Savage Spring (27 page)

The deep wrinkles aren’t the only thing that makes her feel uneasy. There’s also a tension in the solicitor’s face, and he looks as if he’d prefer just to run away. Maybe this isn’t merely a routine meeting after all, and she looks at her dad, sitting in an armchair by a wall covered in bookcases full of legal volumes.

Dad isn’t looking at me.

His back is straight, and he’s looking the other way, like Mum used to.

He’s looking at the solicitor. Or is he looking out of the window, at the cloudless blue afternoon sky? Is he thinking about Mum’s ashes, wondering where to scatter them?

Malin knows what he’s looking at.

She realises now, from her instantaneous scan of the room, yet she somehow, within a fraction of a second, managed to suppress the sight, because she doesn’t even want to try to understand this scenario. Because who’s this woman in her sixties, sitting in another armchair and looking at me, smiling a friendly but strangely businesslike smile?

Malin takes a step into the room, holds out her hand to the woman in the armchair, as if they both require politeness and respect, and says: ‘Malin Fors. And you are?’

‘Take a seat,’ the solicitor says. ‘Welcome.’

‘Yes, sit down,’ her dad says, she doesn’t remotely feel like sitting down, damn it, no one tells her what to do, then the woman nods, gives her a look that seems to want to say: ‘It’ll all be fine, but you should probably sit down’, and Malin recognises that look, it’s the sort of look she adopts when she has to pass on news of a death, or give people some other really bad news.

She sits down.

Allows her buttocks to be abused by the hard wooden chair positioned between the two armchairs, and she looks at her dad, but he refuses to meet her gaze. His shoulders are slumped now, as if weighted down by shame and a secret that has unjustly remained a secret for far too long.

The solicitor.

He’s steeling himself, and Malin can see how hungover he is now, recognises it, knows how much effort he is having to make to take command, become the master of the moment and do what is expected of him.

A tequila, she thinks.

What I wouldn’t give for a tequila now, and she digs the nail of her forefinger hard into her thumb, and then he is there as an image inside her, the faceless boy she has been dreaming about for so long, so many times over so many years, the boy she has perhaps been looking for without understanding what it was she was looking for. Is this my real mum, sitting there in the armchair, was that why you were never there for me, Mum, why you turned away from me, and why I had to search for your love?

No. That’s not it.

Mum. I’ve seen pictures of you with a big stomach when you were carrying me. Pushing my pram. So who is this woman? What’s she doing here?

‘Who are you?’

And Malin realises that she sounds aggressive, doesn’t want to sound aggressive – but I feel threatened now, something’s attacking me, attacking what might be my very core, and if darkness is the only thing you have, you cling onto it.

Don’t you?

That’s what you do.

‘This is Britta Ekholm from Norrgården Care Home in the village of Sjöplogen in Hälsingland.’

The woman nods.

Malin nods back, and then she looks at her dad, and asks: ‘What’s she doing here? Who is she?’

Tove is sitting in the garden of Janne’s house, hoping to get a bit of a tan in time for the end of the school year.

Mum.

I love you, Mum, no matter what nonsense you get up to. But I think what you need most of all is someone to cuddle up to, someone who likes you for who you are.

Sometimes I get the impression that you’re not going to manage, that you’re going to let the darkness take over, and start drinking again, that you’re just waiting for an excuse to start knocking back the tequila again.

I’ve seen it in some of the boys at school.

They drink the way you sometimes did.

Like there’s no tomorrow, like it’s in their genes to destroy themselves.

I love you, Mum, you need to know that, I’ll never give up on you.

Even if I move away, go somewhere else.

Janne can see Tove sitting with her head turned towards the sun. Her body slumped on the plastic chair.

He’s standing on a rickety ladder down in the garden’s small orchard, working his way through the branches of an apple tree with a pair of secateurs. He knows he ought to employ a gardener to get the most out of his fruit trees, but who can afford to get a professional in to do the pruning?

Tove.

It’s as if she got the best of both of us.

Malin’s intelligence and determination.

My calm, but not my restlessness. Nor has she inherited my inability to cope with responsibility, the way I feel like turning and running the moment things get tricky in any relationship.

She’s going to forge her own way through life. She’s meant for greater things than the two of us. That much is obvious. Malin and I aren’t the sort of people who have grand visions. We might be good at what we do, very good, even, but that’s as far as it goes.

A few seriously large branches fall to the ground.

The grass beneath them is pale green after the sunshine of recent days, but without any real life-giving warmth or moisture.

We won’t leave any trace.

Your mum didn’t either, Malin, but she couldn’t even manage to show her own child any love, didn’t even take that responsibility, and we’ve always managed that, even if I know you sometimes think that we didn’t, that we didn’t show our love to Tove, that we somehow managed to let her down with our own indecisiveness, our own inability to sort out our own love.

But she’s fine.

She’s stronger than we have ever been, or ever will be.

Janne drops the secateurs.

Shit, he thinks.

Climbs down from the ladder.

Kneels down beside his tools. Sees her, the other woman’s face, in his mind’s eye, and he daren’t even imagine how Malin is going to react if things go far enough for it to become official. Tove doesn’t know anything, he doesn’t think she even suspects anything, she’s so preoccupied with her own life, blind to certain things in that way only teenagers can be.

The secateurs in his hand.

Maybe she ought to become official.

Malin.

Maybe that’s the only way we can cut our ties to each other, the grown-up ties of love that we still carry.

They need to be cut. After all, we’ll always be connected through Tove anyway.

She is us, she is the best of us, she is the person we have made.

30

We see you, Malin, in the solicitor’s office. You’re about to find out something, you’re upset and scared and you feel like you’re about to explode, that all the feelings in the room where you’ve gathered are going to make you burst.

The solicitor has introduced the woman.

She’s asked him to let her explain who she is. Stay calm, Malin, she isn’t your mother.

Calm down.

She’s about to start talking, and even if you feel the world quake, you should know that she’s bringing an opportunity, a present, the most beautiful present of all.

Malin’s nostrils flare, and she feels them develop a nervous twitch, and looks at the painting – or is it a photograph? – behind the solicitor’s head.

She recognises the picture. Can’t quite place it. It’s a photograph of people in a hammock, but they’re just silhouettes, as if they’ve abandoned their lives. Didn’t it used to hang in Skogså Castle? The castle where they found the IT millionaire murdered in the moat?

Malin feels like sinking into the picture, but the present wants her here.

Dad.

He hasn’t said a word and it’s as if Mum’s spirit is floating in the room and once more turning him into the wimp he so often was in her presence.

But now she recognises what it is. He isn’t in control here, and this drama, written and directed by another force, is to be played out to its end.

The woman, this Britta Ekholm, is facing Malin, looking her in the eye, as she starts to talk.

‘As Mr Strandkvist has just said, my name’s Britta Ekholm. For more than thirty years I’ve worked at Norrgården Care Home in Hälsingland, the last fifteen years as manager. Norrgården isn’t a home for the elderly, we’re mainly a home for children whose parents can’t quite manage to look after them, children who were either born with a severe handicap, or developed one early in life. Some of them have been with us for a very long time, and Norrgården has become their home.’

Fuck.

She has an idea of where this is going, doesn’t want to hear any more, or does she? The woman’s voice, a gentle narrator’s voice.

‘For over thirty years I’ve been Stefan Malmå’s legal guardian.’

Malmå.

She wants to turn to her dad, but can’t, wants to yell at him and ask what the hell is this? What have you done? What did you do? But she stays silent, lets Britta Ekholm carry on.

Malmå.

Mum’s maiden name, and the rest of the stories told by the woman and the solicitor are like a long exhalation, as if someone’s been holding Malin’s breath for her throughout her life, and now she’s free and can breathe again.

What next?

Then an indescribable anger wells up. A sense of having been betrayed. Robbed of something important. Something that has made her feel like half a person all her life.

Then the desire for revenge.

‘So, Stefan Malmå lives in our care home. He’s thirty-one years old, and he’s severely handicapped, both physically and mentally. He’s spent his whole life with us, since he was just a few weeks old. I’m here to represent his interests when his mother’s will is read.’

The solicitor clears his throat, stretches his neck and looks less hungover now, but his attempt to look authoritative fails, and he just ends up looking rather foolish.

Britta Ekholm falls silent as Johan Strandkvist goes on: ‘While I was working on the will, a second child appeared in the records. It turns out, Malin, that your mother had a son for whom she surrendered responsibility shortly after birth, and who is now entitled to a share of the inheritance. This will not be applicable until after your father’s death, but in purely legal terms this needs to be taken into account, and the rights of a child of a different union protected. I should point out that this came as a surprise to me, and that I was the person who found the information.’

Dad.

You must have known.

Malin shuts her eyes, is taking short, shallow breaths, then she says: ‘So this Stefan Malmå is my brother?’

‘He’s your brother,’ Britta Ekholm says.

A face, a faceless face, a mask turning into a person’s face.

‘Your half-brother,’ Britta Ekholm clarifies.

‘So I’ve got a little brother?’

Dad. Malin can’t see the look in his eyes, is it apologetic? Is he sad? Ashamed? He’s slumped deeper into the armchair, his shoulders look weighed down by some invisible force.

‘In all these years your mother didn’t want any form of contact with us. I called her several times, but she got angry and upset each time, and told us to leave her family alone.’

Mum?

Dad? What about you?

It’s as if you’re not really here in the room. That both the solicitor and the woman from the care home have decided to despise you.

A brother? A half-brother? So, Dad, you’re not his father? And me, why was I never told of his existence? Surely that ought to have been my fucking choice, and she gets up, looks at her dad, then turns to the woman and yells: ‘Why the hell didn’t you contact me? If he’s been there in the home all my life, surely you could have contacted me? I might have wanted to meet my brother.’

She knows her anger ought to be directed at her dad instead, but she can’t bring herself to force him up against the wall and demand an explanation.

‘We were under the impression that the whole family wanted to be left alone. Your mother stressed that point, time and time again. Our duty was to look after Stefan as well as we could.’

Official records, Malin thinks, sitting down on her chair again. If only I’d ever looked up our family in the records, just once, I’d have found out about this long ago.

Clarity.

And unreality, and she sees a skinny little boy lying alone under a yellow health-service blanket on a hospital bed pushed into the corner of a dark, featureless sickroom, marked out by the fact that none of his own flesh and blood care about him at all.

A room without love.

She gets up and shouts: ‘So you, you’re not his father?’

The woman said half-brother.

Her dad is staring down at the floor.

And the solicitor says, in a voice that sounds as if he is summarising a boardroom decision: ‘Your father isn’t the boy’s father. His father was a travelling salesman dealing in office supplies, she met him while she was working at Saab.’

Dad nods slowly, as if to confirm the story.

‘She spent one night with this man at the Central Hotel. He, Stefan Malmå’s father, died just a few months later in a car accident. When your mother realised she was pregnant it was too late for an abortion. She refused to acknowledge her condition for a long time. Then she left you and your father to conceal her pregnancy from everyone.

‘She gave birth to the child in Hälsingland and was planning to have it adopted. As I understand it, she didn’t want to cause a scandal or disturb her marriage with an illegitimate child. But when the child turned out to be severely handicapped, that was no longer even an option. Social Services stepped in and arranged a place in the care home, with Britta Ekholm here as his legal guardian.’

‘And the years passed,’ Britta Ekholm says.

She holds back what she was about to go on to say, breathing calmly and looking at Malin, as if to calm her as well.

Malin’s thoughts are spinning. Was it you, Dad, who refused to accept the child? Or was it her? It must have been Mum, so worried about protecting her precious fucking reputation at all costs.

‘I can tell you that Stefan is a very special young man. You should meet him. He’d probably love to meet you,’ and there isn’t an ounce of criticism in the woman’s voice, no reproach, just hope for something new, perhaps an end to loneliness, and Malin feels her eyes filling up, then she takes two steps towards her dad and starts slapping him hard about the head and face, over and over again, but she doesn’t shout, she just goes on hitting him, and he makes no attempt to defend himself and just accepts her blows. Then Malin feels arms around her, the solicitor and the woman from the care home, and she realises that this is all true and she has no idea what to do next, how to get out of this situation, and she thinks that she has to visit him, now, now, now.