The Silver Road, page 1
Originally published in Sweden as Silvervägen
by Albert Bonniers Förlag in 2018.
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Corvus,
an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Stina Jackson, 2019
English translation copyright © Susan Beard, 2019
The moral right of Stina Jackson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
The moral right of Susan Beard to be identified as the translator of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78649 730 7
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78649 732 1
OME ISBN: 978 1 78649 822 9
Ebook ISBN: 978 1 78649 731 4
Printed in Great Britain
Corvus
An Imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd
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To Robert
PART I
It was the light, the way it stung and burned and tore at him, hung over the forests and the lakes like an incentive to go on breathing, like a promise of new life. The light, that filled his veins with an urgency and robbed him of sleep. It was still only May, but he lay awake as dawn filtered through fibres and gaps. He could hear the melting frost seeping out of the ground as winter bled away, and streams and rivers rushing and surging as the fells shed their winter covering. Soon the light would consume every night, invading, dazzling, shaking life into everything that slumbered beneath the rotten leaves. It would fill the buds on the trees with warmth until they burst open, and the forest would fill with mating calls and the hunger cries of newly hatched life. The midnight sun would drive people from their lairs and fill them with longing. They would laugh and make love and become crazy and violent. Some might even disappear. They would be blinded and disorientated. But he didn’t want to believe that they died.
He smoked only while he was searching for her. Lelle saw her in the passenger seat every time he lit another cigarette, the way she grimaced and fixed her eyes on him over the rim of her glasses.
‘I thought you’d given up?’
‘I have given up. This is just a one-off.’
He could see her shake her head, scowl and bare her teeth, the pointy canines that embarrassed her. Her presence was more palpable then, as he drove through the night and the daylight clung on. Her hair that was almost white when the sun caught it, the dark splash of freckles on the bridge of her nose that she had tried to disguise with make-up in recent years, and her eyes that saw everything, even though she gave the impression she wasn’t looking. She was more like Anette than she was him, and that was just as well. The beauty genes certainly hadn’t come from him. She was beautiful and that wasn’t just because he was biased, people had always turned to look at Lina, even when she was very little. She was the kind of child who would bring a smile to the most jaded of faces. But these days nobody turned to look at her any more. No one had seen her for three years – at least, no one who was prepared to say it openly.
His cigarettes ran out before he reached Jörn. Lina was no longer sitting in the seat beside him. The car was empty and silent and he had almost forgotten he was driving, eyes on the road but taking nothing in. He had been travelling along this main road, known as the Silver Road, for such a long time that he knew it like the back of his hand. He knew every bend and every gap in the wildlife fencing that allowed moose and reindeer to cross if they had a mind to. He knew where rainwater collected on the surface and where mist drifted up from the tarns and distorted his vision. The road’s sole purpose had disappeared with the closure of the silver mines, and it had become treacherous after years of neglect and deterioration. But it was also the only road that connected Glimmersträsk with the other inland communities, and however much he detested the cracked tarmac and the overgrown drainage ditches that stretched out behind him, he would never abandon it. This was where she had disappeared. This road had swallowed up his daughter.
No one knew that he drove at night, searching for Lina. Or that he chain-smoked and put his arm round the passenger seat and chatted with his daughter as if she were actually there, as if she had never disappeared. He had no one to tell, not since Anette left him. She said it was his fault from the very beginning. He was the one who had given Lina a lift to the bus stop that morning. He was the one to blame.
He reached Skellefteå at about 3 a.m. and stopped at Circle K for fuel and to fill his flask with coffee. Despite the early hour, the lad behind the counter was bright-eyed and cheerful, with red-blond hair combed to one side. He was young, maybe nineteen, twenty. The same age Lina was now, although he found it hard to imagine her so grown up. He bought another pack of Marlboro Lights, despite his guilty conscience. His eyes fell on a display of mosquito repellent beside the till. Lelle fumbled with his bank card. Everything reminded him of Lina. She had reeked of mosquito repellent that last morning. It was actually the only thing he remembered, the way he had wound down the window to get rid of the smell after dropping her off at the bus stop. He couldn’t recall what they had said to each other that morning, whether she was happy or sad, or what they had eaten for breakfast. Everything that happened afterwards took up too much room, and only the mosquito repellent remained. He had said as much to the police that evening – that Lina stank of mosquito repellent. Anette had stared at him as if he were a total stranger, someone to be ashamed of. He remembered that, too.
He opened a new pack and kept the cigarette in his mouth until he was back on the Silver Road, going north this time. The homeward stretch always went faster, felt bleaker. Lina’s silver heart hung from its chain over the rear-view mirror and reflected the sun. She was sitting next to him again, her blonde hair falling like a curtain over her face.
‘Dad, you do know you’ve smoked twenty-one cigarettes in only a few hours?’
Lelle knocked the ash out of the window, blowing the smoke away from her.
‘That many?’
Lina rolled her eyes as if she were calling on higher powers.
‘Did you know every cigarette takes nine minutes off your life? So this evening you’ve shortened your life by one hundred and eighty-nine minutes.’
‘You don’t say,’ said Lelle. ‘But what have I got to live for, anyway?’
The reproach clouded her pale eyes as she looked at him.
‘You’ve got to find me. You’re the only one who can.’
Meja lay with her hands on her stomach and tried not to listen to the sounds. The hunger that growled under her fingers, and the others, the nauseating sounds that came up through the gaps in the floorboards. Silje’s heavy panting and then his, the new man’s. The squeaking of the bed and then the dog barking. She heard the man yell at it to go and lie down.
It was the middle of the night by now, but the sun was still shining strongly in the little triangle-shaped room. It fell in warm, gold shafts over the greying walls and revealed the pattern of capillaries under her closed eyelids. Meja couldn’t sleep. She kneeled beside the low window and brushed away the cobwebs with her hand. There was only blue night sky and blue tinted forest as far as the eye could see. If she craned her neck she could see a slice of lake down there, black and still. Enticing, almost. She felt like a captured princess in a fairy tale, locked inside a tower surrounded by deep, dark forest, doomed to listen to the sex games of her wicked stepmother in the room below. Except Silje wasn’t her stepmother, but her mother.
Neither of them had been to Norrland before. During those long hours on the train heading north the doubt had plagued them both. They had argued and cried and sat in lengthy periods of silence as the forest thickened outside the window and the distance between stations became longer and longer. Silje had sworn that this would be the last time they moved. The man she had met was called Torbjörn and he owned a house and some land in a village called Glimmersträsk. They had met online and talked forever on the phone. Meja had heard his monosyllabic Norrland way of speaking and seen pictures of a man with a moustache and thick neck, and eyes like slits when he smiled. In one photo he was holding an accordion and in another he was leaning over a hole in the ice, holding up a fish with red scales. Torbjörn was a real man, according to Silje. A man who knew how to survive in extreme conditions and who could look after them.
The train station where they eventually got out was nothing more than a hut among the pines, and when they tried the door it was locked. No one else had got out and they stood feeling helpless in the slipstream of the train as it pulled away and vanished among the trees. The ground vibrated for a long time under their feet. Silje lit a cigarette and started to drag the suitcase over the crumbling platform, wh
Silje had already made her way to the neglected car park where a rusty Ford was waiting. A man with his face shadowed by a black cap was leaning against the bonnet. He stood up when he saw them coming, revealing the wad of snus tobacco in his mouth as he smiled. Torbjörn looked bigger in real life, more solid. But there was something awkward and inoffensive about the way he moved, as if he were unaware of his own size.
Silje dropped the case and clung to him like he was a lifebuoy in the middle of this sea of forest. Meja stood to one side and looked down at a crack in the asphalt where some dandelion leaves had found a way through. She could hear them kissing, hear the tongues rooting around.
‘This is my daughter, Meja.’
Silje wiped her mouth and waved her hand in Meja’s direction. Torbjörn studied her from under the peak of his cap, saying in his abrupt way that she was welcome here. She kept her eyes pinned to the ground to emphasize that this was happening against her will.
His car stank of wet dog, and a rough greying animal skin was spread out in the back. Yellow stuffing had started to bulge out of one of the seat backs. Meja sat on the very edge of the seat and breathed through her mouth. Silje had told her that Torbjörn was well-off, but judging from appearances so far that was an exaggeration. There was nothing but gloomy pine forest lining the road to his house, interspersed with areas of ground bare from felling. Small, isolated lakes shone like teardrops among the trees. By the time they reached Glimmersträsk there was a burning lump in Meja’s throat. Torbjörn had his hand on Silje’s thigh, lifting it only to point out things he thought were of interest: the small ICA supermarket, the school, pizzeria, post office and bank. He appeared immensely proud of it all. The houses themselves were large and scattered. The further they drove, the greater the distance between the buildings. Forest and fields and pastures lay in between.
From time to time there was the sound of a dog barking in the distance. In the front seat Silje’s cheeks had turned red and shiny.
‘Look, how lovely, Meja. Like something out of a story!’
Torbjörn told her not to get excited, that he lived on the other side of the swamp. Meja wondered what that meant. The road in front of them narrowed and the forest crept closer, and a heavy silence filled the car. Meja found it hard to breathe as she watched the soaring pines flicker past.
Torbjörn’s house stood alone and isolated in a forest clearing. The two-storey building might have been impressive once, but now its red paint was peeling and it gave the impression of sinking into the ground. A scraggy black dog stood at the end of its chain and barked at them when they got out of the car. Meja’s legs felt unsteady as she looked around her.
‘Here she is,’ said Torbjörn, flinging his arm wide.
‘So silent and peaceful,’ Silje said, but the delight had gone from her voice.
Torbjörn carried in their bags and put them on the filthy black floor. It stank in there, too, of stale air and soot and ingrained fat. Shabby upholstery on furniture from a forgotten decade stared back at them. The brown-striped wallpaper was hung with animal horns and knives in curved sheaths, more knives than Meja had ever seen, and the place was full of dust and inescapable smells. Meja tried to catch Silje’s eye, but failed. She had glued that smile to her face, the one that meant she was prepared to put up with almost anything, and that she was far from admitting she had made a mistake.
The moaning from the ground floor had stopped, leaving space for the birds. Never before had she heard such birdsong. It sounded hysterical, unsettling. The roof sloped and formed a triangle above her head, and hundreds of knotholes were watching her. Torbjörn had called it the triangle room when he stood on the stairs indicating where she was to sleep. Her own room on the upper floor. It was a long time since she’d had a room of her own. Mostly she’d had only her own two hands to stop the noises. The noises of Silje and her men – the loud sex and the arguments. Always the arguments. It didn’t matter how far away she and Silje moved, the noises always caught up with them.
Lelle didn’t notice the tiredness until he swerved off the road and the tyres rumbled under him. He lowered the window and slapped his face hard, making his cheek sting. The seat beside him was empty. Lina had gone. All this driving about at night – she really wouldn’t have approved of that either. He put another cigarette in his mouth to keep himself awake. His cheeks were still glowing from the slap when he arrived home in Glimmersträsk. He pulled up by the bus stop and parked, looking disapprovingly at the innocuous-looking bus shelter that was embellished with marker-pen graffiti and bird droppings. It was early dawn and the first bus wasn’t due for a while. Lelle climbed out of the car and walked over to the wooden bench covered in scratches. There were sweet wrappers and globs of chewing gum on the ground. The night sun shone in the puddles, but Lelle couldn’t recall it raining. He trudged a couple of times around the shelter, then positioned himself as usual where Lina had stood when he had reversed the car. Then he leaned his shoulder against the dirty glass just as his daughter had done. Nonchalantly, almost, as if she wanted to emphasize that this was no big deal. Her first real summer job. Planting spruce trees up in Arjeplog, earning good money until the autumn term started. Nothing special about that.
It was his fault they were early. He was the one who was afraid she would miss the bus and arrive late for her first day at work. Lina hadn’t complained, because the June morning warmed and was alive with the chorus of birds. All alone she had stood there at the bus shelter, with the sun reflected in his old aviator sunglasses she had nagged him to give her, even though they covered half her face. She had waved, possibly. Maybe even blown a kiss. She used to do that.
The young policeman had been wearing similar sunglasses. He pushed them up on to his head as he stepped into the hall and fixed his eyes on Lelle and Anette.
‘Your daughter didn’t get on the bus this morning.’
‘That can’t be right,’ Lelle said. ‘I dropped her off!’
The police officer shrugged and his pilot sunglasses slipped.
‘Your daughter wasn’t on the bus. We’ve spoken to the driver and the passengers. No one has seen her.’
They had looked at him knowingly, even then, the police officers and Anette. He could feel it. The reproach in their eyes pierced him and all his strength oozed away. After all, he was the last person to see her. He was the one who had given her the lift, the one who was responsible. They asked the same detestable questions over and over again, wanting to know the exact time he’d left her and how Lina was feeling that morning. Was she happy at home? Had they quarrelled?
In the end it got too much for him. He had grabbed one of the kitchen chairs and hurled it fiercely at one of the officers, a spineless bastard who raced out and called for backup. Lelle could still feel the cool, wooden floor against his cheek as they held him down and fastened the cuffs, still hear Anette crying as they took him away. But she hadn’t come to his defence. Not then, not now. Their only child was missing and she had no one else to blame.
Lelle started the engine and reversed the car away from the solitary bus shelter. Three years had passed since she stood there, blowing him kisses. Three years, and he was still the last person to have seen her.
Meja would have stayed forever in that triangular room if it hadn’t been for the hunger pangs. She could never escape the hunger, wherever they lived. She kept one hand on her stomach to silence it as she pushed open the door. The stairs were so narrow she practically had to walk down them on tiptoe, and some of them creaked and groaned under her weight. It was useless trying to be quiet. There were no lights on in the empty kitchen. The door to Torbjörn’s bedroom was shut. The dog lay stretched out beside it, watching her guardedly as she passed. When she opened the front door it got to its feet and slipped out between her legs before she had time to react. It lifted its leg by the lilac bush and then made a few circles in the long grass with its nose to the ground.
