‘Love back,’ I said, and ended the call.
The thin man in the suit approached me, hair mussed, shoes covered in dust. I looked down at the sheet of paper in my hand. I held it out to him, began to turn towards Elsa.
‘Cal.’ I felt his hand on my shoulder, saw the concern in his eye.
‘Oh my God, Edvard. Thought you were at police headquarters. Jo said …’
‘We’re all doing everything we can,’ said Edvard. ‘But it’s a mess. I’m really sorry.’
‘What do you mean?’
He nodded at the men in the police cars. ‘You don’t bring them ashore somewhere crowded. Things could have got out of hand. No one’s following protocol.’
‘So those men …?’ Again I couldn’t finish the thought.
‘Yeah,’ he said quietly. ‘This is bad, Cal.’
I swallowed down my fear.
I nodded. ‘Wait …’ I reached into my pocket, pulled from my wallet a strip of passport photos that Licia had taken and never used, folded at the middle. I had rescued them from the trash, carried them with me without her knowing. I held out the strip of pictures to Edvard.
‘These will help,’ he said. He took a paperclip and attached them to our form, added the form to the top of the pile in his hand.
‘You’ll tell me?’ I said. ‘When you know something?’
His look told me not to expect too much.
Another boat, closing fast.
Behind, around, voices murmured then fell silent. Paramedics opened ambulance doors, unloaded equipment on to the slipway, waited. The boat was closer. I searched for Licia’s face, but Licia was not there.
Elsa knew it too.
Licia is not here.
Parents stepped forward, reached out, held to them their boys, their girls as they stumbled forwards from the boat. Some drew their children gently from the scene and away. Others knelt beside gurneys, ruffled hair, kissed foreheads and backs of hands. Beside them, nimble fingers found veins, attached cannulas, fitted monitors. These sons, these daughters: amongst us again now, but changed.
Water lapped. Wood strained against wood. Gurneys slid into ambulances, doors slammed, motors started. Around us, amongst us, news people spoke hushed words into shielded microphones. Ambulances began drifting up the rise, silent, blue lights flashing. We forced ourselves to turn to face the island. Too early for despair, too late for hope.
Down by the slipway children were standing in small groups, confused, waiting for parents who had not yet arrived.
A hand pressed gently against my back, another placed a coffee cup into my hand. I could not see Elsa.
‘Here.’ An arm in a grey sleeve, steadying me, so that I might not spill the coffee.
‘Thank you,’ I murmured. That small unbearable kindness: I looked only at the hand that offered it, afraid that I would give myself away if my eye met the eye of this stranger.
‘Be assured that all will be well.’ Words spoken softly, in accented English, the man’s mouth by my ear.
I glanced upwards, saw a shock of black hair, a grey vestment.
You can’t know that all will be well, I thought. But there was kindness in the man’s eyes. I nodded and thanked him for the coffee.
Further down the slipway I saw Elsa, staring out across the fjord. A new boat was crossing the mirror-flat water. A fresh wave of ambulances was approaching from the rise. All else was silence.
When I looked around again the priest was gone.
I was about to return to Elsa when I felt the phone in my pocket vibrate.
CELEBRATE
That same word. Another film clip that was not a film clip. This was either a mistake, or a cruel joke. I deleted the clip and blocked the number from my phone.
There was one child on this last boat. A boy, shockingly young, statue-like in the bow, arm in a blood-blackened sling. The officer at the wheel took the key from the ignition; his colleagues moored the boat to concrete posts on the jetty.
‘Oh please God, no.’
Every face turned towards Elsa. The boy stared at her, eyes wide. She had spoken the words loudly and clearly. I took my wife by the shoulder, drew her away from the group towards a rocky spit that pointed out towards the sea.
She looked across at the jetty. I followed her eye, saw the boy carried up into the air, held tightly in his mother’s arms. The arc lights picked out the wetness of their faces, the relief, the love.
‘I mean,’ Elsa said, her voice level, ‘we don’t know, of course, because no one has told us. But actually we do know, and every other parent here knows.’
She looked over her shoulder at the other parents. The group had scattered. Some stood looking out across the ink-black fjord. Others sat huddled in groups, blankets around their knees, clustered around the arc lights and the heaters. Elsa sat down, stretched her legs out along the rock, pointing out towards the island.
‘How many of us are there left?’ she said.
‘Sixty?’ I said. ‘Seventy?’
‘So that’s what? Forty missing kids? Fifty?’
‘These are just the parents who live near Oslo,’ I said. ‘I’m guessing.’
‘So it’s more?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘So strange,’ she said. ‘Right now I feel calm.’
‘Because we aren’t out of hope.’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, actually we are.’
The boy looked smaller than ever. He sat bolt upright, saying nothing, still in his orange life preserver, as his mother talked to the medical crew.
‘Cal,’ said Elsa, ‘you need to understand this: that boy is the last of the children.’
As the next boat drew near we saw the shrouded bodies on the deck and turned away.
A new wave of adults began to arrive. The parents of the missing, contacted by the police, setting out across the country, desperate for news.
Further up the rise were four rows of white tents. Officers were leading people inside, singly, or in pairs. Lights on metal stands threw vast shadows. You could see the stark outlines of the parents on white nylon walls, as they stood and identified their children. We saw hands raised to faces, saw shoulders bend and heads shake in disbelief.
When our turn came, a police officer led us to the nearest tent on the bottom row. On the canvas wall silhouetted figures slid a gurney into place.
‘I can wait with you, if you like,’ said the officer.
I shook my head. Elsa shook hers.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘No.’
‘Someone will be with you shortly.’
It was only then that we cried, wordless, by the white canvas wall that separated us from the body of our murdered child. We cried to prepare ourselves for what was to come: the fragmenting of bone, the tearing and obliteration of muscle and lung. We cried silently because we could not surrender to the pain, could not let it consume us, could not scream and rail and shout when we were surrounded by other parents who knew – but had not yet seen the proof – that their sons and their daughters would not be coming home.
‘Cal Curtis and Elsa Steen?’
I looked at Elsa. Elsa looked at me. She nodded.
‘Yes,’ I said, my voice as steady as I could keep it.
‘Yes,’ said Elsa.
‘This way.’
Dry earth. Stale air. Disinfectant.
The body had been covered with a hospital sheet, ruched at the thigh. Pearl-white underwear on milk-white skin in the blinding light of the arc lamp.
‘Is this how she was found?’ I asked.
The officer nodded.
Half-naked, and so very vulnerable. She must have jettisoned the kingfisher dress.
I loved her for wearing that dress. Those iridescent blues, constantly changing. So exuberant; so very unlike Licia.
‘Promise me you will have fun,’ I had said in the hall.
‘Why would you think this time would be any different?’ Vee had said. ‘You know she never does.’
<
br /> ‘I promise I will.’ Licia smiled a serious smile as she leaned in to kiss me, as if having fun would require preparation.
‘Love you, Licia.’
‘Love you so much, Dad.’
My little girl.
How unlike herself she was now. How strange her hand looked, palm up, fingertips bleached in the glare of the arc light, like an object I knew but could not recognize.
I turned to the police officer who stood between us and our daughter. She looked exhausted, worn out by other people’s grief.
The officer stepped out of the way. Elsa knelt down, began to draw the sheet down Licia’s torso.
‘Please,’ said the officer. ‘You mustn’t touch.’
The child-white skin. The pair of bullet wounds in her shoulder, a finger-length apart, just above the left clavicle. The bruising that radiated outwards.
Seawater had emptied the wounds of blood.
Elsa’s hand up by her mouth. ‘Oh, my …’
Something odd. Wrong.
I stepped forwards, crouched down. A beautiful face. A girl’s face, tiny pink spots the only disturbance on her otherwise perfect skin.
Elsa put three fingers on the strap of the girl’s bra, ran them up and down.
‘You mustn’t touch,’ said the officer again.
‘Elsa,’ I said. ‘Step back.’
‘This is not …’
‘I know …’
‘But …’
The girl’s lips were a fraction tighter than Licia’s. Her forehead a fraction broader; her hairline a fraction higher.
‘Fuck,’ said Elsa. ‘Oh fuck.’ She gave a confused laugh.
I turned to the officer. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘Laughter is not uncommon,’ she said levelly. ‘People often swear.’
‘She doesn’t understand,’ said Elsa.
‘There is no correct response,’ said the officer reflexively. ‘You are both very much in shock. I am here …’ she gave a professional half-smile, designed to reassure. ‘… to help.’
‘This is not my daughter.’ Elsa’s eyes were blazing.
‘Also a common reaction. Would you like me to call someone?’
‘It isn’t her,’ I said.
‘Would you like to be alone?’
‘You don’t understand,’ I said, keeping my voice as steady as I could. ‘This girl is not Alicia Curtis. This is someone else’s daughter.’
* * *
At four the sun came up. At six someone brought us waffles and hot chocolate. At eight we agreed with the police that we would go home. All the while that other girl lay there on her steel gurney in her plain white tent, still and alone, waiting for parents who did not come.
After the last ambulance left we stood on the shoreline, eyes fixed on the fjord, as if something might change, as if some new and better reality might dislodge this one. And as the lights in the tents were extinguished one by one I felt a guilty, vertiginous hope take hold of me.
What if our daughter were not amongst the dead?
PART TWO
The Sceptic
6
We thanked the policeman who had driven us home, walked the last fifty metres up the tarmacked path, turned left at the barrier.
Another police car was parked on the path outside the apartment. Its doors were thrown open, blocking the way. Next to it was a grey van.
At the front of the van Elsa’s father stood talking to a detective in a dirty suit.
‘Henrik,’ I said.
Henrik turned, began to walk towards us. ‘Oh, Cal,’ he said. ‘Elsa.’
The detective moved with him, tracking him. He was fifty, I guessed, face ugly with lack of sleep, his cuffs stained with late-night food.
Henrik and Elsa held each other, all sinews and silent suffering. I knew Elsa. She and her father would not cry, either of them. Not here in front of strangers.
Henrik embraced me. I heard him whisper, ‘Courage, Cal.’
I stepped away. We looked at each other, nodded. After all, we still didn’t know.
The door of the apartment building swung open. Two ponytailed female officers. The first carried Licia’s iMac in a large plastic crate, along with Vee’s gaming laptop. The other woman carried a smaller crate that contained two iPads, two old mobile phones, and my own laptop. She smiled at me as if we were friends. I saw the green drinking glass from the bathroom, spattered with toothpaste, and in the glass our toothbrushes. I did not return her smile.
Some tiny movement at the edge of my vision.
Vee was standing in her sister’s window. She looked bleached out, drained of blood.
‘You OK?’ I mouthed. Vee blinked hard and looked away. When she lifted her head to face me again, she nodded.
‘Mr Curtis?’
I turned. The detective in the dirty suit. His smile was friendly, though there was something behind the eyes that was not. He held out his hand. ‘May I have your cellphone?’
Licia’s bed was made. The blind was closed, the air stale and lifeless.
I walked to the window and wound the handle. Outside, metal slats jerked open. Light flooded in. Everything was neat, with none of the easy disorder of Vee’s bedroom. The plain blue carpet and the clean white walls and the cheap IKEA bedframe, none of which we owned. Licia had never made the room her own.
I sat down on her bed. My little girl, I would say, and she would sigh, and roll her eyes, and make her voice deep. ‘Don’t tell me I’m little. Who wants to be little?’ Still she would lean in to me briefly, before thinking better of it, pushing me laughingly away. The closest she ever got to rebellion.
I lay my head on the pillow, smelled the washing powder and the soap and the patchouli scent that make up Licia’s smell.
My little girl, I thought. Fifteen and gone. But my other daughter’s voice pulled me back.
‘Dad!’
‘Coming, Vee!’
There was Vee in the living room, balled into the rented blue sofa, a bag of cheap yellow sweets on the table in front of her, flicking through the channels on the rented TV. On every channel a new opinion over the same images, over and over and over. The bomb, the obliterated town hall, the ash raining down through the burnt air. Hard to know what you were looking at; everything grey and indistinct.
Above the sofa a two-metre square of deep red-brown. Another of Elsa’s photographs, Carmine 34. The only object in the room that we actually owned.
From the kitchen I could hear Elsa’s bare feet scuffing about.
‘Vee,’ I said. ‘Let’s eat.’
‘Not hungry. Thanks though.’ Looking at me all the while.
‘What you got in that bag?’
‘Scum bananas. They’re actually pretty good.’ Still staring at me. ‘Are you really not going to get that?’
‘Get what?’
The doorbell chimed.
Vee turned towards the hall. ‘You didn’t hear it the first time?’
‘Did it ring before?’
Vee nodded.
I walked through the dark interior of the apartment to the hall, looked at the screen on the entryphone. Edvard, staring awkwardly down at the camera.
I pressed the button, heard the door to the building swing open. I opened the front door, watched as he appeared around the corner. He was carrying a scuffed plastic bag, wearing yesterday’s shirt. He looked flat and ragged, as if he had been up all night. He reached out, hugged me awkwardly, patted my back as he stepped away.
‘Jo sends his love.’
‘Thanks, Edvard,’ I said. ‘Appreciate it.’
He gave a little half-smile. ‘I did think you might need these.’ He looked down at the plastic bag in his hand. ‘Normally they’d just download your phone and hand it back, but they’re up to their eyes right now.’
He opened the bag, handed me three simple grey mobile phones.
From his shirt pocket he took three folded envelopes. ‘Sim cards.’
‘They didn’t take mine.’ Vee
was beside me, blinking up at Edvard.
Edvard smiled. ‘They will. Once they realize they haven’t.’
‘OK.’ She reached into her jeans pocket, held out her phone.
Edvard shook his head. ‘I’m not on the clock.’ He stood there for a moment, staring at Vee. ‘I can’t imagine what this is like for you, Viktoria.’ He smiled awkwardly, turned and walked briskly along the passage.
Vee watched him go, listened as his footsteps faded down the passageway. The main door swung open; it swung shut. She turned to me. ‘Jo’s so great, and Edvard’s so weird.’
She headed into the living room. I heard her sit heavily down on the sofa, followed her in.
The images had switched to aerial shots from the news helicopters. Clothing lay scattered. Bodies lined the water’s edge, some in bags.
‘Love,’ I said, ‘I don’t think watching this is a such a great idea.’
‘But yesterday, that clip they showed. Same dress. Same hair. So we know she was alive. And they never showed that bit again. Which is weird, right? We agree on that? And we agree that the bomb was a diversion? And the children on the island were the real target?’
‘We don’t know that for certain.’
‘Actually yes, we do.’ She picked up her phone, unlocked it, handed it to me.
PRESS RELEASE
All media
From the desk of Commander John Andersen
12 p.m., 23 June
‘What is this, Vee?’
‘Read it.’
At first you will call us child-murderers.
The actions we will take today are horrible, unthinkable to any civilized person. Yet the ‘children’ we eliminate on this peaceful island would soon enough have on their hands the blood of our white brothers and sisters. And so we are compelled to act.
We must learn the lesson our enemies learned long ago: that the child is never simply the child. Children are soldiers. They are transmitters of ideology. We underestimate them at our peril.
Their parents and their parents’ parents have opened our borders and left us at the mercy of an ideology that would enslave our women and emasculate our men. And thus we target this new generation of traitors. Thus shall we dismantle tomorrow’s treacherous elite, for they are lost to the ways of God and of our people.
The Island Page 7