Harbour (62 page)

He went into the hallway and picked up Simon's jacket. His fingers found the matchbox, half hidden in the torn lining of the pocket. He took it into the kitchen, sat down at the table and looked out of the window.

Evidently he had made the boat fast after all, at least at the stern end. The prow was facing away from the jetty at a right angle and the engine was scraping against the stonework, but the sea was almost dead calm, and there was nothing to worry about. Beyond the jetty, out in the bay he could see the lighthouse on GÃ¥vasten, a white dot in the morning light. A reflector suddenly glinted like a beckoning flash.

Don't you worry. I'm coming.

Spiritus was moving slowly around the sides of the box when Anders opened it and let a gob of saliva fall. When he tried to push the box shut, the skin wrinkled, because the insect had grown so fat there wasn't really enough room any more.

He could poke it with his finger and push it in, but it was too much. After all, it had saved his life the previous night. In the junk drawer he found a box of matches for lighting the fire, which was slightly bigger. He tipped the matches out and moved Spiritus into the bigger box.

Anders couldn't tell whether the insect was happier in its new prison, but at least he could close the box without resistance. He stood up and put the new box in his trouser pocket.

He should have been hungry, but he wasn't. It was as if his stomach had solidified around its own emptiness, and was unwilling to let in any food. And that was fine. In any case, he couldn't begin to imagine what he might eat.

He filled a glass with water from the kitchen tap and drank it,
cheers, sweetheart
, filled it up again. And again. His stomach, already stiff, contracted around the cold liquid.

On the worktop stood the bottle of wormwood. Without weighing up the pros and cons, Anders raised it to his lips and took a couple of deep swigs. His mouth tasted like shit and the dizziness went straight to his head, making him sway where he was standing.

With his back to the sink, he slid giggling to the floor. When his bottom hit the linoleum with a hard thud, the giggling turned into gasps of laughter. He slapped the palm of his hand on the floor but couldn't stop laughing, he just had to get it out, so he sang in a loud voice:

‘
Thunder honey, Grandma's thunder honey, that's what he eats when it's time to start a fight.
'

Still giggling, he staggered into the bedroom and found Bamse. He pushed the bear underneath the knotted sleeve of the snowsuit so that Bamse's head was sticking up above his hip and the short legs were dangling down his left thigh. He patted Bamse's hat, said, ‘How lucky I am to have such a friend!', and by leaning on the walls and the furniture, he managed to make his way through the house and on to the porch.

His head cleared slightly once he got out into the fresh air. He rubbed his eyes hard with his knuckles and stopped giggling, blinking in the sunlight. It was a beautiful, calm day, a wonderful autumn day not unlike the winter's day almost two years ago that had brought him to this point.

His legs carried him steadily down towards the jetty. He could see the natural world around him with exaggerated clarity, he could feel the water inside, beneath and in front of him. He was an oversensitive consciousness transported in a fragile body, an infinitely complex organic computer inside a shell of rusty metal.

And the strongest bear in the world!

He loosened the mooring rope and clambered down into the boat, sat down and picked up the fuel can, gave it a shake. The liquid splashed to and fro ominously. He looked up and gazed over towards GÃ¥vasten.

Well, I'm only going in
one
direction, aren't I? I'm hardly likely to be coming back.

He looked at the bubble of air that marked the level of the fuel. It sank to the bottom when he put the can down, and at the same time something sank inside him. The fatalistic calm that had filled his spirit since he got dressed faded in the face of this practical fact: there was no need for him to fill up with fuel, because he wouldn't be coming home.

Slowly, slowly the boat drifted south, while he sat with his arms resting on his knees, staring towards GÃ¥vasten. Then he nodded briefly, pumped up the petrol, pulled out the choke and yanked on the starter.

As long as the little boat can sail…

The engine started and he shut down his mind against any questions, engaged the clutch and set off as slowly as possible. GÃ¥vasten was gliding towards him across the sea and he was thinking about nothing at all, he just kept his eyes firmly fixed on the lighthouse and watched the distance diminish. When he was about halfway he could see that the birds were still out there. Hundreds or perhaps thousands of little white dots swarmed around the glowing white walls of the lighthouse like moths around a bright light.

With only a few hundred metres to go, the engine coughed. He was running out of fuel, but the strange thing was that the boat seemed to be moving
even more slowly
. When he had travelled another hundred metres or so, he heard a cracking noise.

Terrified, Anders looked along the sides of the boat, because it sounded as if the old fibreglass were splitting. There was no sign of anything, but the noise grew louder and the boat began to vibrate.

What the fuck…

The engine coughed again and when it got going once more it felt as if it were struggling into a headwind. It was roaring for all it was worth, but the boat was barely moving forward. The vibrations became jolts and jerks and the engine began to cough.

‘Come on! Come on!'

Anders turned around and slapped the engine as if to stop it from falling asleep. When his hand flew back from the cowling, he saw something that made him realise his efforts were pointless. He could whip the engine until it bled, he still wouldn't get anywhere.

The whole bay had frozen. He was surrounded by ice in all directions. The engine gave a couple of final coughs, then died.

No lapping of the waves, no wind, no engine humming. The only sound was the screaming of the gulls as they moved around the prayer wheel of the lighthouse like white-clad pilgrims. Anders tilted his head to one side and looked at them. They were moving in a clockwise direction.

The central axis.

It wasn't difficult to see, alone in the stillness on the desolate sea, where the only sound and the only movement was coming from the gulls. They were the ones keeping the world in motion by circling around the central axis.

His thoughts were about to fly away, but were interrupted by a fresh cracking sound. This time it was not the boat's progress through the freezing water that was creating the noise. This time it was what he had first thought. The fibreglass hull of the boat was cracking as the ice grabbed hold of it and squeezed. Anders shook his head.

Sorry. It's not going to be that easy.

If there was some form of thinking entity behind what was happening, it wasn't particularly intelligent. It had certainly managed to bring the boat to a standstill. But it wasn't so easy to bring him to a standstill. Anders patted Bamse tenderly and clambered over the rail.

The ice bore his weight. He left the boat and set off across the water towards the lighthouse.

The honeymoon

The ferry was a floating microcosm of pleasures. You walked a few steps to eat, a few more to enjoy duty-free shopping. You went around the corner to dance and up or down a flight of stairs when it was time for bed. Simon usually thought this was a pleasant change from all the difficulties caused by the distances on Domarö, but on this voyage the ship was inducing a feeling of claustrophobia rather than freedom.

And yet he and Anna-Greta had a bigger and better cabin than on previous trips. It wasn't exactly a suite, but it was above deck and had windows. Simon was usually quite happy in a cabin below deck as the throbbing of the engines lulled him to sleep, but the previous night he had lain awake with Anna-Greta beside him and a lump in his chest.

Did I do the right thing?

That was the question that was tormenting him. He had given Spiritus to Anders, and had done it in a way that could only be interpreted as encouragement to tackle things as he saw fit. Had it been the right thing to do?

Simon lay awake in his bunk, listening to the sea surging along the sides of the ship and feeling weightless with doubt and anxiety. He had committed himself to following his fate, together with Spiritus, to whatever the bitter end might be. He had not been particularly afraid.

Or had he?

Had he in fact been afraid, and made use of Anders to get rid of his fear? He could no longer say for sure. He had lost his foundation and his ballast when he gave away Spiritus, and it was not relief he felt now, but an unpleasant weightlessness.

Thus Simon's night passed as the ferry ploughed through the darkness, reaching the outer rocky islets of the Roslagen archipelago towards morning. When Anna-Greta woke up, they got dressed and went down to breakfast.

When they had helped themselves to rolls, various spreads and coffee, and settled down at a window table, Anna-Greta looked searchingly at Simon and asked, ‘Did you sleep last night…' she smiled, ‘…husband?'

Simon smiled. ‘No…wife…it was a bad night.'

‘Why?'

Simon rubbed the palm of his hand with his forefinger and stared at the scrambled egg quivering on his plate with the vibrations of the ship. It looked like his brain felt, and he couldn't come up with a good answer. After he had remained silent for a while, Anna-Great asked, ‘Isn't there something you have to…do?'

‘Like what?'

Anna-Greta nodded towards his jacket pocket. ‘With the box.'

The movement of the forefinger became more frantic, and the palm of his hand started to hurt. Simon looked out of the window and saw that the rocky islets had become islands. They had just passed Söderarm. In an hour or so they would arrive in Kappellskär. The finger stopped rubbing and he placed his hands on the table, palms down.

‘Well, you see…I gave it to Anders.'

‘Gave?'

‘Yes, or…handed it over. Passed it on.'

Anna-Greta frowned and shook her head. ‘Why?'

‘Because…'

Why? Why? Because I'm a coward, because I'm scared, because I'm brave, because Anders…

‘Because I thought he might need it.'

Anna-Greta's eyes were fixed firmly on his. ‘For what?'

‘For…for what he had to do.'

As Simon had feared, Anna-Greta was lost for words. Her hands dropped to her knees and she gazed open-mouthed out of the window at the islands, which seemed to be spooling past on a slow film. Simon picked up his fork and put a small amount of scrambled egg in his mouth. It tasted of ash. He put down the fork again just as the ship gave a jolt and the egg lurched towards the middle of the plate like an amoeba.

Anna-Greta looked at him. Simon's eyes darted away. The ship jolted again, more sharply this time, and when he finally made the supreme effort to look into Anna-Greta's eyes, he found something else there.

They looked at each other. The engine's revs increased and all around them they could hear clinking and clattering as glasses and cutlery trembled and collided. A faint lurch ran through the entire ship; Simon was pushed forward slightly, but didn't take his eyes off Anna-Greta.

The engines roared and everything shook. Raised voices from the tables around tried to make themselves heard above the rattling and roaring. There was a more powerful jolt and Simon's stomach hit the table. Anna-Greta was almost tipped backwards off her chair, but managed to save herself by grabbing hold of the windowsill. They had stopped.

Their eye contact had been broken during the ship's last convulsion, and they both looked out of the window. Simon thought he could just make out Ledinge and GÃ¥vasten in the distance, in a sea that had frozen solid. The ship was trapped in a thick layer of ice, and Simon was intelligent enough to understand.

What have I done? What have I done?

People had got up from their tables and were conducting loud conversations as they ran to the windows to see what was going on. A man and a woman pushed in at their window, obscuring the view and exclaiming incredulously, ‘This is just ridiculous…this just can't be happening…how can this happen, we were in open water a few minutes ago…'

Anna-Greta caught his gaze once more. She nodded slowly and said, ‘So there we are. Whatever will be, will be.'

She reached out and placed her hand on the table between them, palm upwards. Simon grabbed it and squeezed it.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I couldn't do anything else.'

‘No, I realise that,' said Anna-Greta. She let go of his hand and looked at it as it lay there open on the table. With her forefinger she traced the lines on his palm. ‘I realise that. My husband.'

A better world

The screams, the racket of the gulls had become part of normality by the time Anders set foot on the rocks of GÃ¥vasten for the third time in his life. He hardly noticed them, they were merely a carpet of sound, a part of the place, now that he no longer feared them.

He climbed up from a sea covered in ice on to an islet where it was still autumn. Where there was no snow, and where odd bushes still had leaves, and the tufts of grass in the crevices were green.

The place he was heading for was on the eastern side of the island. He had seen it the last time he was here, and it was just visible in the background in the photographs, but he hadn't
noticed
it until now, hadn't dared to formulate the thought.

Standing on the rocks on the eastern side, he couldn't understand how he had been so blind. Maja had tried to show him with the beads, with the lines in the Bamse comic, and it had been right there in front of him all the time: the flat rocks on the eastern side led steeply down into the sea in a broken step formation.