“Here,” Pinky said and handed Sandra her jacket. “Sorry that I woke you. But this is an emergency. She’s out there. On the steps. She wants . . .” Pinky’s voice broke. “I said she’s not setting a foot inside this house!”
Sandra put on her jacket and went out and it was of course Inget Herrman who had been outside the door and not been let in. Inget Herrman who had taken a taxi to the house in the darker part of the woods again but now the taxi had driven off. Pinky had not let her in, what was she going to do? All of this was hanging in the air when Sandra came out to her, but it was nothing she said, instead she cheered up, Inget—because she was, despite all unexpected obstacles, in a wonderful mood—and that it was actually for her sake, Sandra’s, that she had taken a taxi all the way here from the city by the sea.
Because she had come up with something she wanted to say to Sandra, something important.
“Let’s have a seat here.” And they sat down on the steps, Inget Herrman and Sandra, and there they sat in the darkness and the cold but it was so beautiful anyway because there was a clear sky and thousands of stars were glittering in the sky above their heads. And suddenly Sandra did not regret it at all that she had gone out to Inget, suddenly she had no thought that it was stupid for the adults to wake her and more or less drag her out of bed in the middle of the night.
Just the opposite. This was suddenly a moment she did not want to miss. Not on her life.
Inget Herrman next to her, Inget, messy and drunk, whom you still could not help but like. You liked Pinky too, and that was what was also making everything so difficult.
Inget Herrman who had put her arm around her and started saying that she had come all the way from the city by the sea in order to tell Sandra, but she had of course been a bit too dazed to really remember what it was, the words in detail . . . but she got out enough, by the way of the stars:
“You have to look at the stars, Sandra.”
“Carefully, Sandra.”
“And then, then, you just have to . . . follow them.”
And it did not matter if what Inget Herrman said was not the most shocking truth, it was nice anyway. And suddenly, it was almost fantastic, they were interrupted by a movement below at the corner of the house, and suddenly the Islander was standing there in the flesh, with a tray of drinks in hand.
And sparkle sticks, or sparklers as they are also called, were poking out of the drinks.
So burning, glittering so fantastically—
And the Islander came with a big, wide smile, balancing the tray with the sparkling drinks in his hands, up the stairs up to heaven, where they were sitting in the middle, up to them.
The heart is a heartless hunter, Pinky.
Love does not save on humiliation, Pinky.
That is the way it is.
In other words, Pinky alone in the house where the Islander had snuck out via the basement, the “catering entrance,” as it was also called.
Yuck, Pinky, Pinky.
And later, much later that same night, Pinky in the corridor on the floor outside the Islander’s bedroom, in front of the closed, locked door. Pinky sobbing in her short, pushed-up skirt, pink underwear in the air, like a dog. Pinky, gradually sleeping a light and unhappy sleep, in the cramped corridor in the house in the darker part of the woods, on wall-to-wall carpet that was so ugly so ugly, so beige.
. . .
The heart is a heartless hunter.
Love does not save on humiliation.
That is what you can say about it.
And so, in other words, Bombshell Pinky Pink was finally disposed of. “I’m no longer a free man,” the Islander would rave the next day when he would explain to his daughter that in the future Inget Herrman would be spending more time in the house in the darker part than before. “At least not one hundred percent,” he would add, which would in any case be interesting in that he would namely never have said something like that even during Lorelei Lindberg’s time.
Without realizing it we are transformed into gray panthers, Islander. Was it like that?
Or something else.
Something with Inget?
It had namely never been part of the Islander’s style to not be with someone a hundred percent.
In the morning when Doris came to the house in the darker part she did not utter her usual “it really smells like a brothel in this house” in her Doris-specific way as she had a habit of doing. She understood intuitively there was something with the mood in the house, that something had happened. Something happy, something sad—or whatever it was.
But something that made it so that all comments were superfluous.
And when she went out into the kitchen she got to see Bombshell Pinky Pink at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee that was so cold and almost all of it was left in the mug.
“Never become a who—striptease dancer,” the Bombshell said to Doris Flinkenberg with quivering lips and did everything she could to act impartial, but her face was red from crying and her makeup was in streaks of dark green and dark brown and black everywhere, and in the next moment, when she had said that, her face wrinkled up and she started crying again.
“They just despise you . . . in the long run.”
“They say everything, but they don’t mean anything—”
And the sound of a car that had driven down to the house below.
“Pinky, the taxi’s here,” someone mumbled in the background.
And then later, Inget Herrman came strutting so energetically fresh out of the shower and stuck her head in the cubbyhole where the girls were changing for the day’s work.
“Didn’t I say that she would seduce him?” Doris Flinkenberg whispered.
Then the hunting season was over.
Shortly thereafter the women also left. The rental contract had run out, time to leave the house on the First Cape. The bus Eldrid’s Spiritual Sojourn did not want to start, so the women had to take a group taxi to the bus stop on the main country road in two trips.
They could have asked Bengt also, but the day the women left Bengt was in his barn, drunk, and refused to come out.
Also Sandra started leaving. To Åland, in order to visit relatives now and then.
It was in some ways a period of breaking up. “Everything that was wide open becomes a closed world again,” played on Doris’s radio cassette player.
And gradually at the beginning of the new year a family moved into the house on the First Cape. A completely ordinary one, they were called Backmansson and were mom, dad, son, and as it turned out the lawful owners of the house, or how it now was, their descendants in any case.
And Sandra and Doris continued to be together, continued to play. The mystery with the American girl, that, but also other games. Sandra and Doris continued to become obsessed with the details surrounding the events at Bule Marsh, Eddie’s death and all the rest. But they always came back to the same old thing. Besides, it was starting to become a bit tedious. They did not get anywhere.
The American girl, like a riptide.
But the little girl, Sandra, she sat on her windowsill in her room and hummed. She hummed the Eddie-song, which she knew pretty well now.
In Eddie-clothes, that was a secret. How she sometimes, in secret, away from Doris Flinkenberg in particular, put on those clothes, the American girl’s clothes, and walked around in them in the house in the darker part when she was alone there.
The boy. Bengt. Was he there? Was he?
She stood and watched him through the big panorama window in the basement of the house.
Sometimes he was definitely there. Sometimes it was less certain. Sometimes you did not know at all.
But also, sometimes it was enough just to imagine his presence.
And she grew, not up but she became older, and hummed her song, Mom, Mom, my song!
And looked out at the boy, the eternal, at the beginning of the woods.
Eddie in the darkness: it was those nights when she was alone in the ho
use in the darker part and she did not know what she was playing.
“I’m a strange bird,” she whispered into the darkness. “Are you one too?”
Breathed on the windowpane, drew figures in the mist that came from her breath.
The end of the Mystery with the American girl
IT WAS AT THE END OF THE SUMMER ALMOST HALF A YEAR LATER.
“Doris! Where are you going?”
“Out.”
This restlessness when Sandra Wärn was gone.
Doris Flinkenberg wandered through the woods in the direction of Bule Marsh.
The death of childhood/What Doris saw in the woods. Doris stood on Lore Cliff, on the farthest edge of the cliff’s precipice, like so many times before. She looked down at the smooth surface of the water about nine feet below her. She tried to see the bottom. She could not. And it was not the first time either. She and Sandra had stood at the same spot several hundred times earlier and they had realized the same thing every time. It was an impossibility. Bencku had never seen anything, for real.
What was on the map, it was just an idea. A picture.
Not a lie directly, but just what it was, a picture. An expression of.
“An expression of feeling and as such completely true.” Inget Herrman had said that to Doris Flinkenberg when Doris on her own—without Sandra—had gone to the Glass House and spoken with Inget and with Kenny, Inget’s sister, about something in connection with the mystery of the American girl. Completely private. It was not that it was supposed to be a secret, but a thought that had come and gone, and when she and Sandra had been busy with the mystery for a while Doris was strongly convinced that what had once been said was true. Good news. And she wanted, completely privately, to make Inget Herrman, whom she liked so much, happy—and Kenny, who was of course Eddie’s sister also—with the news. And it was not unreasonable that the first people you told what you almost knew to be true were those who were directly affected by it. In other words the relatives. The closest.
Sandra had not been there, besides she was gone, on Åland, with her relatives. And besides, something strange started coming into the Eddie game too, something foreign, something that in some way made Sandra drift away from her, Doris, a bit. Though Doris Flinkenberg could not exactly put her finger on what it was, it was something with those clothes, and the mannerisms. Sometimes Sandra dressed up for herself too, when Doris was not there, when they were not playing. Went and hummed that song for herself in her own way, the American girl’s song. The Eddie-song. Look, Mom, what they’ve done to my song. It looks like they’ve destroyed it.
In any case, Doris had gone to the Glass House when Inget Herrman was there. That was after the women had left the house on the First Cape, but Inget spent a lot of time in the District anyway, with the Islander in the house in the darker part of the woods, and sometimes she visited Kenny in the Glass House, just sometimes. Otherwise they did not seem to have much in common, Kenny and Inget Herrman.
“I suspect that she didn’t die. The American girl, that is to say, Eddie.”
That was what she had said to Inget Herrman and Kenny de Wire, in other words, she had gone to the Glass House expressly to say that.
But it had not gone the way she thought it would, not at all.
“What?” Kenny had said, as if to say she had not understood a bit of what Doris was talking about.
Inget Herrman, on the other hand, looked at her thoughtfully, really looked. And then she had almost burst out laughing, or not directly, but in some way had been, well, a bit amused. But when she had seen that Doris had been so happy and had wanted to surprise them, then she had become serious again, a bit motherly so to speak, like when you are talking to a two-year-old.
“But dear girl,” Inget Herrman had said, accordingly, “who is it who has fed you those kind of whoppers?”
“No one in particular,” Doris had mumbled and her spirits sank.
She had come to make them happy after all. Kenny and Inget. She liked Inget Herrman so much. The tea saucer eyes. The sexiest of the sexy.
But, “fed you those whoppers”? What were you supposed to say to that? And Doris had pulled back, wounded.
Not answered the question at all.
“Oh. It was just a thought. A game.”
She had said and then quickly changed the subject. And nothing more about it. But she had certainly had a hard time swallowing Kenny and Inget’s—well, what would you call it?—almost indifference. Lack of enthusiasm.
“Who?” Inget had asked in other words. And she would have been able to answer, for sure.
Rita. Rita Rat, one time ages ago. When they were younger.
It was because she, Doris, had thought she had seen something strange at Bule Marsh once, something that she really did not know what it had been. But it could have been—
And since Rita and Solveig had also been there at the marsh then, she had as it were tried to get closer to them, at first. In her own way. She had teased them a bit first, Solveig and Rita and Bengt, but for fun that is. Pretended to shoot them in the back when they were sitting by themselves on a pier on the Second Cape, keeping to themselves, so secretive, and had not wanted her to join them.
They had been so terribly frightened by it. In, yes, an interesting way. Rita had also become very angry and threatened to drown her most prized possession, the wedding present she had received from the cousin’s mama when she had come to the cousin’s house the first time, the Poppy radio cassette player, if she did not disappear right away.
She had been so angry, Rita, and there was something interesting about Rita in general. She was, also when she was angry, so obvious. You could see that something else was going on.
But later, one time in the woods, Rita had come to her. Not so long after. She had been different then. Normal. Easier to deal with. The way she actually always was, Rita, when Solveig was not there. When they were, as Solveig always nagged, “the two of them.”
And then Rita of her own accord had brought up the events at Bule Marsh. She had explained how she believed, or actually knew, she said that, how it was. She said she would tell Doris even though she really should not say anything, it was a big secret. Simply no one could be told.
They had promised her that. Her, the American girl.
Eddie de Wire. They had not known her of course, but they just happened to be in the right place at the right time, “or at the wrong place at the wrong time, depending on how you look at it,” Rita had said, and they had, against their will, been dragged into something, something big. Which could be dangerous.
“We helped her,” Rita said to Doris. “That’s our secret. Now that you know can you promise to keep it to yourself?”
Of course Doris had not promised anything right away, like on the spot. She was admittedly young then, but very used to having the wool pulled over her eyes. So before she promised anything, she wanted to be sure about what she was promising and why. She had in other words kindly asked to know more.
Rita had hesitated, but later she nevertheless met Doris Flinkenberg halfway. She and Solveig happened to be on the beach that morning. The girl had come there, the American girl, something had happened, she had told them. There had been a big fight, not between the American girl and Solveig and Rita but something the American girl had been a part of just before . . . in any case she could say nothing more about it—and yes, admittedly, the American girl fell into the lake, but she came up again.
“As luck would have it,” Rita said, relieved. “And guess who it was who saved her? It was Solveig.” Solveig who could swim so well and was truly capable of saving lives in the water.
The American girl had been so moved and thankful. She had as a matter of fact not really known how she should express her gratitude.
Finally, as a thank-you, the American girl told them everything about the rather terrible story that she had been dragged into with some people, not Bengt and Björn and them, but some others. And because of that she
had to get away. She had to disappear. Completely.
And she had in other words asked the girls to keep quiet about everything. That they had seen her that morning. She had to disappear.
Could she trust them? the American girl had wondered.
And Rita and Solveig gave their word.
And then, when Rita had told Doris Flinkenberg this, she asked Doris the same thing.
Could she trust Doris now? That she would keep the secret now that she knew everything? When Doris was still hesitating a bit, but mostly for the sake of show, she had probably already started thinking that it was quite nice just being entrusted with something so big and important and vital, that she could have thought about going along with almost anything, Rita had said again:
“Do you understand, Doris? This is a story involving many people and if it gets out it’s possible that nothing will ever be the same again. Not even in the cousin’s house . . .”
And that of course put the screws in Doris Flinkenberg. The most terrible thing Doris Flinkenberg could think of was that something in the cousin’s house would change irrevocably, something that could result in her being without a real home, and she would be forced back to her marsh papa and her marsh mama—
So Doris had finally promised, truly sworn, too. No, she would never ever say anything.
“Not a word to the cousin’s mama. Promise.”
That had been the hardest thing of all.
“Remember, Doris. It will become very complicated if a lot of people know. And you know how terrible this has been for her already. With Björn . . .
“Because the worst thing about this story,” Rita finally said. “Is. That it probably is the way it seems, that Björn went off and killed himself for Eddie’s sake. He was so in love with her. And he didn’t know her. He didn’t know who she was. He took it very much to heart to discover that she had been someone other than who he thought she would be, the whole time. But remember something else, Doris. Björn had a violent temper. And he wasn’t the first person in his family to off himself. Almost everybody there had snapped. For all sorts of reasons.
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