Harbour (7 page)

‘Welcome home, Anders.'

The medium-length white hair that was Simon's pride and joy tickled Anders' forehead as he rested his cheek on Simon's shoulder and closed his eyes. Those brief moments when you don't have to be a responsible, grown-up person. You have to make the most of them.

They went into the house and Simon put the coffee on. Not much had changed in the kitchen since Anders used to sit there during the summer when he was a little boy. A water heater had been installed above the sink, and a microwave oven. But the fire in the cast iron stove was crackling as it had always done, spreading its warmth over the same wallpaper, the same furniture. Anders' shoulders dropped slightly, relaxing. He had a history and a home. They hadn't disappeared just because everything else had gone to hell. Perhaps his memories gave him a licence, permission to exist here.

Simon placed a plastic box of biscuits on the table and poured the coffee. Anders picked up his cup.

‘I remember when you…what was it you did? You had three of these and a piece of paper that moved back and forth. Then in the end…there was a toffee under each cup. Which I got. How did you do that?'

Simon shook his head and pushed back his hair. ‘Practice, practice and more practice.'

Nothing had changed there either. Simon had never revealed any of his secrets. He had, however, recommended a book called
Magic as a Hobby
. Anders had read it when he was ten years old, and hadn't really understood any of it. It did describe how to do different tricks, and Anders tried a couple of them. But it wasn't the same as what Simon did. That was
magic
.

Simon sighed. ‘I wouldn't be able to do that today.' He held up his fingers, stiff and crooked as they held the coffee spoon. ‘I only have the simple things left now.'

He pressed his hands together and rubbed them against each other before opening them again. The coffee spoon was gone.

Anders smiled and Simon, who had appeared on the world's greatest stages, performed for kings and queens, leaned back on his chair and looked insufferably pleased with himself. Anders looked at Simon's hands, on the table, on the floor.

‘So where is it, then?'

When he looked up, Simon was already sitting there stirring his coffee with the spoon. Anders snorted. ‘Misdirection, I presume?'

‘Indeed. Misdirection.'

That was the only important thing he had learned from the book. That a great deal of magic was a question of misdirection. Pointing in the wrong direction. Getting the observer to look where it isn't happening, getting them to look back when it's already happened. Like the business with the coffee spoon. But it was merely a theoretical knowledge. It didn't help Anders. He took a sip of his coffee and listened to the crackling of the stove. Simon rested his arms on the table. ‘How's it going?'

‘Really?'

‘Really.'

Anders looked down into his coffee. The light from the window was reflected as a bobbing rectangle. He looked at it and waited for it to stop. When the rectangle was completely still he said, ‘I've decided to live. After all. I thought I wanted to disappear as well. But…it turned out that isn't the case. So now I intend to try…I'm at rock bottom. I've reached the lowest point and…that's when it becomes possible to move on. Upwards.'

‘Hmm,' said Simon, and waited. When nothing more was forthcoming, he asked, ‘Are you still drinking as much?'

‘Why?'

‘I just thought…it can be difficult to stop.'

A muscle twitched in Anders' cheek. He wasn't keen on discussing this. He and Cecilia had drunk in moderation when they had Maja. One wine cask a week, approximately. After Maja's disappearance Cecilia had stopped altogether; she said that even one glass of wine messed up her head. Anders had drunk enough for both of them, and then some. Silent evenings in front of the TV. Glass after glass of wine, and then spirits. To avoid thinking at all.

He didn't know how much his drinking had to do with the fact that after six months she had said she couldn't cope any more, that their relationship was like a lead weight around her feet, dragging her deeper and deeper into the darkness.

After that, the drinking had become central to his life. He had set a boundary for himself: not to start before eight o'clock in the evening. After a week, he had moved the boundary to seven. And so on. In the end he was drinking whenever he felt like it, which was almost all the time.

During the three weeks that had passed since the incident with the fern, he had once again set the boundary at eight o'clock, with an enormous effort of will, and had managed to stick to it. His face and eyes had regained at least some of their normal colour, after a year of being red from burst blood vessels.

Anders ran his hand over his face and said, ‘I've got it under control.'

‘Have you?'

‘Yes. What the hell do you want me to say?'

Simon didn't move a muscle in response to this outburst. Anders blinked a couple of times, feeling ashamed of himself, and said, ‘I'm working on it. I really am.'

Silence fell once more. Anders had nothing to add. The problem was his, and his alone. Part of the idea of returning to Domarö had been to get away from the destructive routines he had fallen into. He could only hope it would work. There was nothing more to say.

Simon asked if he had heard anything from Cecilia, and Anders shrugged.

‘Haven't heard from her in six months. Strange, isn't it? You share everything, and then…pouff. Gone. But I suppose that's just the way it is.'

He felt the bitterness come creeping in. That wasn't good. If he sat here for a while longer he would probably start crying. Not good. It wasn't a question of suppressing his emotions, he'd wept bucketfuls.

Bucketfuls?

Well. One bucketful, perhaps. An entire fucking ten-litre bucket full of tears. Absorbed by tissues, sleeves, dripping on to the sofa, on to the sheets, rising like steam from his face during the night. Salt in his mouth, snot in his nose. A bucket. A blue plastic bucket filled with tears. He had cried.

But he wasn't going to cry now. He had no intention of starting his new life bemoaning everything that had vanished.

He finished his coffee and stood up.

‘Thank you. I'll go down and see if the house is still standing.'

‘It is,' said Simon. ‘Oddly enough. You'll call and see Anna-Greta, won't you?'

‘Tomorrow. Definitely.'

When Anders got back to the point where the track forked in two different directions, he thought:
A new life? There's no such thing.

It was only in the magazine headlines that people got a new life. Stopped drinking or taking drugs, found a new love. But the same life.

Anders looked along the track towards the Shack. He could buy new furniture, paint it blue and change the windows. It would still be the same horrible house, the same poor basic construction. He could of course tear the whole thing down and build a new house, but how do you do that with a life?

Can't be done. When it comes to a life, all you can change is the equivalent of furniture, paint and windows. Doors, maybe. Change the things that are in too bad a state and hope the core holds. Despite everything.

Anders gripped the handle of his suitcase firmly and set off along the track to the Shack.

The Shack

A curious name. The Shack. Not the sort of thing you put up on a poker-work sign, like
Sjösala
or
Fridlunda
.

But then the Shack wasn't the name its builder had given it, or the name on the insurance documents. It was actually called Rock Cottage. But the Shack was what everybody on Domarö called it, even Anders, because it was a shack.

Anders' great-great-grandfather had been the last pilot in the Ivarsson family. When his son Torgny inherited the pilot's cottage, he extended it and made it into a fine two-storey house. Inspired by his success, he also built Seaview Cottage, the house Simon now rented on a permanent basis.

When the first summer visitors arrived on the Vaxholm ferries at the beginning of the twentieth century, several of the islanders wanted to add extensions to their houses, or rebuild them completely. The brothers fitted out old hen houses as small summer cottages, extended and re-roofed boathouses, even built new properties in some instances. The building that later became the ramblers' hostel was built to order for a textile factory owner from Stockholm.

When the son, Anders' grandfather Erik, needed a place of his own in the mid-1930s, he was allocated the empty plot out on the cliffs. People probably had their doubts. Erik had accompanied his father on various building projects, lending a hand and carrying out some of the simpler work. He showed no particular talent. But he knew the basics.

His father offered to help, but Erik was determined to build the house himself. He was a hot-headed boy who couldn't bear to be contradicted; he swung between periods of intense activity and gloomy introspection. Building the house was to be the proof that he could stand on his own two feet and make his own way in the world.

Timber was transported from a forestry company on the mainland; it was cut at the sawmill in Nåten and shipped across to Domarö. So far, everything was going well. In the summer of 1938, Erik began to lay the foundations. With autumn approaching he had finished the joists and the roof ridges, and the roof trusses were in place. He never once asked his father for advice, and wouldn't even allow him to visit the site.

And so the inevitable happened. One Saturday in the middle of September Erik went across to Nåten. He and his fiancée Anna-Greta were going to go into Norrtälje to look at wedding rings. They were planning to marry in the spring, and the young couple hadn't seen much of each other during the summer, as Erik had been so busy working on the house. The idea was that he and his wife-to-be would move into the completed house after the wedding.

Once Erik's boat had disappeared from view around the southern point, his father sneaked down to the building site with a plumb line and a spirit level.

He came out onto the cliffs and stopped to look at the wooden framework. It looked reasonable, but weren't the gaps between the upright posts for the walls a little too wide? He knew that the pine tree outside the front door grew at an angle of exactly ninety degrees to the ground. He crouched down, closed one eye and squinted. Either the tree had started to grow crooked during the summer, or… He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach as he took out his folding rule and measured the distance between the posts. They were too far apart, and there wasn't even the same distance between them everywhere. In some places it was seventy centimetres, in others a little over eighty. He always went for fifty, sixty at the most. And there weren't enough horizontal supports.

He went to look at the stock of wood. It was as he had suspected: there wasn't a single whole piece of timber left. Erik had scrimped on the wood.

The bad feeling in his stomach moved up to his chest as he went around the building with the plumb line and spirit level. The foundations inclined slightly towards the east, and the framework inclined more strongly towards the west. Presumably Erik had realised that he hadn't got the foundations right, and had tried to compensate by making the house lean in the opposite direction.

Torgny walked around the foundations tapping them with a stone. It wasn't a disaster, but in places it sounded hollow. Erik had got air bubbles in the mortar. And there were no air vents either. If Erik put a slate roof on the crooked frame, it was only a question of whether the damp from underneath or the weight from above would wreck the house first.

Torgny slumped down on the threshold and noted in passing that the door measurements were wrong. And he was the first person to think what so many people would say in the future:
What a bloody shack.

What could he do?

If it had been in his power, he would have pulled the whole lot down immediately and put up a new framework before Erik came home, confronting him with a fait accompli. He did actually consider for a moment whether he could keep Erik away from home for a week on some wild pretext, get together every single person he knew and do just that. But it wasn't that simple. Just to redo the foundations… He teetered across the sparse floor joists and inspected the internal layout of the house. That was peculiar as well. A long, narrow hall ran through the house, with the incorrectly proportioned bedrooms and kitchen scattered along its edges. It was as if Erik had started with the living room, which did actually appear to be normal, then added each of the other rooms as they occurred to him, until he ran out of wood.

Torgny stood with his legs apart, balancing on two joists in the middle of what would be the living room. And he was ashamed. It wasn't so much that it was his son who had built this, but more that he would have to spend the rest of his days with this monstrosity close by, on his property. That it would, so to speak, become a part of the family.

Torgny gathered up his things and left Erik's house without looking back. Once he was home, he put a decent slug of spirits in his coffee and a great gloom settled over him as he sat out on his balcony in the autumn sunshine.

His wife Maja came out and sat beside him with a pail of apples to be peeled and puréed.

‘How was it?' she asked, as she produced a serpentine curl of peel from the first apple.

‘How was what?'

‘The house. Erik's house.'

‘Well, let's hope it'll keep the wind off them.'

Maja's knife slipped and the serpent fell to the ground before she made it to the end. ‘Is it that bad?'

Torgny nodded and gazed into the dregs of his coffee. He thought he could see the Tower of Babel, crashing down on to the screaming crowd. You didn't have to be clairvoyant to understand what that meant.