The Cold Song (15 page)

“ROCK!” she cried, punching the air with her fist triumphantly.

Milla felt how the bike almost seemed to take off, to take wing, like a huge bird, she whooshed past her father.

“ROCK,” she cried again and looked back to see if he was watching her.

When she lost her balance and the bike came crashing down, the ground seemed to come alive. It punched and clawed and bit and beat and battered her bones.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw her father’s lips—as he swept past—forming the word
paper
. He had the palm of one hand raised as if he was waving to her.

Don’t look back. If you look back you’ll fall off your bike. If you look back you’ll be turned into a pillar of salt. If you look back the one you love will die.
You’re beautiful. You’re luminous
. Milla looked back, there was no one there, no one had seen her go. The big, white, brightly lit house she had just left had a lonesome air to it. She could hear voices, party guests shouting and laughing, but the sounds were swathed in thick velvet. Soon the fog would envelop them all. The house, the garden, the people.
Sweetheart like you
. Milla walked on.

In the middle of the road lay a buckled bike and in the ditch a little boy was sitting, crying. Milla drew closer, the boy looked up, caught sight of her, and cried even louder. She went over to him, crouched down beside him, and saw the grazes on his knees and the palms of his hands. He was bleeding. There was grit in the cuts on his knees. The grit would have to be picked out before his wounds could be cleaned and dressed. Her legs went watery, as if it were her own knees that were hurt and bleeding.

The cuts were seeping red, rimmed with black, and crisscrossed by stinging pink streaks, it looked as though someone had drawn on his knee with a sharp pink pencil, but she didn’t think he would need stitches. She hadn’t needed them either, that time when she fell off. She laid a hand on his shoulder.

“Did you fall off your bike? Have you hurt yourself?”

The boy cried even louder and nodded vigorously. Milla looked up and down the road, wondering whether he was on his own or with his parents or someone. But he was clearly alone. She took his hand and helped him to his feet, then she used the red shawl she had borrowed from Siri to wipe the dirt and tears off his face. The boy had gone very quiet.

“What’s your name?” she whispered.

There were bloodstains on the shawl. It didn’t matter, she told herself. She would tell Siri that it was not her blood, it wasn’t as if she had been careless or anything, she had just helped this little boy who had fallen off his bike.

“Simen,” he sniffed. “My bike’s wrecked, I’m sure it is, and I can’t afford a new one.”

He burst into tears again and rested his head gently against her. Milla let him stay like that for a few moments before extricating herself and going over to his bike, which was lying in the middle of the road. She hunched over it and inspected the damage. The bike had survived the crash well, it was a bit muddy, but nothing was broken that couldn’t be fixed.

“It’s not wrecked,” she said, pulling it up onto its wheels. “Look, Simen, it’s not wrecked.”

And then Milla asked if she could walk him home. Simen nodded, his face brightening a little as he let her take his hand.

“Where do you live?” Milla asked as they started down the long slope.

She had one hand in his hand, the other on the handlebars of the bike. Her umbrella was slung over her shoulder alongside the evening bag.

“Near the bottom of the hill,” he said. “It’s the second house on the left as you come up the road.”

“But we’re not coming up the road,” Milla laughed. “We’re going down it, so your house must be on the right. Which means we’ll have to look to the right to find the house where you live.”

They said no more after that. But Milla glanced at him every now and again, walking beside her, upright as a little tin soldier. The mist wrapped itself around them.

“It’s like walking in a cloud,” Milla whispered.

When they got to his house she said, “I’m Milla.”

She propped his bike up against the fence. He looked at her and almost burst into tears again. Maybe because she was about to go.

She bent and kissed the top of his head.

“I’m Milla,” she said, “and you’re Simen and you’re not to cry anymore.”

Then she turned and walked away.

JENNY HID BEHIND
the bedroom curtain and looked down on the garden and all the guests in their finery milling around in the fog. They didn’t stand a chance. The fog was too big for them. Too heavy, too gray, too impenetrable and too beautiful. Jenny screwed up her eyes. Her head hurt. The bump on her right toe burned. Her hands shook. More Cabernet would alleviate the shaking. And possibly also the headache. What more could one possibly ask for? Her feet were leading their own fleshy existence down there in the nectarine sandals, she had put them on, but now she kicked them off again, and her dress strained so tightly across her belly that she could hardly breathe. Jenny peeped out the window. Oh, look, there were Daniel and Camilla and their hapless daughters, and there was Steve Knightley from Seattle and dear old Ola, her neighbor, who had turned gray and sad after his wife, Helga, died, and what on earth was her dear friend Julia wearing—some sort of caftan? And bright green? It was far too short, surely? And then her eyes fell on Siri wearing a blue silk dress that had once been hers. Jenny drained her glass and watched her daughter walking around the garden, playing the hostess. Siri would be all right. Siri had her restaurants and she had Jon and she had both her children. They were not dead. And look there was
her old friend Mary Olsson and that ridiculous little husband of hers. Jenny took another swig. Who on earth were all these people? Was this the gang that would show up at her funeral? Jenny could see several who—and she observed this with some satisfaction—were sure to go before her. Definitely! And in the spirit of feeling momentarily immortal, she decided she would make a speech. There were a couple of things she wanted to say. Jenny stumbled over to her bed and stretched out on it. Pen and paper. Somewhere in her room she had pen and paper. Why was it always so difficult to find pen and paper? She had a speech to write. Not a long speech. No. She was going to write a short speech. And it would begin as follows:

Nothing
.

Jenny sat up and stared into space. It would begin as follows:

Nothing
.

Jenny got down on the floor and looked under the bed. Well, what do you know—a pen under the bed. And over there on the dressing table—a couple of receipts. She would write on the back of them. Jenny climbed back onto the bed.

It would go like this:

Dear family and friends. Dear Siri, who has organized this party for me. Dear Irma. Here we are, standing in the fog and wondering whether it’s going to rain …

Yes, that was good.

Another little drink and maybe she could make the rest up as she went along.

SIRI SHUT THE
front door behind her and everything went quiet. Her knees buckled under her and she flopped to the floor, like a puppet, then she sat up again because, she thought,
I’m not a puppet and I control my own movements, I just need to sit here for a minute and collect myself and rest
, and then she put her face in her hands. Disastrous. Disastrous. Disastrous. This whole party was a disaster.
What have I done with my life?
Something had gone wrong. The long pale blue dress that Jenny had given her slithered down over her form and streamed and spread across the hardwood floor into a pool of silk.
You look so beautiful
, Jon had whispered as they had arranged themselves on the steps outside: Siri, Jon, Alma, Liv, and Milla, and even Irma (Irma the giantess with a face that Jon had once compared to the angel Uriel in a painting by Leonardo), they had stood there, as if on a stage, and greeted the guests and bade them welcome.
You look so beautiful
. And the next moment:
Leave her alone!
So curt. So harsh, his voice. And only because Siri, in the gentlest of fashion—softly, quietly, lightly—had expressed her objection to the flower in Milla’s hair. The meadow behind the house was full of wildflowers that Milla could pick for her hair. Milla—this big clumsy child who had come to Mailund with all her sadness and all her loneliness.

Leave her alone!

So curt.

So harsh.

The white flower bed at Mailund was Siri’s pride and joy, and not there for Milla to be picking flowers for her hair. Goddamned child.

Siri blamed Milla. Something had gone wrong and Siri blamed Milla. Milla was there to help but was turning into a nuisance, a big, clumsy, needy nuisance, lurking around, snapping pictures with her cell phone. And she blamed Jenny who decided to fall off the wagon on this exact day, in front of all these people, triumphantly announcing this family’s defeat—why?
Because she didn’t want a party and had said so many times and Siri hadn’t listened?
And she blamed Jon who smiled foolishly every time he saw Milla come into a room. Just because she was young and pretty. It was too stupid. But then she pictured him sitting there in the attic room not writing. Yes they joked about it.
All work and no play makes Jon a dull boy
. She hated him for joking about it. The not working. The giving up. The lies. The cheating.

Sometimes at night Siri would go upstairs to the attic to say good night to Jon. They slept apart almost every night now—and he looked so lonely lying there on his bed, staring at the ceiling or reading a newspaper on his cell phone, or flicking through novels he’d written himself.

There was a stack of Jon Dreyer books on the floor.

“So, now all you read are books you’ve written yourself?” she asked him once.

“Leave me alone, Siri, just leave me to read whatever I want.”

“Maybe if you actually read a book written by someone other than yourself, you would be inspired to write again.”

“Thanks. Why don’t we make the following agreement right now: I don’t tell you how to cook and you don’t tell me how to write. Okay?”

It was wrong to call this room the hallway, Siri raised her head and looked around, they had always called it “the hallway”—
I will not have a lot of mess in the hallway, Siri, help Syver hang up his outdoor things
—when in fact the room was grand and lofty, with old wooden flooring and no furniture. There was the stairway, set like a throne at the room’s center, the broad stairway that wound up from floor to floor. On the first floor Jenny was perched on the edge of her bed (or maybe she was standing behind the curtain, looking out the window), refusing to come down. And Siri had come to take matters in hand.
She was going to take matters in hand
. This was not an expression she had ever used before, but suddenly she had found herself plodding around the garden in her long, blue silk dress and high heels (that had sunk into the ground with every step she took, squelch, squelch, squelch), behaving in a manner that seemed foreign, using words and expressions that were not like her at all. Occasionally, for a fleeting, horrified moment, she caught a glimpse of herself. The shrill note in her voice. The stupid words. It was as if there were something
heavy weighing on her tongue that had to be removed immediately—that expression,
It’s time I took matters in hand
, uttered in such a phony way—and out of her mouth she plucked a big, shiny bug. And then another. And one more. Her mouth full of big, shiny bugs.

“Well, I think it’s time I took matters in hand,” she said with a smile to old Mrs. Julia Herman, who was swanning around, talking to everybody and dressed in a rather odd-looking green caftan that emphasized her old, skinny, blue-tinged, varicose-veined legs. Had Julia Herman perhaps forgotten to put on her trousers?

“Right, now I’m going to take matters in hand,” Siri said. “I’ll go and get her. Mama has to come down now, of course she must. We can’t wait any longer.”

Siri listened. Out in the garden the party was running its course, but the heavy front door muffled the sounds of it. The silence in this house was deafening, it had been that way ever since Syver died. She had tried so hard to fill it with sound.

“MAAAAMMMMAAA!”

As a child she’d had a clear, high-pitched, penetrating voice, but she had learned to control it.

“Not that voice, Siri, if you please!”

But sometimes she forgot, whooped and sang and danced around the house, ruining everything.

And all at once Jenny would appear on the stairs, somewhere between the ground floor and first floor, her face chalk-white, with her red lips, her long flowing hair, her high heels, her neat little figure, and whisper,
“Your voice, Siri, could you take it somewhere else? Please. Please! I can’t take it.”

The stairway reared up, it had always been scary to walk those stairs, up or down, as if the stairway were out to get you, as if you and it would never see eye to eye, as if at any moment it might withdraw a stair here or insert an extra one there. Over the years the stairway had been sanded down, oiled, and painted, it had been furnished with carpet, stair rods, and a new banister, the carpet had been replaced by another carpet, but no one in the house wanted carpet,
I don’t like carpets
, Jenny said, so now the stairway had been sanded down and painted again, cobalt blue, the same color as it had been long ago, before she, Siri, was even born. She had counted the stairs time and again. One stair. Two stairs. Three stairs. Four stairs. Until she got to twenty-six. Sometimes she got to twenty-seven, on one occasion she counted thirty. When Jon counted the stairs he got twenty-seven. And only a couple of days ago, just before they had that big fight about the party, the two of them had taken each other’s hands and walked slowly, like a bride and groom, up the stairway, and together they had counted the stairs in between kisses:
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven
—they
got to twenty-six, but Jon insisted that they had miscounted, that he had kissed her too many times and that neither of them had taken the counting seriously, so he wanted to do it again, and this time there was to be no talking, no laughing, no kissing. So they turned around and started to walk back down the stairs:
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight
, but when they reached
eighteen
Siri tripped and twisted her ankle. It hurt, but not very much.