Trapped, page 7
Jane would soon be sixteen years old and had lived on this farm for half her life. She and Mum had been the first to arrive. In the summer of 1974, her mother had quit her job in Stockholm. They had moved out of the city centre flat and away from all of Jane’s friends because her hippy mum was going to set up a commune with her chums on a farm outside Kvibille – a village in Halland county that was so small that, had it not been for the big cheese factory, no one would have heard of it. Cheese was where people’s awareness of the village started and finished.
Jane didn’t even live in Kvibille. She lived outside it. Where you could never wear anything nice since there was mud everywhere.
She inspected her shoes. The white soles were beyond salvation. She hated it. Again.
Jane went up to the house, took off her shoes and jammed her feet into a pair of wellies, sighing. Just because Mum chose to stay didn’t mean she had to. She went down to the lawn, where Mum and her little brother were waiting.
‘Mum, when are we moving?’ she asked as she sat down on the blanket, just as she always did.
‘And hello to you too,’ said Mum.
‘Erik got out,’ Jane muttered. ‘So why not us?’
Erik had been the only one of Mum’s acquaintances who had actually put in an appearance. But he’d only managed six months. When Mum fell pregnant, it was apparently no longer quite as far out to be at one with nature. So Erik had bounced. They’d heard on the grapevine that he worked at a bank and had only taken a leave of absence for a few months. Another time they heard he was a travelling salesman for a sports equipment store. They didn’t know what to believe. Mum didn’t even know where he was any longer.
‘You know why,’ her mother said. ‘It’s hard to find work out here in the country. At least our costs are low, here on the farm. And, sweetheart – you’ve lived here for as long as we lived in Stockholm. Besides, the city’s not the way you remember it – you’ve built up some fantasy about what life was like for us there. It wasn’t that good. We’re better off here – much better. I promise. But that’s enough talk about that. Time to eat cake – once your brother has done his magic for us.’
Mum looked tired. It was one of those days. There was no point causing any more fuss. She might as well be left to be happy.
‘It’s a birthday present,’ said her little brother by way of explanation for the imminent magic display.
He was wearing the cape that Jane had made for him on his last birthday. He was already outgrowing it.
‘I got you a present,’ said Jane, proffering a small parcel to her mother. ‘But you can only open it if you can read the card.’
Hanging below the package was a piece of paper on which she had drawn lines. Some were dashed and others solid. Fragments of letters were also visible here and there, interrupted where they encountered the lines. Mum twisted and turned the piece of paper.
‘How am I supposed to …?’ she muttered in confusion.
Jane sighed. It was annoying when people didn’t even try.
‘Think origami,’ she said, by way of a clue.
Mum looked at her uncomprehendingly.
‘Good God, Mother. Think paper plane.’
‘You mean I’m supposed to fold it?’ said Mum with a laugh. ‘Fun!’
She stuck the tip of her tongue out of the corner of her mouth as she folded the paper, following the lines. A twig under the blanket pricked Jane’s thigh. She tried to find a more comfortable position without success. It seemed everything in this place was out to get her.
‘Done,’ said Mum in a concerned tone. ‘But I think I may have got it wrong.’
She was clasping a crumpled little ball of paper on which half an F was visible on the top. Jane, her little brother and their mother began to roar with laughter all at the same time.
‘That’s how a cat would fold it,’ said her little brother, tugging meaningfully at the leopard print dress his mother was wearing.
Jane laughed even more.
‘She said like a paper plane,’ he explained. ‘You fold the dashed lines inwards, the solid ones outwards.’
Mum unfurled the paper and refolded it according to his instructions. The result was a perfect hexagon with a clear message on the top.
‘Happy birthday,’ Mum read from the hexagon. ‘Your last one in Kvibille!’
‘We can always live in hope,’ Jane said, when her mother glowered at her.
‘OK, Sis,’ said her little brother. ‘Now it’s my turn.’
He got out a deck of cards and waved it flamboyantly, as if it were a living thing.
‘Remember this day: three o’clock in the afternoon on the eighth of July,’ he said dramatically, ‘because you’ll be telling your grandchildren about it.’
‘Do you even know where grandchildren come from?’ said Jane, rolling her eyes but also smiling in spite of herself.
‘Take this deck of cards,’ he carried on as if he hadn’t heard her. ‘Cut it, shuffle it and take a card. Look at it but don’t tell us what it is.’
It was so unfair: her little brother always seemed to be happy. Sometimes he verged on manic. But he had spent all his seven years on the farm and didn’t know anything else. He was happy as long as he was left to do woodwork in the barn and practise his magic tricks. He was actually starting to get really good at the magic. The fact that Jane was nearly always able to work out how he had done it wasn’t his fault. She’d always found it easy to calculate logical consequences, ever since she could remember. When the trick was over, she had no difficulty looking back and working out what must have happened. Of course, she always pretended to be surprised.
She took the cards, shuffled them, looked at one and then replaced it in the deck. Eight of clubs. Without being able to help it, she noted that the card ended up in eleventh or twelfth position in the face-down deck.
‘Was I supposed to remember it too?’ she said teasingly.
She received a dark look in reply. Magic was serious for her brother.
‘Mum, now it’s your turn,’ he said, taking the deck of cards from her and handing it to her mother. ‘Shuffle it and pick a card – any card.’
Mum concentrated as she shuffled and then selected a card.
‘You were able to select any card at all, right?’ he asked in a serious voice.
‘Yes,’ Mum replied, just as seriously.
She raised an eyebrow and tried to look earnest. Jane couldn’t help laughing.
‘And now, for the first time,’ he said, turning back to her, ‘would you be good enough to tell us which card you’re thinking of, miss?’
‘I’ll show you “miss”!’ she said. ‘But OK, I saw the eight of clubs. Not that you can know that.’
‘And what do you have in your hand, madame?’
He gesticulated towards Mum, indicating that she should show the card she’d removed from the deck. It was the eight of clubs.
‘Bloody hell!’ Jane exclaimed, bursting into laughter.
‘Jane!’ her mother said.
Her little brother had pulled the wool over her eyes. It was an unusual but wonderful feeling. She might be able to work out how he’d pulled it off, but she had absolutely no desire to. Not today. He bowed and she and Mum applauded him enthusiastically. As they always did.
Everything was as it should be.
But it wouldn’t last for much longer – she knew that. This summer everything was going to change. She needed to tell Mum that she’d be leaving as soon as the holidays were over. That her life was going to take a new direction. She was going to tell her soon. Soon.
11
Vincent bent down and adjusted the shoelace on his right-hand shoe. The loops had been bigger on the right than the left. He wasn’t usually so careless. But his thoughts weren’t as collected as he’d have liked them to be. He stood up and took his coat off the hanger.
‘So you really think I should go there on my own?’ said Maria from the kitchen behind him.
She had a book about research methodologies open in front of her. She was training to be a social worker, but didn’t seem to have fully grasped what this involved in terms of study, and she was constantly muttering ‘Christ, I thought this was going to be about people’ whenever she was forced to take the more theoretically demanding courses. But now there was something else on the agenda. Vincent could feel the knot in his stomach growing.
‘You’ve known about Dad’s seventieth for months. Given you’re “The Master Mentalist”, you’re useless at planning sometimes. You’ll have to call Umberto at the agency and ask them to cancel your show. There’s more than a month to go, so it shouldn’t be a problem.’
He turned around and looked at his wife sitting at the table. Maria was clenching her mug of tea so hard her knuckles were white. He had been so close to getting out of the door. He was reluctant to take off his shoes now – it was doubtful whether he would get the knots as symmetrical again. Vincent stared at the words on the ceramic mug: Glitter Pussy. There wasn’t much glitter to Maria right now. Rather, she was surrounded by a thunder cloud. And the storm was heading his way.
‘You know that it’s not up to me to schedule shows,’ he said, hoping it was one of those days where Maria accepted straightforward explanations and that the thunder would pass by without any lightning strikes.
The even tighter grasp on Glitter Pussy quickly dashed that hope.
‘So you’re telling me …’ she said, inserting an ice-cold dramatic pause, ‘you’re telling me that if you had told your agent when the tour was being planned four months ago that they couldn’t schedule a show on the date my father was having his party – a party you’ve known about for six months – they wouldn’t have paid any heed to that?’
Vincent could feel the door frame cutting into his shoulder while he thought. This was funny. He could win arguments against anyone with clever rhetorical devices. It wasn’t even sporting. But Maria, with her frankly simplistic analytical skills, always managed to put him on the spot. None of his usual tricks worked on her. Granted, they hadn’t worked on Ulrika either. Perhaps it was hereditary. And she was right. Even if he couldn’t do anything about it now, it didn’t mean that he couldn’t have done something about it earlier.
‘Are you going to say anything?’
Lightning was beginning to flicker in the dark clouds around Maria. He realized that he’d allowed his moment of thought to extend for too long.
‘I may have forgotten to mention it,’ he said. ‘But now things are how they are.’
He realized his tone was too untroubled. Big mistake. He sighed, bent down, untied the perfect shoelaces and took off his shoes.
‘“Things are how they are”?’ his wife mimicked. ‘Things are how they are? How can you be so insensitive?’
Maria’s voice rose to a falsetto and he could hear that she was verging on tears. He would have preferred the lightning strike. Her tears left him defenceless. He went into the kitchen and sat down opposite her. The pattern of small eddies on the wooden table reminded him of fingerprints. He began to trace the waves and meanderings with his index finger.
Vincent wondered whether to take Maria’s hand in his. It lay there in front of him, the wedding ring glimmering on her ring finger. But just as he was about to put his hand on top of hers, she pulled it out of the way and placed it in her lap. He avoided meeting her gaze, knowing that he would see eyes shiny with tears and a trembling lower lip.
‘I don’t mean to be insensitive,’ he said, his gaze glued to the table. ‘But no matter how stupid it was of me not to say anything – and I admit it was stupid – it doesn’t change anything now. Of course I should have put Leif’s seventieth in the diary back in the autumn, but I made a mistake. And now we have to adapt to the circumstances, no matter how stupid we think they are.’
Maria let out a sob. She took a big gulp of her green tea and grimaced. Vincent had never understood why she continued to drink litres of the stuff on a daily basis when she didn’t even like it. But green tea and its health benefits were one of Maria’s many hobby horses. For a while, she had tried to force him and the kids to drink the crap too, but that had almost descended into outright war and she’d had to give up after a couple of days.
He got up, went to the kitchen cupboard above the draining board and got out a mug. It matched Maria’s, but the difference was that it said Festive Farter on his. He shook his head. The alliteration appealed to him and there was something amusing about how the consonants in the words slipped off the tongue, but it massively bothered him how unevenly the letters were positioned. How hard was it to stay in one line?
The teenagers had been suitably scandalized by Maria’s sense of humour, but all objections had been met with a long lecture on how bodily functions were perfectly normal and everyone should learn to be more comfortable with their bodies. Which was ironic, given how uncomfortable she was when it came to her own body. She could now only have sex if the lights were off, the curtains drawn and neither of them said anything. It hadn’t always been like that, so he suspected that it was because it was him she had to have sex with.
The aim for openness was naturally the correct one, on principle – that much he realized. And he didn’t require his wife to practise what she preached. But it could be annoying when she managed to convince herself she was doing so. There had been another time. Another Maria. A snapshot flashed through his memory of Maria, wild and sweaty beneath him on the kitchen table – the same table whose surface he was now tracing with his finger.
His thoughts moved on to Mina. He wondered whether the detective had found any fingerprints on that sword box. Probably not. He ought to ask her how they did that kind of thing the next time he saw her.
‘So what do you think we should do?’ she said. ‘About the party.’
He got up, poured a mug of coffee and sat back down again. Vincent looked carefully at her face. He had hoped that Maria’s rush of adrenaline would have dissipated a little before they continued their discussion, but she was still bright red with rage and there were tears in her eyelashes.
‘I’m not really sure what Umberto can do. Seven hundred people have bought tickets to the show. I can’t move it or cancel. It’s up to you what to do about the party – whether or not you’re going.’
He sipped the coffee. It was over-brewed.
‘Whether or not I go?’ said Maria, knocking back a big swig of green tea. ‘What on earth are you like? Why wouldn’t I go to my own father’s seventieth birthday party?’
Her voice cracked. He didn’t know what to say. They always ended up at this point eventually. The logic was perfectly clear. He couldn’t go to the party. Maria would have to take the kids by herself. Maybe she could see the party as time to herself? After all, Aston loved his grandfather. Or she could choose to stay at home. But he knew that Maria had seen through him.
‘You know how it usually goes when I come along,’ he said, in an attempt to head her off.
He wiggled his toes under the table. This topic always made him jittery. He had put it behind him; the fact that everyone else stubbornly insisted on dwelling on it wasn’t his problem. But it galled him that they still brought it up at every family dinner.
‘I don’t want them to think we’re having problems,’ said Maria.
And there it was. The root of this entire discussion. The facade was important to Maria. Especially in front of her family. It had been a scandal without parallel when he had left his then wife for her sister Maria, who was eight years younger. It hadn’t been taken well, which was altogether understandable. But not indefinitely. After all, it had been almost ten years ago – the family had had plenty of time to calm down. It wasn’t rational for them to still have so many views on the matter a decade later. Views on things that were none of their business in the first place. Their attitude was illogical and unreasoning and that meant he struggled to relate to it. So he hadn’t told his agent about the date. Sometimes the most logical thing to do was to avoid an illogical and complex situation.
‘Oh, wouldn’t Ulrika be pleased if she thought we were having problems,’ Maria said. ‘She’s been hoping for it all these years. For us to separate, for you to leave me, preferably for someone else. Or to come back to her. She even said as much—’
He’d heard this many times before. Dwelling on the past.
‘So what?’ he said, interrupting her. ‘She only has the power over you that you give her.’
‘And you’re saying she doesn’t have any power over you? You’re in touch several times a month.’
‘Maria, your sister and I have kids. But it’s you and I who live together.’
‘You and I have a child together too,’ she said.
‘Yes, although sometimes I wonder whether Aston knows that he has a dad,’ he said. ‘I think Aston would marry you if he could.’
A microscopic smile appeared at the corner of Maria’s mouth, but it quickly vanished, to be replaced by the same bitter expression as before. She opened her mouth to say something else.
He didn’t feel up to listening and stared at the mug in front of him. Festive Farter – 13 letters … 8 consonants and 5 vowels: 13 8 5. He took out his mobile phone under the table and looked up 1385 on Wikipedia. In 1385, King Olof of Norway had proclaimed himself King of Sweden. Well, there you had it. And Olof was Benjamin’s, his son’s, middle name. Him – the mug – Festive Farter – 1385 – King Olof – Benjamin – him. A closed circle. Vincent realized too late that Maria had just said something about Benjamin.
‘And tell your teenagers that they’re definitely not allowed to call me auntie at the party. Ulrika loves it when they do that.’
The tears had dried up and he could see that she was now more angry than upset. Which was in many ways easier to deal with.
