A Summer of Drowning

by John Burnside

  ‘Really?’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine much happens –’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ I said, coming in a little too quickly. I shot a sideways glance at Mother. ‘All kinds of odd things happen,’ I continued. ‘There’s a long history of things happening here. You should talk to our neighbour –’

  Mother laughed. ‘I wouldn’t recommend it,’ she said. ‘Not unless you can stay for another month.’

  Frank Verne looked at her, as if he wanted to speak, but he didn’t say anything. He turned back to me. ‘Odd things?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘Two brothers just vanished …’ I was about to go on, but I’d felt Mother tense at the mention of the Sigfridssons. She must have heard something about Harald, though I hadn’t spoken about it, and I didn’t think she had seen Kyrre. Maybe she’d spoken to someone at the shops in Kvaløysletta. Whatever she knew, I could tell she didn’t feel happy with this topic of conversation.

  Frank Verne was aware of the change in her manner too, but he continued. How could he not? He didn’t want to seem dismissive and risk hurting my feelings. ‘How do you mean, vanished?’ he said.

  Mother stood up. ‘People vanish all the time,’ she said, as she went to the cupboard to fetch more wine. ‘It’s one of their saving graces.’

  Frank Verne was surprised by this. Maybe, for a moment at least, he thought she was being callous. Not to the drowned boys – he knew nothing of them I supposed – but to me. Callous in a fun way, of course, but with a warning about it as well, and it was clear that he didn’t quite know what to say for a moment – and, for that moment, we both sat watching as Mother took out a bottle, opened it and set it on the table. Then she sat.

  ‘Have you ever noticed that the old stories are all about disappearances,’ she said, not changing the subject, but changing the subject. ‘Somebody goes out in the moonlight, and suddenly they’re gone –’

  ‘But this isn’t one of those stories,’ I said.

  Mother looked at me. The warning was clear now, though it was only in her eyes and I don’t think Frank Verne really saw that. When she spoke her voice was light, pleasant, just a touch mysterious, but in a mocking way. ‘Are you sure?’ she said.

  I didn’t say anything. I looked at Frank Verne. He seemed surprised, and interested in all this, as if he thought he might have stumbled into some revelation, some secret that Mother was on the point of giving away, in spite of herself. Though whether he was interested as a journalist or in some other capacity, I couldn’t have said. I suppose Mother sensed that, then, and perhaps she had the same thought – which for her, would have come under the heading of doubt – for she gave a low, sad laugh, a laugh that betokened sympathy for Kyrre Opdahl, with his folk tales and superstition, and for anyone else who might share his crazy ideas. ‘It’s always one of those stories,’ she said. Her eyes lingered on me, then she turned to Frank Verne. ‘The winters are long,’ she said, as she refilled his glass. ‘And the summers are sleepless. Everybody goes a little crazy from time to time.’

  * * *

  I went to bed as soon as I could decently leave them, and I lay for a while, listening to the sound of their voices mingling with the thin, oddly sweet drone of the wind in the eaves overhead. It was a cool, white night, and there was no other sound, and I think I drifted off for a while, but I was awake again when Mother showed Frank Verne to the spare room, and I listened, with a mixed feeling of awe and dismay, as she told him what, as a guest, he needed to know. Her voice was only just above a whisper, I couldn’t hear the actual words, but I knew what she was saying and I heard the occasional soft murmur of assent or understanding as Frank Verne took it all in. Where the bathroom was, help himself to stuff if he got up early, where my room was so he knew not to disturb me. I knew all this, though in all the time we had lived here, we hadn’t had a guest to stay, and I could picture them in the doorway, hesitant and a little awkward, possibly tempted to act in a different way, and constrained only by the fact of me – awake, listening, possibly sensed, just a few feet away. Then, when everything that needed to be said had been said, I heard her wish him goodnight, and the door to the spare room closed. A moment later, the door to Mother’s room, which she usually left open, swung shut too, and the house was silent, except for the occasional creak as Frank Verne went back and forth next door, wondering what might have been.

  Some time later, I woke suddenly. I couldn’t hear anything, but I sensed them there – Mother and her journalist lying asleep in their separate beds, divided from me by a wall, yet strangely intimate and magnetic in their closed rooms. I got up quickly, and put my clothes on; then, without even stopping for coffee, I hurried out into the cool air. It was a still, clear end to the night, not a breath of wind and an odd white overhead, the kind of white night they show in the old storybooks Kyrre used to give me every Christmas when I was little. It was the world I had grown up thinking of as the supernatural – not the dark forests or rocky backlands where trolls lived form of the supernatural, but the romantic, silvery, boy meets ghost-girl on the seashore variety, where everything is beautiful and doomed and, at the same time, strangely reassuring. I didn’t know why it should be so, but I always looked back on those stories with a certain fondness and I remember finding an odd comfort in them, even as a child. In those stories, everyone had a double or a phantom lover on the far side of some unnamed and indefinable borderline, a line that nobody could see on maps or ships’ charts, and there was constant traffic between one side and the other. Constant traffic and endless transformation – and I suppose that was what beguiled me about it. The way one thing became another, the way a hand reaching to skim the surface of a lake would feel, if only for a moment, the chill, or the eerie calm, of a proximate world. It wasn’t that I believed in spirits and trolls, and I wasn’t that interested in handsome princes or seventh sons. No: what I liked about that pictured world was what it said about the world I already knew – that it wasn’t as fixed as I’d been led to believe, that it was shifting around me, endlessly reshaping itself. That’s an appealing notion to a child; or it was to me, at least. Through all those years when I was growing up there was always the possibility that the world would surprise me – that I would wake up one day and find it exactly as it had been the day before and, at the same time, utterly different.

  I headed down to the shore. It felt good, being alone. Being unseen. Usually, on such a night, Mother would have been in the studio and if, by chance, she had looked out from the big window at the back of the house, she would have seen the greenish inland light over the carved rocks and the birch wood, not this silvery shore light. That was what she should have been doing, of course. She should have been in the studio, working on the next painting for the new show, and she should have been completely immersed in the work. Frank Verne should have been back in Tromsø, and Mother should have forgotten him the moment he left, just as she forgot the rest of us, as soon as she closed the door to her studio and found herself alone in what I had come to think of as her natural habitat. She shouldn’t have let this stranger stay in the house; she shouldn’t have stood in the doorway with him, considering a possibility that wasn’t possible. She shouldn’t be falling in love, or infatuation, or whatever it was. That wasn’t who she was. Not really. Who she was would be standing in front of the new painting, listening to it, not thinking about some man. Listening, paying attention, not putting anything between her and the work. That was how she had described it, once, to a woman who had driven over from Tromsø to interview her for the local paper. She had gone to considerable trouble to explain it all, how it was more like listening than looking, how everything was in the waiting, in a state of extreme preparedness for the picture to arrive, and how hard it had been for her, to learn not to think, not to choose, not to make decisions about what she was doing. She had explained it all so carefully, which meant she must have liked that journalist, she must really have wanted he
r to understand – and I remember how amused she was when Ryvold brought the article to the house the following Saturday, that the woman had either forgotten or chosen not to include that explanation. Instead, she talked about the northern landscape, and influences, and how courageous Mother had been, to leave the city and come to live here on her own. They always talked about what a recluse she was, after they had sat all afternoon with her, drinking her tea and eating her special cakes, and she never seemed to mind. At the time I thought this new journalist, this American, would be no different and that, sooner or later, on some Saturday morning over tea and napoleon cakes with Rott and Ryvold and the others, Mother would have a good laugh over what he had written.

  I followed the path down through the stand of birch trees between Mother’s garden and the meadows, then I crossed the coast road. It was a still night, but no matter how still it was, there would always be a faint drift of wind along that road, a local current touched with the scent of sea fog and kråkebolle, flowing from one end of the island to the other like a river. I remember that thread of wind flickering across my face as I turned to look for traffic. Then I was crossing the first meadow, veering away from the narrow track that led down to Kyrre’s hytte, because I didn’t want Martin Crosbie to think I was spying on him. The grass was dry, but it was so thick, and so lush, laced with wildflowers and shadows, that I slowed on the first few steps, the way a bather slows as she walks into a quick tide – and that was when I saw the girl, at the far end of the meadow, making her way up from the shore. I didn’t see who it was at first and, for a moment, I thought my imagination was playing tricks on me – because, on these white summer nights, I am just as susceptible as anyone else to the fanciful notions that I used to find in Kyrre’s old storybooks. After a moment, though, I realised that it was Maia. I hadn’t seen her since Grunnlovsdag, when she had stood with the Sigfridsson boys, watching the parade of ballroom dancers and American classic cars sliding by in the May snow, and I hadn’t seen her for months before that, but I knew who she was right away. If I’d bumped into her in a shop on Storgata, I would have had to think, to cast my mind back and pick out a name from the class roll of girls I’d ignored for years, but out there, in that sea of grass and shadows, I knew her immediately. She was just as she had always been, it seemed, and I remembered seeing her in the corridor one day, just before she dropped out of school, a girl with cropped hair and a loose, tomboy walk, with a slight bounce to her that said she was ready to take on the whole world – and I remembered that I’d been sad for her that day, because, for me at least, that boyish, fake-tough bounce of hers had precisely the opposite effect to what she intended. It made her fear visible, because anybody who paid any attention at all could have seen that the bounce was an act. She had been smiling that day, but I noticed that her fists were clenched, and her thin, bird-muscled body was not so much lean as undernourished. Which made sense, considering the stories people told about her home life. It was all bravado – and that night, as she came bouncing up out of nowhere, in a place where she so obviously did not belong, I thought it was the same act, an act all the more pathetic for being, as far as she knew, unwitnessed, and I felt sorry for her again because, even though I didn’t think she had belonged with Mats and Harald at Grunnlovsdag, even though she had looked like an intruder in their private, flaxen-haired world, I assumed that she must have felt something for them, some fondness, say, or perhaps some confused romantic attachment, which could only mean that this act she was putting on, for herself, for no one, was a cover for some variety of pain or grief that I was unable to imagine.

  I couldn’t have imagined it, of course – and maybe that was the reason why I stopped and turned aside, so that our paths wouldn’t cross. Had I continued, I would have met her in the middle of that sea of grass and shadows, and I didn’t want that, all of a sudden. I didn’t want to intrude on her act. I didn’t want her to know that it had been witnessed and seen through – so I stopped and, if I didn’t exactly duck, I did bend into a crouch, my head level with the top of the surrounding grass. At the same time, I changed course and began walking, still crouched, towards the west edge of the meadow, where the land dipped down to a chill, black stream bordered on both sides by thick veils of a dusty-flowered, water-loving plant that Mother had painted often in the little botanical studies and still lifes she did from time to time for her own amusement. Enghumleblomst – an elaborate name for such a common plant. Its botanical name was Geum rivale, which made it a relative of those gorgeous red and golden flowers she grew in her sun garden, but where those plants belonged to warmth and dry limestone, the native variety was always a sign of water and thick, sweet mud.

  For a moment, it felt like a game. Like hide-and-seek, say – one of those games children play, in fun and in earnest, with other children that they do not especially care for, but are obliged to acknowledge. I was sure she hadn’t seen me but, as I veered away, in my half-crouching stance, I was watching her all the while – or at least, I thought I was. For thirty seconds, maybe longer, I watched as she came bouncing up the slope from the shore, her face turned away slightly, her arms raised just a little, as if she were feeling her way through a force field – and then, in a matter of milliseconds, she wasn’t there any more. I didn’t see how it happened. I didn’t see her trip and fall, there wasn’t a point at which she noticed me and ducked down, as I had, to avoid being seen, but one moment she was there, and the next she had disappeared. It was ridiculous. I stopped dead and stood up straight, peering out over the thick mass of grass and wildflowers to see where she had gone, no longer concerned whether she saw me or not, but she wasn’t there. It was as if the ground had opened up and swallowed her, or like one of those tricks they do in movies, when they can’t think of anything better to beguile or mystify the audience: one moment, she was there, the next, she was gone, but there was no event, no transition from there to not-there, no disappearance. I looked off to the left, towards the hytte, half expecting her to reappear by Martin’s car, or on the track just beyond, but there was nothing. I waited for a movement, or maybe a sudden peal of laughter, in the thick grass between me and the last place I’d seen her, because it wouldn’t have surprised me if she had known I was there all along, and had only pretended not to see me. But nothing happened. It really was just as if she had never been there at all – and, after a moment, I decided that she hadn’t. It had all been an illusion, a trick of the light that had allowed me to summon up the one person who held the key to the mystery and, obviously, I had allowed myself to be taken in, not by a girl, or a phantom, but by my own susceptibility and a confused fondness for those sad white boys that, until that moment, I hadn’t known I possessed.

  Mother wasn’t alone in not wanting to talk about the Sigfridsson boys. Oh, it’s true, people discussed the events of that summer, asking aloud how such a tragedy could have happened, but they didn’t dwell. They made a space in their lives for these inexplicable events, but it was just enough to set the mystery down and then, with a modicum of care and of giving the boys their due, to forget about it. It wasn’t the usual sort of forgetting, of course: there was always something there, at the outer limit of their awareness, the way the cemetery sits at the edge of the town, the headstones set out in ordered rows, the names and dates in gold letters, and so banished into the untellable space of recent history. The only one who didn’t want to let it go was Kyrre Opdahl – the boys had been taken, he said; we hadn’t seen the last of this; this was the huldra’s doing – though as far as I know, he didn’t choose to air his theory to anyone else but me. He didn’t say who the huldra was, though I think by then he had put two and two together. As for me, I thought he was just being Kyrre. Nothing he said made any sense as an explanation of what had happened, and I was still looking for answers of my own. I had seen Maia with the boys, but that could have been nothing more than a coincidence and, even if it wasn’t, I was probably more concerned for her, at that point, than I was afraid of her. I had he
ard that, after Harald died, she had run away from home, and was out on her own somewhere, and the questions that troubled me were about the ordinary facts of her day-to-day existence. Where was she? Where did she sleep? What did she eat? What did she do for money? I had an inkling of why she had left her mother’s house, but where she had actually gone was a mystery. I couldn’t imagine anybody else offering her a bed or a meal. I couldn’t imagine anyone taking her in. What I could imagine was another drowning. Hers. What I could imagine was some stupid teenage death pact, made between two impressionable boys and a lost, unloved girl, and now that two were dead, I pictured Maia floating in the Sound somewhere downshore, and a stolen boat drifting on the tide, miles away, empty, barely moving, on water that, to all appearances, was as still and unbroken as the surface of an empty mirror.

  * * *

  There were summers when Kyrre Opdahl’s guests would be surprised by how warm it could get, up here in the frozen north. They would come with sweaters and thermal socks, expecting a cold, austere land – and they were disappointed when they found themselves walking on the shore in T-shirts and sandals, or rummaging in the freezer at the Straumsbukta store for Raspberry Ripple ice cream. For us, though, it was different. Our winters were long and dark, and we would start to feel like people under house arrest long before spring came – so when the thermometer rose to twenty or thirty degrees and the land between the shore and the meadows was spotted with gentian and jåblom, it became almost impossible for us to stay indoors, even at night. Sometimes, the outdoors seemed so vast and illumined, and the memory of the winter darkness was so strong, that we had to go out and walk on the shore, or wander about the meadows, filling our heads with light. To stay at home, reading a book or watching television, was like sitting in the foyer of a theatre reading the programme, while the play unfolded on a brightly lit stage, just a few yards away.