Blackwater (4 page)

Gudrun was at the desk, staring out at the enclosure when he came back. She was looking unhappy, nibbling bits of skin off her lips. He had always felt uneasy when she was unhappy, because it was usually his fault. He irritated Torsten and annoyed the brothers.

‘I didn’t know the police were there,’ he said.

‘You’ve done nothing wrong,’ she said, but it sounded mechanical to him. He wondered what she was thinking. It struck him that she knew everything about him, almost, anyhow, but he knew nothing about her. She was his mother and everything she did down there in the kitchen and out on the farm was predictable. Nearly everything she said, too. But he didn’t know any of the important things. Nothing about the time she was pregnant. Nothing about her and the man on the scooter. Or why it was Torsten she had married.

‘If he’s charged with assault, they’ll take his guns off him, won’t they?

‘We don’t know if he’s been charged yet.’

‘I only meant if he should be. Then he won’t be able to lead the shoot?’

‘Stop it now,’ said Gudrun. She seemed to think he wanted Torsten to lose his licence. Then he started telling her what he had really seen from the window, but she didn’t want to hear it.

‘Stay here for a while,’ she said. ‘I’ll talk to Torsten later.’

She looked tired as she got up. She was all dressed up in a white cotton cardigan over her flowery dress, and she had high-heeled sandals on. But her face was looking ordinary again. She had nibbled off all the lipstick as she sat there on his bed.

A little later he heard her in the kitchen, a cupboard door slamming and the clatter of china. She was emptying the plate rack, ordinary sounds, and they calmed him.

At about half past six, the cars came back. The brothers’ voices were loud and raucous. They had clearly taken quite a lot on board. Torsten was laughing at something Väine had said. Gudrun had started frying fish and the smell wafted up to John, but they ate their delayed evening meal without her calling up to him. He was shut in his room as if he had done something criminal.

He was the only one of the brothers never to have been thrashed by Torsten, and it was Gudrun who protected him. But although he had never been thrashed, he was the one most afraid of it, and they knew it. Her protection made him look foolish.

He got up and went down. But halfway down the stairs, his fear returned, not of them hitting him, but of Torsten’s half-closed, heavy eyes, the way he waited for an opportunity when drunk. Of the swift movements of the brothers, intended to frighten him. He decided to go fishing.

On these early summer nights, he fished at Dogmere, just by the path up to the outfield buildings. There he could see if anyone went up to the peregrine falcon’s nest by the river Lobber. He didn’t think the attacks would come from the main road. Henry Strömgren saw every single car up there. Two chicks had disappeared the previous summer.

His jacket was hanging in the hall and his rod and boots were in the porch. He was careful not to clatter with the rod, but when he got outside and started up the moped, he revved up loudly so they wouldn’t think he was running away from them. He knew they were watching him from the kitchen window.

He fetched bait up at Alda’s, as he usually left the moped there and then walked up to Dogmere. The old woman was in a long-stay ward permanently now and the grass was already growing in great clumps round the steps. He usually dug for bait behind her woodshed.

He found a tin on the garbage heap just inside the forest, and an old potato digger in the woodshed. He hadn’t been digging long before he heard a car. It skidded on the grass as it took the corner. The doors slammed almost the moment the car stopped. He listened for voices and footsteps.

The brothers had surrounded him before he had time to decide whether to run or not. He stood with the digger in his hand and they were all round him, apparently in a playful mood. They shifted their feet like footballers waiting for kick-off. As they came closer, he could smell aftershave and beer.

They must have got up in the middle of the meal to come after him. Gudrun had not be able to stop them. She was sure to have tried.

He realised something quite new was beginning now. It had begun the moment he left the house, taking the moped, and also when he revved up to show them he didn’t care if they did see him.

He put the digger down on the brown soil full of nettle roots and bits of glass. He picked up his rod and the tin of worms and started up the path to the hut. They followed, shoving him from all sides and asking what he was scared of. He started half-running, although he wished he hadn’t. Väine caught up with him and tripped him up. Pekka grabbed his arm and hauled him back on to his feet.

‘Stand up, for Christ’s sake.’

‘What do you want?’

Björne drove his fist into his stomach, though not with full force. Johan doubled up as if bowing and they all laughed. Through his nausea, he caught the scent of the forest, but there was no way out in that direction. They were all round him. Per-Ola and Pekka had lit cigarettes. Björne shook his head when they offered him one and put a dose of snuff under his upper lip, which now bulged and looked swollen. He had his mouth open as usual, and was staring at Johan, but he didn’t appear to be going to hit him again.

‘What are you scared of?’ Pekka asked. ‘Aren’t you going to call the police?’

‘What the hell’s the matter with you? Afraid of pissing in your pants?’ said Väine, and the others laughed. Väine would be regarded as a man after this. He struck out, but playfully and not at Johan’s face. They left him alone, perhaps because of their clothes, for they had all changed into light jackets and trousers.

Hoping to show the others what he could do, Väine grew more and more annoyed when Johan ducked without defending himself. He started making karate blows with stiff hands, checking them just in front of Johan’s face.

Björne and Pekka had moved away from the others for a moment. Something rattled further up in the forest. When they came back, Pekka said to Väine:

‘Get the tow rope.’

They’re going to tie me up, thought Johan. They’ll tie me to a tree. Then they’ll go. That’s all. They daren’t do anything else because of Gudrun. Or the police.

Pekka didn’t tie him up once he had the tow rope, but just put it round Johan’s body under his arms, and pulled. It felt like a noose. Then they pushed him ahead of them. They made a detour off the path and in among the trees he saw a decayed wooden lid leaning against a stone. They kicked him ahead to the edge of a round stone-walled hole. Then he screamed.

As they let him down through the opening he resisted as best he could, kicking out, biting one of them in the arm, and received a blow on the back of his neck. Falling, he felt a violent pain as the rope tightened round his body from its own weight.

He was hanging, the rope cutting deeply under his arms from the weight of his body and legs. He could feel no water. Above, he could hear their voices, but not what they were shouting. Then he fell.

When he came to again, he was at the bottom of a well. It had dried up, he realised, and perhaps never been used in Alda’s time. He was half sitting in muddy clay with the rope round his body. At first he thought he had broken something, but when he cautiously moved his limbs he noticed it hurt only where the rope cut in. He had a thick sweatshirt on and thanks to that the rope had not cut in too deeply, but he could get at neither the knot nor the end of the rope. They must be on his back. He tried to sit down properly in the narrow space, then looked up. The well opening was almost white in the light of the summer evening. No face visible up there, and he couldn’t hear anything.

He was sitting in loose mud and water, stones underneath. He wriggled to get away from one hurting him, then began fumbling for his knife to cut the rope. Once he had got hold of it and cut through the nylon rope, the pressure lifted and he struggled into an upright position. Nothing broken. It was difficult to know how deep the well was. The circle of light up there had now turned blue and he could also see a little more of the well wall. The water came just over the foot of his boot.

At least they hadn’t put the lid back on. They would soon be back to let a rope down. Fairly soon. They wouldn’t want anyone else to hear his calls for help.

But he was not going to call out. They were probably sitting in the car waiting for him to begin shouting for help. They had always thought him a coward. He just used to walk away when they started picking a fight, hating to look on when people got knocked down. But down here at the bottom of the well, he felt he had something in him they knew nothing about. He would not shout. They would not have that pleasure. The bastards.

He tired of standing and tried leaning in various ways with his backside and lower arms against the well wall to lighten the pressure. His legs and back ached and prickled. He wouldn’t be able to stay standing in the long run.

How long were they going to leave him here? An hour? Or right into the night? The worst would be if they drove back to the village and got so drunk they forgot him – he wouldn’t be brought up until long into Midsummer Day. Gudrun would look for him if he didn’t come home. She would spot the moped if she drove round in the car. So presumably it was no use starting to shout until early morning. But he was not going to do that. This time Gudrun was not going to take him home. He was finished with that.

She took Mia by the hand and walked down towards the shore. There was a house by the water, an unpainted old wooden house eaten away by rain and age. A confusion of growth surrounded it: clumps of wild chervil flowering together with columbines in beds where the soil had sunk away and dried to a mouse colour. Currant bushes had grown into each other and put down a tangle of shoots that had rooted. On the slope towards the lake, raspberry canes had grown together into an impenetrable tangle. The grass came up to Mia’s waist and there were great clumps of nettles by the steps. She had no desire to go any further into this green mass, humming with insects, the smell of spices and venom rising from it.

Annie lifted Mia up on the concrete lid of a well and left her there while she went down to the water to fill a flask. But Mia refused to drink lake water, shook her head and clamped her mouth tight shut. The water was perfectly clear, like glass right down to the brown bed of immobile stones. But she wouldn’t drink.

The store was painted white and had the pennants of the two countries above the door. It wasn’t far from the house with the nettles. The patch of ground where the petrol pumps stood ended at the remains of a fence that had rotted away, probably once belonging to a cottage now gone. A long narrow wooden building, painted green, a parish hall or a community centre, had a collapsed timbered barn next to it, its shingle roof fallen in. The house on the other side was clearly occupied, with puckered nylon curtains in all the ground-floor windows. But the attic window had a big hole with a rag stuffed into it, a sheet of hardboard replacing the other pane.

The village was very quiet now the rush at the arrival of the post bus was over. Annie found it hard to make it all out, the decay and desolation jarring against the new buildings and improvements. Why couldn’t they be bothered to pull down the collapsed and decayed buildings? Didn’t they see them any longer?

Perhaps the villagers saw only what looked like urban developments. They saw modernity where she saw decay and neglect, and where Dan saw simplicity. For neither in his letters nor in his brief telephone calls, presumably made from the phone box by the store, had he described the village as she now saw it in the clear evening light.

The greenery was obscene. It made her think of bushy pubic hair (seen in bath-houses, before turning away). She hadn’t expected this, but rather some kind of barrenness. But all the preconceptions she had vividly held during the weeks of expectation and anxiety had now evaporated.

They went over to their cases and sat down to wait. On the other side of the road, grassy slopes were gleaming in the sun, the colours of the meadow flowers brighter than she had ever seen before. Opposite the store was a modern house, boxlike, painted green and dark brown. As the house was on a steep slope, the basement was high. In it was a small fishing-tackle shop with the name Fiskebua in pokerwork on a board outside and a Swedish flag hanging from a flagpole protruding from the wall. They could just see a man inside, so Annie took Mia’s hand and crossed the road.

The door was locked, but he opened up when she knocked. He had no soft drinks for sale, but he said Mia was welcome to some homemade juice. He refused to let Annie pay for the juice and buns he fetched from the kitchen upstairs, but she had to satisfy his curiosity.

He had greying hair brushed forwards, long at the back and round his ears, and his trousers were flared. She thought he looked idiotic, almost indecent in those tightly cut trousers, but the fashion had penetrated all the way up here, and she hadn’t expected that, either. He looked exhausted, with slack, baggy creases under his eyes, his nose big, the pores on it enlarged, his eyelids heavy. But he seemed anything but tired.

She told him as little as possible – that they were to be picked up and that they were on their way up to Nilsbodarna. He asked if she meant Nirsbuan. What was she going to do there?

‘We’re going to live there,’ said Mia abruptly. Up to then she had drunk her juice and eaten the buns without a sound. He laughed. Annie never forgot that laugh.

‘Are you one of the Starhill people?’ he said suddenly.

‘We come from Stockholm,’ she replied. But his guess wasn’t far wrong. It was thanks to the commune at Starhill that Dan had found Nilsbodarna.

‘Oh, so you’re taking Nirsbuan from the Brandbergs. That won’t be easy, I guess,’ he said, grinning. She didn’t understand what he meant. She didn’t like him, and now she didn’t want to talk about their circumstances any more.

They heard a car and Mia rushed over to the window, but it wasn’t Dan. Four men got out of large Volvo which had driven up by the house, the tyres scattering gravel. They were really three young men and a boy who was driving. He looked scarcely eighteen. A smell of aftershave and liquor wafted from them as they entered the shop. One of them was dressed in white and had muddy marks on his trousers, as if someone had kicked him. The trousers were tight, the material thin. Annie could see his genitals quite clearly outlined against his thigh and had to avert her eyes when he looked at her. They were dressed for the Midsummer events; once again she saw that fashion was being followed up here, and she felt childish with all her preconceived ideas.