They do what they have to do, then they go home. His mistress is standing outside when Benny returns.
‘Bad dog!’ she says, and Benny knows exactly what that means. ‘Bad dog!’
Benny gets into his basket. He doesn’t usually like it when Mistress says those words to him, but right now he couldn’t care less. Regardless of what Mistress thinks, he is a good dog. Good boy, as they say.
*
‘Look, Mummy.’
The drawing in Molly’s hand represents nothing. It is merely a series of chaotic spirals, wavy lines in black ink.
‘Lovely,’ Isabelle says. ‘Listen…’
‘Do you like it?’
‘Yes. I need to…’
‘Do you really like it?’
‘Be quiet, please. Did you take the hoses?’
‘What hoses?’
‘You know what hoses.’
‘No.’
Molly’s eyes are wide open. There is not the slightest twitch of an eyelid, not the hint of a blush on her cheeks: her whole face is the very picture of innocence and honesty. Isabelle doesn’t know why she even bothered to ask.
Perhaps Molly has taken the hoses, perhaps not. Trying to find out by asking her is a complete waste of time. Isabelle might be a good liar, but she is a rank amateur compared with her daughter. Whatever proof of Molly’s guilt might emerge, she will continue to insist that the opposite is true with that same utterly credible conviction.
Sometimes Isabelle almost allows herself to be fooled, just like most other people. She is almost ready to accept that perhaps Molly really has forgotten, perhaps she really doesn’t know what she is supposed to have done. Almost.
In a case like this, where there is no proof, it is impossible to determine whether Molly is telling the truth or not, so Isabelle drops the subject and turns her attention back to Molly’s drawing, or whatever you might call it. She has pressed so hard with the pen that the ink has gone through the paper, and there is a ghostly image of the drawing on the next page, a dark blob.
‘What’s it supposed to be?’
Molly opens her eyes even wider in a slightly exaggerated indication of surprise. ‘Can’t you tell?’
‘No, Molly. No, I can’t.’
‘But it’s us!’ Molly smiles and nods. ‘It’s you and me, Mummy!’
*
Majvor has never seen Benny behave like that, chasing after a harmless little cat. She would never hit him as Donald sometimes does, but she has given him a real telling off, and she hopes he is ashamed of himself. Although he doesn’t look as if he is, sitting there in his basket having a good wash.
Oh well. At least the incident got her on her feet, which is probably a good thing. She has been spellbound by the radio for the last quarter of an hour, song after song reminding her of the good old days. She wonders what station it is, whether it’s possible to pick it up…at home?
There is no sign of anyone else. Majvor runs a hand over her stomach and frowns. It’s not that she is hungry, or lonely, but there is an emptiness in her belly and her chest that she can’t quite put into words. It’s as if the field has moved inside her body.
Majvor is no fan of weird ideas. As a general rule she believes that people think too much, and that this is at the root of much of their unhappiness. The thought that the field has moved inside her is definitely a weird idea, and Majvor cuts it off before it can upset her, thinks about something real instead.
A party, with lots of cakes.
The empty space between the caravans, the lack of people, doesn’t feel right. A party would bring everyone together. Majvor could bake a huge batch of cinnamon buns, then they could put a big table in the middle, covered with a gingham cloth, and everyone would sit around sharing the buns while they were still warm. With milk to accompany them.
Majvor walks around the outside of caravan, thinking it over. Is it possible? Yes, she has the ingredients, and the oven will do if she bakes two separate batches. They must have a table and enough chairs between them. The only problem is the gingham cloth, because it has to be gingham. Preferably red and white, but blue and white will do at a push. She doesn’t have one herself, but perhaps someone else does?
She pauses at the back of the caravan, picturing the cloth as she stares at the cross painted on the wall. She is just about to go and ask Carina if she has a suitable cloth when she stops dead.
A cross? Why is there a cross?
She can’t recall ever having seen it before. The two intersecting lines are approximately six centimetres long. When she rubs her finger over them, a little of the paint comes off. If it is paint. The grainy pigment on her fingertip is more like…blood. Dried blood. But she’s not sure.
Majvor goes round the back of Carina’s caravan on her way to see her neighbour. Sure enough, she finds an identical cross. The gingham cloth is temporarily forgotten as she hurries over to the caravan belonging to the two farmers. The cat is lying in the window, and follows Majvor with her eyes as she passes by. Soon Majvor can add a third cross to her list.
Isabelle is leaning against the doorframe of her caravan. Majvor nods to her. Isabelle nods back, looking slightly puzzled as Majvor continues around the corner, where she is able to establish that there are in fact four crosses. One on each caravan. She stands there, trying to interpret this discovery, until she hears Isabelle’s voice behind her.
‘Excuse me, but what are you doing?’
Majvor turns around and points out the cross to Isabelle. ‘This,’ she says. ‘There’s one on each caravan.’
Isabelle shrugs. ‘So?’
‘Don’t you understand?’ Majvor says, pointing to the simple symbol. ‘We are marked.’
*
With every kilometre Peter has driven, with every cane he has pushed into the ground, the map on the GPS has become clearer and clearer. But it is no longer showing Vällingby. He is now travelling through the area around Linköping. Soon he will be eleven years old, and his belief in God will come to an end.
Peter always had to use a false name when he started training with a new football team to minimise the risk of his father finding him and his mother, but they still had to move twice during that first year.
As far as the development of his skills was concerned, this was not a disadvantage. As the new boy he had to make an extra effort so that he would be accepted, and with the talent he already had, this quickly made him a star. However, even though he laughed and celebrated with his teammates, he rarely felt genuinely happy.
His other hobby was guns. He could spend hours daydreaming over the Hobbex catalogue’s pictures of air rifles that were made to look like real guns. A copy of Guns & Ammo, found in a well-stocked newsagent’s, provided even more food for his imagination.
By this stage he was nine years old. He and his mother had been living in Norrköping for just over six months with no sign of his father. Peter was playing for one of IFK Norrköping’s youth teams, and seemed to have a very promising future; he was already playing alongside ten-year-olds.
After another year in Norrköping, Peter and his mother had begun to lower their guard and relax. Peter had stopped looking out for his father on his way to school every morning, and his mother no longer jumped when the telephone rang. Perhaps God had finally led them to safety.
Because God was with them.
After the night when He had saved Peter’s mother from the hammer, Peter had started to say his evening prayer with sincerity and conviction. He thanked God, he asked God for advice, he placed his troubles in God’s hands. God never gave a clear response, but Peter felt His presence, and every time they had to move and Peter was forced to leave new-found friends yet again, there was consolation in the knowledge that God was with them in the removal truck.
God didn’t even object to Peter’s interest in guns, although Peter was aware of His displeasure when it came to his gun-related fantasies. Then again, God wasn’t the type to turn the other cheek if someone was mean to him.
<
br /> Jesus was a different kettle of fish. Peter had no interest in Jesus, in spite of his mother’s best efforts. And that business of God and Jesus somehow being the same just seemed like an unnecessary complication. God was the main man as far as Peter was concerned.
Until the summer when he was eleven years old, that is.
Peter stops the car and picks up a cane from the passenger seat; this is number fifteen. Before he gets out he glances at the GPS, which now claims that he is in the vicinity of Slite. As soon as he realised where he was heading, he tried to veer off, but to no avail. The GPS simply adapts itself to his driving, the map turns, and however hard he tries to get away, his destination always lies straight ahead of him. He has stopped fighting it.
Peter shudders as he puts his foot on the grass. He rubs his arms and blows, looking down towards his mouth. No, it isn’t cold enough for his breath to form a mist, but it can’t be far off.
The atmosphere around him has a strange, concentrated quality. As if the air were thicker, tougher than usual, as if it were in the process of turning into water. He waves his hand in front of him and can almost make out ripples in the air. It is difficult to breathe.
He gazes out across the field, screwing up his eyes to sharpen his focus. It could be his imagination, or something created by the saturated air, but he thinks he can see a change on the horizon. He would like a brighter light, a sign that the sun is somewhere below, but what he might be seeing is the exact opposite. A line of darkness. He hopes it is his imagination.
He looks behind him; he can still see the last cane he inserted. He walks in front of the car, takes a couple of steps, then pushes in the next one.
When he lets go he feels something tickling his palm. He looks down and sees that the cane is not a cane. The thing that tickled him is a fletch, and the cane is an arrow. He crouches down and runs his index finger across the smooth surface and up over the feathers.
It looks just like the arrow he had when he was eleven years old. No. It is the same arrow.
Just over two years had passed since the last time his father came hammering on the door, and during that summer’s caravan holiday they decided to risk a few days on Uncle Joel’s farm.
Uncle Joel had taken over his parents’ place in Slite just outside Linköping, and it was okay for Peter and his mother to put their caravan on what had once been grazing land.
Peter got a pet rabbit that summer, and Uncle Joel helped him to make a wooden hutch and a run so that Diego could be outside without being watched all the time. At first he had called the rabbit Maradona, but that was difficult to say, so Peter had settled on Diego instead. Besides which, it seemed unreasonable to keep Maradona in a hutch and feed him on dandelion leaves, but with Diego it was fine.
One of the sad things about having to keep a low profile was that they hardly ever dared visit the friends and relatives Peter’s father knew. Not that Peter thought it was all that much fun to visit Aunt Margaret or his mother’s former work colleagues, but he had missed Uncle Joel.
There was plenty to do on the farm, and Uncle Joel was one of those grown-ups who was always interested, but didn’t interfere. You could do stuff with him and wish it would never end.
The day before they were due to go home, while his mother was having a lie-in, Peter went out into the pasture with his bow. Uncle Joel had given it to him, and it was a ‘top present’. His mother hadn’t been very pleased, but Joel had placed his hands on Peter’s shoulders and said that he was sure Peter would handle it responsibly—wasn’t that right?
Absolutely, if only because Uncle Joel had said ‘handle it responsibly’ assuming that Peter knew what that involved.
The bow was made of fibreglass, and was almost as long as Peter was tall; he could only just manage to draw back the string. He had also been given five arrows; they too were top quality, with sharp, weighted points and rainbow-coloured fletching. Uncle Joel said the feathers had been plucked from a peacock’s tail, but that was probably a lie.
There were a number of old pine trees on the edge of the pasture, and Peter had asked Uncle Joel if he could use them for target practice. Joel had inspected the thick bark and given his permission.
Halfway across the meadow, Peter stopped. It was a beautiful summer’s day, pleasantly warm. The old pasture was strewn with dandelions, and the bumblebees were busy shuttling from flower to flower. One bee would take off, and another would land seconds later. Peter didn’t understand how this could possibly be an efficient way of working, and made a mental note to ask Uncle Joel about it at dinner.
He turned his face to the sky and sent up a little message of thanks, a simple here I am, thank you for letting me be here, but without words. He sent the feeling instead.
Then he got an idea and immediately acted upon it. He placed an arrow in the rest, pulled the string back as far as he could, and fired the arrow straight up into the sky. In a fraction of second it was out of sight, and however hard Peter peered up into the blue, he couldn’t see it.
Then he got scared.
He had sent the arrow straight up, which should mean that it would come hurtling back towards him once it had turned.
He ran a short distance towards the caravan, still looking upwards. His mind was racing. Presumably the shot hadn’t been straight after all, and as the arrow flew higher and higher, it was impossible to say how great the deviation might be, and in which direction. Would he be able to see the arrow as it came down, and thus be able to avoid it, or would he—scary thought—see it only a nanosecond before it penetrated his eyeball? And what about God? What did God think about people shooting arrows at Him? Admittedly God was probably a lot further away than an arrow could reach, but…
A few more seconds had passed as Peter considered the problem; he spun around, but couldn’t make up his mind. He didn’t dare look directly up at the sky, but nor could he risk not looking up at all, because the arrow might land on his head, giving him no chance to get away.
He decided he had no alternative but to crouch down with both arms over his head and his eyes screwed tight shut. If the arrow landed on him it would hit an arm, which seemed like a better option.
He waited for five seconds, then another five, but nothing happened. He opened his eyes and looked around. He should have heard a thud when the arrow came down, but he had heard nothing, and there was no sign of an arrow anywhere nearby, so he concluded that his shot hadn’t been straight after all.
He searched for a little while longer, then gave up and set off towards the pine trees once more. He spent ten minutes on target practice with the four remaining arrows, taking great care not to lose any more. Then he went back to the caravan to see if his mother had woken up.
She hadn’t; the door was still closed, so Peter gathered a handful of dandelion leaves for Diego. When he reached the hutch, he dropped the leaves first of all, then the arrows. An ice-cold wind passed through the summer’s day.
Diego was lying in the middle of the run with the missing arrow through the back of his neck. Blood spattered the grass all around him, the grass he had been nibbling, and his paws were splayed in all directions. The feathers on the shaft of the arrow protruded through the wire netting.
This just couldn’t happen. Of all the millions of places the arrow could have come down, it had chosen to land in the rabbit run, in the exact spot where Diego happened to be at the time. Peter simply stood there staring for a long time, as rage and guilt overflowed in his breast, making his cheeks turn bright red and his eyes fill with tears.
He looked up at the sky and whispered: ‘Why? Why? He was just a little rabbit!’
God was sitting up there watching, but as usual he didn’t say a word. Peter carried on glaring furiously at the sky as tears blurred his vision. God refused to say anything in his defence. When Peter finally lowered his gaze, he saw a figure walking across the meadow, heading straight for the caravan. It was as if he was looking through a mist, but he rubbed the tears from his eyes
and focused. A second later he was tearing open the caravan door, yelling at the top of his voice: ‘Mum, Mum, wake up! Dad’s coming!’
On that day Peter stopped believing in God. He was still aware of His existence, but he no longer believed. If God could do such evil things just because a person had fired an arrow in his direction, then he simply didn’t deserve to have people believe in Him. He was worthless, or worse. Peter ended their relationship forever, broke off all contact.
Twenty-seven years later Peter is crouched down in an endless field with the wretched arrow in his hand. Now he knows what is wrong. He sensed it as soon as he realised that the sun had gone, but didn’t dare follow the thought to its conclusion.
All his life he has felt God’s silent presence, but since that day he has refused to respond to the wordless call.
Now it has disappeared. The presence has dissolved, the constant question is no longer being asked.
God is not here.
2. Inside
Everyone has returned to the campsite. Donald was the last to arrive, because he almost got lost. He tells the others about this, but nothing else. Stefan is not particularly communicative either. Like Donald, he seems uncomfortable with the meeting, and avoids the questions that are put to him.
When Lennart and Olof have come straight out and said that they saw nothing, but have started to take an interest in the soil itself, Majvor cannot keep quiet any longer.
‘We’re marked,’ she says. ‘Someone has marked us.’
The entire group follows her on a tour around the caravans as she points out the four crosses. As she suspected, no one can remember seeing these marks previously.
‘So what do you think it means?’ Olof asks.
‘I’ve no idea,’ Majvor replies. ‘But there must be a connection, surely?’
‘Then again, a cross can mean lots of things,’ Lennart says.
‘Lots and lots of things,’ Olof agrees.
A discussion follows about the cross on a map showing the location of hidden treasure, the universal sign for here it is, the unknown factor in an equation, and the intersection between two lines. Majvor becomes increasingly frustrated during this debate, and for once she wishes that Donald would step in, but he is just standing there, staring at the ground.
I Am Behind You Page 11