‘It’s arson,’ he said as he pulled on Dad’s trousers.
‘How do you know?’
‘I just know... somebody who didn’t give a damn whether I was at home or not.’
The sirens were getting closer. The fire brigade were on their way.
‘I was lucky enough to wake up in time. The cat woke me. Or maybe I just dreamt she was sitting by the bed howling at full volume. The room was filled with smoke by that point. But I haven’t seen her since then. Do you think she’s still in there?’
He was in shock, I now realised. Underneath the soot his face was as white as a sheet. His eyes darted around, and he didn’t seem to be taking in that I was there.
‘I’m sure she made it out.’
‘I jumped from the window up there. Don’t ask me how, and don’t ask me how I’m still standing up.’
Some people had started to gather further down the drive. Neighbours, I guessed, from the nearby farms. They seemed completely immobile, or else the heat was so fierce they didn’t dare to come any closer.
‘But you didn’t hear anything?’ I asked. ‘No voices or anything like that?’
‘Scooters,’ he said. ‘Leaving the road. I saw them, too. When I jumped. They stood still. Their lights were on. Then they just rode off, into town.’
‘Maybe to ring for help,’ I said. ‘Can’t you hear? The fire brigade are on their way.’
We could see the fire engines over on the main road now. Soon they would turn onto the gravel track leading up to the house.
‘What the hell am I going to do now?’ He sounded desperate. ‘Where am I even going to live?’
I didn’t have a clue what to say to him. I didn’t have a clue how I was going to come up with anything that even approached reassurance.
The vehicles were getting closer. They took a detour across the field to avoid the flames. Then they turned ninety degrees and drove straight through the wooden fence up into the farmyard. I put my arm around the Professor’s waist. This was my fate, I thought, to comfort people who were even sadder than I was. Not because I had it better than others, but because it always just fell to me.
‘We need to try to get hold of your mum,’ I said. ‘And you’ve got to sit down somewhere. Can you walk if I hold you up?’
He didn’t answer. Just stared wild-eyed towards the house. The flames were reflected in his eyes. It looked horrible, like a scene from a nightmare.
‘Let’s go over to the neighbours. Do you see... they’re standing over there by the road. They’ll help us.’
But we didn’t need to go anywhere. Suddenly there were lots of people all round us. Firemen checking the outbuildings, the shed and the woodshed. Others had started fighting the blaze. Maybe I was also kind of in shock, because I could hear people speaking quite clearly even though the noise of the fire was deafening and some of them were standing over a hundred feet away.
Two paramedics came over to us, but the Professor took no notice of them.
‘How did it go with your essay, by the way?’ he said absently. ‘I’d like to read it when you’ve finished.’
‘Of course you can. And I’m glad you helped me. Thanks.’
‘It wasn’t easy. There’s not much that’s been written about mermaids, you see. Mainly fairy tales with tragic endings.’
The paramedics also seemed to realise he was in shock. Without saying a word, they wrapped him in a blanket and helped him over to the ambulance. Three days later I met Gerard at the pinball arcade in Olofsbo. The meeting had been arranged. He’d rung the doorbell that morning, and when I opened the door he was just standing there holding his crash helmet, a roll-up in the corner of his mouth, looking straight at me.
‘I want you to come to the Mill tonight,’ he said. ‘Eight o’clock. We need to have a chat.’
He peered over my shoulder into the house.
‘Is this how you live, Ironing Board? All on your own. Like Pippi Longstocking. Bloody hell, look at the state of the place!’
He knew Mum and Dad had left, I thought. He knew what was going on. He’d been keeping us under surveillance.
‘And both you and your brother are holed up at home. You haven’t been at school this week.’
He was right on that count as well. But that was information that was easier to come by. Gradually, it dawned on me that he was actually there on our front step at nine in the morning.
‘You can say whatever you’ve got to say to me now,’ I said. ‘I don’t need to meet with you somewhere else to do that.’
‘The Mill is a better place. I haven’t got time right now.’
He turned and picked up something he’d placed behind him on the step. I saw what it was even before he handed it to me: a taxidermy hare in its winter coat. From the Professor’s collection.
‘I thought you might like to have this. Or maybe your mate would want it back. It was a shame it nearly got ruined. It almost looks like it’s alive.’
I peered down to the street. Just his motorbike was there, a blue Puch Dakota with Esso stickers on the petrol tank. No sign of Ola or Peder.
‘What do you want from me?’
‘Just to talk a little about the future. But first you get this hare. As a reminder that I keep my promises.’
The phone started ringing. It had been ringing constantly the past few days, but we hadn’t bothered answering.
‘I won’t keep you,’ he said. ‘That might be important, somebody who needs to get hold of you. Come to the arcade at eight. And bring my money.’
He’s sick, I thought as I watched him walk over to his bike and kick-start it. He just wasn’t right in the head. He even waved to me as he rode off, down towards Solrosvägen, and finally the phone stopped ringing.
‘Who was it?’ asked my brother when I closed the door. He’d just got up and hadn’t even put any clothes on.
‘Nobody you know.’
‘He was riding a motorbike anyway. Is there any breakfast?’
‘Only crispbread. But I’ll go shopping today.’
I didn’t want to make him more worried than he was already. So Mum and Dad had finally cleared off, just as they’d warned me they would; they left two hundred kronor in an envelope on the hall table and disappeared out of the picture. That sort of thing just didn’t happen, but it did happen to us.
Mum hadn’t even said anything to Robert. That job had fallen to me.
‘What’s going to happen now?’ he asked when I explained the situation to him. And I answered quite honestly that I didn’t know.
That was three days ago, on the morning after the fire at the Professor’s place. We hadn’t been to school since then. There was no point. The women from social services would still turn up. Attendance and compulsory education were irrelevant. There was no chance they would let us stay here together.
The phone started ringing again when I went into the kitchen to sort out my brother.
‘Aren’t you going to answer it?’ he asked.
‘If it’s L.G. or the school welfare officer, I still don’t feel like talking. Much less so if it’s some concerned woman from the council.’
‘What if it’s Mum or Dad, though?’
‘It’s not, so you might as well not get your hopes up.’
The Mill was a combined arcade and café on the edge of Olofsbo. Kids from Glommen and Skogstorp often hung out there at weekends. In the summer there was a miniature golf course too, and an outdoor dining area. During the tourist season it was usually rammed with people, but in the autumn it was quieter.
Gerard was sitting at a table down at the far end with a cup of coffee. My school bag bounced against my hip as I walked over to him between the rows of pinball machines. I’d brought along four cartons of cigarettes. Just as he’d promised, Dad had cleared out my room before he left, but he was obviously in a hurry because he didn’t manage to take everything. I found them under the bed. Hopefully they would work as a down payment.
‘You’re on time,’ G
erard said. ‘I appreciate that. How’s your friend doing, by the way – the Hungarian?’
‘He’s at his mum’s place.’
I sat down on the chair opposite him. He took a drink from his cup, put it down again and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘He was lucky. He could just as well have ended up in hospital with smoke inhalation. Or with burns in the worst-case scenario. There’s not much left of the house.’
‘You’re gonna do time for that.’
‘For what? I have no idea what you’re talking about. I just want my money. And yet you still haven’t come up with it.’
I took the cartons of cigarettes out of my bag and put them on the table. ‘They’re worth two hundred,’ I said. ‘And they’re easy to sell. I need more time to come up with cash.’
Gerard looked at me with a concerned expression, as if he was sad about something, but I knew he wasn’t, I knew that nothing was right behind those placid brown eyes; everything was, like, short-circuited in him. Then he bent down under the table and took something out of a duffle bag.
‘You can keep those,’ he said. ‘I’ve got more than enough myself.’
He was holding a carton of his own – the same German brand that had been stacked up in my room. I felt a shudder run down my spine. What was it Tommy’s brother had said to Dad at the mink farm: You can’t have young kids working for you, Jonas.
‘I want cash, Ironing Board. I’ve already got loads of fags. By the way, where’s your old man keeping himself?’
It was Gerard who’d caused him to leave, I thought. It was Gerard he was terrified of. I wasn’t sure how, but they were connected in some way.
‘People are ending up in a bad way because of you. Even made homeless, and you don’t want anything like that to happen again, do you?’
‘You’ll get the money next week. I promise.’
That’s how it was. Even adults were scared of him. Because he had no boundaries. Because he was capable of anything. I mean, I’d seen it myself, by the kiosk last winter, in the common room when he’d nearly killed the caretaker. And then the Professor’s house that he burnt to the ground, even though he must have known he was asleep inside. And something had happened to make Dad realise as well.
‘Let’s say the day after tomorrow instead. At the latest. Eight o’clock. Remember, I warned you, Ironing Board, but you didn’t listen.’
He finished the rest of his coffee, peered out of the window down to where you could just make out the sea beyond the rows of summer cottages.
‘By the way, d’you know anything about something going missing from a mink farm?’
I made every effort to appear relaxed. Relaxed and surprised at the same time.
‘Huh?’
‘Just wondering. I know Tommy’s brothers found this thing, or rather caught it, and now it’s disappeared. So I thought you might know something about it. You and Tommy are best mates, so maybe you’ve talked about it?’
‘Like I said, you’ll get your money.’
‘It was at a mink farm near Olofsbo, a living creature. I saw it once myself, really fascinating, I wouldn’t have thought a thing like that actually existed. But somebody cut a hole in the fence and went in and took it.’
He saw the creature, I thought. Tommy’s brothers showed it to him. So he knows them, he buys fags off them, and maybe other stuff as well. He’s taken over loads of business from Dad, joined forces with other criminals, maybe with that junkie guy who was at our place? But he’s lying about the other stuff. He’s not even guessing, he’s just plucking it out of thin air to see how I react.
‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about,’ I said.
‘Okay. Just wanted to check.’
I was just as good a liar as him. Maybe even better. His expression revealed that he believed me.
As I was sitting in my room that evening, it struck me how hopeless everything was, that my circumstances basically consisted of a dwindling number of choices.
Gerard wanted cash and I had absolutely no idea where I was going to get any From a shop, I thought, if I could get to an unmanned till. Or the teachers’ lounge at school. The bags and jackets hanging outside the office would have money in them, but how much would that net, a hundred kronor at most?
But there was another possibility if nothing else worked. People were prepared to pay to have young girls take their clothes off or to touch them. In Year 7 I briefly knew a girl who got money that way. She had a hard time at home just like me, hung around in the town centre because she had no other choice, and went round with a load of dodgy people. She had lived in various foster homes in the area but was actually from an entirely different part of the country. All you have to do is stand around long enough outside the Klitterbadet pool, she’d told me once, or in the town square in the evenings.
Sooner or later some bloke would always come up and make a sleazy proposal. And then she’d accompany him into the Kronan multi-storey car park or the public toilets by the Domus department store.
She disappeared from town soon after that, and I couldn’t even remember her name. But I did remember being frightened by the idea. But desperate times call for desperate measures. If you’re really up against it, everything has its price.
The phone rang again. It was past ten o’clock so it couldn’t be from school or social services. Maybe it was the Professor who needed to talk about what had happened. Or Mum calling from a phone box, wanting to explain what she’d done. Come up with an excuse that didn’t ring true, so she wouldn’t be plagued by a guilty conscience.
I waited for the phone to stop ringing before going into my brother’s room. He’d fallen asleep with the light on. I tucked him in and switched off the light. Then I went downstairs and got the torch out of the cleaning cupboard.
I could hardly see my hand in front of my face as I cycled down towards the sea. A new low-pressure system had moved in. If there were any stars up in the sky, I couldn’t see them. I pulled up the hood on my raincoat. It was bucketing down, and the rain was falling diagonally in the wind.
I left my bike behind a bus shelter down by the coastal road and took a shortcut across a field until I came to the path that led to the abandoned cottage. I couldn’t see the house, and could just make out a structure between the fields. The rain ran down my hood in little streams, meandering before the edge, and then dripped onto my eyebrows and cheeks.
It felt as if the world was getting darker the further away I got from the main road. At one point I trod awkwardly in a rut and nearly sprained my ankle. I didn’t dare turn on the torch yet; it would be visible from far away.
I passed the north face of the house. It looked creepy standing there abandoned with broken windows and a collapsed roof. Other eras brushed against me as I went by, past times that had nothing to do with me. I forced myself to look the other way, into the darkness, towards the root cellar on the other side of the yard.
I didn’t turn on the torch until I was shielded by the trees. As I pushed the branches away from the door I could hear the creature inside. He was awake. And he knew that it was me who had come.
I felt sort of dizzy when I opened the door. He was luminescent in the dark. It was like sea-fire, I thought, only much brighter. His scales were phosphorescent, and so were his eyes. The whole pool was illuminated; the bluish-green light shone on the walls, ceiling and the water around him. Maybe that’s how he could see so far down there in the ocean depths: his body functioned like a sort of lamp.
He remained still a few inches below the surface of the water and looked at me. I was welcome there, he said, he’d been waiting for me. Where’d I been all this time? And I told him that some things had been going on that prevented me from coming.
I sat down on the bottom step. His smell hit me; of sea and seaweed, and other things I couldn’t describe. I just sat there thinking about what had gone on over the last few days, sort of got it all out, went over everything that had happened whi
le the creature asked questions, questions that went beyond themselves, or were hidden in themselves, were both questions and answers, as if they were inextricably linked like pearls inside oysters.
At one point he reached his hand out to me, brought it out of the water and put it in mine. I felt the claws tentatively close around my palm, how the webbing between his fingers clung to my skin. His hand was warm, much warmer than mine. Then he closed his gills, floated up to the surface, breached it with his face, opened his mouth... the mouth that was both human and a sea creature’s... and drew in air through his throat before slowly sinking back into the water.
Strangely, I didn’t feel cold. The water had been warmed by his body and served as a heater. I noticed that I was getting warm, so I undid my raincoat. The sound of the zip made me aware of the silence outside. It had stopped raining. There were footsteps coming across the yard, shoes or boots squelching through the mud.
The creature looked calm: if he could hear anything, he was definitely not afraid.
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘I’ll come back.’
I went up the steps. Squatting down, I replaced the door over the opening. Darkness again. The wind had died down. But the creature was still talking to me: Don’t be afraid, he said, it’s not anyone who’s going to harm us, you’re safe, everything will be all right...
Tommy was standing six feet away from me with his back to the farmhouse.
Is that you, Nella?’
‘Who else would it be?’
‘I don’t know. You can barely see your hand in front of your face.’
He put something down on the ground.
‘Fish,’ he said. ‘A whole crate, straight off the boat. He must be hungry.’
His teeth glinted in the dark when he smiled.
‘I’ve been worried about you. You haven’t been in school all week. And nobody answers your phone.’
‘A load of stuff has happened. How did you know I was here?’
‘I went round to your house. Just now. I had to check if everything was okay. Nobody opened the door when I knocked, but you’d forgotten to lock the door so I went in. Robert was in bed asleep. Nobody else was there, and I could only think of one place where you might be.’
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