Blackwater (24 page)

He was glad to be left in peace with his painting, but in the long run couldn’t avoid noticing that his life was falling apart. He thought about flesh putrefying. Something greyish white. Salt ling fish soaking. An absurd image he had long had.

At least he cooked his meals. He had promised himself that and kept to it.

He saw nothing of his neighbours. They shared a subscription to the
Östersund Post
, but he hadn’t time to go across and fetch it. Barbro had always done that. He read it at the surgery, so quite a time went by before it occurred to him that the neighbours had not brought it over. In fact, they never had done.

One evening he met Karl-Åke outside the kiosk. Without any preliminaries, he asked Birger to do something about the linseed. At first Birger didn’t know what he was talking about, but then he remembered that Barbro had rented a patch of land and paid their neighbour to plough and harrow it. It had been sown with linseed. Birger trudged off in the evening and found the patch. It was in full flower, a lovely blue, a sight to take your breath away, as he said to Karl-Åke later. But neither Karl-Åke nor Birgit seemed to understand that he meant it was beautiful. They were sitting at their kitchen table and they wanted him to take the linseed away. He said he didn’t know what to do with it. It had been Barbro’s project, jointly with the local community council, he thought.

‘Perhaps you could cut it?’ he said. ‘Or plough it in.’

Karl-Åke looked so peculiar, Birger added:

‘I’ll pay you, of course.’

For some reason that aroused Karl-Åke’s ire. Or was it only an excuse to be rid of some sour old rage he had long been accumulating?

‘Pay! Do you think that settles the matter? Linseed’s a bloody weed. You can’t plough it in. It seeds itself and comes back again.’

‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Birger vaguely.

‘You should have thought of that before you sowed it.’

He wanted to say he hadn’t been involved. I know nothing about linseed. He left Karl-Åke and Birgit, nodding goodbye and pretending he was in a hurry. I must think this through, he thought. There’s something odd. Hostile.

He remembered Barbro’s outburst about the neighbours after her miscarriage. And then there was that time he had been in bed with flu. It had snowed heavily all January.

She had half killed herself shovelling it away. Karl-Åke cleared the drive with the plough as usual. That had been agreed and he was paid to do it. But not once over those three weeks had he offered to help shovel by hand up to the steps. He joked with Barbro, teasing her, she said. ‘Now you’ll have to set about it. Now you know what it feels like, eh?’

Suppose she was right? She had been here at home and presumably at the receiving end of their hostility, their envy of a life they believed was easy because it entailed no physical labour. The security of Birger’s appointment. His salary. It struck him that they must know how much he earned, for that was a comment he had heard before, but it had passed him by. Now he remembered and reckoned they must have got it from the tax authorities. The sum had actually been correct.

‘Some people have it all right,’ Karl-Åke’s father had said as he was digging in the potato patch when Barbro happened to be passing. At the time she had been working on the council tapestry, the bilberry picture against the Agent Orange defoliant (though that didn’t show directly on the huge dewy blue berries in the tapestry), and the hours she was putting in were absurd.

They must know how he drove like a maniac round his vast district, available at all hours of the day and night, his mouth dry with lack of sleep and worry that he might have made a misjudgement. Sleeping with one eye open. Never counting on any free time or a proper holiday. And yet this: some people have it all right!

And he thought so himself. They had touched on a sore conscience with their clumsy joke, which was nothing more than an outburst of envy. They had touched on a conscience he did not want and had no reason to have.

He forgot the linseed. Having offered Karl-Åke money to take it away, he put it out of his mind. He was free of it and had really never had anything to do with it at all.

He decided to ask some people to dinner because he realised he was drifting into something he would have jokingly diagnosed as paranoia in anyone else. He phoned Vemdal. He ought to have done that long ago. The situation was strange, not knowing anything and hearing nothing from the police since that thorough questioning. For a while he had been so paranoid, he had thought they suspected him of having stabbed through that tent by the Lobber in the belief that Barbro was in there with Ulander. Since then he had calmed down. So he phoned Vemdal and said he was going to get a fillet of venison out of the freezer.

‘Thanks very much,’ said Åke, in a wooden voice. ‘But I can’t possibly at the moment.’

Birger had encouraged him to choose another day, but he didn’t want to come.

Later, Birger was overcome with a self-pity that was so fierce, he couldn’t even laugh at it. His thoughts were scattered, yet manic, circling round his neighbours, the cleaner (who had quit without explanation) and Åke Vemdal. He thought the only damned person who hadn’t changed was Märta, but she had never been particularly friendly. He dwelt on all the calls he had made on neighbours without charging a fee, the medicines he had given them from his own supplies. He longed intensely for Barbro. A trip to Östersund to see Frances would make no difference. That was another world. She wouldn’t understand the weight of what was happening all around him and it would sound so trivial. Fetching the newspaper. An overgrown field of linseed. A cleaner who had quit.

He telephoned Barbro’s mother as well as her brothers, then finally got hold of her. As he was speaking to her, he found he had difficulty breathing. Her voice was low and intense, a dark voice, always had been. Dark like her hair, eyes and the bluish-brown skin of her eyelids. Like the hollows that became visible deep down below when she parted her legs.

When the cramp in his chest let go, he started shuddering, sobbing. She called out over the phone, not realising he had started crying. He hardly realised it himself. He asked her to come home. Afterwards, he had no idea why he had done so nor why he had been weeping. But she came.

That turned into three unreal days which he remembered afterwards as if they had lasted only a few hours. The first evening he drank too much at dinner and particularly afterwards. He woke alone in front of the television on the upper landing, and the bedroom door was shut.

They had still said nothing about what had happened. She cleaned and he tried to explain what had befallen the indoor plants. In the evening, she wanted them to sit in the living room and he recognised at once almost everything she said from those desperate early spring days. She kept talking about people with whom she had things in common, people who no longer wanted to live on these terms.

What terms? And why did she say people? His name was Ulander.

Birger helped himself to a whisky and she said quite sharply that he had to listen to her. That meant, you mustn’t fall asleep this evening. He was confused, but would do his best. When she had been talking for about an hour, the telephone rang. It was a mother whose son had an ear infection. They had been to the surgery that afternoon and now the child was spitting out the penicillin. He told her what she should do, but two more calls were necessary before she had got the dose into him.

Barbro said he ought not to let people phone him at home in the evenings. He replied that he didn’t, but they phoned all the same. Then she went upstairs to bed.

The next evening she was decisive. She wanted them to talk it all through. He felt slightly scared and said she wasn’t to be angry if the phone went.

‘It won’t,’ she said.

He didn’t understand what she meant. He was careful not to pour himself any whisky and brewed coffee instead. She waited, strangely irritated, and didn’t touch her coffee. Then she talked, and finally she cried. He felt totally helpless, not knowing what to say or do. His mind was quite blank.

She talked and wept until she got cramp. But he didn’t know if she meant any of what she was saying about loneliness and silence and his indifference.

She said that even his impotence was due to his indifference. He was almost relieved that she thought he was impotent. She said, ‘A kind of cold, sullen indifference which is really political.’ She used words like ‘bourgeois’ and ‘cynical’ and he didn’t think he had to take such nonsense. So he started telling her about his working days, the long journeys to patients, the road accidents, the suicides and cases of abuse and all kinds of things about which she already knew perfectly well. He couldn’t understand why he was degrading himself with this litany. Without his knowing how it happened, they were upstairs. She was lying on the bathroom floor, slapping her own face with both hands.

He leant over the rigid, tense body and tried to lift her up. He could feel how cold she had become from lying on the floor. She resisted and went on hitting herself. He said he would give her something to calm her. The slapping and screaming ceased for a few seconds, as if an engine had stopped. In an almost normal voice, she said he had been trying to drug her for several years.

He went out of the bathroom, took his bedclothes and decided to sleep on the sofa in the living room. But it did not go quiet upstairs. He could hear her sobs and screams and persuaded himself he could also hear the blows against her cheeks. He went out.

It was cold and damp outside. His breathing began to return to normal as he took in the night air, but his head started to ache, a flashing ache just above his eyes. He sat down on the steps with his head in his hands. He heard a car, then steps on the gravel, but was unaware someone had come into the garden until he felt a hand on his arm.

It was Märta in a raincoat over her nightdress, asking why he hadn’t answered the phone. There had been a road accident on the border. The ambulance had left Östersund a quarter of an hour ago and Ivar Jönsson was on his way towards it in his taxi with the injured man. But Birger must go to meet Ivar. He was afraid the man was bleeding to death, and he needed painkillers. She went in with him and already in the hall she heard the screams. She looked him straight in the eye and he didn’t know what to say.

‘You go,’ she said. ‘I’ll see to this.’

When he got back towards morning, Märta was in the living room doing the Friday crossword in an old copy of the
Post.
She had brewed some coffee and found a blanket to put round her legs. She said Barbro was asleep and the telephones were plugged in again.

‘I didn’t know they’d been unplugged,’ Birger said.

It was quite light now and he could clearly see the grey hairs in Märta’s sandy, severely permed hair and the hairs on her upper lip. He thought he ought to say something about Barbro, but he had no need to. Märta said several people had had breakdowns.

‘These interrogations are driving people crazy. They ought to stop now. They serve no purpose, anyhow. It’d be best if they dropped it. It all drags up far too much.’

He didn’t know if she really meant it. He had found Märta to be a fairly stern moralist, but she always had her own opinion on things. She had medical intuition and a talent for organisation on which he had become dependent. After she had left, he found himself thinking about what she had said, as if it were worth testing out.

If only you knew it wouldn’t happen again – what would it be like then if they dropped it? Like a natural disaster. An accident. A landslide. Would it ever be explained even if they found whoever had wielded the knife?

He knew that killing often had little to do with the victim. And whoever had held that long, sharp hunting knife up there by the Lobber – did it have anything to do with him any longer? With the killer?

His thoughts dispersed and he felt very tired. He took the blanket Märta had had over her legs and lay down on the sofa. He soon fell asleep and when he woke he heard Barbro in the kitchen.

His thoughts, his emotions were wide awake, clear and unmuddied. He wanted her to leave and not return. But he didn’t want to say it.

He longed for his solitude and the dull, regular days, for his surgery and the treatment room and morose Märta. Painting when he got back home. The can of lager. The TV documentary and the Goldberg Variations. The weather forecasts. I’ll subscribe to the
Östersund Post
, he thought. Alone.

She left the same day, and they said little to each other before she drove off. She had made no comment on his having painted the veranda. He supposed she hadn’t even noticed how far he had got.

You cannot live in the world without living off it.

The words rang a bell in her head that told her they had not originated there. So she went round asking. Petrus answered.

‘If by “the world” you mean nature, then that’s right.’

Annie said she didn’t believe ‘the world’ meant ‘nature’ and she had only wanted to know where the line came from. He didn’t know. He gave her a long look, clearly thinking she was being bloody-minded.

She didn’t know whether she was being bloody-minded. She was feeling good. It was warm and the scents from the meadow flowers were sweet. The old leader ewe in the flock had become so trusting that she would put her nose into Annie’s hand, standing still and spreading warmth over her palm. When she brought up the cud and started chewing, Annie felt a puff of her mild, saturated breath.

No, the world did not mean nature. Bert, who didn’t know where the words came from, either, but thought he had heard them before, said at once:

‘The world is society, do you mean?’

‘I don’t mean anything. I just wondered what it was.’

‘Don’t do that,’ Dan said one evening, his voice low and pleading. She felt a stab of guilt.

Whatever it meant, the world was full of cuckoo calls. She saw the cuckoo. At first she thought it was a bird of prey landing in a low spruce. A rich smell of decay came from the forest, blending with the delicate acidity of the reddish cones forming on the tips of the spruce branches. She squatted down on her heels in the moss. In the quiet, the bird called and revealed its presence.