Blackwater (5 page)

They filled the little shop with their large bodies and loud voices, but fell silent when they saw her, as if no longer aware of what they had come for. They weren’t interested in fishing tackle, nor in the rack of chocolates and evening papers.

‘Yes, well then,’ said the man behind the counter, looking straight at Annie. She realised he didn’t want them in there any longer and that made her feel ill at ease. She took Mia’s hand and went out. The moment she had closed the door she heard the voices raised again.

Mia wanted to pee and they went down among the currant bushes. There was still no sign of Dan and it wasn’t as quiet as before. A bus had driven up in front of the community centre and musical instruments and large amplifiers were being unloaded from it.

She had considered sitting with Mia on the porch steps of the abandoned house to wait, but insects kept emerging out of the grass, almost invisible creatures which stung like sparks from a fire. Mia started crying. Annie picked her up and ran off into the tall grass, every step she took raking up a cloud of the stinging insects. Up on the store stand it was relatively free of them. They seemed to stick to grass and foliage.

Buttercups and red campion glowed in the evening sun on the grassy slopes. The lake was still just as calm, but the colour had deepened. From the community centre came the thump of an electric bass and keyboard riffs hugely amplified through the loudspeakers. The four men came out of the little shop, got into the car and started drinking beer from bottles, leaving the car doors open and their legs outside. The youngest stayed on the steps of the shop and belched ostentatiously after emptying his bottle, which he threw down on the gravel. The others laughed. The shopkeeper came out and said something in a low voice, then took the bottle back in with him, after a glance at Annie on the other side of the road. She presumed he had no proper licence so the purchase had been illegal.

More cars came skidding on to the gravel at the roadside, nearly all of them full of men, young men. She couldn’t make out what they were shouting at each other, but could hear some were Norwegians. Most of them appeared to be good-naturedly drunk.

Cars were also drawing up at the community centre and the instruments were rasping and thumping inside as they sound checked. Outside the little shop, a couple of Norwegians were teasing the young driver of the Volvo. He was now quite drunk, stumbling and swaying as he headed back to the car, singing in a slurred voice a short song she found it hard to catch. Anyhow, it caused some amusement and so he kept singing it again, over and over as he strode round in his tight trousers. In the end she could make out the words:

He pirouetted clumsily like a bear and almost fell over in front of one of the cars containing an older man in a cap on which it said Röbäck’s Garage.

‘Bloody hell, Väine, you don’t have to tell Evert about your dad and your mother,’ shouted the shopkeeper, causing loud and long laughter from the other cars. There was an abrupt silence when one of the men got out of the Volvo, the fattest of them, a large man with curly brown hair that looked sweaty under his peaked cap. He wasn’t dressed like the others, but in jeans and a thick blue sweatshirt. Strange, wearing that in the middle of summer, she thought. She noticed a sheath knife dangling below the hem at the back.

He strode up to the steps. It was just like watching a film. He raised his hand and she saw they were to witness a show of strength. The hand was rigid, the little finger and the outer edge turned towards the flag hanging out from the wall by the door. He struck out with the rigid hand and the flagpole snapped with a crack. The shopkeeper vanished inside and closed the door. The man who had snapped the flagpole strolled back to the Volvo and crawled into the back. Another man pulled in the youth who had sung the song, switched on and drove down towards the community centre. The other cars followed.

The music had started up properly now. More cars kept appearing. But Dan did not come.

It was not easy to get hold of Torsten Brandberg and his four older sons. Åke Vemdal and Birger Torbjörnsson gave up after a hour’s random driving round and asking, but they found them when they returned to the camping site out at Tangen. All five were drinking beer in Roland Fjellström’s office. Nor was questioning them particularly profitable. Torsten did not deny hitting Vidart, but said it was in self-defence. As far as the rake handle was concerned, he said he had held it out to protect himself.

‘He was unconscious for over twenty minutes,’ said Åke. ‘At least.’

‘And you believe that? Any road, he was on his feet when I left.’

The sons grinned. Torsten looked calm, almost amused as he sat there, his hand clasped round a beer can. The boys standing round him were muscular and not one of them had yet acquired the stigmata of the forestry worker. Väine, the seventeen-year-old, appeared to be drunk, breathing heavily, his mouth open. He was as beefy as the others. Birger felt fat and flabby before all this looming muscularity.

Åke again asked about the rake handle, but was given the same answer. Torsten didn’t budge. In the end that great hand round the can looked rather forced. He was still sitting in the same position when they left and did not reply when they said goodbye.

By then they were both hungry, so they went to the cabin before leaving. They had reckoned on fish for the evening and hadn’t purchased much more than beer and bread. But Birger had bought a sausage ring in case the fishing was bad.

‘Isn’t there a bar or a hotel here?’ said Åke.

‘No, not here.’

They ate slices of sausage on crispbread. Birger thought it was good. That was what he ate more and more frequently whenever Barbro was away, though just as frequently he thought he really ought to start cooking properly. He wondered what Åke did. He knew he lived alone, though not whether he was divorced or a widower, or simply a bachelor.

Birger felt just like some old bachelor as they got into the car and drove up to the Blackreed River. People were heading for the community centre. The music thumped. They watched girls in summer clothes hurrying down the hill, perceiving them as moist fragrance, despite the thick glass of the windscreen. He wondered what Barbro was doing. She was out organising an information meeting on the uranium prospecting on Bear Mountain, and he didn’t think she would want to join in the Midsummer celebrations. Last year she hadn’t even wanted to celebrate Christmas.

There were cars outside Lill-Ola’s fishing-tackle booth and when Åke saw the shop was open, he said he wanted to get some more flies. But Birger managed to steer him away. Åke would discover that the men in the cars were drunk and at worst he would realise that Lill-Ola Lennartsson sold other things as well as fishing flies and licences. And Åke would not be able to ignore drink-driving. At this rate, they would get no fishing at all.

A young woman was sitting outside Aronsson’s, a small girl beside her. Birger thought they looked old-fashioned, perhaps because the little girl had plaits and the woman was wearing a long blue skirt. They were sitting on cases just below the loading stand and appeared to be waiting for someone. But the woman seemed resigned. For a moment he thought of asking her where she was going and whether anyone was coming to fetch her. But he had no desire to be officious.

He tried shading his watch so that he could see the hands, but the light from above was too bright and at the same time too poor at the bottom of the well to make out the numbers. He had no real idea how long he had been down the well. The sharp stones and the smell of mud, the rough shale and the circle of light above dazzling him – it was a shaft right down into timelessness, a vacuum for him and him alone. He found he had to sit down in the mud. The seat of his jeans was already wet, so maybe that didn’t matter much, but he was cold. After he had got down, had shoved aside a few stones and was sitting with his forehead against his knees, he thought he felt a movement just by him.

He sat dead still. This was silly. There couldn’t be anything in the well. No rats. He considered hallucinations – was he so weak he was already having them?

He could feel nothing with his foot through his stiff boot, so he had to grope with his hand among the stones. He distinctly felt something quiver against his palm, something cold and smooth. Then a strong movement like an arm striking out. He screamed.

He stood up, stamping and kicking, yelling insanely up at the circle of light.

‘Help! Help! Get me out!’

Finally he was just screaming, no words. But the hole up there stayed light, like a blue disc. Nothing moved against it.

His voice cracked. He was standing with his back pressed to the sharp, knobbly wall of the well. There was something down by his feet. Larger than a snake. He felt cold again. He had forgotten it when he was yelling.

Whatever he did, nothing changed. The well wall and the blue lid in the sky were the same. And that powerful thing hitting out down by his feet.

He tried shouting again, but that only hurt his throat. He had damaged something by screaming. For a moment it seemed to him as if the bottom of the well was being raised and he was being pressed up against the hard, blue-white disc.

He got his knife free again, a small sheath knife, rather blunt. He used it only to gut fish. And how could he slash with it in the dark?

He started stamping and kicking among the stones on the bottom, stirring up a smell of mould from the water. But no movement. He started stamping systematically round and felt the same movement by the wall, though more evasive this time. Then he kicked out so water flew and he stubbed his toes on the stones, but he ignored the pain. He was going to go on kicking until it was still. Kick it to death. Whatever it was. I’m bigger, anyhow, he thought.

Something – was it a smell? – make him think of fish. And then there was the memory of a feeling like a snake against his hand.

Eel.

There’s an eel in the well.

He knew that in the old days they used to let eels into wells to keep them clean of worms and insects. He wanted to piss and he was very tired. If I piss in the water, I can’t drink it, he thought. I must have a drink first. What if I’m to be here a long time. Maybe it’s not harmful to drink piss. It’d be diluted. Eels can live for a hundred years. Maybe it’s white. I can’t stand here much longer. Then I’ll have to sit with the eel. That doesn’t matter. But the water, the cold. How long has this well been dry or almost dry? How the hell can an eel live in so little water year after year?

He had begun shaking with cold, so he kept beating his arms round his chest, but he couldn’t stop his body shuddering. He tried to get warm by stamping, though more cautiously this time. There was no need to stamp on the eel. Foul, pissing in the water, too, but he had to in the end, his bladder bursting. Then he sat down to rest. He fumbled among the stones and felt the eel. It wriggled away, but couldn’t get far. Fucking tough on the eel! And how often had it been hit by a stone?

Pekka and Björne must have thrown stones to check how much water was down there. He didn’t think they’d wanted to drown him. Or dared.

The chill of the water made him get up again. He could hardly see the well wall in the darkness but he could feel moss in the cracks. It must be a long time since there had been any water down there.

The wall was made of shale, of course, like all the old stonework in the area. The slabs of shale had been displaced by the frost. It must be a crooked old well shaft.

He tried standing absolutely still, listening for cars or voices, but he could hear nothing, not even birds. Up there where time and light existed, it was Midsummer Eve. People had had their meal. The Norwegians had started coming. Cars were skidding in towards the community centre. There would be much talk about Torsten and Vidart and that Torsten’s own lad had gone and reported him. Or whatever they made of it.

The music had begun thumping away and they were dancing inside – or was it already over? He had lost all sense of time. Gudrun had washed up, of course, and put her white cardigan on over her dress. Had they gone down to the centre? Torsten wouldn’t care a fuck about the talk.

Did Gudrun know that when he was young, Torsten had knocked down men he didn’t even know? And that with two others he had taken the Enoksson boy out and beaten him up because he’d left their lumber team and gone to work for Henningsson? That they’d done that at least twice?

Had she known that when she married him? Was there something deep down in sweet little Gudrun, with her courses in English and natural dyes, that liked all that? In the dark of the night? He felt sick. Maybe it wasn’t right to think in that way. But all the same, it was her fault he was down a well.

The light didn’t reach down here. It was up above. He could see it. But it had no effect down here. The well shaft was too deep. Someone had dug and dug, confidently hopeful at first because the divining rod had turned down just there, then in sheer rage. Eventually, he must have dug on from sheer pigheadedness, whoever it was. Not Alda’s husband. It must have been whoever had cleared the forest and built the cottage. He would have returned from the forest for a meal, saying nothing, taken his cap and gone out again. And if he had sons, they had to haul up the rubble. When at last he reached water, he had proved that he couldn’t have been wrong. Then the wall was built with shale, thoroughly, first-class work.

But the water had retreated.

Johan sat down with the eel. He couldn’t do that for long because he soon froze, but he found it almost as cold when he stood up. The seat of his trousers was soaking wet. He dozed off with his head against the sharp slabs of shale, a kind of sleep, although he knew all the time where he was, and that he had to rest and keep moving alternately until they came to get him out.

He woke thinking someone was touching his hand, but the hand and arm had gone numb. He was sitting heavily on one side with his arm underneath him and could no longer feel the cold. His body was stiff and chilled through and through. When he tried to ease himself up, his legs refused to obey.