by Chris Power
‘Who else plays here?’ Mr Fisk said.
‘Lots of people. I need to go now,’ I said, but before I could get up he put his hand on my arm.
‘Have you seen anyone doing anything they shouldn’t? Have you seen anyone throwing things at the building?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘The Lindebloms have been away for the last few days and they’ve come home to a horrible mess: lumps of rotting fruit outside their door. Flies. Wasps. They’re very upset.’
The Lindebloms’ apartment was on the top floor of our stairwell. I was impressed Nisse had managed to get anything all the way up there. I felt warmly towards him then, and for a moment I thought of telling Mr Fisk that it was Anders. That every day after dinner Anders would come down onto the lawn with an apple and toss it up through the stairwell window for fun. I saw Mr Fisk marching Anders out of the building, his hands bound like a criminal. But I knew he wouldn’t believe me, so I told him the truth. ‘It was Nisse,’ I said.
‘Nisse?’
‘Nisse Hofmann.’
‘Nisse Hofmann? Are you sure?’
‘Yes,’ I said, moving away from him. ‘Nisse does it all the time.’ I ran away. As I reached the door of the stairwell I turned back to see him still crouched by the tree, staring after me like a simpleton. I hated him.
‘Nisse did it!’ I shouted, and turned and ran upstairs.
*
That night I lay in bed waiting for Mrs Hofmann to start shouting. I wondered if I would get in trouble too. I felt like throwing up. Outside my window I heard a dustbin lid clatter to the ground, and the answering bark of a dog. Like every other night of that summer, the air in my room stood thick as jam. It was too dark to make out the countries on my map, but I could see the black lumps of the continents: Europe, Africa, the Americas. As I looked at them, they appeared to grow in the darkness. I stood on my bed and put my ear to the smooth wall. I squeezed my eyes shut and concentrated as hard as I could on hearing something, but I could only hear myself: the blood hissing in my veins, the treacherous words blocking up my throat.
*
I never even considered the possibility that it wasn’t Nisse who smashed the fruit outside the Lindebloms’ apartment, but the day after he spoke to me Mr Fisk knocked on our door. We had just sat down to dinner. Anders was complaining, about traffic or politicians or the idiots he was surrounded by at work, like he did every evening. I wasn’t listening; all I could think about was the summer ending and school beginning. I got so used to my own company in the holidays that it was difficult to be around so many people again. Mum, too, was somewhere else entirely. You could taste her distraction in the burned meat and hard potatoes.
‘Can I speak to your parents, Eva?’ Mr Fisk said when I opened the door. He sat down with us at the dinner table, declined food, accepted beer, and asked Mum and Anders if I had told them about ‘our little chat’ the day before.
‘She hasn’t,’ Anders said, and frowned at me, an expression that triggered a spurt of fear.
Mr Fisk explained what we had talked about, and described what the Lindebloms had found when they came back from their trip. ‘And it’s not just this block,’ he said. ‘This has been happening all over. Potatoes, cabbages, apples – sometimes stones. Someone’s been very busy.’
‘It happened here!’ Anders said. ‘People are pigs.’ He stabbed the table’s oilcloth cover with his finger. ‘You give them a nice place to live and they muck it up.’
‘Anders,’ Mum said. He lit a cigarette and pushed his plate away from him.
Mum looked at me, then at Mr Fisk. ‘Surely you don’t think it was Eva …?’ she said.
‘No, no! I just wanted to ask her again about what she told me. It was a little confusing and I wanted to be sure.’
‘What did you tell Mr Fisk, Eva?’ Mum said, leaning towards me.
I looked at the potatoes on my plate.
‘What’s this silent act?’ Anders said. ‘Speak up, Eva, answer your mother.’
I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t say again what I had said before.
‘She told me it was Nisse Hofmann,’ said Mr Fisk.
‘Oh,’ Mum said. She sounded sad to hear it.
Anders snorted, as if he had known all along. ‘She lets him run wild,’ he said. He leaned conspiratorially towards Mr Fisk. ‘You know, she—’ he began, but Mum cut him off.
‘“She” has had a hard time, Anders, as you know. So enough.’ She didn’t sound tired now. Her voice was steady and strong.
Anders shrugged and slumped back in his chair. He flicked sulkily at a tear in the oilcloth, like a child. There was a pause.
‘It’s just I haven’t seen them around,’ Mr Fisk said, clearly uncomfortable about whatever was passing between Mum and Anders. ‘Most people tell me when they’re going away so I can keep an eye on things for them, but Mrs Hofmann – never. I can’t say for sure, but they’re never in when I go round and no one’s seen them. So I just wanted to ask Eva,’ here he turned to me and took extra care to pronounce each word, ‘if she was absolutely sure that she saw Nisse doing what she said.’
They all looked at me and waited for my answer: fat Mr Fisk; sulky Anders; my anxious mum, with sorrow contorting her face.
*
That night I woke to find Mum sitting at the end of my bed. The light from the lamps outside shone on the tip of her nose and her eye, which was the only part of her that was moving. A cigarette burned between her fingers but she didn’t raise it to her mouth.
‘Mum?’ I whispered. ‘Mum!’
But either she didn’t hear me or she didn’t want to answer. I fell back asleep, and when I woke up again she was gone.
*
Two days later Mrs Hofmann came to our apartment. It was just after nine at night. I was curled up in a chair, reading. Anders was watching something about the election on TV – it was going to happen on my birthday. Mum was at the kitchen table looking at photographs taken when I was a baby. Every so often she would say my name, and when I looked over she would be holding up a picture of me looking fat and startled.
‘This is when you were eight months old,’ she said. Then, ‘This was at your Uncle Kalle’s house.’ Then, ‘You loved those little shoes so much. You cried when they didn’t fit any more.’
All the pictures looked exactly the same to me.
The bell rang, and Mrs Hofmann was speaking before Mum had the door all the way open. Her words came fast and venomous. Blood surged into my face and I felt like I was shivering. I wanted to run to my room and climb out of the window, but found myself standing up and moving to where I could see the front door.
Mum invited Mrs Hofmann in, but she refused. ‘Two weeks away,’ she said, ‘and I return to this note, this note full of lies about Nisse. How did he do all this from Gothenburg?’ she said, waving a piece of paper in Mum’s face. ‘Please tell me how.’
Mrs Hofmann’s voice grew louder and louder as she went on. I could see Nisse standing beside her. He was looking right at me, but was expressionless as if I wasn’t there.
I felt two hands press down on my shoulders and Anders frogmarched me to the door. Mrs Hofmann pointed her finger at me and said, ‘Her. That one. She has been lying about my son.’
I expected Mum to say something, to tell Mrs Hofmann not to talk to me like that, but she only looked at me sorrowfully. She still had a photograph of me in her hand.
Then Anders was talking, but I didn’t listen to what he said. I looked at Nisse, who continued to stare right through me. Mrs Hofmann and Anders talked for a long time. At one point he shook me by the shoulders and told me to say I was sorry, and I did. They agreed that I’d go with Mrs Hofmann the next day and explain everything to Mr Fisk. I didn’t tell them I really had seen Nisse throw an apple through the window. I didn’t tell them anything at all.
Late that night, as I was drifting off to sleep, I thought I heard tapping through the wall. The sound was coming from Nisse’s bedroom. I lay t
here waiting to hear it again, deciding whether or not to tap back. I was still trying to decide when I fell asleep.
*
It was already hot when I pressed the buzzer to the Hofmanns’ apartment the next morning. It had been warm even when Mum came into my room before she left for work, the sky still getting light. She told me she was very disappointed. Just that, nothing else. It was more than Anders managed. He only stood silently in my doorway for a few seconds before stomping off and slamming the front door.
As soon as I pressed the buzzer I heard Mrs Hofmann coming down the stairs. She had obviously been waiting for me. I saw her through the glass of the stairwell door, wearing a white dress and brown leather sandals. She looked like she should have been descending into the lobby of some grand hotel in Paris, not a concrete stairwell in a Stockholm suburb. I remembered Mum’s tired face looking down on me in bed that morning. That, I thought, was the face of a woman who belonged here.
Mrs Hofmann opened the door and Nisse followed her out, dressed in a clean white shirt, black shorts and polished black shoes. I’d never seen him look so smart. I had picked what I was wearing off the floor, and my jeans had grass-stained knees. None of us spoke on the way to Mr Fisk’s cubbyhole. The chattering birdsong falling from the trees seemed like mockery. All I wanted to do was get this over with, pick up a book and disappear again. I looked at the ground, and at Mrs Hofmann’s slim legs moving ahead of me. She held Nisse’s hand as he stamped along the path. But why was no one holding my hand? I can still feel, fifty years later, the absolute loneliness of that walk, perhaps more strongly, even, than I felt it then. Then I thought I was above everything, that nothing could touch me. Who was she, I thought, this glamorous woman stuck in the suburbs? And this silly boy she was raising, who, if he wasn’t guilty of this, was certainly guilty of something. But when I stood in that musty room, when I looked at Mr Fisk and told him I was sorry for telling a lie, I found that I couldn’t stop myself crying. And when I cried, it was my mum’s anxious face I saw and that only made it worse. But I didn’t cry because I had disappointed her. I was crying for her, and because of where she was: with stupid Anders and their stupid parties. And I was crying for Mrs Hofmann, who didn’t want to be here at all, and for Nisse, who was just a silly boy without a father, and of course for me, too, most of all for me. I cried so much that Mrs Hofmann put a stiff hand on my shoulder and rubbed it to try and calm me down.
*
On the weekend before I went back to school, Mum and Anders threw the last party of the summer. All day the sky had been growing darker, and by dusk the distant grumble of thunder could be heard. The evening air was greasy with the coming storm.
The music was so loud there was no question of sleeping, and I lay awake in bed until the rain started. When it came down it sounded like sizzling fat. I went to the open window to watch: the drooping leaves of the birch were moving, for the first time in what felt like years. Drops of rain bounced up from the sill onto my face and chest. The water was cool, the air fresh. I heard screams and applause coming from the living room. For the rain? I went to my bedroom door but all I saw was a confusing jumble of parts of people, so I crept down the hallway to get a better view. I didn’t need to creep at all: it was a cacophony. The windows were thrown open to the pouring skies, and the roar of the rain blended with the watery rush of cymbals while drums beat frantically under buzzing lines of saxophone and trumpet. The cheering continued; each time it seemed to be coming to an end it caught again and grew louder. The lights were low, lower than usual, and everyone was dancing, moving together in the too-small living room. I saw a man squatting like a toad at the feet of a woman, shaking his head and grimacing. The woman’s hands moved in her hair as she jerked her head violently from side to side. A man was turning a circle with a woman held in his arms, her legs clamped around his waist and her hands waving. Another man danced alone, jabbing his fingers at the air and shouting, ‘Yes! Yes!’ in time with the music. Through the mass of bodies I saw Mum on the other side of the room. Her eyes were closed and her head turned up to the ceiling. The first few buttons of her shirt were undone and the lace of her bra was showing. Anders was directly behind her, his hands gripping her hips. As I watched, her eyes flew open and fixed on a point just above my head. All their dulling sorrow had been washed away. They blazed. In that moment she was more beautiful even than Mrs Hofmann.
She was alive for another two years, but I never saw that look on her face again. It comes back to me still, on nights when I can’t sleep. Who was she really, this woman? She was my mum, of course, but that was only one part, and I want to know all the parts. I could have asked Anders, but I have no idea what happened to him, and I don’t think he would have been able to tell me. Not the way that man on the jetty could tell me. So I don’t ask; I remember. Remember and imagine. I imagine her sitting on the edge of my bed, her face outlined in the glow of lamps that burn, if they still burn at all, hundreds of kilometres from where I sit writing this. A forgotten cigarette shrinks between her fingers. She stares out of the window, but what she is looking at I cannot see.
ABOVE THE WEDDING
‘Can you be here a week before the wedding, Cameron?’ Nuria’s voice crumpled as the Skype connection failed: her frozen face pixelated. She hung there waiting for an answer, Mexico City a rain-marked window behind her. It was a hot summer evening in Brixton. Huddled together in front of the laptop screen, Liam and Cameron’s arms stuck lightly where they touched.
‘We’re there,’ Cameron said.
Nuria’s face remained static.
‘We’ll be there,’ Liam echoed, unsure she could hear what they were saying.
She unfroze mid-sentence: ‘… say you’re both coming?’
‘Yeah,’ Cameron said, leaning closer to the screen. ‘Li’s coming too.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That’s great.’
Cameron and Nuria had met three years before, on a ferry between Greek islands. She had recently moved to Barcelona from Mexico to study, and Cameron was spending the summer helping renovate a friend’s house on Naxos. That autumn, when Cameron returned to London, he and Liam moved in together. It had been their parents’ idea, something Liam wasn’t supposed to know. They thought Cameron – younger by fourteen months, but always the more sensible brother – could get him ‘back on an even keel’, the phrase Liam could practically hear his mother saying when Cameron, drunk one night, admitted the whole arrangement.
Liam met Nuria when she came to see Cameron in London. She brought her boyfriend, Miguel. On the Saturday night of their visit they went out with a large group of Cameron’s friends, and Liam tagged along. There was a lot of drink and some cocaine, and they ended up at a party in a mazelike warehouse in Shadwell. Liam and Miguel lost the others and tried calling Cameron and Nuria, but no one had reception. It was around three when Miguel suggested leaving. On the cab ride to Brixton they talked about the differences between growing up in London and Barcelona. They were both yawning as they got in, but decided on another drink. They were in the flat’s cramped kitchen, talking about Spanish football, when it happened. Miguel pressed close into Liam and started kissing him, moving against him with a violent energy. Liam, who had never kissed a man before, kissed Miguel back. They moved to Liam’s bedroom, but Liam’s phone rang before anything could happen.
‘Where are you?’ said Cameron.
Liam heard the nervousness that edged the question. He heard people laughing in the background. ‘We’re at home,’ he said.
‘Miguel’s with you?’ Relief slid into Cameron’s voice.
‘Yeah, he’s right here.’ Miguel was sitting still on the edge of the bed, his shirt and jeans open.
‘Miguel’s there,’ Liam heard Cameron say.
‘Mi amor!’ Nuria shouted. Three or four other voices repeated the phrase.
‘We’ll be home soon, Li,’ Cameron said. ‘There’s a few of us. We’re picking up booze.’ Cameron said something away from the mouthpi
ece, then his voice returned. ‘Liam …’
‘Yes?’
‘It was good tonight, wasn’t it?’
Liam knew what the question really meant. ‘Don’t be a headcase. Don’t be a fucking weirdo.’ ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I had a great time.’
‘And you’re OK?’
‘I’m good, Cam. See you in a bit.’ He ended the call and looked at Miguel, who was looking at the floor. ‘They’re on their way.’
‘This did not happen,’ Miguel said.
*
In the weeks after the visit, when he saw an opportunity, Liam steered conversations around to Miguel. He was a web developer, Cameron told him. He worked freelance and was often away from Nuria and Barcelona, which gave Liam a thrill of pleasure to hear. The more time that passed, the more Liam found himself playing out what might have happened that night if Cameron had called twenty minutes later.
‘You guys really got on, didn’t you?’ Cameron said, after another of Liam’s questions.
He shrugged. ‘Seems like a good guy.’
*
Nuria invited Cameron to Nice, where Miguel was working, and Cameron suggested Liam join them. Liam, buried under several years’ worth of credit-card debt, said he couldn’t afford it, but Cameron offered to pay. ‘Come on, they’d love to see you again.’
‘I don’t know,’ Liam said, scraping a foil container of takeaway noodles onto two plates.
‘What are you going to do otherwise?’
‘Sit there,’ Liam said, nodding through the kitchen doorway at the couch. ‘Soil myself.’
‘You’re not funny, Li.’
‘Oh yeah I am. Bone-cancer funny.’
Cameron gave him nothing.
Liam sighed. ‘Maybe I should get back to the book,’ he said. ‘Really get stuck into it.’ A couple of years before Liam had started writing a novel, although it hadn’t got beyond a page of bullet points and a few disconnected scenes.