The Christmas Lights

by Karen Swan

  To her right, the fjord angled away at a ninety-degree turn and three dramatic waterfalls cascaded over the slopes into the water below. She had expected they might eddy the water, given the size of them, but the fjord was so big and deep that there was not so much as a wrinkle on its surface, a small demonstration of its impermeability and might, its permanence.

  And that was what had stunned her – the very scale of this place. In spite of the number of images she had seen before coming here, she still hadn’t been prepared for it. They always researched their next location in great detail, wanting to know exactly what they would be giving their followers and whether or not they could justify the trip: two or three days of pictures wouldn’t cut it. They weren’t tourists, they were travellers. Nomads. Wherever they went, they went to live there, rarely staying anywhere for less than a month, and that meant getting down like a local. But the downside of all that research was that sometimes – increasingly often, in truth – she would have seen so much of a place beforehand that by the time they got there, she felt she’d already been and gone. It was getting harder to find the thrill of the new, the unknown, the exotic.

  But this place had done it. It was the land of giants, the perfect conflation of air, land and sea. It felt like the crucible of the planet, where the world had begun and where time stopped – for what was the past or the future in a place like this? Nothing had changed here in millennia and nothing would.

  It had knocked all three of them into silence – a first, surely – as they had crested the Eagle Pass road and caught their first glimpse of the fjord. The road – narrow, icy and punctuated by eleven hairpin bends – was the only way down to the village at this time of year. It was absolutely terrifying with Lenny at the wheel – although they all knew Zac would have been far, far worse, looking for his next adrenaline kick – but the ferry from the nearby village of Hellesylt stopped running in the autumn and the fleets of giant cruise boats that choked the fjord nine months of the year didn’t visit during the winter due to the sea ice. And that was precisely the reason why she and Zac had chosen to come now; they wanted to be here when it was in its ‘natural’ state: no tourists, no ferries. They wanted it bleak, remote, imperious, untouched.

  ‘Yeah, that’s nailed it,’ Zac said, pointing out one image in particular. ‘Right, let’s go, I’m freezing my balls off,’ he said, heading back for the small silver hire car they had parked out of shot in a layby.

  Blowing on their hands, they got back in, the heating on max, and continued on down. The icy road conditions improved as they drew closer to the water and within five minutes they were driving into the village. They hadn’t passed another car for almost an hour through the valleys and it was no different here.

  ‘Where the hell is everyone?’ Lenny asked as they passed a small parking area outside the tourist centre, with no cars in it.

  Close up, Bo could see that the open grassy area she had seen from the distance was in fact an empty caravan park and she suppressed a shiver, only too able to imagine how it must look in the summer – hundreds of white plastic blocks parked up on the edge of one of the most beautiful sites in the world. It was the invariable irony of tourism, all those people wanting to appreciate its beauty, never thinking that they themselves were becoming the very blight that ruined it.

  ‘I can’t wait to see the place we’re staying,’ she sighed, her chin cupped in her hand as she gazed out of the window. ‘It looked so incredible in the pictures. Where is it exactly?’ she asked as Lenny followed the road through the village, their little car climbing again in neat chicanes, the fjord at their backs now. She saw the steepled church and narrow, four-storey houses with illuminated stars and candles at the windows; a large river tumbling over rocks through the very centre of the town, a walkway and viewing platform built alongside it, no doubt as a safety precaution to stop the millions of tourists who visited from scrambling over them.

  ‘We need to ask for a guy called Anders Jemtegard,’ Lenny said, peering over the steering wheel as they passed by an enormous hotel on their left, a visitors’ centre to their right. Ahead of them, the road appeared to travel straight on through the mountain pass, leaving the village behind.

  ‘That’s it?’ Bo asked. ‘No address?’

  Taking her comment as a criticism, Lenny swore under his breath as he pulled into the visitors’ centre car park and turned round again. ‘The woman I booked it through said to ask for Anders Jemtegard when we got here. I assumed that would be sufficient if those were her instructions.’

  Bo sat back in her seat, not wanting to start an argument – but were they supposed to go around the town just asking random strangers for the whereabouts of this man? That was assuming they could actually find any strangers in the first place. Beside her, Zac was on his phone, applying filters to the image he had decided upon. Could he get reception here, she wondered? Surely nothing but Valkyries could get past those mountains.

  They drove back down into the town again and parked in the small turn-off they had passed on the way in.

  ‘Well, there’s the tourist centre – shall we ask them?’ Bo said, zipping up her jacket and bracing herself to step outside again. It would have been hard enough dealing with these below-zero temperatures if they’d come from Europe, much less the South Pacific.

  ‘We could, if it was open,’ Lenny said, pointing to the dark building and the ‘closed’ sign on the door.

  ‘Dammit,’ she sighed. ‘Well, can we get a coffee at least?’ she asked as they clambered out, her gaze falling to the neighbouring building, a pretty single-storey cream-weatherboarded cafe with a scalloped tile roof and a Norwegian flag by the door. ‘We haven’t stopped since breakfast and we’ve been on the road for hours now.’

  ‘Fine. I’ll ask after this Anders guy and you can get the drinks,’ Lenny said, pulling up the hood of his jacket and trudging off, bleeping the locks as he went. ‘Make mine a double-shot caramel. I need the sugar hit.’

  ‘If we can, bro,’ Zac shrugged, one hand patting Bo’s backside as they walked towards the cafe. ‘We might just be lucky to get milk with it.’

  Bo walked in and breathed a sigh of relief at what she found there: black log walls, a lofty white ceiling and trendy rattan lights. Civilization! This place catered to the international tourist crowd after all; they could be sure of a decent coffee here.

  They met up with Lenny again a few minutes later, the steaming cups in their hands better than any gloves. The tip of his nose was glowing red and his eyes were watering from the cold. ‘Okay, so the guy at the bakery there’ – Lenny pointed to another charming log building, this one black, across the road; it had gables in the pitched roof and wall-to-wall windows. ‘He says Anders’ place is the white house down there on the right, past the Ole cafe.’

  ‘Let’s go then. I want to settle in. I’m done with all this wandering about,’ Bo said, zipping her yellow jacket all the way up to her chin so that the fur trim of the hood encircled her face completely. What she wouldn’t give right now for a massage at the hotel and another night’s sleep on their pillowy beds. The jetlag was kicking in and it was evil.

  With their hoods up and hands clasped around their steaming drinks, they walked down the narrow footpath that led into the village, down and away from the road. A run of tiny, weather-beaten huts bordered the fjord on their right-hand side; some of them were in better condition than others, a couple of them looked almost derelict.

  ‘Reckon they must have been boathouses originally?’ Zac mused as they passed. They were all closed for the season and seemed to cater specifically to the tourist trade now, selling jewellery, Norwegian jumpers and locally made chocolate, offering bike hire and incongruously – now, at least – an ice-cream parlour.

  Cafe Ole was impossible to miss a little further down the lane. It was a large creamy weatherboarded building on their left with an amusing sign written in English in the window: ‘The more you weigh, the harder you are to kidnap. Stay safe –
eat cake.’

  Bo laughed. ‘Well I like them! I hope they’re not going to be closed all winter too.’

  ‘Me too. Jeez, and we thought Samoa was quiet,’ Zac murmured as they carried on walking in the silence, no sign of another human being around.

  Fifty metres further down, just as a vast and ugly 1960s hotel hoved into view and made Bo shudder again, they came upon a small white weatherboarded house on the corner. Its gable end faced onto the lane, making it at first glance appear smaller than it actually was, but as they walked around, they could see it stretched back towards the water. On its left-hand side – thankfully all but blocking the view between it and the hotel – there was an enormous boulder, almost as high as the two-storey house.

  ‘Well, this must be the place,’ Zac said, pushing the gate open with a squeak and walking down the path. The ‘front’ door was situated halfway down, a mailbox to the side of it, and Bo saw that the pretty windowbox was filled with tools, rather than geraniums. Zac rang the bell, both Bo and Lenny hanging back a little so as not to crowd the step. There was a light on in the far room that faced onto the fjord but no one came.

  Zac rang again. ‘Come on, mate,’ he muttered, blowing on his fingers.

  Again nothing.

  Zac turned back to Lenny in annoyance. ‘What exactly did the guy in the bakery say again?’

  ‘That he lives in the white house beside the rock, just past the cafe. He never said anything about whether or not he was in.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything about him being away, did he?’ Bo asked quickly.

  Lenny shook his head.

  ‘Well he’s clearly not here now,’ Zac muttered, looking irritated. He was never very good at being in limbo; whenever they relocated, he liked to transfer quickly and seamlessly to their next chapter. And although last night’s hotel had been outstanding – notwithstanding the mobbing in the drawing room – they’d spent over three hours in the car this morning. They hadn’t left until ten, which was when it had been light enough to set off; there had been no point leaving earlier as then they couldn’t have taken shots along the way, but the receptionist at the hotel had told them it would start getting dark again from two and Bo could already feel the light beginning to dim – and tempers beginning to fray.

  ‘Shall we go back to the cafe and wait?’ she suggested, taking his hand in hers to keep him calm. ‘I liked it in there. They do pizza too. I could eat. I’m pretty hungry.’

  ‘You’re alw—’ Zac began, just as the door opened suddenly. He turned back, pulling his hand away, to find a tall, rangy man filling the doorway. His dirty-blonde hair was long and shaggy, golden stubble on his cheeks and jaw, but he had eyes of such piercing blue intensity, Bo felt her lungs deflate a little. Give that man a horned helmet and a longboat, she thought to herself, flinching under his glacial gaze as their eyes met momentarily.

  ‘. . . Ja?’ the man asked warily, eyeing the three of them with a hostile look. Bo wondered how many people – tourists – he had to endure walking right past his windows, taking photographs, possibly even knocking at his door too. From his expression, she thought it must be too many.

  ‘Hi, I’m Zac Austen. You must be Anders Jemtegard?’

  Another short silence, suspicious stare. ‘Yes,’ he replied in English.

  Zac’s smile brightened with relief, his teeth looking comically white against his nut-brown skin. ‘Great! We’re here to pick up the keys for the farm.’

  There was a longer silence this time, and Bo wondered how good the man’s English was. Perhaps he was having difficulty understanding what her fiancé was saying? ‘The farm?’

  Zac grinned. ‘Ah, right, there’s a challenge. Okay, I think it’s pronounced . . . Sy-oil-ip-ay?’ Anders continued staring at him, no hint of a smile on his face as Zac gave a hapless shrug. ‘Apologies. My Norwegian is non-existent.’

  ‘Sjøløipet,’ he said finally, pronouncing it Sholopet, ‘is my grandmother’s farm.’

  ‘Your grandmother?’ Lenny asked, stepping forward now. ‘Now is her name Signy? ‘Cause she’s the person I’ve been dealing with. We’ve arranged a month let.’

  ‘A month . . . ?’ Anders’ suspicious frown morphed into an outright scowl. ‘Wait there.’ And he slammed the door in their faces.

  ‘Jeez, good to meet you too, dude,’ Zac muttered, stepping back off the step and leaning against the boulder. ‘Would it kill the guy to smile?’

  Bo just shrugged, as though apologizing for this stranger’s lack of manners. ‘That’s not good. He didn’t look like he knew anything about it,’ she said quizzically to Lenny.

  It was Lenny’s turn to shrug. ‘What can I tell you? The woman’s the one I had dealings with. How they communicate in their family is up to them.’

  ‘But you booked through Airbnb, right?’

  ‘Yep. Exclusive use.’

  ‘I wonder why she didn’t arrange to give us the keys herself then, if it was going to be such a hassle for him? Or she could have at least left them in a key box like most other places.’

  Lenny shrugged and sighed. ‘People.’ This was his catchphrase, the sign-off he used whenever he couldn’t explain other people’s behaviour.

  They looked back at the firmly closed door and waited. Minutes passed. Then more minutes.

  ‘Fuck’s sake,’ Zac said, beginning to get irritated again. ‘Is he even coming back or just going to leave us hanging here to freeze to death?’

  ‘Zac, just—’

  But Zac had already raised his arm to knock on the door again, just as it opened once more. Anders had changed and was wearing orange and navy waterproof trousers, a matching jacket and short rubber boots.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said with a jerk of his head, walking further down the side path towards the water.

  Zac and Bo both looked back at Lenny in confusion. Should they?

  ‘Well I don’t know!’ he protested.

  With a roll of his eyes, Zac followed the terse Norwegian, Bo and Lenny skittering after them. They turned the corner, to find a small terraced area at the back fenced off from the fjord by white picketing, a small matching white-weatherboarded boathouse to the left side. Slab steps led down from the terrace to a makeshift stone jetty, which Anders was walking down, towards a moored orange rib. The exposed shore was stony, deep beds of kelp bearding the water’s edge.

  ‘Really?’ Bo asked as she watched him hop aboard. They were going on the water, right now? It had looked cold enough from the vantage point on the Eagle Pass road, but up close, it looked even worse: viscous and frigid as the ice began to creep from the land out to the sea.

  ‘Let’s just get there. We can ask questions later,’ Zac said, opening the gate and following down the slipway too.

  Anders was waiting for them, impatience radiating from him, even though he wasn’t twitching so much as a fibre and Bo took his hand gratefully as he wordlessly helped her step onto the boat.

  ‘Is it far?’ she asked him, her voice sounding muffled in the enormous furry hood which all but obscured her face, as Lenny jumped in last, making them rock.

  ‘Not in this,’ Anders replied, casting her only the most cursory glance as he threw out the mooring rope and got the engine going.

  They sat on the hard plastic seats – hand-holds moulded into the tops of the chairs – and Zac squeezed her knee as they began to pull away from the little house, his mood improving already now that they were on their way again.

  She looked around them as they moved into deeper water. By the water’s edge, it was so clear she could see straight to the bottom – a glass bottle, a tyre that had been sunk as a buoy anchor, some bright orange starfish . . . But rapidly the colour of the water intensified, the pale, almost sandy tint of turquoise becoming teal and then that rich indigo she’d seen from the heights. From the water side, it was clear that the huts along the lane they’d just walked down were indeed old boathouses, enormous boulders laid out on the sloping shore in guiding rows below each one, with
slim birch branches laid crossways to lift and roll the boats off the ground.

  ‘Hold tight,’ Anders said, glancing at them all to make sure they were holding on. Bo – even though her hands were freezing – tightened her grip, bracing for the acceleration. He eased forward on the gears, and within seconds they were moving so fast across the surface of the water, Bo was sure they must be skimming it. The air – now a wind in their faces – was so cold it made her gasp and she was grateful all over again for the storm hood of her jacket. Her eyes instantly began to stream and she heard Zac and Lenny whoop with joy, prompting their driver to glance round in puzzlement, his stern gaze meeting hers for a moment before he turned back again.

  Now that they were out on the water, the true majesty of the fjord began to impose itself. The cliffs were like walls around them, unyielding and immovable, the stone streaked with ice like frozen tear tracks, as though the mountains themselves were weeping. If the terrain wasn’t extreme enough, the arctic climate was and Bo thought she had never been anywhere so hostile, nor so beautiful. She didn’t even need to shift her gaze to see up – the water reflected the scenery so perfectly, she could have put her make-up on with it.

  She blinked in wonder as within minutes they turned the corner and passed the waterfalls she had seen from the road – one seemed to be made up of seven different tributaries, each one converging at the same point on the cliff before cascading into the fjord below.