by Chris Power
‘And I will,’ he said, smiling. They sat in a sunny paved courtyard. In the flowerbeds slugs oozed across fat-leaved plants. There was a large group of older tourists sitting nearby, and a pair of hikers with a huge bronze rucksack lying at their feet, a Canadian flag pinned to it. The waitresses, all women in their fifties and sixties, wore white shirts, knee-length black skirts and dark tights. David saw the tables full of German officers drinking cognac and smoking cigarettes.
‘What are you thinking about?’ Gunilla asked, blowing across the surface of her coffee.
‘Nothing,’ David said. ‘How diabetic these slugs must be.’ He watched one, long and brown, mount a large cake crumb.
‘Liar,’ Gunilla said, her smile tight. ‘You’re probably thinking about soldiers. Your stupid war didn’t happen here, you know.’
‘Well,’ David said, unable to stop himself, ‘the Swedish government did allow Wehrmacht troops railway passage to and from Norway until mid ’43. How do you think your grandfather got the chance to fall in love with them?’
Gunilla snorted and flicked a fragment of cake away from her. ‘You are so fucking boring,’ she said.
David winced. ‘That’s harsh,’ he said. She said nothing in reply, and he decided not to either. The argument with her mum must have really got to her. He would give her some time.
In the same silence they walked down a narrow green lane to a thin strip of beach. On a rise above it stood three thatched fishermen’s huts, one of which had been converted into a chapel. Running at head height around the inside of the small, low room was a ledge filled with pebbles left by visitors. On the section that ran above the rudimentary altar, children had painted images of Jesus and Mary and fishing boats on pieces of driftwood. David shut the chapel door behind him and stood alone in the quiet, dusty air. Veins of sand crossed the stone floor. The sea was a distant hiss. He had stopped believing long ago, but still found comfort in the calmness of holy spaces, especially intimate ones like this. He ran his fingers along the pebbles, some marked with names and dates: Andersson Juli 2014; Erik Parnaby; Mary and John Cartwright, England, 12/07/12. He picked up a pebble the size of his palm, smooth and pigeon-grey. He thought about what Per had said to him in Gothenburg. He replaced the pebble on the ledge and heard himself say, ‘Don’t let her leave.’ As soon as the words left his mouth he felt ashamed. He hadn’t said them. He would not remember them. He swept his hand along the shelf, the pebbles clattering to the floor.
*
That night they grilled cod and ate it on the patio with a salad, citronella candles burning in a rectangle around them. They were surrounded by an inky blackness, given depth by the distant clustered lights of Simrishamn.
‘Would you get lonely living out here?’ David asked.
‘By myself?’ said Gunilla. ‘I might.’
Why by herself? he thought. ‘Not with someone else?’ he said.
Gunilla waved her hand, a gesture David thought might mean anything. A phone rang in the house. Their phones had the same ringtone, and both of them were inside.
‘Let’s leave it,’ David said, ‘I don’t want to speak to anybody.’ But Gunilla was already up. David watched her go inside, speed-walk the length of the living room and lift her phone from the kitchen counter. She raised her voice in what might have been surprise or enthusiasm. Whichever it was, it was a change from the monotone that was all he had heard since the cafe. Still talking, she moved deeper into the house. He watched her white T-shirt dwindle into the darkness of the corridor that joined the kitchen and living room to the rest of the farmhouse. His meal unfinished, David threw his cutlery onto his plate and lit a cigarette. He wondered who she might be speaking to, hating that he had no idea. He thought about confronting her, but knew how foolish she would make him feel for getting angry about a phone call. Was that who he was now? Couldn’t she talk to a friend on the phone? He finished his cigarette, flicked it onto the lawn and lit another. After an hour, when Gunilla still hadn’t returned, he went inside and put on the TV.
*
The next morning they went for a run. They quickly left the village behind and climbed a long, low hill. At the top of the hill the road split in two. They would take one fork out, loop around and return by the other.
The day was humid, the air pressed thick between the grey sky and the dull green fields. They ran past a man in overalls inspecting a tractor. The sun broke out, then was dragged back behind the clouds. At a turn in the road stood a dead rowan, its limbs sleeved with ivy. David pointed at it.
‘They plant them in graveyards at home,’ he said, panting. ‘They keep the dead in their graves.’
Gunilla nodded but didn’t reply. She was looking at the map on her phone. She turned off the road onto a dirt path and David followed. The hot, damp air was like cotton in his mouth. They turned into the driveway of an old farmhouse, grey, half-timbered, its three sides facing a courtyard with an empty fountain. David stopped beside Gunilla. ‘Is this right?’ he said.
She waved her phone in a figure of eight. ‘The signal,’ she said.
To one side of them stood a field of green wheat. The sprouting heads of the crop gave the impression that a thin mist hung above it. In the distance stood a phalanx of wind turbines, their long blades slowly turning.
‘We’ve gone wrong,’ Gunilla said. ‘This way.’ She started running back the way they had come. They ran past the farmhouse again, then took a sharp right into what looked like a private garden. A dog loped towards them and they heard a woman cry out. They stopped. David bent towards the dog, a stout black Labrador, as it butted his hands. He scratched its head and neck. The woman said something in what David assumed was Swedish, but Gunilla answered in English.
‘This is private property,’ the woman said. The dog backed away from David and sneezed.
‘Prosit,’ David said automatically. He looked at the woman. She was very short, and her deeply tanned skin was tight to the bones of her face. She stood a foot shorter than Gunilla, and a foot and a half shorter than him.
‘You can’t run here,’ she said. She spoke rapidly. She almost sounded Irish, David thought.
‘We thought it was a public path,’ said Gunilla.
‘You can see it’s my garden,’ the woman said, sticking out an arm and waving it stiffly around her lawn. ‘He might have attacked you. It’s all right, Chilli,’ she muttered to the dog, which was now lying on the ground. He panted to himself, unfazed, his back legs thrown off to one side. A scrap of wind riffled the rows of wheat standing beyond the garden.
‘I’m sorry,’ Gunilla said, ‘I didn’t know we were trespassing.’ She sounded irritated. She showed the woman her phone. ‘I need to get here,’ she said, pointing to the road that would complete the circle of their route and take them back to the farmhouse.
The woman jabbed a finger at the end of the garden where a gap in the fence opened onto a track. ‘That way,’ she said, ‘get going.’
Chilli pranced between them as they walked to the end of the garden, his tongue flapping from his mouth.
‘Friendly lady,’ David said.
‘Danish bitch,’ Gunilla said, wiping her forehead against her bicep.
They ran along an uneven track dividing two large fields of green wheat. David looked across the fields at the turbines in the distance. He imagined he could hear their great blades slicing the air, a menacing, monumental sound. He wanted to talk to Gunilla but he couldn’t think of anything she’d want to hear. They were running at different speeds, now one catching up, now the other pulling ahead.
They rejoined the road, which ran between more wheat fields. The fields were green to the left and a dirty gold to the right. Small clouds passed across the sun, pools of shadow lying on the wheat. David ran past two thick black skid marks that ran on for fifty feet, reaching their darkest point then suddenly stopping. He wondered what the driver had been trying to avoid, and if they had succeeded.
Some distance had opened between them, and David widened
it still further. He made his tired legs move faster. At the end of his burst he stopped, his breath scorching his chest. He bent over, hands on his knees, and sucked in air. He spat. Blood throbbed in his temples and crowded his vision, making the tarmac at his feet crawl. He spat again.
As his vision cleared he heard an intricate piping fill the air around him, long lines of melody tumbling from the sky. Standing up straight, hands on hips, still breathing hard, he saw a skylark hovering above him. The bird alternately beat its wings and stilled them, its rushing music continuing without pause. Then it suddenly plummeted down towards the ground – like a Stuka, David thought – and flew away, rising rapidly from the land.
He looked across the fields. The wind blew and the wheat was pushed down and to the side as if hands were searching through it. He turned around, expecting Gunilla to be approaching, but he saw her still distant, standing in the middle of the road. He waved but she didn’t respond, only stared in his direction. A small black car rounded the corner behind her and slowed to a stop. She turned and leaned on the off-side door. She spoke, but she was too far away for David to hear what she was saying. The sun’s glare filled the windscreen, stopping him from seeing who was inside.
He knew exactly what was going to happen next. He moved a small, useless step towards Gunilla as she straightened, opened the car door and got in. The car reversed, neatly and at speed, turned a tight semicircle and drove away. David started to run and stopped. He ran again and stopped again. The car took a corner and disappeared from view, the noise of its engine growing fainter and fainter until it could no longer be heard. He waited for it to turn around and come back. The sun had been quenched and the wind had died. In the distance stood the turbines, their blades still.
David ran into the driveway expecting to see the car there; he expected Gunilla and her mystery friend to be waiting with beers and explanations: a big joke. But there was no car, and inside the house there was no one. His phone was on the kitchen counter. He picked it up and called her. It went straight to voicemail. At the sound of her recorded voice a cramp of panic gripped his belly. He went into their bedroom and saw her things were gone. Maybe there was a ghost after all, he thought. It took her things. It took her.
He walked back out of the house and stood in the yard, his hands on top of his head. He stared into the grey sky. The wind stirred. He walked past the empty barns to the aspen grove. The wind blew through the trees and their leaves hissed like the ocean. Their limbs creaked. Traffic rushed past on the other side of the hedge. He lay on the cool grass. The tree branches weaved like hands above him. Tomorrow he would be gone, leaving no trace. He listened to the cars drive by, each one refusing to slow and turn.
PORTALS
I went to Paris to meet a girl called Monica. I’ve never forgotten it. She was a dancer from Spain. I met her at a wedding in Barcelona where the groom was the only person I knew. We really got on, Monica and me and her boyfriend Victor. We drank a lot and told stories, and Victor and me took it in turns dancing with Monica.
We added each other on Facebook but didn’t really stay in touch. Then, a year after the wedding, Monica messaged me to say she was going to visit a friend in Paris. She wasn’t with Victor any more, she said, and she wanted to see me. I really liked spending time with you at the wedding, she wrote. I bought a Eurostar ticket the same day.
That first night we took it easy and went for dinner at a place beside the Seine. You couldn’t see the river from the restaurant, though, only the stone balustrade that ran above it, a thick band of mauve sky and a stream of cars. There was Monica, me, Tanis, the childhood friend Monica was visiting, and Tanis’s French boyfriend Alex, who was a bit of an arsehole. She was a real talker, and he was always shutting her down.
– Tanis, he’d say, making it sound like ‘tennis’ – Tanis, don’t exhaust our guest. He has only just arrived in our city.
Or – Tanis, Tanis, don’t be so … Iberian, looking at me like he was Oscar fucking Wilde.
But I didn’t say anything to him. After all, I didn’t really know any of these people.
– Is Alex always such a dick? I asked Monica as we walked beside the river. Tanis and Alex were a little way ahead of us.
She covered her face with her hands and groaned. – Yes! Always! I love Tanis so much but her boyfriends are … are shit. You can’t tell her, though. You try and it’s—she put her fingers in her ears and shook her head. We stopped, waiting for a gap in the traffic. Tanis and Alex were already on the other side of the street.
– Where have all the good men gone, Stephen? Monica said, looking up at me, her large green eyes framed by curls of glossy black hair. She said it like she was quoting it from somewhere, like I was supposed to know the next line.
– When I find out I’ll let you know, I said, immediately wishing I’d said something else. I wasn’t smart enough to know that I could have said anything. That at this point the actual words we said to each other didn’t really matter at all.
*
The next morning I ate breakfast in the sad little restaurant at my hotel, where everyone else was dressed for business meetings, then went to meet Monica. We took the metro north, to the flea market at Clignancourt. Tanis had told us about it at dinner. – It’s like Blade Runner! she said, – or Thunderdome!
Walking from the metro we crossed the concrete trench of the Périphérique, a torrent of cars rushing beneath us. On the far side of the bridge the market began: haphazard stalls selling handbags, and tall racks of shiny leather coats overlapping each other like scales. Traders were selling phone covers and cuddly toys, fake luggage, baseball caps, basketball shirts, trainers, sunglasses and phone cards. Hip-hop and Arabic pop blared from speakers hooked to the awnings of the stalls, and the air was greasy with burning oil from falafel stands.
We came to a gate in a wall. Passing through it was like teleporting: we left all the chaos and noise behind and walked down narrow lanes with ivy growing across the walls. – It’s like Provence, – Monica said. Here the traders didn’t have stalls, but snug garage-like spaces. Most of them were selling antiques, and a jumble of furniture spilled onto the narrow pavements: metal garden chairs, school desks, benches and scarred kitchen tables. Monica stopped beside a chaise longue with a group of porcelain rabbits scattered across it, turning the white fabric beneath them into a snowfield. Beside it a man sat slumped in a battered leather armchair, reading a paper. A knotted trunk ran up the wall behind him, disappearing into a mass of triangular green leaves. Long tendrils weaved out from the leaves like serpents.
– What kind of tree is that? I asked Monica. The owner lowered his paper, studied us for a moment and went back to the news.
– In Spanish it’s glicinas, she said.
– Glee-thee-nass, I repeated.
– Yes, glicinas.
– C’est ‘glycine’ en français, the man said, lowering his paper for a second time and pausing dramatically. – Not for sale.
We took the metro back into the city. We got off at Les Halles and walked through the cobblestone streets of the Marais, past tiny art galleries and expensive clothes shops. We had settled into each other’s rhythm, it felt like, and we were touching each other more and more – my hand on her shoulder, hers in the small of my back or on my arm as she pointed something out. It was a comfortable feeling.
We ended up lying on a patch of grass on a peaceful square surrounded by old stone arcades. Monica’s face was so close to mine that I could feel her breath. Nearby a girl sat cross-legged, sawing at her violin. The way it scraped and squeaked was a disaster, but the look on her face, intense and earnest, suggested it was meant to sound that way.
Monica told me about the next piece her company was doing, something abstract with guns. – Guns are sexy, she said. – It’s corny to say it, maybe, but it’s true. Everyone says America, America, crazy with guns. But look at the stories we watch all the time. All guns. We love the drama of a gun.
– But sexy? R
eally?
– Of course! Have you fired one?
– I haven’t.
– I have. It feels totally sexy. She laughed. – I sound so fascist! She was wearing these wide-legged black trousers, and as she spoke she raised and lowered her right leg in stages: just above the ground, at forty-five degrees, at ninety, and as her leg rose her trouser leg dropped and gathered at her knee. I watched her calf muscle tense and slacken and tense again as she rotated her foot.
– You’re not a fascist, I said.
– What a sweet thing to say, she said, and laughed again.
I looked into her eyes’ bright green. It put me on edge, the way they shone. I rolled onto my back and looked at the milk-white sky. I reached for her hand. It was sweaty. A little boy and girl ran around us laughing, each one chasing the other. I closed my eyes. Listening to them, and to the girl’s violin braying like a dying animal, I fell asleep.
I must have only slept for a minute. When I opened my eyes Monica was sleeping too. Her hand was still in mine. I studied the crumbs of mascara in her eyelashes, the tiny creases in her lips. She had these incredible swollen lips. When her eyes opened I rolled onto my back and fakeyawned, pretending I’d just woken up.
– We should go, I said, releasing her hand.
– Why?
I turned and looked at her. Staring at me she shifted her body, rolling onto her back. It was an invitation, but I hesitated. This was exactly what I had come for, but now the tiny space between us felt unbridgeable. To be there again! I was in front of a door I’d been searching for, only now I couldn’t reach out and turn the handle.
– We should head back, I said. We were going to a party that night. We picked ourselves up and brushed curls of dead grass off our clothes. Monica was silent as we walked to the metro. When I said I might walk all the way back to my hotel she only shrugged. – See you in a few hours then, I said when we reached the entrance.
She just nodded and held her fingers up in the shape of a phone. – I’ll call you, she said without turning around, descending the stairway into the tunnels.