I Am Behind You (31 page)

His stomach ties itself in knots as he thinks about how he sucked up to Peter, a mediocre footballer who made millions running around after a lump of leather in Italy, and who now has the gall to sit there moaning because he's been booted out of the national team too soon, in spite of the fact that he can easily live on the money that has simply fallen into his lap. The little shit!

And then the little shit comes along and wrecks Donald's caravan, for which Donald has toiled in the sweat of his brow, before taking off like a frightened rabbit in
Donald's
car!

Donald kicks the speaker so that it flies across the room and lands on top of the dough smeared across the sofa. He is so angry that his hands are shaking when he gets up, slips the gun over his shoulder and goes outside.

All around him there is nothing but emptiness as far as the eye can see. He checks out the caravan and discovers that the fixings for the awning have been torn away, which will mean an expensive repair job. This makes him even more livid, if that were possible. He wants to shoot something, any fucking thing, but there is nothing in sight.

He goes to the back of the caravan and lowers the ladder, then stands hesitating with one hand on the bottom rung. He's not in the best shape, and if he fell and hurt himself out here it could prove fatal.

They didn't think about that, the bastards. What if Donald had
been seriously injured when Peter drove off with him? Would they just have left him out here in the middle of nowhere to bleed to death like an injured animal? Would they?

Tears of rage spring to Donald's eyes as he hauls himself up the ladder. Anger gives him strength, and he doesn't stop until he is on the roof. He unhooks the gun and peers through the sight in the direction in which Peter took off in his car. Nothing. The little bunny has scampered home to mummy.

Or…

Donald lowers the gun. Only now, standing on the roof with nothing to obscure his view, does he realise that there is nothing to say that the camp lies that way. Donald has no idea where the camp is.

He positions the shotgun against his shoulder and slowly sweeps the barrel across the horizon, moving no more than a centimetre at a time so that he can search the entire area for a deviation, a hint of unevenness. When he is looking in precisely the opposite direction from the route Peter took, he spots something. He gasps and lowers the gun, as if to make sure that the sight isn't playing a trick on him.

Yes. Even without magnification he can see the tiny figure in the distance. He looks through the sight again, and the figure moving across the field becomes clearer. Its body is blotchy red, and it has no hands.

The Bloodman

The gun begins to shake and Donald is no longer able to fix the figure in the sight. When he lowers the weapon his body is tense, hunched as if to defend itself against an attack, while the old fear slashes and tears at his belly and the guilt presses him down, down. Then something happens. A simple thought takes root in Donald's head and flowers in a second.

Enough.

Enough. Everyone and everything is trying to break him, to bring him to his knees. Peter and those other milksops sitting there shaking in their little camp, noses trembling; even this fucking place is trying to scare him into submission. Enough. This is not How the West Was
Won—no, we set off into the wilds with our guns in our hands and we took the land that had been given to us, if we just had the courage to be men.

A man or a mouse, Donald? A man or a mouse?

Donald nods to himself, slips the gun over his shoulder once more and climbs down from the roof without even considering that he might fall. He doesn't fall.

When he reaches the ground he inserts a cartridge in the magazine, then sets off resolutely towards the Bloodman. After a short while he starts to whistle ‘John Brown's Body'.

Enough.

*

Peter has been driving around aimlessly for fifteen minutes, sometimes heading to the left or the right without seeing anything but the horizon all around him. This is just what he was afraid of. He is hopelessly lost. Nothing about the field changes: there is only that endless expanse of green everywhere he looks.

He has sniffed at the liquid that ran out of the glove compartment and established that it is whisky; he caught a few drops in his cupped hand and lapped it up. This made him feel better for a little while, but the monotony of the field is taking its toll. It is as if he is being hollowed out, becoming as empty as the landscape in which he is driving around, with no goal and with the same view constantly before his eyes.

At the same time, something is growing within his body. An irritation, an itch, as if the soft tissue of his intestines is slowly hardening, chafing from the inside. He is
itchy
in places where it is impossible to scratch without the help of a knife.

To distract himself he switches on the radio and smiles in spite of himself when he recognises that cracked, croaky voice. It's Peter Himmelstrand himself, singing one of the last songs he wrote, and possibly the most bitter. ‘Thanks for All Those Slaps'. It's about things
going wrong just when everything seems okay. Peter stops thinking about driving and focuses on the song, which seems to him to be truer and more real than the place in which he has ended up. When it gets to the part where Himmelstrand says his old man always hit him, he starts to sing along.

Yes, there are so many occasions in life when it might be appropriate to give up, to stop trying. There have been so many times when he could have done just that.

He could have given up when a knee injury ended his career in professional football. Or when the Italian restaurant chain he and Hasse had started up went bust. When all possible routes were closed off, one by one. When it became clear that he had married a woman with whom it was impossible to be happy, and had a daughter who turned out to be a stranger.

To allow his legs to give way, to fall over. Inside. Shoot down the energetic little devil that always drives him on. Kill him. How liberating would that be?

The refrain dies away: ‘At last I know my place…' Peter stops the car and turns off the radio. The air has thickened once more; it is pressing on his head. He leans back in his seat and examines how he is feeling.

The itching sensation has become even more noticeable. It is as if a huge spider is squatting somewhere inside his chest and stretching out its long legs right to the tips of his fingers, tickling and tugging at him. No, not a spider. A tree. A tree has taken root in his heart and is reaching out with its branches.

Peter closes his eyes. And sees the tree. How stupid is he? Coming up with such complicated images when the answer is much simpler. It is
the circulation of his blood
that he can feel. He has become aware of the blood that usually passes quietly around his body. And it is pulling at him.

He gets out of the car and takes a few steps in the direction in which his blood wants him to go. When he sees what lies in the distance up ahead, he stops. There is a thin band of darkness on the horizon.

Over there. Come on. Let's go over there.

He doesn't know how high the wall of darkness is or how far away, but he has to physically resist the compulsion to go towards it.

Why resist? That's where you have to go. You know that.

Peter holds out his hand with the fingers spread wide, and relaxes his muscles. The hand really is being drawn towards whatever is beyond the horizon. He walks around to the passenger door, opens the glove compartment and takes out a shard of glass from the broken whisky bottle. It has a sharp point, so there is no need to slice; he can simply stab.

It takes a couple of attempts before he manages to pierce the skin of his left middle finger. He squeezes out a fat bead of blood with his thumb, then turns his hand palm down. The blood slowly becomes a drop, then falls.

There is no doubt whatsoever. It's not just in his head. The drop of blood does not fall straight down, but turns off towards the darkness. Peter wipes his finger on his shorts, then clamps his arms to his sides as if he were standing to attention, his gaze fixed on the horizon, swaying slightly because of the power that is pulling at him, at his blood.

Life is no picnic, for heaven's sake.

What does it matter, after all? He could go back to the camp, to Isabelle and Molly, maybe manage to get away so that he can carry on ploughing through the mud for another year, and another year after that. He has been offered an alternative.

I'm coming, Peter. Peter is coming.

He gets back in the car and drives towards the band of darkness.

*

So.

After replacing the cans in the small fridge, Majvor has settled down in her chair with a can of Coke by one foot and a Budweiser by the other. She rarely allows herself a treat, but sitting here alone with
her treasure trove she has decided to take a little holiday.

She has the occasional glass of low-alcohol beer with herring or a prawn sandwich, but how long is it since she simply sat down and opened a can of strong beer? Twenty years? Longer? She feels free and slightly naughty as she tips back her head and allows the cool liquid to run down her throat.

It doesn't taste very nice, but she takes another swig simply because she
can
. Under normal circumstances she prefers not to sanction Donald's alcohol consumption by following his example. When he really gets into the swing of things he can sit there knocking back can after can, which he then crumples and throws on the floor, building a pile of growing evidence of his achievement. He can be so…Majvor wrinkles her nose at the bitter taste and puts down the can as she searches for the right word.
Unsavoury.
That's it.
Repulsive
, in fact.

It is many years since anything of a sexual nature happened between them. It was different when they were young, oh yes. But after Majvor gave birth to Henrik, their youngest, it was as if a light went out, and stayed that way.

Majvor was usually too tired, and if she was in the mood occasionally, it seemed that more and more frequently Donald wasn't up to it. They never talked about it because
you don't talk about that kind of thing
, but each of them slowly withdrew and stopped trying.

Majvor sighs and reaches for the can of Coke. Admittedly she's no Liz Taylor; she's overweight and her legs aren't up to much, but could things have been different between her and Donald? Could they still have had a sex life?

She opens the can and swills the cola around her mouth to wash away the taste of the beer. No. With the way Donald looks and behaves these days, it's out of the question. Nononono. Just thinking about Donald in that way almost makes her feel sick.

So it's come to this. To tell the truth, at the moment she feels as if it would be best if Donald never came back. She would be able to lead a quiet life instead of running around trying to please him all the time.
She has dedicated her life to being a mother, and now that job is done, perhaps she could have a rest?

Majvor puts down the can, leans back and folds her hands on her stomach so that she can really, really relax. She manages five seconds. Then she looks around and everything changes. She sits up straight, narrowing her eyes as she stares out at the field. It's impossible.

Jimmy?

She is not a crazy person. When she imagines her conversations with James Stewart, she knows exactly what she is doing: using her imagination. Sitting him down opposite her in the role that suits her at the time, making him speak Swedish.

The slightly knock-kneed figure approaching across the field, dressed as Will Lockhart in
The Man from Laramie
, is no figment of her imagination. Majvor hasn't thought about James Stewart for over an hour, and she has done nothing to conjure him up.

And yet it's definitely him. She can hear the jingle of the spurs on his boots, visible below the turned-up jeans; she can see the gun belt hanging low on his hips, and his brown suede jacket is dusty, as if he has just come back from riding across the plains. His face is weather-beaten and sunburnt, his blue eyes shine beneath the brim of the characteristic white hat that Jimmy wore in so many of his cowboy films. Those eyes are looking at Majvor as he moves closer.

Majvor's hands flutter nervously over her body as if to brush something away: dirt, several kilos of fat, quite a lot of years. It's not fair of him to turn up
now
, when she's old and such a sight. However, she still gets up and goes to meet him.

She knows that James Stewart has been dead for seventeen years, and that what she is seeing must be a particularly detailed vision, or perhaps she is well on the way to being as crazy as Donald, but right now none of that matters at all. He's
here
. That wonderful, incomparable man whom she has seen on the screen in so many roles, the best of them all: James Stewart.

Majvor accepts what she sees so completely that the only thing she finds strange is that he doesn't have his horse with him. Pie, who
accompanied him throughout his career in Westerns—how did he get here without Pie?

That's the first question she asks when they meet in the open space in the middle of the camp: ‘Where's Pie?' she says in Swedish.

James Stewart pushes back his hat with one finger, and Majvor, who is already weak at the knees, is quite overcome. She curses herself, feeling like a silly little girl.

He doesn't speak Swedish, you idiot.

She blushes, partly because of her stupidity and partly because she is now going to have to speak English, which is not her strongest suit. Whenever she and Donald visit the USA, he always teases her about her limited vocabulary and terrible accent.

But her fears are unfounded. James Stewart smiles in that gentle, sad way as only he can and says in Swedish: ‘He couldn't come along this time. Unfortunately.'

In the last word Majvor picks up a hint of Roslagen, as if he comes from her home area. Her overwhelming feeling is one of relief, because she will be able to talk freely. She decides to start again.