Blackwater Read Free

to pee, and something to drink, then perhaps something to eat, but Annie could do little for her until Dan came. She had to make sure the driver included everything that was theirs as he unloaded. He was a quarter of an hour early, he said, and she presumed that was why Dan had not yet put in an appearance.
    After all the cars had driven away and the storekeeper had locked up and gone down to his house on the headland beyond the store, they were left alone on the gravelled patch with their suitcases and cardboard boxes. The silence was violent after the noise of the cars. It was strange to experience the stillness she had longed for and feel uneasy at the same time. Dan ought to be there by now.
     

On Midsummer Eve, Johan Brandberg was sitting at his desk in his room. It was afternoon and it had grown very hot. He was reading about the Antarctic expedition with the
Maud
in the 1950s. He was free. Since the end of term, he had been working with his father, clearing in the forest. There had been no talk of any other job. Later on in the summer, Väine and he were to plant. He wondered what it would be like to be out all day with Väine. His half-brother was scarcely a year older than he was, but he was stronger, and not just physically. Johan thought about the Lajka dog, and that disgusted him so much he began to feel sick in the stuffy room.
    He leant over the desk and opened the window. Down there he could see the yard and the barn, the enclosure and some of Vidart’s goats. They had grazed it bare inside, but on the other side of the fence the grass was thick and full of flowers. He recognised the globeflowers.
    During the October elk shoot, the Lajka had come back twice and sat on the steps. On the Saturday, the day before the share-out of the meat, Torsten shot her. The body lay in the woodshed over the weekend, then he had told Väine to bury it.
    Johan remembered the sound of Väine hacking into the grass behind the barn with the spade. The ground was already frozen hard. He had been at his desk, as now, but with a social-studies textbook in front of him. Suppose he’d asked me, he had thought. Suppose I’d vomited into the hole.
    On the Monday he had been on the school bus again, leaving it all behind him. Now he had to stay. All week. All the weeks up to 22 August. He was to clear eight hectares of pine forest and then they were to plant contorta pines in the clearing above Alda’s.
    But now he was free and was sitting there with a book, free thanks to Gudrun. He might become a vet, or a surveyor. There were books and books. Not everything was the same muck, not even for Torsten. Per-Ola worked in Åre as a crane driver. Björne felled for the Cellulose Company and Pekka had as well this last year. But now he was talking about the mines in Spitsbergen. Or an oil rig. But that was probably just talk. Or dreams.
    Pekka had dreams in that mess called brain tissue. And what had he got in his testicles? Mine look the same, he thought. And I have the same kind of matter in my brain.
    But not the same genes.
    Those thoughts were coming again. He kept having them, and wanting to have them, but he would never have dared ask Gudrun. Not straight out.
    He had had those thoughts once when he was out skiing with her, when he was about eleven or twelve, old enough anyhow to manage Bear Mountain. They were on their way up the last steep slope when they heard a scooter. At first they couldn’t make out where the sound was coming from and then it was suddenly deathly quiet again. But they zigzagged up a bit further and had just taken off their skis to climb the last bit on the ice crust, when they saw the man on the scooter outlined against the sky.
    Johan was able to call up that sight at any given moment. A tall man. Orange sweatshirt and worn black leather trousers. Belt with silver studs and a knife in a horn sheath, bigger than any knife he had ever seen before and fiercely curved towards the tip. The man had taken his cap