‘Okay, Ironing Board. I’m gonna do something really fucking nasty to your brother now so you understand that this is serious.’
I realised the rules of the game had been changed again as Peder started to pull him over towards the shed.
‘Down on your knees! ’ he roared. ‘Come on now, you fucking spacker! ’
Robert sank down into the mud. He looked like a condemned prisoner there, with his hands bound behind him and his face covered by the hat. He was directly underneath the opening to the old hay loft. A beam that was part of a lifting device extended several metres above his head.
My voice sounded strange and shrill when I turned to face Gerard.
‘You wanted me to show you where he is... the creature. That’s what we agreed.’
‘I don’t remember that.’
‘You were going to let him go in exchange – that’s what we said.’
‘Unfortunately there’s nothing I can do now. It’s in Peder’s hands.’
The water was still dripping from the roof of the cottage in a steady rhythm like a clock. My brother was turning his head in every direction, as if trying to identify the location of the sound. Peder stood behind him with one foot on his shoulder. He was holding the rope, but suddenly seemed unsure what to do.
It was only then I realised what they were going to use the chair for.
When Ola went to fetch it, placed it underneath the beam and looked up to assess its position.
‘You can tie him to the hook there,’ he said. ‘The one that’s sticking out.’
‘I need to cut the rope if it’s gonna work. Otherwise he’ll hit the ground.’
‘The rope will give way anyway after a while. It’s gonna burn like hell.’
My brother was whimpering and panting at the same time. His whole body was shaking.
‘Are you joking?’ I tried to sound as calm as possible. ‘Peder, stop it now!’
‘Shut it, Ironing Board! You were the one who blabbed about the cat... and that was where it all started. You’ve got to pay the price for that.’
‘You know it wasn’t me. It was you. It was your sister’s cat.’ I turned to Gerard: ‘Why aren’t you telling the truth? That you figured it out a long time ago.’
But Gerard just nodded over to him, started him up with a single glance, got him to fasten the loop around the hook and pull on it.
It was like I was suffering from paralysis. This stuff that was happening wasn’t really happening. The petrol can Peder got from the shed... they must have brought it with them and hidden it there... the total insanity of seeing him empty it over my brother, several litres on his head, on the cap, as if it were water, as if he really just wanted to wash him clean of all the dirt.
Over in the root cellar the creature had woken up. I could hear him. And he could hear me. Somehow he knew what was happening; he understood everything. So he tried to calm me down, get me to focus my concentration. That was the only way, he said: I had to think clearly; they hadn’t decided yet, and I had the power to change the course of events.
I took a step closer to my brother, but Ola held me back.
‘I don’t know what’s left to negotiate,’ Gerard said. ‘Sooner or later you reach a point where there’s no use talking any more – when you’ve got to do something. And that’s where we are now. Unfortunately.’
‘Get up,’ Peder said as he poured petrol out to make a fuse between my brother and the shed. ‘And now lift your foot. Get up, I said. This is a chair, understand, and when it gets knocked over it’s goodbye for you.’
The petrol was making him cough and gag. He was drenched in it; there were fumes rising rom him. He got up. His legs were shaking. Peder took his right foot, placed it on the chair and sort of lifted him up. The chair legs sank down into the mud.
Then I heard the creature again. It was too late, he said, we wouldn’t be able to do anything now, he realised; he understood where these actions were leading.
I could hear him more clearly than ever before. As if he was vibrating within me, like he was making my whole body shake with that voice that was not a voice, which did not consist of sound or words.
And the others could hear him as well. I only realised then... that he had taken them into his range, although I didn’t understand why.
Gerard stood stock-still.
‘What is that?’ he asked, turning to Peder.
‘Dunno.’
‘Can’t you hear it? What the hell is it?’
But the voice was not coming from outside; it was coming from themselves, from within their bodies, as if they had hollow spaces in there, large chambers that suddenly started to resonate. He was speaking to them. And he was letting me listen in on everything, letting me step into Gerard’s consciousness so I could hear through him.
Come! he said. I want to show you something. I want to challenge you, little person... come to me... what have you got to lose?
But without words, just as pure feelings, something far more easily comprehensible and clearer than language, and impossible to resist.
‘What is that?’ asked Gerard again. ‘What the hell is going on?’
Peder and Ola heard it as well. He was luring them to him. They could not defend themselves. They didn’t stand a chance, and as if following a command, they started walking towards the root cellar.
That’s how I interpreted it, because he let me understand everything. How he was basically leading them away from the yard, all three of them, away from my brother who was standing there on the rickety chair with a noose round his neck, drenched in petrol; how he was luring them, calling to them, alternately screaming and whispering inside them with his inaudible voice, making them forget about Robert and me and go towards the place where he was.
They walked slowly over towards the root cellar. Peder first, as if he still wanted to prove his loyalty to the boss. The door was open. He must have worked it loose somehow, maybe kicked it out with his tail fin.
Ten metres from the opening, they stopped. Peder put down the petrol can. Gerard took something out of his jacket, a metal object of some kind.
‘Who’s going first?’
The others looked down at the ground.
‘Is it going to be me as usual, then?’
He looked ruefully at them as the sound of the water got louder and louder inside, as if heavy waves were striking a pier. And even though I was standing on the other side of the yard, I could see it splashing, how water was sort of being cast out from the opening, as if somebody was in there with a bucket or bailer. I heard him again. He told me to hurry, to get out of there as fast as I could.
My brother was still on the rickety chair in front of me. He hadn’t moved since Peder secured the rope on the beam. And I hadn’t moved either. Time had put us onto a side track, and in a parallel world Gerard and the others were still going closer to the root cellar. Go, I heard the creature saying. Hurry!
My paralysis vanished. I was up with my brother in an instant, removing the noose from round his neck and helping him down to the ground.
‘Come on, Robert!’
He didn’t seem to understand anything. Like he wasn’t there, just staring uncomprehendingly into space.
‘We’ve got to get out of here. Here, hold onto me!’
I took him by the hand and ran like I’d never run before in my life, away from the abandoned cottage, away from what I saw out of the corner of my eye or maybe with an eye that had suddenly sprung up in the back of my head. As if I was seeing events through the creature’s eyes, I thought, through his consciousness, as if he was letting me peek into himself and witness what was happening. How the petrol they’d poured over him suddenly caught fire, how the root cellar was shaking, how he got hold of Gerard even though he was on fire, knocked the slaughterman’s bolt gun out of his hand and pulled him in through the opening. How earth and stones started to come crashing down when he beat his tail fin against the roof and walls: the mound that collapsed under its
own weight, cubic metres of rock and earth over flames and water, as if we’d ended up in a mudslide or a minor earthquake. And Gerard’s terrified screams went silent as if someone had pulled the plug, while my brother and I sprinted down towards the sea.
BORÅS,
MAY 1984
Five months later I got a letter from Robert, the first sign of life since we’d been split up just before Christmas. He ended up with a family down in Skåne. The couple he was placed with were teachers and had two children of their own. They were nice to him, he wrote, but in a slightly chilly way It was not the first time they’d fostered a child. Before Robert they’d had a girl from northern Sweden, and before that a disabled guy whose parents needed some respite. To me, they sounded like pros, adults who take in foster kids for the money.
My brother wrote that they had a big house and two cars; maybe it was a matter of big loans that their salaries didn’t cover, so they took in problem children in order to make ends meet. At any rate, I could tell that not a lot had happened with his schoolwork. His handwriting was more spidery than ever, and his letter was full of spelling mistakes. For example, he spelled my nickname Nela instead of Nella.
His letter was six pages long, and it took me at least an hour to decipher it. He wrote like Dad: under great resistance, as if he had to struggle with every single character.
He was doing well in spite of everything, he assured me. It was the dad in that family who had taken him under his wing. He was keen on shooting air rifles, and in his first week my brother got to go along to a shooting range. Even with his glasses, he proved to be good at it, and now he’d begun to train with a club. His foster brother Erik was also keen, so they spent quite a bit of free time together. It felt weird to read the expression ‘foster brother’, as if he were being pulled even further away from me by those words.
Erik was the same age as Robert. He was spoilt rotten and had loads of nice brand-name clothes, which Robert got as hand-me-downs because he was smaller. There was a foster sister as well, Elinor, who was in Year Eight and liked horses. At first she had barely spoken to him. Perhaps she thought he’d soon get swapped for someone else and didn’t really think it was worth the effort to get to know him, but things had got better over time.
The first month he’d spent most of his time pining for me. It had been hard, especially at Christmas, even though a support person from the children’s mental health service had been there. Our own Christmases in Skogstorp would usually descend into chaos, and yet it felt much worse to him to be sitting there in the midst of someone else’s happiness and watch strangers hand out presents to each other. He had been given a model building set and a hand-me-down Lacoste shirt from Erik.
Gradually he had grown accustomed to his new environment. It got easier week by week, both at school and with the family. He had his own room and put up the old Michael Jackson posters he’d got off me. His room was much bigger than the one in Skogstorp; it was located away from the other bedrooms and even had its own en-suite.
The mum in the family was the one he had the hardest time with. She wasn’t unkind to him, more like uninterested. And she always took her own children’s side. Especially the first time there had been some conflict. His foster siblings thought it was unfair he got the room with the en-suite, and there were some rows about the shower, who got to shower first and that kind of thing, and sometimes about what there was to put on their bread at breakfast. His sister Elinor thought he ate too much. The mother would usually side with her. But it didn’t matter, he wrote, he could understand it; after all, he would always take my side against everyone else on earth, no matter what it was about.
As I stood there by the window in my room in a terraced house on the outskirts of Borås and read his letter, I couldn’t believe five months had passed. It felt like a lifetime. And I had no idea when I’d get to see him again, whether it would take months or years.
At school he’d been put into a remedial class, he wrote, and some of the pupils had violent tendencies. He was frightened of several of them. A big lad who went by the name of Hosepipe was particularly dangerous. He could fly into a rage at any moment, and my brother had borne the brunt on several occasions. The other pupils didn’t pay much attention to him. But they might be nastier to him than he realised, because he couldn’t understand everything they said. The Skåne dialect, he wrote, was like a whole different language.
One bit of good news was that he’d got new glasses, with thinner lenses. His foster parents bought them for him in Denmark. Everything was cheaper in Denmark – even glasses, he explained. They usually went to Helsingør once a month to go shopping, and sometimes he got to go along. So now at least he’d been abroad, and it wasn’t such a big deal that he’d missed out on the class trip in Year Six.
I could see him before me as I read his letter, among those strangers, certainly a little taller now as he was growing, in hand-me-down brand-name clothes from his foster brother and a pair of stylish glasses from Denmark. I knew how much that meant to him, and yet it felt painful, as if being split up was the price we’d had to pay.
He’d got my address a week before when Mum went to visit. It was during the Easter break, and she only stayed for an afternoon before she got the train back to Linköping. It was like she was ashamed, he wrote. Not because she smelled of alcohol, because she did, but because she was such a failure she couldn’t look after her own children. Robert asked after me, where I was living and how I was doing, and when we would see each other again. She gave a vague answer, there was a load of secrecy around everything, a custody case that was still under way, but finally – in secret – she gave him my address. I found it completely incomprehensible, not only that they split us up, but that they were also keeping our locations secret from one another.
I had already known Mum was in Linköping. She’d phoned a few times, but didn’t say what she was doing there or whether she was in contact with Dad. My new family didn’t seem to know either, or else they weren’t allowed to say.
The last time I’d heard from her she said she would try to regain custody of us, but it might take a while. Once you’d signed a document giving away your children, it could take several years of investigations before you got them back.
I folded up the letter and looked out at the garden patch. Robert hadn’t mentioned any of the events at the abandoned cottage or with the merman, which I finally told him about, but maybe it was too painful for him to remember? We’d agreed not to tell anyone what Gerard and the others had done to him that day or how everything turned out. Not because we thought justice had been done, but to avoid a load of new investigations and being treated like victims in need of help. Of course, it hadn’t helped: they still split us up.
Spring was approaching outdoors. Tulip stems were poking up through the flowerbeds. Gunnar was going round with a strimmer to tidy up the lawn. Unlike my little brother, I would never bring myself to use the term ‘foster dad’ about him. Nor was it my ‘foster mum’ who stood in the living room sorting laundry with an easy-listening radio station on. That was Annie, Gunnar’s wife and the mother of Lars-Inge who was three years older than me and lived in a room in the basement.
I went to Lars-Inge’s old school in the centre of town. I even had his old form teacher, a science teacher called Sonja. The pupils in the class came from the same neighbourhood of detached houses where we lived, and many of the boys knew Gunnar because he’d been their football coach in primary school. So that lent me a certain social status. Nobody was nasty to me, but they all stuck with their own kind, especially the girls in their usual cliques.
Within the family, Gunnar was the one I liked best. He wasn’t talkative, worked at a factory in town and dedicated his free time to his car, a Mercedes he’d gone over and brought back himself from Germany. Occasionally he would give me strange looks, sort of as if he wanted to ask me something but couldn’t quite figure out what. Annie was the one who decided I would live with them. She volunteere
d with the Red Cross, and suddenly one day she decided it was time to contribute to the welfare of society by taking in a girl from a problem family. Once I was there, she seemed to think it wasn’t as exciting any longer; she was polite but avoided contact with me.
Instead it was Gunnar who tried to be helpful, with school and everyday problems and what I should do with my future. The day before my brother’s letter arrived he told me they were looking for summer interns at his workplace, and if I was interested he would make sure my name was near the top of the list. I said yes. A summer job was a start, at any rate.
I lay down on the bed again, the place where I spent most of my time since I’d come to stay with this family. On the bedside table was my old school yearbook from Skogstorp, open to the page for Robert’s class. I couldn’t look at it without starting to blub. Other than an old passport photo from the booth at the Domus department store, that was the only photo I had of him. Kneeling in the front row in those incredibly ugly glasses with sellotaped arms and a plaster over one lens, surrounded by classmates who the other kids at school called idiots or retards. But still with a smile on his lips, as if he still had hope for this life in spite of everything, that things would get better sometime in the future.
Oddly enough, Ola was one of the last people I’d spoken to in Falkenberg. It was about a month after the events at the abandoned cottage, just before Robert and I were going to leave our temporary accommodation and each be sent to our new families. He was standing there waiting for someone at the Kronan shopping centre, and he said hello as I happened to walk past.
Gerard’s death had already been written about in the paper – several articles, in fact, about the tragic accident in which a young boy suffocated when a root cellar collapsed. According to Ola, he and Peder had been so terrified they initially didn’t tell anyone what had happened. For over a week people were asking about Gerard, his parents and the police, their own parents, but they didn’t say a word, not until people started to direct suspicions towards them – thinking they had something to do with his disappearance. Then they decided to talk, but they would only tell a simplified story about an accident. They told the police it was a game that had got out of hand, that Gerard decided to set fire to the root cellar, and for some reason the roof fell in on him. They were scared they would get blamed for it, and that was why they hadn’t said anything.
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