Harbour (49 page)

Wormwood

He really ought to go home and put the cash in his money box, but Anders wanted to hang out for a while enjoying the feeling of being
rich
. His pockets full of money. Like the boy with the golden trousers, he could simply peel off a note with a rustling sound, and another, and another.

He went up to the shop with no other plan in mind: just to saunter around as the richest boy on Domarö for the time being.

The boats were still out searching for Torgny Ek, but the crowd on the jetty had thinned out. Anders hesitated. If he went down to the jetty there would be a load of adults asking him questions, and he didn't know if he wanted that.

‘Hi.'

Cecilia pulled up beside him on her bike. Anders raised a hand in greeting. When the hand was in the vicinity of his nose, he realised it smelled of fish. He shoved both hands in his back pockets and adopted a relaxed attitude.

‘What are you doing?' asked Cecilia.

‘Nothing special.'

‘What's going on down on the jetty?'

Anders took a deep breath and asked, as if in passing, ‘Would you like an ice cream?'

Cecilia looked at him as if he were joking, and smiled uncertainly.

‘I haven't got any money.'

‘I have.'

‘Are you paying, then?'

‘Yes.'

Anders knew perfectly well that it was a strange question to ask, a strange thing to do. But none of the others were around, and his pockets were full of money. He just had to ask her.

She pushed her bike up to the shop and he walked alongside her, still with his hands in his back pockets. She had put her hair up in two medium-length plaits, she had freckles on her nose and he was struck by an urge to touch her plaits. They looked so…soft.

Fortunately his hands were deep in his back pockets, which prevented him from giving in to that particular impulse.

Cecilia propped her bike against the wall and asked, ‘So did you sell a lot of herring, then?'

‘Yes, this morning. Loads.'

‘I usually sell Christmas magazines.'

‘Is that worth doing?'

‘It's OK.'

Anders started to relax properly. This was the first summer he had really considered the fact that he was different from his friends, who were only summer visitors. That there might be something embarrassing about the fact that he sat outside the shop selling herring and ended up with his hands smelling of fish. That he was…a bit of a hick. But it turned out that Cecilia sold things too. Although presumably Christmas magazines didn't smell.

They went into the shop and studied the contents of the freezer.

‘So what can I have?' asked Cecilia.

‘Whatever you like.'

‘Whatever I like?' She looked at him suspiciously. ‘A Giant Cornet?'

‘Yes.'

‘
Two
Giant Cornets?'

‘Yes.'

‘
Three
Giant Cornets?'

Anders shrugged his shoulders and Cecilia opened the lid. ‘What are you having?'

‘A Giant Cornet.'

She picked up two Giant Cornets and when Anders leaned over to pick up another, Cecilia slapped him on the shoulder, said ‘I was only joking, idiot!' and handed him one of the ice creams she was holding.

At the till Anders pulled a ten kronor note out of his pocket without managing to create that special rustle you always heard when the boy with the golden trousers took out his cash.

They sat down on the bench outside the shop to eat their ice creams. Anders told her what had happened that morning, and Cecilia was seriously impressed that he had seen a person
drown himself for real.

While they were eating their ice creams, while Anders was telling his story, while they sat looking out over the water afterwards, a little prayer was running through Anders' head:
don't let anybody come along, don't let anybody come along.
He wondered if Cecilia was thinking the same thing, or if this sort of thing was perfectly normal for girls.

OK, it wasn't particularly embarrassing to be sitting here with Cecilia eating ice creams that he had paid for, but nor did he want the moment, the atmosphere to be broken. Even though he felt uncertain and didn't really know how he ought to behave, he was having such a
fantastic
time. It was just the
best
, sitting here with Cecilia.

When they had finished their ice creams and looked at the sea for a while, Anders' suspicion that girls were more used to this sort of thing was confirmed when Cecilia stood up, wiped her hands on her shorts and said, ‘Shall we go back to yours?'

All he could do was nod. Cecilia picked up her bike and pointed to the parcel rack. ‘Hop on. I'll give you a lift.' He sat astride the parcel rack and Cecilia kicked off and rolled the bike down the hill from the shop.

There was nothing else to do. It was completely natural. At first he tried to keep his balance by hanging on to the back of the parcel rack, but the track was uneven and he wobbled and nearly made the bike fall over. So he placed his hands on her hips.

He could feel the warmth of her skin on his palms, the sun was shining in the sky and the wind was caressing his forehead. They coasted through the village and he held on to her. The few minutes it took to coast and pedal to his house were the happiest he had experienced in his life, so far. They were…perfect.

Cecilia parked her bike by the woodshed and nodded in the direction of the smoker, which was still giving off a faint aroma.

‘We were going to do some smoking, but we didn't get round to it.'

‘Were you going to smoke buckling?'

‘Mm.'

Anders didn't bother to correct her. Buckling was smoked herring. To say ‘smoked buckling' was like saying ‘a curved bend' or ‘a cold ice cream', but this was probably the sort of thing a hick would know, and not something to show off about.

When Cecilia was with him he saw it so clearly: his garden didn't look like theirs. In his garden there was a woodpile and smoke and old rubbish his father had saved because ‘it might come in handy'. No beautifully mown lawns or fruit bushes in neat rows. No badminton court and no hammock. He didn't usually notice. But now he noticed.

Cecilia walked towards the house and Anders thought that at least his
room
looked like the others' rooms, fortunately.

What are we going to do in my room? What are girls interested in?

He had loads of comics. He didn't know whether Cecilia read comics. He had books. Maybe they could
bake
something? He could bake sticky buns and scones. Did she like baking?

He didn't get any further in his pondering, because Cecilia had stopped and was looking down at something on the ground. He hurried over to her and when he saw what she was looking at, his lungs sank down to his thighs.

Beside the spindly gooseberry bush next to the house, his father was lying on his stomach with his arms by his side, face down on the ground. Cecilia was on her way over to him, but Anders grabbed her shoulder.

‘No,' he said. ‘Come on. Let's go.'

Cecilia pulled herself free. ‘Don't be silly, we can't leave him like that. He could suffocate.'

Anders had never seen his father so drunk that he lay down and went to sleep like this in the middle of the day, but the drinking itself was nothing new to him. Sometimes when he got home in the evening his father would be sitting there with glassy eyes, talking rubbish, and at those times Anders tried to stay out of the house as much as possible. Right now he was so embarrassed he didn't know where to put himself.

Cecilia crouched down beside his sleeping father and shook his shoulder. ‘Hey,' she said. ‘Hello.' She turned to Anders. ‘What's his name?'

‘Johan. Look, just leave him. He's drunk.'

‘Johan,' said Cecilia, shaking him more roughly. ‘Johan, you can't lie here.'

Johan's body twitched and a deep cough rumbled up through his chest. Cecilia drew back as Johan raised his head and rolled over on to his side. He had been lying on a half-full plastic bottle that had been squashed out of shape by the weight of his body.

He caught sight of Cecilia and his eyes were made of dirty glass, a thread of saliva dangled from the corner of his mouth down to the grass. He smacked his lips, cleared his throat and slurred, ‘Love one another.'

The humiliation crushed Anders into the ground and splashed his cheeks with red. His father's hand was groping for Cecilia's foot as if he wanted to get hold of it. When he couldn't reach he looked up at her and said, ‘Just be careful of the sea.'

The shame of it all exploded into blind rage and Anders ran over to his father, aimed a kick. However, a faint glimmer of sense made him change the direction of the kick at the last moment, so that instead of his father's head he caught the plastic bottle, which bounced away across the overgrown lawn.

It wasn't enough. His father attempted a foolish smile, and Anders was about to hurl himself at him to beat the rage out of his body and into his father's when Cecilia grabbed his arm and pulled him away.

‘Stop it! Stop it! There's no point.'

‘I hate you!' Anders yelled at his father. ‘I really hate you!'

Then he fled. He had no words to say to Cecilia, nothing that could excuse or explain. He was shit, with a shit father, and worse than that, he was a hick who was shit.
None
of the others had parents who did this sort of thing. They drank wine, they were fun. They didn't lie there dribbling outside their cottages in broad daylight. That's what the fathers of useless country kids did.

He ran across the rocks down to the boathouses in the harbour, he just wanted to get away, away, away. He would pick up a great big rock and jump in the sea, he would obliterate himself, he would no longer exist.

He passed the boathouses and ran out on to one of the small jetties where brightly-coloured leisure boats were moored, he ran all the way to the end and stopped, looking down at the sparkling water. Then he sat down, right on the edge of the jetty.

I'm going to kill him.

He'd been sitting there for a long time, weighing up different ways of killing his father, when he heard footsteps behind him on the jetty. He thought about jumping in the water, but stayed where he was. Then he heard Cecilia's voice.

‘Anders?'

He shook his head. He didn't want to talk, he wasn't here, he wasn't Anders. There was a faint rustle of fabric from Cecilia's shorts as she sat down behind him on the jetty. He didn't want her to console him or to say something nice, something to smooth over the situation. He wouldn't believe it anyway. He wanted her to go away and leave him alone.

They sat like that for a while. Then Cecilia said, ‘My mother's the same.'

Anders shook his head again.

‘She is,' said Cecilia. ‘Well, not
quite
as bad. But almost.' When Anders didn't say anything, she went on, ‘She drinks a lot and then… she does the stupidest things. She chucked my cat off the balcony.'

Anders half turned around. ‘Did it die?'

‘No. We live on the first floor. But it was scared after that. Of practically everything.'

They sat in silence. Anders pictured the cat being hurled off the balcony on the first floor. So Cecilia lived in an apartment. He turned so that he could see her out of the corner of his eye. She was sitting cross-legged on the jetty, resting her chin on her hands. He asked, ‘Do you just live with your mum?'

‘Yes. When she's like that I usually go over to my grandmother's. She's great. She lets me sleep over and stuff.'

Anders had seen Cecilia's mother a couple of times, and she hadn't been drunk then. But when he thought about it now, she did have that look. Something strained about the face, something wet in the eyes. Maybe she had been drunk, but he hadn't been able to see it as clearly as in his own father.

They went on talking, and after a while the conversation moved on to other topics. It turned out that Cecilia enjoyed baking as well, and that she read books too, mostly by Maria Gripe. Anders had read only one story by her, but Cecilia told him about some of her other books, and they sounded good.

With hindsight Anders could see that that day had mostly brought good things. It wasn't until the following summer that he and Cecilia had kissed each other and become a couple up on the big rock.

But it all started on that day.

Homeward bound

The engine started first time and Anders roared away from GÃ¥vasten. The speed made him feel safe, he didn't think a gull could manage fifteen knots. When he had travelled a few hundred metres he looked back. The gulls had reverted to circling around the lighthouse.

He picked up the plastic bottle and waggled it back and forth in his free hand. The liquid was cloudy, opaque. The same painful clarity of vision that had affected him when he drank the poison had been in his father's eyes as he looked at Anders and Cecilia that day.

Love one another. Just be careful of the sea.

That was probably the story of Anders' life since that day, in brief. But why had his father drunk the poison in the first place? After all, it wasn't the sea that got him in the end.

Or was it?

Anders was twenty-two years old when it happened. By that time his father had taken early retirement, because he had ‘lapses'. He would turn up to work at the shipyard feeling groggy, then he wouldn't turn up at all for a couple of days, then he'd come back, work normally for a week, then disappear again. It couldn't go on, and they managed to work out an early-retirement package.

However, he was still well liked, and if they needed an extra pair of hands they would ring him and see how things were. If he felt OK he would go along and pitch in wherever he was needed; he was paid in cash, no questions asked.

Among other things, he made a significant contribution to the building of the new shed for the storage of summer visitors' boats. When the topping-out party was being planned, he was naturally invited. The building wasn't completely finished, but the frame and the roof were in place, and it was a long time since they had thrown a party, so a party it was.