Trapped, page 55
His brain is in free fall. His thoughts are pounding feverishly against the walls, he is trapped but all he did was follow the instructions, he’s always just followed the instructions to the letter, it wasn’t his fault, he was only seven years old …
‘Vincent!’ Mina shouts, hitting him hard on the thigh. ‘Stop it!’
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Sorry for everything.’
Jane takes in the water and the archipelago while Kenneth wheels her down the path behind the mink farm. It’s very beautiful on the island – especially today.
She’s grateful to him. She can’t claim to have had a good life, but Kenneth at least made it meaningful, towards the end. He didn’t have to care about her. But he understood. Perhaps because he was so close to the end when they met. He’s helped her obtain redress – which is the greatest declaration of love she could ever have received from anyone.
They reach the jetty and Kenneth stops. The water is lapping peacefully against the wooden posts supporting the jetty and a seagull cries out to its friends in the distance. He puts his hand on her shoulder and she pats it lovingly without turning around.
‘It’ll soon be over,’ he says.
‘I know,’ she replies. ‘Thank you. Without you it would have dragged on unbearably.’
They don’t need to talk any longer. He doesn’t need to ask whether she really wants to. He hasn’t asked that question for a long time. They’re past all that. Not that they have a choice anymore.
He gets out a roll of silver tape and wraps it around his left hand and the handle of the wheelchair. Loop after loop after loop. It’s important for the hand to stay attached. She helps him to tape his right hand. Only when he is done does she look up at him. But he doesn’t meet her gaze – his has already disappeared into the distance.
He begins to roll her along the jetty. Slowly at first. The planks of wood creak under the wheels. The further out they get, the more he picks up pace. She holds onto the seat to avoid falling out. When they reach the end of the jetty, he doesn’t stop. Instead he leaps, letting the wheelchair continue straight into the air.
Kvibille 1982
‘Vincent? The door doesn’t seem to be working like it should.’
She presses against the hidden door her son showed to her, but it’s stuck. Immovably stuck. Or perhaps she’s doing it wrong, maybe she’s pressing on it from a strange angle, it’s hard to tell when she’s as good as bent double. Clearly, you have to be stick thin but as flexible as a hinge if you’re a magician’s assistant.
‘Vincent, where are you?’ she calls out again.
She tries to push open the lid, but it’s stuck too. He’s obviously locked it with that padlock. Vincent said he was going to fetch something. It’s probably a surprise for her. That’s what it’ll be. He knows the door can’t be opened. It’s his way of making a joke. Any moment now he’s going to unlock the lid and present the assistant’s costume he’s made for her in rainbow colours. Or something else. She needs to remember not to shout at him too much.
But it’s taking a long time for him to come back. Far too long, given how uncomfortable it is sitting bent double in the box. She changes her mind. There’s going to be quite a telling off after all. This is not one of Vincent’s better ideas.
Finally she hears a sound. Voices. They’re not in the barn, not yet. Outside. She can definitely hear Vincent. And he’s not alone. There are several voices. Girls’ voices. They’re laughing. Vincent is too. Then they hush each other. As if they’re up to mischief.
‘Don’t be such a coward about swimming, Vincent!’ someone shouts. ‘Come on!’
Then the voices begin to fade.
‘Vincent!’ she shouts, hammering the box wall in front of her.
Much harder this time.
‘Have you come back, Vincent?’
Mina gives him a sharp look. He merely nods in reply, too ashamed to say anything. She tries to stand up, and is forced to press herself against him to fit. It’s just about possible. The water reaches their thighs. Their ribcages are pressed hard against each other, squeezing the air out of their lungs. He can’t look at her. She’s standing too close. But he can feel that she is there. Not only because she’s pressed against him but also because she … is.
4 + 6 = 10, which is 1 + 0 = him and Mina. Two bodies in orbit. A small object, a fragile understanding, in perfect balance between them. But that’s not what he says. He’s not an idiot.
‘We can’t move if we stand like this,’ he says in a strained voice. ‘And that means we can’t get out.’
‘Tell me that you know how we can get out,’ she says with the same effort.
‘I know how we can get out.’
‘Do you mean it?’
‘No, I’ve got no idea. All I know is that we don’t have enough strength to smash the glass from the inside. That only works on TV. We have to come up with something else.’
‘There’s a lot of water, Vincent.’
‘I know. Sorry.’
‘Stop apologizing and think instead. You’re good at that. Sometimes.’
The water reaches their stomachs. They have two minutes left at most. But she’s right. And his thoughts are his own again. He ignores the water, ignores the glass box, tries to think.
Hang on a second. Take a step back.
The glass box. Unlike Agnes, Tuva and Robert, this isn’t a home-made box. They’re in a professional water illusion. And those always have layer upon layer of secrets. Presto may not have revealed all to Jane. There are ways to get out and there are also … ways to get air in.
Snorkels.
A water illusion always has hidden tubes leading to the outside that the magician can breathe through. He pounds his forehead hard against the glass in frustration.
‘Vincent?’ says Mina, and he hears the worry in her voice.
But he can’t forgive himself. He should have thought of it far earlier. The box is still stopping his brain from working the way it should. It’s so cramped. In around a minute, the air will run out and he needs to find the tubes fast.
Assuming Jane and Kenneth haven’t removed them.
For a second, it feels like flying. As if she is weightless, or she is falling upwards. Then the wheelchair strikes the water with a big splash. The chilly water takes Jane’s breath away. She knew it would be cold, but not this cold. She’s still holding on tight to the seat as they begin to sink.
The sunlight vanishes almost immediately. The seawater is dark and she can see nothing ahead of her. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She lets go of the seat, turns around and searches for Kenneth’s arms in the darkness. He’s still taped to the sinking wheelchair and can’t respond to her touch. She pulls herself up his arm and away from the chair until she can hold him. He presses his upper arms around her in an insufficient embrace.
They were going to meet their end together.
Sink entwined into the blue.
Dignified and calm.
But it’s pitch black and it’s cold and it hurts.
Hurts so much.
She screws up her eyes against the chill and tugs at Kenneth, trying to pull him upwards, out of the dark. She can feel him desperately trying to release his hands from the wheelchair, but they’re stuck down with the tape.
Loop after loop after loop.
The chair continues to drag them down. She tries to think. Panic strikes when she realizes that she can no longer tell which direction they are moving in, or even whether they are moving at all. The dark of the water has consumed them. There’s nothing left to reveal what is up and what is down.
Kvibille 1982
‘Vincent, Vincent, Vincent,’ she whispers, her lips pressed to the wood.
At first she shouted until she was hoarse, waiting for the voices to come back. But they never did. Now she can only hiss. So she whispers his name until she can no longer do that.
The heat inside the box is like a sauna, sweat leaving her hair straggling and dripping from the tip of her nose. She can feel how wet her back is, even though she can’t reach it with her hands to check.
If the box had been made from thin fibreboard then she might have been able to kick out and destroy it from the inside. But Vincent has done his homework. Allan must have given him good quality materials from the timberyard. And the joints have been nailed and glued.
The lactic acid in her limbs is screaming at her. If she doesn’t get to straighten her legs out soon she’s really going to lose her mind. It’s an inhuman feeling to sit like this for hours. Or however long it’s been. It could be days. Years.
‘Someone help me,’ she whispers.
She’s going to shout that too. Soon. Just as soon as she’s gathered her strength.
Vincent takes a deep breath and then bends his knees as much as he can. Then he reaches for the bottom. He runs his hands along the edges underwater. Nothing along the floor. The finger of his pinkie catches something in one corner, around a centimetre up. There it is. There it is. Jane didn’t find it after all.
He carefully prises open the tube. Of course the snorkel is at the very bottom. The magician hangs upside down in the box, which means the floor is closest to the head. He stands up again, spitting and spluttering water. It’s up to Mina to use her mouth now.
‘Are you sure it’s not possible to break the glass?’ she says quickly, spitting as the water slops against her lips.
The desperation isn’t far away, he can hear it in her voice. He nods in reply and looks at the letter from Jane, his final message for posterity, pinned to the outside of the glass. He would do anything to smash the glass and tear the letter into tiny pieces. He doesn’t want his family to start hating him.
‘There’s a snorkel down there,’ he says. ‘You have to take it.’
‘There’s no need for you to be the knight in shining armour, I’m the police officer,’ she says, coughing again into the water.
‘You’re shorter than me,’ he says. ‘I’ve probably got another half minute up here to try and find a solution. Then I’ll come down. And then we’ll have to see which of us is the strongest.’
‘Ha ha ha.’
But Mina does as he says and dives down to the snorkel just before the water reaches her nose. The movement makes the water splash and he screws his mouth and eyes shut. He’s never bothered to practise holding his breath. Of course, he could share the snorkel with Mina, if it weren’t for the fact that the manoeuvre to change places would take longer than the amount of air they had in their lungs. And they would need to swap places straight away again. He tries to control his breathing.
The water is tickling his lips and he shuts his mouth, pressing his lips together. He breathes in fits and starts through his nose. It already feels like he can’t get air. No air left in the tank. He thumps hard on the lid just above his head. Let us out, please let us out. That’s enough. The sound of his fists against the metal echoes in the space outside but otherwise there’s silence. He can’t cope with this. Not any longer. He can’t be smothered in this tiny space. When the water passes his upper lip, he slams against the glass walls in a panic. He can’t give in to the panic, if he does he’ll have lost, but he can’t hold it at bay any longer.
Panic.
Something about panic.
The water reaches his nostrils, he lunges upwards and takes what he realizes is his final breath. He has as long left as it takes for his lungs to be exhausted. Someone tugs at his trouser leg. He looks down and sees Mina pointing at the snorkel, but he shakes his head. There’s no time. His body is already exploding. He should have practised holding his breath. All his focus goes on not opening his mouth. He can’t see clearly, blinking in response to the water in his eyes. If he lets go at the last moment then it’s over. His body is on fire he’s on fire his brain wants to stop now
panic
panic …
… lever.
Umberto. What was it Umberto said? His field of vision begins to flicker. Something about a lever. All sound disappears as the water covers his ears. A lever that wasn’t there. A panic lever. He’s isolated in the water. Enveloped. On the other side of the glass is an empty room. Air. Life. The lever wasn’t there because Tom Presto took risks. He presses his hand against the glass. Salvation on the other side. On his side nothing but death. But the Tom Presto Vincent met wouldn’t play with death. On the contrary. He’d refuse to place his life in the hands of someone else. Vincent can no longer think. His brain shuts down, he’s sinking into a primal darkness. He strikes wildly out at the water but his movements are dull, lacking force. He relaxes his cheeks and his body reflexively draws water into his lungs. Umberto’s French collector was wrong. Tom would definitely have had a panic level. Not just on the outside. It would be … on the inside of the tank.
The perfect balance between two bodies is smashed into a million pieces when they complete their orbits.
It doesn’t take long.
It feels like a mere second’s dizziness.
The rest is just like falling asleep.
The body that Jane is clinging to is jerking about in violent spasms. She doesn’t want this any longer. She wants to live. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
She lets go of Kenneth and tries to swim upwards. Let’s him sink to his fate on the seabed. She knows that she’s far too deep and that her legs are useless. She can only swim with her arms.
It’s taking too long. She might not even be swimming in the right direction. Perhaps she’s just going deeper down. But she doesn’t want it.
After three strokes, her lungs explode.
It wasn’t like this.
It was like this.
Kvibille 1982
She doesn’t know who she is any longer. All she knows is that it has hurt for so long. Her limbs are screaming. The heat. The thirst. She sucks on her bloody fingers to get some liquids into her. The fingernail she long ago scraped off against the wood that is still holding her prisoner. It seems like so long ago. She curses the world and then she begs for forgiveness.
‘Vincent, Jane. This is for the best. I’m not going to shout at you anymore. You’ll be better off without me. I know that. I’ve always known that.’
She doesn’t know it, but she’s probably not saying this aloud.
Then she says nothing more.
132
Kvibille 1982
‘Was it you who built the box?’
An unfamiliar woman was standing in front of him with a notepad and pen in her hands. She was talking in an eager, almost greedy tone. He didn’t answer. It sounded as if she already knew. Anyway, he didn’t know her. He looked at her hands again. A pen was a line. A dimension. A notepad was a square. Two dimensions. The box he had built was a cube. Three dimensions. The fourth dimension was time. But right now he was moving outside of that. He had been standing in the farmyard for an eternity. Or a second. Someone had talked to him. Or perhaps not.
A policeman whom he thought he had met before – it was probably the same officer who had helped Mum when the car had broken down outside the shop – took the woman by the arm and led her away.
‘Leave the lad alone,’ said the policeman. ‘He’s not even meant to still be here. But the woman from social services is late.’
The barn door was cordoned off with police tape and the star-spangled box was standing in the yard, having been rolled out. It was lucky he had put wheels on it – it would have been too heavy for them to carry otherwise. But he couldn’t understand how he was supposed to get into his workshop now – where he had all his secrets. Just as long as they didn’t start rooting through them. That’d make him really upset.
‘I’m from Hallandsposten,’ snapped the woman, twisting herself out of the policeman’s grip. ‘The public has a right to know.’
He looked at his shadow on the gravel. It was starting to get long. He was just his shadow. The very core shadow where the light never penetrated. And he was one-dimensional. He wasn’t visible from the side. The woman bent down towards him.
‘How does it feel not to have a mother anymore?’ she said, putting her pen to paper.
He couldn’t understand how she could see him. He was turned to the side. And what did she mean, no mother? Mum was there, in the kitchen. Mum was there in how he brushed his teeth. We are what we do, his mother always said. He can be her whenever he likes.
‘Jesus, that’s enough,’ the policeman said angrily to the woman. ‘This is the scene of an accident – either you leave or I’ll arrest you for obstructing the police in the course of their duties.’
Before the policeman had time to react the woman produced a camera and took a photo. The flash made him blink.
‘You forgot to smile,’ she said. ‘But that’s good. Serious children look good on film. Wasn’t there a sister too? Perhaps she’ll be more talkative.’
The woman vanished across the yard. The policeman stood in front of him and put his hands on his shoulders. He blotted out the sun.
‘It was an accident,’ said the man. ‘You know that, right? No one blames you. It’ll be OK. You and your sister will be placed in new homes, but the important thing is, you must understand that no one thinks that what happened was your fault.’
‘Will we live together?’ he asked anxiously. ‘Me and Jane?’
‘I don’t know, Vincent. It depends whether someone is willing to take you both. So maybe not. But you’ll both still live close by. I’m sure you’ll be able to see each other as often as you like. This is only temporary. I can understand if everything seems weird right now. But you’re both smart kids. The pair of you will grow up to be strong and put this behind you. You’ve got each other. You’re a family. Everything will be forgiven.’
133
Mina was sitting on the bottom of Houdini’s water torture cell trying to gather her thoughts. The water had suddenly gushed out of the tank and onto the floor below – as if the bottom had dropped out. Water continued to pour into the tank from the hose but it poured out just as quickly.
