Inertia, page 18
Grandpa Bernt used to say one shouldn’t do that, because my little boy foot destroyed in a minute what it took the lichen hundreds of years to create.
Grandpa.
When I think of him my breath gets kind of heavy. Like there’s a stone in my chest.
If I’m being completely fucking honest he’s like a dad to me. Still, I can’t deal with visiting him in that place they call a hospice – the place you go to die. It’s like a concentration camp for cancer patients.
Grandpa has always taken care of me, watched me when Mum worked, scolded me when I did something stupid. If you disregard the religious shit I respect him one hundred per cent.
The problem is he lets the religious shit dictate his whole life.
I look out across the rocks. Lean forward to look really closely at the rough stone.
A myriad insects move in different directions: small black ants, big brownish-red ants and minute orange spiders with legs so small and so fast they appear to float across the rocks.
I kick another rock.
It rolls down the cliff with heavy thuds and finally hits the ground below with a sharp bang.
Several insects become visible in the indentation where the stone lay; shiny copper earwigs and matte black creepy-crawlies that rush around dazed by the sun.
I take a step back, suddenly worried a large furry spider will emerge.
I hate spiders.
Grandpa was the one who taught me all the names of the insects and plants. When I was little I got to come along to the congregation’s summer camp on Ljusterö. Since I wasn’t able to concentrate I didn’t have to participate in Bible school and singing, but I tagged along for all the other activities.
We went sailing and camping and grilled sausages. And we learned about animals and plants.
Grandpa explained that spiders play an important role in the ecosystem and that they are definitely not dangerous to humans.
It didn’t help.
Spiders are still the worst thing I know.
All that stuff with Grandpa seems so distant to me now, almost like it happened in another life, or was just something I saw on Netflix.
I keep going down to the water.
For each step the memory fades of the summers at camp and is replaced by the other shit, the shit that is my real life.
I remember Igor’s expression when he realised that I didn’t have the package of product samples, and Malte’s skinny body and gleaming gold teeth.
I let them down.
Then I think about all the other people I have let down, like Grandpa Bernt and Liam whom I promised I would stop working for Igor. And Alexandra who stood there crying behind her front door and wouldn’t let me in.
For fuck’s sake, don’t call me baby.
I guess she had a point.
But most of all I think of Mum.
All the things she nagged me about, that she has been there for me over the years etc., etc. – it’s actually true. Without her I don’t know what would have become of me. Now things have gone to hell anyway, but it would have happened a whole lot faster without her.
I hope she hurries up, that she gets the money soon, because I can’t handle staying here for much longer. Zombie-Jonas gets on my nerves. Rachel, too, but in a completely different way.
It has been five days since I arrived and the day after tomorrow, Friday, it will be Midsummer.
I would like to be really far from here by then.
When I get down to the jetty I pull off my trainers and jeans. Take the T-shirt off and place it next to them.
The wood is warm and sticky under my feet. It smells of tar and seaweed. All I hear is a low, tinny lapping.
I look down into the water.
It looks deep.
All I can see is a wad of yellowish-brown seaweed floating past by the jetty and a couple of small fish darting past in the sunlit surface water.
I imagine what it’s like further out, where the water is deep and cold. Where the Baltic herring swims and the eels slither along the bottom.
I stretch out and am just about to dive in when I turn around for some reason and look up toward the house.
There is a man standing outside Rachel’s window. He is too far away for me to able to make out what he looks like, but it seems like this person is shading his eyes with his hand and looking in through the window.
I am guessing this is one of Rachel’s friends and think of the sobbing from Jonas’s room. For a second, I consider going back up but I decide to swim instead, so turn to the sea, take a deep breath and dive in.
It is colder than I thought it would be, but it is as if my entire body welcomes the cold, as if I am born again down there in the cold, greenish-blue stillness.
I open my eyes and squint at the surface. Bubbles rise, the sun crumbles into golden flakes that float on the waves, as if it were a Christmas tree ornament that fell from the sky and smashed into a thousand pieces.
When I come up to the surface I float on my back for a while and listen to all the sounds in the ocean, strange little snaps and thuds and the constant hum of all the invisible life that swims, crawls and floats in the water.
‘You look like you’re enjoying yourself.’
I turn to the jetty, treading water.
Rachel is standing at the very edge, dressed in a navy blue bikini. Her eyes are red and slightly swollen, but her smile is wide.
‘Are you going to swim?’ I ask and hear how fucking stupid that sounds.
Because she is standing there, on the jetty, in her bikini. Of course she is going to take a swim, not weed the bloody rose bed.
But Rachel just laughs.
She bends her knees slightly and dives into the water a short way to my right.
It is a near-perfect dive. There is barely a ripple on the surface. And just like the time I saw her from the window upstairs, she swims under water for a long time before she surfaces, at least twenty yards away.
Then she front crawls towards me with slow movements.
‘God, that felt good,’ she says and wipes her hair out of her eyes with one hand while treading water.
‘Yes,’ I answer.
She heaves herself up and sits on the jetty, but I stay in, suddenly very aware of the fact that I am only wearing boxers. White ones too, that are definitely see-through when wet.
Rachel watches me with amusement.
‘Are you going to stay in long?’
‘A while,’ I say and feel my cheeks get hot even though the water is ice cold.
She shrugs slightly, closes her eyes and turns her face to the sun. The pale skin on her arms has goosebumps from the cold and I can see the outline of her nipples under her wet bikini top. She lets her feet swing slowly in the water and holds on to the edge of the jetty with her pale, slim fingers. Water is dripping from her long hair.
She is so damn fit.
I would give anything to touch her skin, run my hand through that hair, stroke her lips with my finger.
My legs feel like pieces of frozen meat in the cold water and I swim up to the edge of the jetty, at a safe distance from Rachel and grab on to the wood.
She looks at my hand and asks: ‘What does your bracelet say?’
I meet her gaze.
‘It’s just something I did when I was a kid,’ I say, feeling ashamed of the childish bracelet.
‘I can see that. But what does it say?’
‘“Mummy”. It says, “Mummy”. I made it for my mum.’
‘So beautiful,’ she whispers, reaching her hand out and stroking the bracelet lightly with her finger.
I’m not prepared for her touch. My hand jerks and I swallow hard.
There’s a long silence. Rachel furrows her brow and looks like she is about to start crying again. She blinks a few times and turns her head away.
‘Who came by?’ I ask, mostly to say something.
She pulls her feet out of the water and turns to me again.
‘Somebody came by just now,’ I say.
‘Did they?’
Without rushing she lifts her feet out of the water and stands up. Then she pushes her hands to the sky.
‘Yeah, a guy. He was standing outside your window, I thought . . .’
‘Outside my window? What did he look like?’
‘Well, I couldn’t really tell from here.’
Now I am trembling with cold. And not just because I am in the water, it is also because I am realising that if the man outside the window wasn’t a friend of hers it may very well have been one of Igor’s men.
‘Shit,’ I say. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’
Rachel raises her eyebrows.
‘What?’
‘Well, it could be something to do with that guy I told you about.’
‘The Russian? Surely you would have recognised him?’
‘It wasn’t him,’ I say. ‘But he might have sent someone else.’
Rachel cocks her head.
‘Aren’t you being a bit paranoid now, Samuel? Isn’t it more likely that someone actually was looking for me? A neighbour, for instance? Or maybe you were mistaken. Maybe it was a deer. They like to stand there in the flower bed and feast on the flowers. If I had a gun I would shoot them.’
She looks up at the house on the rock.
‘Show me where he was standing,’ she says calmly.
I heave myself out of the water and quickly pull my jeans on.
But I needn’t have worried.
Rachel is not looking at me at all, instead she is staring intently at the house with her hands on her hips.
We walk up the stairs in silence.
It gets warmer for every step we take and before we’re all the way up I am sweating again. The sun is baking my shoulders and my heart is thumping in my chest from the effort.
When we get to the top we round the deck and walk over to the two windows with bars that face west on the ground floor – Rachel’s and Jonas’s bedrooms.
Below the windows there is a narrow flower bed with some kind of plant with large, round leaves.
Rachel sinks into a squat and I do the same.
With her hand she carefully pushes the juicy, shiny leaves aside, revealing large footprints in the moist dirt – prints that look like they come from a pair of heavy men’s shoes.
Pernilla
W
hat am I actually trying to do here?
I began to have second thoughts even as I left a speechless Karl-Johan on the pavement yesterday.
That percolating sense of triumph that came over me when I snubbed him was soon replaced by a growing doubt and an anxiety strong enough that it almost made me turn around, run back and retract and repent, like the good girl I have always been.
I look around.
The industrial area is cloaked in that ghostly blue light that only exists for a short time in early summer when the real darkness never dares emerge.
I hurry my steps, turn off on the bike path that leads to the plant nursery and take a shortcut across a small patch of grass.
It is unfathomable.
I – a hard-working, evangelical helicopter parent – am here retrieving drug money from under a boulder for my son.
I – who am so law-abiding that it would make a newborn look like a criminal, who has never even got a parking ticket or forgotten to return a book to the library.
What would Father say?
What would God say?
Instinctively I turn around, as if God were lying in wait for me in the dark bushes.
I can almost hear Father’s deep voice as he reads from Hebrews:
‘And no creature is hidden from His sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.’
But the bike path lies empty behind me.
Not a movement to be seen, not a sound to be heard.
But the street lights are sparsely distanced and some are broken. It would be easy to hide in the dark between the domes of light, if one really wanted to.
I shudder, even though the night is warm, at the thought of the bald man with an Eastern European accent in the stairwell. The man Samuel called Igor.
The man who is a monster.
I don’t know if Samuel was right about Igor wanting to kill him, but I don’t dare take the chance, because suddenly it is clear to me, everything is so liberatingly simple: Samuel is my only child and I must do what I can to help him.
It is entirely possible that this new insight is actually a subconscious attempt to compensate Samuel for having denied him a father all these years.
So be it, in that case.
But that Russian monster will not be allowed to lay hands on my son.
Besides, it was high time that I stood up to Karl-Johan. But it took me quite a while to realise that he was actually hitting on me.
It upended my world view actually – that the pastor, of all people, would do something so low.
Because if he can behave like that, who can one trust?
No person.
No congregation.
And what about God? How are things between us, Him and me?
I hurry my steps and look into the dark, trying to keep the theological quandaries at bay, but the pastor’s face keeps intruding into my mind’s eye.
Maybe he is right that I ought to meet someone.
Ever since Samuel was born I haven’t had time for a real relationship.
Of course I have been on dates, I have even been in love a few times, but I always felt that Samuel’s and my delicate relationship wouldn’t withstand my letting a man into our lives in a significant way.
I think of Mario, the gym teacher at Huddinge high school, and feel a little butterfly in my stomach. What would happen if I called him and asked him over for dinner? If I really invited him into my life?
There is a sound behind me. Squeaking and clattering in the distance.
I step aside quickly, into the shadows next to the bike path. Stand behind a tree trunk and let my hand rest against the cold, rough bark.
The sound intensifies and a bike becomes visible fifty yards or so in the distance.
An older lady is bent over the handlebars, she seems to be struggling to keep the old bike moving. I realise something must have got stuck in the spokes, causing the clatter.
I press up against the trunk and wait until the woman has passed.
The noise dies away slowly in the direction of the plant nursery and I draw a sigh of relief.
I’m sure that Igor has heavies, but I strongly doubt he has old ladies on rickety bicycles working for him.
My eyes are getting accustomed to the twilight in the woods and the outlines of trees and bushes emerge more clearly now. I gaze into the sparse woods. Just as I make out the silhouette of something that might actually be a boulder, my phone rings.
I curse myself for forgetting to turn it off, but still pull it out of my pocket and look at the screen.
It is from Father’s hospice.
After a few seconds of deliberation I pick up.
A woman, whose voice I don’t recognise, introduces herself as Katja, a nurse. She calmly explains that Father has taken a turn for the worse.
‘Can you come in?’ she asks.
My heart sinks.
Not this too, not now.
And immediately the thought occurs: that this is God’s punishment for my being rude to Karl-Johan and for leaving him alone with the kids when I knew that he would never manage the hike on his own.
‘How bad is it?’ I ask. ‘I am in the middle of something important.’
The nurse patiently explains that it is impossible to say, but that Father hasn’t been able to communicate since six o’clock and that his blood pressure has dropped. She says it could be hours or days and that it is obviously up to me to decide what to do.
I glimpse movement at the corner of my eye and turn toward the industrial area, but all is still.
Yet I am sure.
Someone or something moved, just within the nebulous fringes of the street light’s glow, and disappeared into the dark woods, like a fish slides through a ray of sunlight in the water only to be swallowed again by shadows.
I take a few steps in among the trees so as not to be as visible. Explain to the nurse that I will do my best, but that I’m not sure I can come at once. I ask her to get in touch immediately if Father gets any worse and she promises to do so.
After I have hung up and turned the sound off on my phone I stand quietly looking into the dark for a long time, but all I see are silhouettes of low bushes and a few chalk-white, flecked birch trunks.
I take a few steps with my arms stretched in front of me in the dusk. And my hand grazes cold stone.
I have found Samuel’s boulder.
Quickly I squat down and begin to dig with my hands at the side of the stone. Pine needles and leaves get stuck under my nails as I shovel last year’s dry leaves and sticks to the side.
At first I think I might be looking in the wrong place, because despite my having dirt up to my elbows I haven’t found anything. But then the ground gives way and my hands fumble in thin air, as if I’ve come upon a subterranean cave.
I bend down, tentatively stretch one arm in under the boulder. Feel around among roots and damp soil before I feel some sturdy canvas under my fingers.
*
Five minutes later I am back at the car. I toss the bag, which is surprisingly light, into the boot and look around one more time.
Everything is calm and dark. Nothing moves in the shadows, no sound can be heard. I sit in the driver’s seat, close the door and sigh deeply with relief.
Then I look at my phone.
There are three missed calls.
They are all from Father’s hospice.
Manfred
I
wake up to the tapping from Afsaneh’s laptop.
The blinds are still drawn and the room is dark. The air is stuffy and heavy, like inside a car that’s sat in the sun for too long.
I glance at the clock on the nightstand.
Half past five.
What could be so important that you need to type it up at half past five in the morning?
‘What are you doing?’ I ask, perhaps a bit more aggressively than I had intended.
‘Writing something.’
