A Summer of Drowning

by John Burnside

  When I reached the hytte, the door was open. I knocked, as usual, then I walked in. Kyrre Opdahl was at the table by the window, surrounded by piles of crockery and glassware. In one corner, there was a stack of boxes and it was obvious, right away, that this wasn’t the usual end-of-season chore. This was something unusual, something final.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  Kyrre looked up and I could see that he was surprised to see me there. Surprised – and not at all happy – and I realised, at once, that he wished I hadn’t come. He pursed his lips, in that way he did, then he went on with his work. ‘It seems that my summer guest has gone away,’ he said at last.

  ‘What do you mean – gone away?’

  ‘He left. Didn’t say a word, just packed up and left –’

  ‘How do you know he left?’

  He looked around the room. ‘Because he’s not here,’ he said. ‘His car’s not here. His things aren’t here. He’s gone –’ He nodded to himself. ‘Yes, he’s gone all right – which is fine by me. I just don’t want to make it easy for anyone else to move in.’

  It’s the end of the season. I said. ‘Nobody’s coming now.’

  He went to the cupboard and took out the next stack of crockery. ‘You know what I mean,’ he said.

  I did know, of course; but I didn’t say so.

  ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure I want to let it out again. Not now.’

  I couldn’t say anything. I had always treated his huldra story as just that – a story – but I knew better now, because, now, I knew that something out of the ordinary had happened in this very place, and I nodded – or maybe it wasn’t quite a nod, but a slight shake of my head: just the hint of a movement, in spite of myself. I wanted to tell him what I had seen, but I didn’t know how. Besides, there was too much that I couldn’t explain. The absence of a body. The missing car. Mother’s disbelief. None of it made any sense.

  Kyrre’s lips tightened. ‘Akkurat,’ he said, quietly, in that grim way of his, though I hadn’t spoken a word. He opened another box and started loading it with books. They were old storybooks and paperback novels, most of them for children, with a few crime thrillers for the grown-ups. Some of them were familiar from my childhood. Fairy stories, picture books, a fat volume of rhymes and songs called Den Store Barne-Sangboka that I remembered singing from as a little girl. He smiled sadly. ‘Some of these books have been here for twenty years,’ he said. ‘And I’ll bet they’ve never been opened in all that time.’

  I nodded. ‘They bring their own,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘Nobody reads books like these any more,’ he said. He picked one book from the pile and held it up. It was a collection of old folk stories, with a picture of a beautiful girl in a red dress on the cover. ‘You know what this is?’ he said.

  I knew who it was, of course I did. But I didn’t want to play that game. This girl in a red dress wasn’t Maia, she was just a character from a story, a creature born of the panic in lonely places and a perverse, incommunicable longing. ‘I saw him take the boat out,’ I said, though I hadn’t meant to say it. ‘He was …’ I thought for a moment, and I knew what I was about to say was ridiculous, but there was no other way to say it. ‘He was happy,’ I said.

  ‘Happy?’

  Tears welled in my eyes unexpectedly, but I didn’t know what I was crying for. It wasn’t for Martin Crosbie. It wasn’t for the Sigfridssons. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Kyrre put down the book and gave me a long look. I thought he would ask questions, try to get at the story – and I could see that he wanted to, because I was a witness, the one witness he had to the story he knew was unfolding in this place. Then, slowly, as if he were doing it on purpose, his eyes filled with sympathetic tears. He put out his hand and touched me on the shoulder. ‘You poor girl,’ he said. I thought, for a moment, that he was going to put his arms around me, give me a hug, try to comfort me – and a thin surge of panic rose in my throat. I didn’t want sympathy; I didn’t want to be comforted – and he understood that immediately. He hesitated for a moment, his hand on my shoulder, and then his arm fell to his side and he stood there, not saying anything, strangely bereft on my behalf.

  I let out an apologetic laugh then and shook my head. ‘I’m all right,’ I said. ‘Besides – it wasn’t –’ I didn’t know what to say. I felt sad, but my tears really hadn’t been for Martin Crosbie, or for the boys. They hadn’t even been for Mother’s betrayal, or for the fact that she hadn’t even known she was betraying me. No: at that moment, I felt sad for this old man and his clumsy, caring heart – and maybe I was beginning to understand something, about him and about myself, that I hadn’t understood before. Of course, I knew the image people had of me, at school. How cold and stuck-up they thought I was, because I didn’t have a best friend, or that supposed prize, a boyfriend, tagging along with me on Saturday afternoons in town. They saw that I wasn’t affectionate, or romantic, they saw that I wasn’t nice – but it had never bothered me one little bit what they thought. I didn’t have an intimate circle of girls who were just like me, girls who read the same books and watched the same movies and listened to the same music – and I didn’t want that. I didn’t want friends and I didn’t want some pretty, inarticulate boy to run around with and, at the same time, to feel slightly awkward about, knowing that he wasn’t quite good enough, but that he would have to do, for the time being. I didn’t even have one of those substitute special friends, like the ones girls like me have in movies. The gay surrogate. The shy nerd who comes on all heroic in the final reel. I was just me, by myself. The only people I had ever cared about, in any meaningful way, were Mother and this odd, slightly mad old man – and all at once, as we stood there, packing books into boxes, with summer coming to an end and all the stories suddenly too dark and strange for comfort, I realised that it was him, this taken-for-granted good neighbour, this mad, lonely old man, that I had loved all along. He was the father that this place had given me, and he was my only friend, this embarrassing man with his ridiculous true stories about trolls and spirits, and his long, clouded memory, a memory that seemed as old and perverse as the tide.

  I looked at him. He peered at me over his glasses for a few seconds, as if in wonder at the odd complexity that had suddenly turned up in a girl he had known all her short life, then he smiled. ‘Let’s get to work,’ he said. ‘We’ll feel a lot better when this place is all cleared up.’

  I don’t know how I could have been so naive, but for a while it seemed as if Kyrre’s plan had actually worked. It really did feel like an exorcism, cleaning out the hytte, and during the days that followed, with Mother alone in her studio again and no sign of Maia anywhere, I even started to believe, or at least to hope, that the summer of drowning was finally over. But three days later, when it had just begun to seem that things had gone back to how they were before, I woke again with an overwhelming sense of dread. It was early. I could hear Mother in the kitchen, going about her usual morning routine, clearing last night’s dishes, making coffee, working in a quiet that only deepened for being interrupted occasionally. This was where she got her ideas, she had said once, and though I understood that it was partly something she had thought up to say to journalists, I also believe that she really did treasure those moments, and I think something of what she did in the studio originated in the silence after a kettle boils, or the quiet of turning round and seeing a boat out on the Sound, gliding slowly past the mountains, just far enough away that she couldn’t hear it. The quiet before a bird began to sing, then the quiet after; the feeling that came, sometimes, when she was alone in the house, that nothing would ever happen again. No sound, no movement. No passage of time. The studio was where she worked, and the dining room was where she negotiated with the outside world – but, in many ways, her true home was the kitchen, especially on those quiet mornings when she got up early and had a solitary breakfast before she began to paint. Other people passed through from time to time – and I includ
e myself among those others – but when she was alone there, that room was transformed into a space that nobody else could ever enter, a temporary and provisional sanctuary that, for her, was all the more reliable for being imaginary and impermanent.

  Naturally, I didn’t like to disturb her when she was in that place. She probably never even realised that I understood it so well – when she talked to other people about it, she made light of it, as if it were just some anecdotal detail she was offering them, like a childhood memory or a story about her early career – but, looking back, I can see that I knew much more about her than either of us ever let on. I had learned her ways over years and they had become part of my life too, just as mine had been incorporated into hers. That house we lived in wasn’t just a building, surrounded by a garden and birch woods, it was a mapped lattice of rituals and habits that, silently, over years of trial and error and infinitesimal adjustments, we had created together, constantly defining and redefining ourselves and one another as we went. I never really thought about this until recently, but that was what she meant when she used the word home. You can’t share home, you can’t be with others there, not if you are like us. It has to be secret. For us, home is a place that nobody else ever sees, an everyday and, at the same time, mysterious terrain of wind and snow and white nights, with colours out of a Sohlberg painting and faint, faraway cries coming up from the meadows or the shoreline at night, touching us as we dreamed or lay awake in the insomnia of midnattsol, before it moved on.

  It was my house and it was hers, and to an extent it was ours together, but we had each to decide when to be visible, and when to go unseen – and that morning I waited till she had finished her solitary breakfast and climbed the stairs to begin the day’s work before I went down. I had some cereal and a cup of coffee, then I headed out, with my camera and binoculars, to see what I could see. I didn’t think I would encounter anything out of the ordinary, though: now that the hytte was shut up and the game of the portrait was over, it felt like the afterwards of something. I think I imagined that, because the summer was over, the story we had been telling ourselves those last few months was finished with too. Martin Crosbie was gone, the Sigfridsson boys were buried, and Maia – well, until that morning, I thought Maia had drifted away, driven off the island by the turning weather and what she must have seen as Mother’s rejection. I really did think she was gone – so it came as a surprise, as I closed the front door behind me and turned, to see her standing by the gate, looking up at the house as if she were waiting for someone to come out and ask her in. She reminded me, then, of Martin Crosbie when I first saw him – a lonely figure on an empty road, not quite sure how he had come to be there – but, unlike Martin, she seemed to know exactly where she was, and exactly what she had come for. It was all an act, maybe, but then wasn’t everything about her an act? Wasn’t it all bravado, a bluff she’d learned to show the world, to let us all know that she didn’t care that we didn’t care about her? That she wasn’t going to be a victim? When she saw me, she smiled that knowing smile of hers, but she didn’t move. She just stayed where she was and waited for me to go to her. Which I did, of course. Not because I wanted to, but because that smile of hers was a challenge that, at the time, I didn’t know how to ignore. Something in me had to show her that I wasn’t bothered by what she said or did – but there was also more to it than that. I didn’t quite believe it at the time, but looking back, I can see that she had cast a spell on me – ridiculous, I know, but how else can I explain the strange, panicked mood that came over me when I saw her? How else can I explain the fear and, at the same time, the odd longing for some terrible event to occur? How else to explain that change of mood and how else to explain what happened next, when what happened next was so inexplicable? That it had something to do with Maia remains unproven, of course. It was a coincidence, nothing more – but it did seem, at the time, that there could be no other explanation for the fact that, all of a sudden, there were feathers everywhere. I hadn’t noticed them when I first saw her and then, in an instant, they were floating through the garden in their hundreds: white down fledging the spider’s webs on Mother’s rose bushes, odd plumes of charcoal or gull grey here and there among the dried-out grasses and lupins, traces of colour and softness, thin as smoke, clinging to the soft brown fuzz of the Himalayan poppy stems. They weren’t all from one bird, like when you find a kill under a hedge somewhere and you can trace it all back to an epicentre of torn beak and innards. No: that day, there were feathers of every kind and almost every possible colour, greys and whites and pale powder blues, as you would expect, but I remember seeing threads of an impossible, delicate pink snagged on the head of a Tromsø palm, and a single wisp of imperial yellow was pasted to the trunk of one of the birch trees by the gate. I couldn’t understand it. Maybe they had been there all along, and I just hadn’t noticed, but when I did, it seemed that there were hundreds of them, thousands even – soft, very downy feathers, floating on the air, settled in the grass, clinging to the leaves of the birch trees, drifting across the gravel at my feet as I started towards the gate. At that moment, they seemed to be everywhere at once – and the thought came to me that I should go and fetch Mother, so she could see. Only, I couldn’t move. All I could do was take it all in as the tide of feathers grew and scattered across the garden. Now, of course, I wish I had gone to find her, because things might have been different if she had been there. I wish I had been stronger, or braver, because that spell could have been broken and, if it had been, the huldra might have abandoned us as easily and quietly as the wind crossing a field and dying in the far grass, a small local darkness, gone to nothing in a clump of reeds or a pile of old timber.

  I looked at Maia, who was still standing motionless by the gate, but she appeared not to have noticed anything out of the ordinary, and for the briefest of moments, I suspected that it was all an illusion, a hallucination that she wasn’t even aware of. A moment later, it was over and, instead of hundreds and thousands of feathers, swirling around me and coating the earth at my feet, there was only a fistful of bedraggled plumes, like the aftermath a cat leaves when it catches a bird and dismembers it under a hedge. I looked around. A moment before, everything had seemed suddenly and darkly miraculous; now, it was the usual garden, the usual, plain light of day.

  ‘What was that?’ I said. I’m not sure, looking back, what I expected from Maia, but I think, for one absurd moment, that I hoped to engage her in some shared moment of bewilderment or wonder, as if, by doing that, I could have made a friend of her, somehow, in spite of what we both knew.

  ‘What?’ She looked off to the side, as if searching for a clue to what I meant – but it wasn’t real. She was mocking me.

  ‘The feathers –’ I said, then I forced myself to stop. I was annoyed with the way I was falling into her trap. Annoyed at being so easy to fool. I could see the way she was looking at me, and I was angry that I had somehow ceded the advantage to her. I had wanted to confront her, to ask what she was doing hanging around our house, or maybe remind her, coldly, and without the least trace of annoyance or irony, that Mother didn’t have any further use for her. Now she had the upper hand.

  She looked down. A few greyish wisps had settled on the path, just by her feet. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I see.’ She looked at me and smiled. ‘You’re right,’ she said, in what I took to be mock surprise. ‘Feathers.’

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said – and for one ridiculous moment, I was about to explain, before I caught myself.

  All the while, she had been regarding me with that same good-humoured contempt that the teachers had shown Mats Sigfridsson when he was lost for words in the classroom. For a moment, she was silent, lingering on that feeling, letting it sink in. Then she spoke, her voice suddenly bright. ‘Going out?’ she said. ‘Are you sure you’re well enough?’

  I didn’t respond to that; though now that she asked the question, I realised I’d had no idea where I was going, and all of a sudden, I didn’t w
ant to leave the house. It may have been fear, in part, that I would be exposed, out in the open – a fear I had never once felt, day or night, in my life – but it was also a reluctance to leave this girl alone, so close to where Mother was working. Because, at that moment, I was afraid for Mother. It sounds ridiculous now, but I suddenly had the notion that Mother really had fallen under the huldra’s spell, just as the Sigfridsson boys and Martin Crosbie had done. Why else would she allow this creature into our house? Why had she suddenly returned to portrait painting? Why did she seem so indifferent to my feelings about the intrusion? I could think of no other explanation than enchantment and, while I realise now that, when someone claims they can think of no other explanation, it’s only because they haven’t really considered the alternatives, I felt sick at heart and hopelessly undecided – which I was desperate for her not to see. But she did see, and she would have prolonged the moment – pretending, say, that she had another appointment with Mother – if Kyrre Opdahl hadn’t appeared at that very moment, walking slowly up the path towards us, his face fixed in what he must have imagined was the semblance of a friendly expression.

  ‘Good morning, young ladies,’ he said, his voice not like his usual voice at all, the tone strained, the language artificial. I couldn’t have imagined him using the words ‘young ladies’ until that moment and, of course, I knew he didn’t think Maia was any kind of lady. ‘What a beautiful day it is!’