dying bull, I thought, and toneless, like a deaf person who can’t hear their own voice. Tommy’s hand ran down my back. I must have passed out, because when I came round again the men had gone.

  Far away through the tunnel of sound I could hear them. The dog had started barking again. Vehicles started up and drove off. The doors to the chiller room stood open. The creature was moving slightly on the floor, its tail fin waving slowly back and forth but secured by the chain. Blood was flowing across the floor, diluted with water to a pink sap that vanished down the floor drain.

  A van was badly parked on the edge of the pavement when got home. Next to it was a motorbike I didn’t recognise. The living room window was open. There was music playing at full blast – it sounded like The Rolling Stones, Dad’s favourite band. I could barely remember how I’d got there or managed to pass the time after our trip to the mink farm. It was as if I’d got a puncture in my body, a tiny hole from which my strength was slowly seeping out. My thoughts kept going back to what I had seen. I couldn’t comprehend where all that hate came from, the desire to harm him. He was totally defenceless. But maybe that’s exactly what attracted them. The knowledge that there wouldn’t be any consequences. It was like he didn’t exist, a creature like him... a merman... couldn’t exist.

  I left my bike by the garage door and continued round to the back. The lights were on in my brother’s room. I picked up a bit of gravel and chucked it at the window. He came over straight away, as if he’d been waiting for a signal.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ he asked as soon as he got the window open.

  ‘Just doing some stuff. Everything okay in there?’

  ‘They’re in the living room. I’ve locked myself in here. You coming in?’

  ‘I don’t fancy meeting a load of bastards. How many of them are there?’

  ‘I dunno. Three, maybe four? Please... I don’t want to be on my own here.’

  I couldn’t refuse him when he sounded like that. As if there was no hope, no matter how hard he searched. He waved to me as I went round the corner of the house. I saw the relief in his face, how every single muscle sort of relaxed at the thought that I was home.

  Robert opened his door straight away when I knocked, and as soon as I was inside his room he locked us both in.

  ‘It’s great you’re home,’ he said. ‘Did they notice you?’

  ‘No. Has anything happened?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. They’ve just been partying downstairs.’

  ‘No fighting?’

  ‘A little drunken arguing. But then they all made up again. They were even dancing. At least it sounded like it.’

  As if it were normal, I thought. As if what was going on down there was what life was about.

  ‘Is Mum there too?’

  ‘I think so. I didn’t feel like going to find out.’

  As a Rolling Stones song faded out and the drunken blathering got louder in the background, I looked around the room, at the desk with schoolbooks and the jar of pens and the rubber, the wardrobe with a big hole in the door that Dad had kicked through one drunken night, the Michael Jackson posters from a music magazine I’d given him so he’d have something to put on his walls. Last summer he’d still had toys around in here, things I’d found or shoplifted for him. But they h
ad been put away now, and the room looked bare.

  ‘You’ve emptied this place out,’ I said.

  ‘I just tidied up a bit.’

  ‘Everything you own?’

  ‘Most of it was crap anyway. And stuff I’d outgrown. I’ll be thirteen soon.’

  I couldn’t help smiling.

  ‘Big lad... how long have you been sitting in here?’

  ‘Since they started down there this afternoon. Where’ve you been?’

  ‘With Tommy.’

  He was scratching between his fingers. His skin had cracked again. If I didn’t remind him, he would forget about his eczema. And I’d had other things to do recently. It felt like someone was twisting a knife in me when I thought like that, that I was letting him down.

  ‘Has something happened, Nella? You’re acting really strange.’ ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘And you’re hardly ever home.’

  That thin veil of terror in his eyes. Nothing could happen to me. Nothing about me could change; he couldn’t handle it.

  ‘And you never say what you’re up to.’

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about. Relax, Robert.’

  ‘So it’s nothing to do with Gerard, then? Or has something else happened?’

  Snapshots from the feed room flashed back in my mind, but I suppressed them so as not to feel nauseated.

  ‘Nah. I swear! Everything’s all right.’

  He swallowed that lie with no effort at all. Because he needed it, I thought to myself. Because he wanted it. Because if I wasn’t there, there was nothing at all. On the other side of me began the void.

  ‘Let me tell you a story,’ I said. ‘Once upon a time there was a boy called Robert. He was growing up in Skogstorp, a little place near Falkenberg, in a street that was named after a flower, just like all the other streets in Skogstorp... ’

  ‘You don’t need to. It’s enough that you’re here.’

  He squinted a bit when he smiled at me. His glasses were dirty. He was tired. Just the tension of having Dad in the house made us all exhausted.

  It took another hour or so before things quietened down downstairs. Maybe they got tired of the music, or else they started to realise there was a risk one of the neighbours might ring the police. Mick Jagger’s voice was gone. Nobody was screaming or making noise. I could hear Mum laughing and unfamiliar male voices joking about something.

  Against my will, my thoughts kept returning to the mink farm. After they drove off we left the building, climbed over the fence and headed down to the Mill, the pinball arcade in Olofsbo. We stayed there for several hours discussing what we should do. I was really shaky and nauseous; I couldn’t make my body stop trembling. We needed a plan. We just had to help him; anything else was out of the question. We had to get him out of there, to some place where he’d be safe and could regain his strength. But no matter how hard we thought, we couldn’t figure out how we could do it. Finally it started to get dark and Tommy had to cycle home.

  Everything would have been so much easier, I thought now, if I just could have ignored everything, just regard everything as a weird dream, something incredible that just happened but which had nothing to do with my life. But that’s not how things were now. He existed. The merman. And he needed us.

  I gave a start, as if I had been daydreaming. There were footsteps on the stairs, and someone pushed on the handle of my brother’s door.

  ‘Robbie, are you in there? How come you’ve got the door locked?’ It was Dad. He sounded drunk.

  ‘It was me who locked it,’ I said hurriedly while the mental images were disappearing. ‘I didn’t know who was here.’

  ‘Come out here. I want to talk to the both of you!’

  The footsteps went downstairs again. It was no use protesting.

  A minute later we were standing down in the living room. Besides Mum and Dad there were two men in the room. A tramp by the look of him, because he looked like he’d been sleeping in the same clothes for a week, and a younger bloke with a junkie’s eyes. The same guy I’d seen at the mink farm, I realised, the one who had come in through the door first with Jens.

  ‘You know why the palms of niggers’ hands are so pale?’ he asked in Dad’s direction. ‘Because they were stood on all fours when they got spray-painted. Damn, there were a lot of those jokes around for a while. I laughed my arse off when I heard ’em the first time. How come they’ve got such big wallets? Cos they get paid in bananas. And how come they’ve got such flat noses?’ He made a ‘halt’ gesture: ‘Stop. Whites only! Or such big ears?’ He pretended to pick something out of his ear: ‘So you got in there after all, you little rascal!’

  Mum was dancing on her own over by the far wall.

  She had her eyes shut and was swaying slowly in time with the music. I saw one other person bending over the record player in the corner: Leif.

  ‘And the jokes about the Jews. D’you remember all the ones about the Jews? How do you fit a thousand Jews into a VW? Two in the back seat, two in the front seat, and the rest in the ashtray. That’s fucking brilliant!’

  He was definitely on something, you could see it in his pupils and his jaw, which was tense and sort of gurned when he talked.

  Dad suddenly turned towards Robert and me.

  Ah, there you are! Relax, you look like you’re scared shitless.’

  He was wearing the same shirt he had on at the mink farm. There was a blood spot on the front pocket. I wondered what was wrong with them. What was wrong with my dad?

  ‘I need to use your room, Nella.’

  I just nodded.

  ‘I need to store some things in there. For a few weeks maybe.’

  The cigarettes, I thought. At least fifty cartons he didn’t dare leave lying around. And probably other things as well that had to stay hidden for a while.

  ‘So go and clear out what you need from your room and move in with Robbie.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Yes, tonight. Robbie, you can help her.’

  The junkie bloke was looking at me in a way I didn’t like. He was undressing me with his eyes and doing things to me in his thoughts. I took my brother by the hand and went towards the door.

  ‘It’s not so bad, Nella,’ Mum slurred. ‘Just for a coupla weeks... then you can move back in again. Put your mattress next to Robert’s bed. You’ll be cosy in there. You can help him with his homework. And Robert, Dad’s got a present for you.’

  I would have preferred to get out of there. But my brother stopped in his tracks, smiling reflexively as Dad took a glasses case out of his trouser pocket, opened it and ceremoniously held out a new pair of glasses.

  ‘You know I don’t like those glasses you go round in,’ he said.

  ‘But these are reading glasses... ’

  ‘So? You can’t go round in a taped-up pair. Try ’em on!’

  Robert was right. It was a pair of reading glasses, similar to the ones our English teacher had, but with thicker lenses. Dad removed Robert’s old glasses and put the new pair on him.

  ‘I can’t see anything,’ he said. ‘Honest, Dad, I can’t see anything.’ ‘No whingeing now. I know the bloke I bought them off. He said they would work. I had your prescription with me.’

  ‘Close up yeah, but not far away, things are blurry. I’m going to feel dizzy.’

  ‘You’ll get used to them after a while. Relax now, Robbie.’

  ‘Please, give me my old ones. I can’t see with these.’

  Dad gave him a chilly look. Then he took the old glasses and bent them in the middle until the frame snapped.

  ‘You’re going to wear those if I have to glue them to your face. We should’ve got rid of this old crap a long time ago. And I don’t understand why your mum didn’t do it already!’

  He turned towards Mum, but she took no notice as she danced with her back against the wall, while the junkie was undressing her, one item of clothing at a time, with that empty, spaced-out expression.

  ‘What the hell did you ge
t up to while I was inside? Nothing but boozing... was that the only thing you did?’

  But he wouldn’t have been our dad if he weren’t capable of turning on a sixpence.

  ‘Come on, kids!’ he said cheerfully. ‘We’re not going to carry on arguing in this family. I’m heading out tomorrow and I’ll be away for a while. But tonight we’re having a party. Now go upstairs and clear out Nella’s room.’

  We didn’t see hide nor hair of Dad for a week. According to Mum, he was in Gothenburg. He, Leif and the junkie bloke had some business up there, she claimed, and she didn’t know when they’d be back.

  I had cleared out my room and moved all the stuff I needed into Robert’s. Maybe it was just for a short time, or maybe I’d have to stay there all winter? Dad had demanded all the keys from me, put what he wanted to store into my room and locked the door. Mum gave us no support as usual. She was on Dad’s side no matter what he did. Out of fear, I figured, or actually out of some messed-up sort of love for him.

  But Robert wasn’t doing very well. The whole situation with a load of criminals coming and going from the house was eating away at him. And then the new glasses. He really couldn’t see anything with them. On Monday morning he declared that he was not going to school, he couldn’t do it, and he was going to stay at home for the rest of the term. He still wouldn’t be able to see properly, he said, couldn’t keep up in lessons, and he’d rather choose to be blind than go round feeling dizzy. What I said didn’t do anything to help. That his form teacher would go spare if he bunked off again. Or that the school might call in social services, with everything that entailed. Nothing had any effect on his determination. And after a while I didn’t feel like nagging.

  Everything that had happened recently had sapped my strength. I wanted to conserve what little energy I had left. Later, I thought, as soon as I’d finished helping the creature, I’d focus on Robert. Just a little while longer, then I’d be back to protect him. Tommy and I spent the week trying to figure out what to do. We had some ideas, but the problem was we couldn’t implement them. Work at the mink farm had started up again, the place was full of people getting ready for the next round of skinning, and at night the guard dog ran loose on the site. Tommy had gone round on a couple of evenings, and every time there were vehicles parked in the yard.