Frozen Tracks

by Ake Edwardson

  'Did you see him on several occasions?'

  'No. Only the once.'

  'Who lives in Gustav's old room now?' asked Djanali.

  'A girl,' she said. 'I've hardly met her either. She's only just moved in.'

  'Would you recognise the guy who came out of Gustav's room?' asked Halders.

  'I really don't know,' she said, looking at Aneta Djanali. 'It's not all that easy. It was just the colour of his skin. And there are lots of people living here.'

  'Now you've lost me,' said Aneta Djanali.

  'Just because people have the same colour skin, that doesn't mean that they look alike,' said the girl, and started gesticulating. 'This has always bothered me. The fact that people's appearances get tied up with the colour of their skin.' She seemed to smile, briefly. 'And it's not just us, in the so-called Western world. There are people in China who can't tell one white person from another.' She nodded at Aneta Djanali. 'I expect you are familiar with this. Or have thought about it, at least.'

  'So this guy who came out of Gustav Smedsberg's room – you're saying that he wasn't white?' asked Djanali.

  'No, he looked like you. He was black. Didn't I say that?'

  He saw a flash of sunlight as he emerged from his block of flats, a reflection. It was an ugly building, but the flash of sun was beautiful.

  Other people said that the sun comes from the sky, but he knew better than that. The sun comes from somewhere else, where it's warm and quiet and everybody is nice to one another. A place where there's nobody who . . . who does things people ought not to do. Where children dance, and grown-ups dance alongside them and play and laugh.

  He suddenly felt sweat on his brow, but it wasn't the sun – it wasn't as warm as that.

  Since he'd been forced, yes, actually forced to stay away from work, things had got worse.

  Pacing round and round the flat.

  The films? No, not now. Yes. No. Yes, yes.

  Things had got worse.

  He'd gone to the chest of drawers and taken out the things that had belonged to the children and held them in his hand, one after another. That amusing little silver thing that was a bird. He spent ages wondering what bird it was. A canary, perhaps? It certainly wasn't a rotty, ha ha.

  The green ball was also fun, soft and terrific for bouncing. It didn't look as if it would be a good bouncer, and felt very soft when you picked it up – but boy, could it bounce!

  Now he was holding the car. The little blue and black car he'd got from the boy he'd chatted with that first time. It was the same car. No, it was the same make. He wasn't exactly an expert, but surely it was the same make as his own car? Yes. Kalle, that was the boy's name, and it had been such fun, sitting in the car and talking to Kalle. What's that you've got? Can I have a look? Hmm. Lovely, isn't it? I've got a car as well. It looks just like this one. But a bit bigger. No, not just a bit. A lot bigger! Much, much bigger! It's the one we're sitting in now. We can go for a little drive in this car, and you can drive your car at the same time, Kalle.

  But that wasn't what had happened. Not that time.

  He drove Kalle's car over the floor, through the living room and then over the threshold into the kitchen, brrrmmm, BRRRMMM; it echoed all round the room when he imitated the sound of the engine, BRRRRMMMMM!

  And now he was opening the door of the big car. The sweat was still there on his brow. Worse than ever.

  He drove. He knew where he was going. His face hurt because he was clenching his teeth so hard. No, no, no! He only wanted it to be fun. Nothing else, nothing else, but as he drove, he knew that it would be different this time, and so it didn't matter that when he tried to turn left he actually turned right at the first crossroads, and then at the second one.

  He could have driven with his eyes closed. The roads followed the tram tracks. He followed the tram tracks. He could hear the trams even before he saw them. The rails glinted in the sun, which was still shining. He kept as close to them as possible, because when he did that he didn't feel so frightened.

  13

  The light over the fields was as soft as water. It seemed as if everything was sinking down towards the ground. Trees. Rocks. Fields glowing black, the soil ploughed into furrows, like a sea that had stiffened and would not thaw and come to life until the spring.

  What am I doing? What have I done? What have I done?

  He could see a tractor in the distance. He couldn't hear anything, but saw that it was moving. It had been working out there in the fields for so long that its paint had rubbed off and disappeared and so everything out there was the same colour, the machine and the country side, the same rubbed-off November glow that always seemed to be gliding through the day towards dusk.

  He felt calmer now, after driving for an hour, but he knew that was only temporary, just as everything all around him was temporary. No. Everything around him was not temporary. It's eternal, he thought. It's bigger than anything else.

  I wish I loved it, but I hate it.

  He turned in through the gates, which seemed to have acquired a new layer of rust on top of the old one. The farm track was almost the same as the fields out there, churned up by the tractor wheels that were still rotating out on the prairie.

  He was standing in the farmyard now.

  I once dreamed about the prairie. I could have had a horse and ridden through that glade and never come back.

  I could have flown in the sky. Lots of people could have seen me.

  I'll do that one day.

  The wind was whipping pieces of straw and twigs into a circle in the middle of the yard.

  There was a smell of dung, as always, and straw and seeds and soil and rotten leaves and rotten apples and rotting wood. The smell of animals lingered on even though there were no animals left.

  Not even Zack. He walked over to the dog kennel, which seemed to be hovering above the ground, as if waiting for the wind to come and whisk it away over the fields and roads.

  He missed Zack. Zack was a friend when he needed a friend, and then Zack had passed on and everything had been as it had always been.

  He heard the tractor approaching down the road. Soon it would grunt its way in through the gate and stop more or less where he was standing now.

  He turned round. The old man parked the tractor, switched off the engine and clambered down in a way suggesting habit rather than agility. His body would carry on moving as per routine long after it had lost all its softness.

  All its softness, he thought again. When you're a child, everything inside you is soft and everything outside you is hard, and you eventually become hard as well.

  The old man limped up to him.

  'It weren't yesterday I last saw you,' he said.

  He didn't reply.

  'I didn't recognise the car,' said the old man.

  'It's new.'

  'It don't look new,' said the old man, staring at the bonnet.

  'I mean it's one you haven't seen before.'

  The old man looked at him. There were flecks of soil on the old man's face. He'd always looked like that. It had nothing to do with age, didn't mean that he could no longer take care of his personal hygiene or anything like that.

  'Shouldn't you be at work?' the old man asked. 'It's the middle of the day, a weekday.' He looked up at the sky as if to get confirmation of the time. Then he looked back at his visitor and snorted. 'But you couldn't very well have driven your tram here.' He snorted again. 'That'd be something to look at.'

  'It's my day off,' he said.

  'A long way to drive.'

  'Not all that far.'

  'You might as well live at the other side of the globe,' said the old man. 'What could it be?' He looked up again at The Big Calendar in the Sky. 'Is it four years since you were here last? Five?'

  'I don't know.'

  'Typical.'

  He heard the beating of wings overhead. He looked up and saw a few crows flying from the cowshed to the farmhouse.

  'Now that you're here, you
'd better have a cup of coffee,' said the old man.

  They went in. He recognised the smell in the hall, and suddenly he was back here again, but at a different time.

  He was a little boy again.

  Everything in the house looked just the same as before. There was the chair he used to sit on at that other time. She had sat opposite him, big, red.

  She had been nice, at first she had, that was when he could still feel that his boyish body had softness in it, when it still wasn't too late.

  Was that the way it was? Did he remember correctly?

  It belonged to that other time. Then those misters and missuses had decided that he shouldn't live with his mum, and he'd acquired a foster father. The old man was faffing about by the stove now, and after a while the water was bubbling away and the old man produced a couple of cups and saucers from the cupboard behind him.

  'Yes, nothing's changed, as you can see,' he said, and served up a little basket full of buns, still in their plastic wrapping.

  'Yes.'

  'Not as neat and tidy as it used to be, but apart from that, nothing's changed,' said the old man.

  He nodded. Assumed it was a joke.

  The old man served coffee, then sat down again and looked at him just as he used to do, with one eye sinking down and the other lifted up.

  'Why have you come here?'

  'I don't know.'

  He'd been back a few times. Perhaps because this was the nearest thing he'd had to anywhere that could be called home. And he'd liked the countryside, no doubt about that. All those smells.

  'I wrote,' he said.

  'That's not the same thing.'

  He took a sip of coffee that tasted like the soil in the fields outside must taste, or the tarmac that had been used to upgrade the farm track when he lived here. That was a smell to remember.

  'What are you after, then?' said the old man.

  'What do you mean?'

  'What do you want?'

  'I don't want anything. Do I have to want something?'

  The old man drank some coffee and took a bun, but only held it in his hand.

  'I've nothing to give you,' he said.

  'Since when have I asked for anything?'

  'Just so as you know,' said the old man, took a bite of the bun and carried on speaking with his mouth full. 'There's been a break-in here. In the cowshed, just imagine that. Somebody breaks into a cowshed where there's no animals and nothing to pinch. For Christ's sake.'

  'How do you know there was a break-in, then?'

  'Eh?'

  'How do you know there was a break-in if there wasn't anything to steal?'

  'You see that kind of thing if you've had the same cowshed all your life. You see if somebody's been in there.' He washed the bun down with a mouthful of coffee. 'You see that kind of thing,' he said again.

  'Really.'

  'Oh yes.'

  'But nothing was taken?'

  'A few things, but that doesn't matter.' The old man was staring into space now. 'That's not the point.'

  He said nothing.

  'The point is that you don't want anybody prowling around when you're not there. Or are fast asleep in bed.'

  'I can understand that.'

  The old man looked at him, his eyes pointing in different directions.

  'You don't look all that well,' he said.

  'I've been, er, been unwell.'

  'What's been up with you?'

  'Nothing serious.'

  'Flu?'

  'Something like that.'

  'So you came here to get a whiff of cowshit.'

  'Yes.'

  'Well, all you need to do is breathe in deeply,' said the old man and snorted again, although he might have been laughing.

  'I have done.'

  'Take as much as you like.'

  He raised his cup to his mouth again but couldn't bring himself to drink. The damp air in the kitchen made him shudder. The old man hadn't had time to light a fire after his work in the fields. God only knows what he'd been doing out there.

  'I think I have a few things here still.'

  The old man didn't respond, didn't seem to have heard.

  'I was thinking about it the other day, and I remembered a few things.'

  'What kind of things?'

  'Toys.'

  'Toys?' The old man refilled his cup, the black sludge that could kill. 'What do you want toys for?' He looked hard at his visitor. 'Don't tell me you've had a kid?'

  No answer.

  'Have you had a kid?' the old man asked again.

  'No.'

  'I didn't think so.'

  'They are my . . . memories,' he said. 'My things.'

  'What are these toys you're on about?'

  'They're in a box, I think.'

  'Oh Lord, for God's sake,' said the old man. 'If there's anything they must be upstairs, and I haven't been up there since Rut died.' He stared at his visitor again. 'She asked after you.'

  'I'll go up and take a look,' he said, getting to his feet.

  The stairs creaked just like they used to do.

  He went into the room that was once his.

  It smelled of nothing, as if this part of the house no longer contained any memories. As if everything had disappeared when the old man stopped using upstairs and made up a bed in the maid's room behind the kitchen. But things hadn't disappeared, he thought. Nothing disappears. They are still there and they're getting bigger and stronger and more awful.

  The faint afternoon light was trying to force its way in through the little window at the gable end. He switched on the light, which was a naked forty-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling. He looked round, but there wasn't much to see. A bed that he hadn't slept in. An armchair he remembered. Three wooden chairs. A wonky table. Three overcoats were hanging on a rail to the right.

  There was sawdust on the floor, in three little piles. There were a few cardboard boxes in the far corner under the window, and he opened the one on the left. Beneath a few tablecloths and handkerchiefs he discovered the two things he was looking for: he picked them up, tucked them under his left arm and carried them down to his car.

  The old man came out.

  'So you found something?'

  'I'll be going now,' he said.

  'When shall I see you again, then?' asked the old man.