I Am Behind You (10 page)

Lennart is in the passenger seat, and as usual he has brought along a crossword. As a rule they take it in turns to drive on long journeys, and share the crosswords, but it seems unlikely that will be necessary on this occasion.

Olof puts the car in first gear and slowly releases the clutch. Lennart starts humming ‘Seven Little Girls, Sitting in the Back Seat'.

TOYOTA RAV4, 2010 MODEL. Peter isn't particularly fond of SUVs, but Isabelle had pushed for this one ‘for Molly's sake'. Safety
and so on. Peter knows that Molly had nothing to do with it.

Isabelle isn't the kind of person who collects things, but the objects with which she surrounds herself have to be
right
. Evidently an SUV was right. Peter refused to buy any of the juggernauts Isabelle found on the internet, and they ended up with a compromise that pleases neither of them. Peter thinks the car is too big, Isabelle thinks it too small.

He sweeps the trash off the back seat so that he can put the garden canes there; he has brought them just to be on the safe side. Sweet wrappers, dried up bits of chocolate, a few films for Molly's portable DVD player.
The Little Mermaid
,
Princesses
,
Cinderella
,
Martyrs.
Peter picks up the last one and reads the back of the case.

Sexual violence…torture…intensely dark…a harder version of
Hostel
.

One of Isabelle's films. Maybe not such a good idea, leaving it among Molly's. He tosses the horror film into the glove compartment and switches on the GPS, which once again assures him that he is in the same place as yesterday evening. He sets off.

VOLVO V70, 2008 MODEL. Stefan is careful with his car. Not that he has any real interest in cars, nor does he believe that it is a part of his identity, but he does think it is important to be careful with expensive things. He cleans it once a month and has it serviced on a regular basis. Over the years he has had to change only the brake shoes.

Stefan places the thirty canes with scraps of torn sheet tied to them in the back seat. He has never bothered getting GPS, because he usually travels only short distances. He looks up at the field, and once again he feels dizzy. When he glances in the rear-view mirror, he sees Emil running towards him. Two of the other cars have already started to move, and Peter is just getting into his.

‘Daddy, can I come?'

‘I'm not sure…'

Stefan doesn't want to say that it might be dangerous, that they don't know what's out there, because Emil is an anxious child, prone
to imagining terrifying scenarios. But with a resolve that is unusual for him, Emil marches around to the passenger door, and Stefan doesn't know what to do. Fortunately Carina appears.

‘Let him go with you,' she says. ‘He seems on edge for some reason. He says he
has
to come.'

Emil gets his cushion out of the back and places it on the passenger seat, then sits down and carefully fastens his seatbelt. It seems the decision has been made.

Carina bends down and kisses Stefan, whispers: ‘Drive carefully.'

Stefan smiles and tilts his head in the direction of the field, as if to say:
Not much chance of hitting anything, is there?
He whispers back, ‘I love you', then he starts the engine.

*

Carina is left alone, watching the cars drive off. As they grow smaller and smaller and the sound of the engines disappears, the usual horror starts crawling up her chest.
I'll never see you again.

Perhaps it is because her mother died so suddenly and unexpectedly when Carina was only fourteen, but she finds parting difficult. When someone goes out of her sight, there is always a little voice murmuring inside her head:
That was the last time. You'll never see them again.

As a teenager she numbed the constant feeling of loss with alcohol and drugs, a lifestyle that soon got out of hand, and could have killed her. When she went back to Stefan as a last resort, the need to drink had subsided, but the feeling itself never stopped gnawing at her. A sense of loss can hurl itself at you and sink its teeth in the back of your neck at any moment.

The cars turn into insects, then dots, until they are swallowed up by the endless field. She thinks about Stefan's last words to her:
I love you
. He has said it so many times before, but this was different. The tone of voice, the expression, what it meant in this particular context.

I. Love. You. It is easy to say those words—anyone can say them.
They are no more than a series of letters. A child to his teddy bear, a gangster to his pit bull; an actor can say them without wanting any more than to sound sincere.

So when Stefan says those words to her, does he mean the same thing she does when she says them to him? That he wants to share his life with her, that he thinks she is a wonderful person, that he just wants to get closer and closer? Is that what
she
means?

Carina looks towards the horizon, towards the point where she watched their car disappear, and whispers: ‘I love you. I love you both.'

Her voice echoes in the emptiness. Something shifts in her mind, and for a moment she feels as if she no longer exists. As if she has been obliterated, along with the sound of her voice.

*

This time when Peter's GPS screen turns blue, he doesn't slow down, but simply presses the button and winds down the window, enjoying the smell of sweat mingled with perfume as he drives on.

If he stopped the car and got out, the women would be standing there waiting, ready to get going, to dance with him. But he resists the temptation.

The engine purrs, and after a slightly late night and a much too early morning, he allows himself to doze for a moment. After all, there is nothing in sight that he could possibly crash into. He drifts off into a waking dream, imagining himself among all those bodies moving in front of him and around him.

Like mermaids they undulate about him in the vast blue expanse, limbs floating…

Blue. Blue.

Peter gasps and opens his eyes, slams his foot on the brake. He doesn't know how long he has been gone. One minute? Two? Five? He shakes his head, looks in the rear-view mirror. Nothing.

How stupid is he? The map might have been incorrect, but at
least it enabled him to find his way back. The dot on the blue screen tells him nothing. He has no idea whether he might have turned the wheel while his eyes were closed, whether the car has deviated from the straight line.

The wonderful smells have disappeared, and it seems as if the air has grown cooler. Peter's throat tightens. There is no sun to help him work out which is backwards, forwards, right or left in relation to his starting point. He could well be lost.

He stares at the GPS screen, his broken contact with the rest of the world.

Hang on a minute.

He leans closer, screwing up his eyes. Something is appearing, so faint that it could be a figment of his imagination, an apparition lingering on his retina, but he thinks he can just make out a map amid the blue. A new map.

*

‘Bit monotonous.'

‘Yes.'

‘Do you want me to drive for a bit?'

‘No, you stick with the canes.'

Lennart and Olof have inserted seven garden canes in the ground since the campsite disappeared from view. When Olof pulls up to let Lennart get out with number eight, he hears a faint sound from the engine. A grating sound.

‘That's just what we need,' he says. ‘To break down out here.'

‘Switch off. Let her rest for a while.'

Olof smiles at Lennart's habit of calling any kind of vehicle ‘she'. The tractor is a she, the forklift truck is a she; he has even heard Lennart refer to the automatic milking system as female.
She's not programmed correctly.

Olof kills the engine and jiggles the handle to get the door open. He steps out of the car. In the deep silence he hears a ticking sound
from the engine; he places his hand on the bonnet, which is hotter than it should be.

‘Does the radiator need topping up?' Lennart wonders as he pushes the cane into the ground on the other side of the car.

‘I don't think so. I topped it up the other day.'

Leaning on the bumper for support, Olof kneels down and examines the undercarriage of the car. Nothing dripping. He gets up slowly to avoid a dizzy spell, and discovers that Lennart is now staring out across the field, arms folded.

‘Can you see anything?' Olof asks.

‘No. I'm just thinking. Fantastic arable land.'

‘Or grazing land.'

Lennart crouches down and pulls up a few blades of grass, rubbing them between his fingers and sniffing. ‘Seems a bit poor,' he says, holding out his hand to Olof. ‘What do you think?'

Olof bends down and sniffs, then feels silly. He pulls up a few blades for himself and does the same thing. He has to agree with Lennart. There is something weak and diluted about the almost imperceptible smell of the grass, and the blades feel brittle between his fingers. As if the grass lacks both water and nutrients.

He carries on rubbing the blades between his fingers as he looks up at the sky. ‘Do you think it rains here?'

‘I suppose it must do. Otherwise how could the grass grow?'

‘If it is growing.'

‘You've got a point there,' Lennart says, gazing around at the grass, which is exactly the same length wherever you look. ‘But it's definitely alive.'

Olof sniffs the blades in his hand once more, and says: ‘I'm not so sure about that.'

*

Majvor's job is to monitor the radio. Keep it switched on and listen out for anything other than golden oldies. Make a note of what comes
on so that they can find out if the songs are on a loop, or if they keep playing new ones.

So far they have been new ones, although that's not strictly true. The songs are old. Wonderful old songs. Majvor has been a devoted listener to the Swedish pop chart for over forty years, and is ideally suited to this task. She doesn't need a presenter to tell her the name of the artist or the title of the song so that she can add them to her list.

Right now, for example, she needs to hear only the introductory bass notes before writing down:
Claes-Göran Hederström, ‘It's Beginning to Seem Like Love'
. Not one of her favourites, but she still knows her Claes-Göran. Yes indeed.

She keeps time with her foot as she pours herself a drop of coffee from the thermos. She raises her cup in a toast to the empty chair on the other side of the table where James Stewart is sitting.

‘So, Jimmy,' she says. ‘How do you think this is all going to work out?'

James Stewart doesn't answer. He merely smiles his melancholy smile and looks at her with his soft, kind eyes. It is only in exceptional circumstances that Majvor imagines a conversation; his silent presence is usually enough.

Perhaps it is because this is such a crazy day that she has chosen to let Jimmy appear as Elwood P. Dowd, the man whose companion is an invisible six-foot-tall rabbit in the film
Harvey
. Jimmy's trademark expression of slightly confused niceness was never more appropriate, and Majvor knows the dialogue virtually off by heart.

They listen to Claes-Göran together, and Jimmy smiles at the words ‘bang bang'. Perhaps he is thinking of one of his many cowboy films. No one can handle a revolver with such effortless elegance as Jimmy; the gun is simultaneously a necessary evil and an extension of his hand. Not like Donald and his shotguns.

James Stewart looks away, pretending to study Majvor's wall-hanging as her thoughts turn to Donald. She hopes he's okay. She always does. She knows his terrible story, and she has made it her life's
work to look after him, make sure his life works.

What she can't say for sure is whether she has ever loved him. Probably not. She has nothing to compare her feelings to, but from books, films and what other people have said she has come to realise that there is a kind of love she has never experienced, and never will.

There is nothing she can do about it now. When she occasionally feels down about all those years wasted taking care of someone else, James Stewart is always there by her side. He is her secret, her Harvey.

*

Donald has been driving for fifteen minutes, sticking to around eighty kilometres an hour all the time, so he should have travelled about twenty kilometres. Still nothing. Still only the field and the field and the fucking field he can see through the windscreen.

This is a mistake. He doesn't quite know what he had been expecting, but possibly that he would drive up a hill, reach the top and be able to see all around. But it's just the same unbroken horizon out there in front of him, offering nothing beyond itself.

When the GPS screen turned blue, Donald didn't slow down at all, didn't even consider stopping to push sticks into the ground like those other fools. Okay, he can't carry on like this forever, sooner or later the deviation will be too great, but surely he can drive in a straight line for a few kilometres.

Strange images came into his mind as he drove into the blue. He thought he was driving through Las Vegas, where both John F Kennedy and Elvis were due to appear, and were just waiting for Donald so that they could get started.

With a wry smile Donald thought that dementia has its advantages after all. Fantasies become so real that you feel you could step right into them. On the other hand there are names for people who do that kind of thing: nutcases, fruit loops, loonies. So Donald had ignored the temptations of Vegas and put his foot down.

And there you go: after a little while his resolve begins to bear
fruit. On the blank screen the map starts to appear once more. Donald nods with satisfaction, following a road that he will be able to follow again on the way back. The map becomes clearer and clearer, but he finds it difficult to see things close up, and he can only just make out the letters.

What the fuck?