Blackwater. Part 1

Blackwater.

Kerstin Ekman.

Princ.i.p.al Characters.

Annie Raft.

Mia Raft Annie's daughter.

Birger Torbjornsson the district doctor.

ke Vemdal the district chief of police.

Roland Fjellstrom campsite owner Lill-Ola Lennartsson owner of fis.h.i.+ng tackle shop.

The Brandbergs: The Starhill Community:.

Dan Ulander Lotta.

Petrus and Brita Sigrid and Gertrud Brita's daughters.

Bert and Enel.

Pella Enel's daughter.

Marianne ohnberg (onis).

Mats Onis's son.

A sound woke her. Four o'clock in the morning. 4.02 in the red digits of the clock radio. There was a grey light in the room. The window panes were streaked with rain and outside damp was rising from the gra.s.s.

She wasn't frightened, but alert. Now she could hear what it was: a car engine ticking over. No one would come up here to see her this early. Saddie was still asleep on the sheepskin below the bed. She was thirteen and rather deaf.

A car door slammed. Another. So at least two people. Then this silence. No voices.

She slept with a shotgun beside her. There was a gap between the bed and the wall, and the gun lay in this s.p.a.ce. A very neat weapon, Spanish. A Sabela. She kept the cartridges behind the clock radio. It took her twenty-two seconds to broach the gun and put in the cartridges. She had practised and timed it. But she had never had any serious need to load it.

The house was locked. She had never forgotten to lock the front door, not even by accident. Not in eighteen years.

She lay with her hand on the finely carved b.u.t.t of the Sabela, feeling its dull, greasy surface. Rigid and a little cold.

She didn't want to go out into the kitchen to look because she would be visible through the window. Instead she got up and stood listening by the door. Saddie followed her, but collapsed on the rug under the low table and started snoring again. No voices could be heard.

In the end she went out into the kitchen after all. Without the shotgun. That's probably what you do. You think it will be all right.

The rain was now pouring soundlessly down the window panes. Beyond the veil of gla.s.s and water, Mia was standing in front of the car, her body welded to another.

They were very wet. Her jacket had been soaked through across the back and shoulders; her hair lay plastered to her head, looking darker than it was. He had really dark hair, brownish black and straight. There were leaves in it, dwarf birch twigs and fern leaves. Mia must have put them there. She had been playing with him. They were so close, it looked as if he had penetrated her out there in the rain. But that was not it. What she saw was something equally primaeval, as if a wound were opening itself in time. And then closed, was gone. As the faces detached themselves from each other, she recognised him.

She leant against the worktop, standing there in her old nightdress oblivious of the fact that they might see her. Her heart was moving inside her like an animal. After a while, her mouth had filled with saliva and a violent nausea forced her to swallow.

The same face. Firmer and coa.r.s.er after eighteen years, but it was him. The rain was streaming as if down a window in time, and he was there, in flesh and blood.

She backed away from the window. They couldn't have seen her. By the time Mia had put the key into the lock, she was already back in bed. She heard Saddie plodding out to the porch and her quiet delight as her tail struck the coats in the hall, making the hangers jingle. Mia went out into the kitchen and the car started up. She was presumably waving to him. Then she went upstairs with Saddie at her heels, not bothering to go and wash. It was not difficult to understand why.

Annie's feet had turned cold and the chill spread upwards. But she didn't dare go out into the kitchen to light the stove, or even hunt out a warm dressing gown. She did not want Mia to hear she was awake.

They had made love. Perhaps outside, in the rain. He was that boy. Though much older. With budding leaves in his wet hair, he also looked like something else. Something she had seen, an image perhaps. In spite of herself, she pictured a knife. She could see the knife in those strong young bodies.

Now Mia was lying up there in the smell of him, not even wanting to wash. She wanted to keep him with her.

What should she say when Mia came down?

You're twenty-three. There must be fifteen years between you. Keep away from him. He's dangerous.

It was eighteen years since she had seen that face, a young face then, and the agitation on it had been of another kind. But it was the same face.

The bed above creaked. Mia couldn't sleep or didn't want to. His presence was throbbing inside her, in her thighs, stomach, v.a.g.i.n.a and her kiss-bruised lips. While Annie lay frozen dry in her bed, stretched out stiffly.

She reached for the telephone. It was not even half past four yet, but she wanted to hear his voice although she perhaps shouldn't talk for long. She might be overheard up there.

He must have been totally closed off at that moment, sealed into sleep like an envelope. But he answered at the first signal and she thought about how used he was to being woken and that he ought to have been allowed to sleep this Sat.u.r.day morning.

'Only me. Sorry. I woke you, of course.'

'Doesn't matter. Are you ill?'

His voice was indistinct.

'No, no.'

'What is it then?'

What should she say? He waited.

'I've seen him. You know. The one I saw that night.'

He said nothing, but he must have known whom she meant because he didn't ask again.

'That's impossible,' he said finally.

'Really, I've seen him.'

'You couldn't recognise him.'

'I did, though.'

She heard him breathing heavily though his mouth.

'I don't know who he is,' she said. 'But I'll find out soon. I can't talk any more now. I'll phone later.'

He was reluctant to put the receiver down. She realised he wanted to calm her down, perhaps persuade her she'd been mistaken. But she said goodbye. She could still hear his breathing as she replaced the receiver.

His voice remained with her, as if he had spoken with his lips to her ear. The warmth in it, the moistness in the whorls on his chest.

A valley with night mist, birds in the leaves.

All she could do now was wait.

Mia didn't sleep late. Annie was having a cup of tea when she came down. Mia's lips were bruised and the look on her face was absent. She ought to be embarra.s.sed because she hadn't phoned to say she was coming.

But she probably hadn't been coming to see Annie. She had come in that man's car. It was clear she was thinking about him all the time. He wouldn't disappear like the squalls of rain over the mountain this cold morning. They would have to talk about him.

'What a lot of flowers,' Mia said finally, probably not realising that it had been the end of term. 'I didn't phone. We just drove up. It just happened.'

We, she said, as a matter of course.

'We were going to stop overnight at Nirsbuan.'

'Did you give up?'

'It got so cold. There's only that little stove and there wasn't much wood. But we saw the blackc.o.c.ks. They're playing in the marsh.'

'Still?'

'There's snow up there. In some places, anyway.'

She had sat down opposite Annie and was holding the hot mug of tea between her hands. Her hair was dry now, curly with reddish tints again. She had found an old tracksuit in the attic, a faded blue with coup du monde across the chest.

'Johan Brandberg drove me up,' she said. 'You know who I mean?'

'No.'

'No, of course not. He hasn't been living at home. Not for many years.'

'Eighteen.'

She looked up.

'Then you do know who he is?'

'I've seen him.'

Mia could know nothing of what her mother had seen that day. She had been deep down in the gra.s.s, her face pressed so hard against the ground that a pattern of gra.s.s and moss had been left on her soft skin afterwards.

The telephone rang. Annie answered and heard it was from a payphone. The voice asking for Mia was light, far too light for his age. Had he seen her, slid down into time?

Mia left after the conversation. Annie needn't drive her down, she said. He had rung from the payphone down by the store and was waiting for her there with the car.

Mia had been with her when it happened. Annie had tried to keep it secret from her and it was unlikely she had any memory of it. But of course she had heard all about it afterwards, ad nauseam. Whenever she said she had been brought up in Blackwater, people would exclaim, Oh, there!

In the early 1970s, Blackwater had been a dying village among many others. Rain fell on the faces round the Walpurgis Night bonfire. The air smelt of diesel oil. They filled coffee tins with oil-soaked sawdust and set them alight. The roads glowed from those lanterns for a few hours on one single evening a year. Otherwise nothing.

Since then this village had become a black jewel. Visible. Full of power.

Yes, it was here. Or rather, four kilometres up from the village, by the water called the river Lobber. It had had other names and would be given more. In places it was a fast-running river, hurtling over precipices further up and forming rapids. But here several large, deep patches of calm water opened up between the racing stretches. The banks were boggy and tangled with bluish willow. Alpine sowthistle and northern wolfsbane grew above head-height and you could fall into beaver holes trying to make your way through it. All round the river was inaccessible marshland crisscrossed by animal paths. The place had no name.

Midsummer Eve almost eighteen years ago. A hot day. They had travelled to ostersund by train. She knew that. But how did she know?

Clear and irrefutable memories were actually very few. She had stood with the telephone crank in her hand. That was a fact and she remembered it, but not much more. The heat. Later that day, the asphalt outside the Tempo store had been soft.

She couldn't remember what they had been wearing or what time the train had got in. They had to wait a long time at the bus station. The bus to Blackwater left at half past two, then as now. Over all those years, the timetable had never changed.

It was Midsummer Eve, so it was a Friday. The old Midsummer Eve was not until Sat.u.r.day. She had looked it up. There was nothing about their journey in her notebooks, because they hadn't existed then. Her loneliness had not begun, everything was still hectic, her head, her whole body singing. She was to start a new life.

And she had done so. When she tried to wind the crank of the taxi telephone, the handle came off in her hand. She might have thought that a bad start. But she didn't. The song inside her was too powerful.

She got hold of a taxi in the street and they spent a long time walking round ostersund. In the afternoon, they sat on a park bench and ate some kind of junk food. For the last time, she probably thought. They boarded the bus with all their luggage from the train and the goods shed. Mia began feeling sick at Gravliden. A horrid name, burial grove, so she remembered that it started there. An old man smelling of goat had got on. The heat rose in the packed bus and the air grew oppressive. The smell of filth and goat hung all round the old man, spreading in irregular waves, perhaps from the movements on the bus. People got on and off with carrier bags. They had been shopping in ostersund. It occurred to her that she would not be able to shop like that any more.

She had a paper bag ready, because Mia kept feeling sick all the way. They got out for a while at every stop to give her some fresh air, but it was suffocatingly hot that afternoon. An hour later, the old man got off and things were better. Hot and exhausted, Mia fell asleep on her lap.

'It'll be better now,' said the driver.

'How much further is it?'

'Going to Blackwater, are you? You one of them Starhill people?'

'No.'

That had nothing to do with him.

'On holiday then?'

She thought that a silly question. But he couldn't know she was going to live a new life. To escape any more questions, she agreed she was on holiday. Mia was asleep so couldn't contradict her. She never found out how much further it was. He did not speak to her again.

Then the forests began, and the major areas of felling. The bus no longer stopped so often. At every village, crates of milk and other perishables were set down on the stand by the store. The post-women came out and opened the door for the driver and he carried in the mailbags. People were waiting in their cars for letters and the evening papers, many of them beery, hullooing at the driver and each other.

'What are they saying?' Mia whispered.

But Annie didn't understand what they were saying either.