A Private Haunting (4 page)

 

They walked hand in hand into the garden. Jonas wanted the boyfriend to be watching. Spencer P. But there was no sign of the kid. A few regulars from The Hub started clapping and whistling.

‘Go Jonas!'

‘He's the firestarter.'

‘Twisted firestarter!'

Before Jonas began he gave a little bow to the crowd. Then he reached into a bag of straw and formed a clump into a ball. Next, he picked up his willow bow, wound the cord round a nine-inch wooden spindle and placed a small piece of bark under a v-shaped cut in the rowan hearth-board. He stepped firmly onto the board, fitting one end of the spindle into the groove in a small wooden bearing block and the other into a similar groove on the hearth.

He could hear Big Haakon whispering.
Long easy strokes, son, like with a woman
. After a few strokes Jonas built up the bow speed, the smoke beginning to wisp now, furry shavings building in the v-notch. A few faster strokes and he put down the bow and picked up the bark, gently fanning the ember to a red glow. He carefully tipped it into the ball of straw, holding it up and blowing, softly,
softly
, then hard and
looong
, the straw suddenly bursting into flame. Then the bonfire itself, the straw ball setting off the cedar branches that he'd stacked in the centre, filling the night with a crackling sweetness that quickly became a roar, the woodpile dry as old dust and the flames licking high and rising as people stepped back and now oohs and aahs and nice one Jonas and didn't everyone love a bonfire. Lacey took Jonas's hand again and he stared at her for a few moments, watching the flames dance in her eyes.

And midsummer's night began to curl at the edges, like the twigs on the edge of the bonfire, the alcohol flowing and the laughter rising with the little orange embers into the dark blue sky, the
Jonsok
sky that would right now, east and across the North Sea, be blanketing the Skagerrak, smoke-hazed from the fiery necklace burning along the coast.

 

‘Penny for them.'

Jonas turned to a pretty face, freckles and auburn hair.

‘I thought I should say hello.'

He stood back and squinted at her. ‘I met you at The Hub, didn't I?'

She smiled. ‘You did.'

‘You're not going to help me out, are you?'

‘A woman could get offended. I mean, if I'm so immediately forgettable – '

He grimaced, but she didn't help him out. ‘It's – '

‘Mary.'

‘
Mary
. I knew it.'

‘No, you didn't.'

‘You're right. An
akevitt
to make up for it?'

‘Well, why not?'

She said a friend had invited her and hoped he didn't mind her being there. Jonas blushed. Couldn't help it. Tried to hide it with a laugh that was too loud, too
loud
.
Gate-crashers have to pay their way
, he managed to say. She had to man the records and the turntable.

‘You mean wo-man the records.'

‘What?'

‘Sorry. Bad joke.'

Now she was blushing and that made him blush again. ‘If you don't want to, you don't – '

‘No, no. That's ok.'

‘You sure? You might not like my taste.'

‘Try me.'

So he did, and led her through to the living room and the records, where she told him he had
a lot of blues
.

‘Don't we all?'

‘BB King,' she said. ‘I've got this one.'

He looked away quickly. Before the gaze was held too long, glad of a hand on his shoulder. Eggers. When he looked back Mary was talking to someone. He watched her surreptitiously, Eggers babbling on about the fantastic meatloaf and you outdo yourself every year, you'll have us all talking Norwegian next, all that oordy boordy stuff from the Muppets, no, hang on, the chef was Swedish wasn't he, you must have seen the Muppets, did you?

When Mary caught his eye, Jonas again glanced away. He wasn't listening to Eggers anymore, thinking instead about the indifference of memory. As above so below, nothing to be done about the press of guilt that followed the reluctant comparison with another face, another time.

‘Why the grump, Mr M?'

‘Just feeling old.'

‘Well, you
are
old. You should just get used to it and have some fun!'

And off Lacey went, as content now as she would ever be. She came back sometime after midnight to collect her forgotten jacket. He made sure to thank her for cheering him up.

First, Fletcher refused the return. Then he deferred it. For years, a spiralling backwards through a series of concentric circles, closer and closer to the village. He'd come closest two years back, taken the National Express from London. But when the local bus turned up he didn't get on.

Nothing was different the next time he took the London bus. The same grey sky and tightness in the gut. Except this time, he did get on the B4 and twenty minutes later was standing by the village green. He had been there - in thought - many times, staring at the invisible crowd of people who knew he was coming or had never stopped waiting for him to return.

 

Fletcher wandered. He realised that the insistence of certain memories obscured so many others, elusive little hints in the name of a street, a shop sign, the kids spilling out of the school. He decided on a more systematic homecoming and decided to walk each of the village's six access routes, centre to periphery. Today was route five. 8 am and thirty degrees.

He followed the main B-road through the village centre. When the road swung west he turned north-east, following the single-track. Memory was brighter here, out in the open fields.

At the end of the track a building site had replaced the old farm. Back then, it was a spooky place, the residents vanished but the rooms still full of furniture, crockery and chairs, like one of those fake homes at ground-zero of a nuclear test site. But where Fletcher once played hide and seek in the barn or made dens among the straw bales, seven
Aspirational Executive
Homes
were emerging.

The seven annoyed him. Six was neater. He should tell this to the show-home salesman, while making clear that he too was aspirational. He aspired to simple things like familiarity. Otherwise the bearing became unsteady, like those precarious, five-high towers of bales, the musty tunnels between them which they knew like moles, the clearings where they sat in an utter, stifling darkness. They thought nothing of collapse, or rats. They were completely fearless.

He turned his back on the houses and faced the yellow patchwork of the rape and wheat fields. The bone-dry earth smelled warm, occasional scuffs of wind lifting and dispersing clouds of dust, making him think of distant explosions on a desert horizon. His hands began to sweat and he wiped them on his new jeans, the pair he'd stolen from a washing line the night before. No more shiny half-masts. He'd wrapped them round a stone and flung them in the river.

A hundred metres or so back down the road he jumped over a fence into a small copse of birch trees, an island in the sea of yellow. He did this a lot as a kid. Sitting and drowsing, dapples behind his eyelids as the sun strobed through the leaves. His aunt called him a
day-waster
.

He opened his eyes when he heard a steady
pad, pad, pad
coming from the road. The runner soon passed and Fletcher hurried to the fence and vaulted over. He'd settled down cross-legged by the roadside just as the man turned at the new houses and ran back the way he'd come. He glanced nervously at Fletcher as he passed, alarmed by the sudden apparition.

‘Nice day.'

‘Nice day,' repeated the runner.

He resisted the urge to run alongside and ambled after him instead, stopping to watch a bright red combine harvester work the wheat. A fog of dust lifted into the hazing blue and a buzzard turned elegantly on a thermal. He followed the hawk down through its spirals, closer and larger, pointing it out to a young couple with a pram who were just passing.

‘A lot of them about these days,' he said.

‘More and more.'

‘Better keep an eye on that baby.'

‘Eh?'

‘They take small animals, you know.'

The man frowned and Fletcher wanted to apologise but didn't. Instead, he smiled. His aunt would be furious. She was the mistress of politeness and cuffed him round the ear if he forgot to say Mr this or Mrs that. She was also the most slanderous bitch he'd ever met. Fletcher watched the couple walking away. Their baby had started screaming and they looked back a few times. He wondered if they were going to Mortensen's party that evening.

* * *

The front door of End Point was wide open. Fletcher walked past at eight and eight thirty. By nine he estimated about twenty people inside. Not enough for decent cover but he decided to go for it. A quick ten minutes, in and out. When he crossed the street and stepped inside it was for the first time in twenty-three years. He stood in the hall, waiting for an emotion that didn't come.

The partygoers were mostly around his age but belonged to a different species. There was no way into their conversations: the bobo-chic housewife, whinnying like a pony about
the unshakeable integrity of Bono
; the technocrat in deck shoes with his
jolly little escape
pad in Provence
…

He let himself into only one conversation, with a fat man stuffing his face at the
smorgasbord
.

‘Quite a spread, eh?'

‘Free food. He lays it on.'

‘That's Jonas. A generous guy.'

‘He thinks he's some kind of eccentric.'

‘How long's he lived here again?'

‘Dunno. He just appeared.'

‘Interesting guy though.'

‘Yeah? Tries a bit hard.'

Fletcher went from room to room. Mortensen was a bushcraft nut, his living room filled with books on tracking, plants and foraging. A delicately carved set of wooden cutlery and a deep bowl edged in neat Celtic loops told him the Norwegian was pretty skilled with a crook knife.

He knew people with similar skills. They all veered to paranoia. Like Spooky Anderson. Anderson ran Ultra Marathons and once on a winter survival exercise sheltered inside a deer carcass. As he watched a pretty, red-haired woman flicking through a box of records Fletcher wondered if, come the End of Days, he'd rather join forces with Spooky or Mortensen.

A few minutes later, he slipped upstairs. The smaller bedroom he used to sleep in was empty, the larger one used by Mortensen. He went into the bathroom and splashed water on his face, listening to the voices drifting up from the back garden through the open window.

The mistake came downstairs. Passing the living room on his way out, he glanced inside. The red-haired woman who'd been flicking through the records was talking to Mortensen. Fletcher hesitated, now wondering if he recognised her. In that moment, Mortensen looked across, a hint of a smile that promised an introduction if Fletcher hung around any longer. As he turned away he bumped into a teenage girl in a blue jacket, a black bow in her hair.

She smiled, such a familiar smile. The party noise became suddenly muddy. That quick-sense of being underwater, sinking deeper. He walked carefully towards the door, an aperture receding the closer he got.

 

You're running. I watch you. Your
family walks behind you. Mother, father and little brother. You
let go the hand of your father to run with
the kite. The red kite you have pestered him about
for so long. Down by the Sangin bazaar is space
enough to fly a new kite. Like the little girl
with the blue jacket, who also flew a kite, a
yellow diamond, soaring above a brown river under a troubled
sky, the fabric whipping and twine singing and her own
father holding her tight in case she flew up, up
and away, into and gone on the winter wind but
happy, so happy, it was all so thrilling, like the
Wizard of Oz, looking down on the patchwork landscape and
all was innocence and wonder and let the wind take
her, up and across green fields and grey seas to
sink on cooling thermals closer to that other land, the
shattered mountains with their ice-cream peaks, sinking to meet
you, another little girl, a little girl with a red
kite, who watches her drift down to the jigsaw blocks
of the desert town, to the bazaar, and even as
the noise becomes louder, troubling, all that matters is the
kite. You must suspect something, why else are your eyes
dropping from sky to earth? You must suspect but still
that smile as you absent-mindedly walk towards me, your
father shouting as I am too but how can you
possibly understand my language, shouting as a black Toyota exits
an alleyway in a white flash, spitting gunfire. Still you
haven't run and I don't know why, everything
is happening too quickly and I have to return fire
, I must, and then I notice your kite, a kite
just like another's.

Fixation, it was different from obsession. Jonas was obsessed with plants and animals, tracking. It happened over years, the ongoing delight and surprise of a universe still coming into focus. Obsession was just across a hazy psychological line. So although Jonas could recognise badger scat he'd never spent hours staring at it, as Eggers did with Petra from
Eurocamgirls.

Every lunchtime for weeks, Eggers 4G-logged onto his iPad. The same Russian blonde with a chest as vast as Siberia, toying herself for the skulking voyeurs. Her slack-jawed expression spoke of day to day banalities: what's for dinner, the itch between her sweaty toes.

Eggers didn't seem to mind and Jonas doubted any imminent bombshell awareness of the weirdness of watching live streaming of a Vladivostok sex-show in the middle of an English dual-carriageway at one in the afternoon, a ham sandwich in one hand and pickle on his chin.

‘I don't want to listen to this,' said Jonas.

‘Then don't.'

‘Can you not turn it down?'

‘S'not the same.'

‘Do you think this is normal behaviour?'

‘They say over half of internet traffic is porn. Do you watch porn?'

‘No.'

‘Then you're the one who's not normal.' He clicked onto another profile. ‘What about this one then?'

Jonas sighed and looked. An immediate sizing-up that surprised him with its
insistence
.‘Nah.'

‘Suit yourself.'

You get used to things. That was the problem. In time, you could get used to anything, as Jonas was now used to Eggers and his lunchtime show. That was different from liking something. Still, on balance, looking at all the different points that Eggers had occupied on Jonas's love-hate spectrum, there were probably more moments of like than dislike.

For a while, Jonas even tried to let Eggers remind him of Kiev Dimitri, sad Dimi of the bottle, whom he met back in 1999 on the Braunfels museum build in Munich. But all Eggers shared with Dimi was functioning alcoholism. Eggers didn't have Dimi's
soul
, a hinterland ever-stretching like the steppes that Jonas learned about on those long beer-garden evenings.

But Eggers did get him the job, kind of. They'd met in the
Lion
, talked a few times, Eggers telling him one evening that the council was hiring. And he trusted Eggers, a man who'd back you up. Like Dimi, that fight with the NPD skinheads when the Ukrainian broke his wrist.

Jonas got out of the truck. They were here to set the site for the night crew. The traffic was restricted to one lane and thirty mph, but everyone flew past at sixty or crawled by at twenty. One extreme or the other, fixation or indifference, speed or slowness. The entire world was bipolar. There had once been a more measured time in his life. Back then the intervention of a man he
kind of
liked
to defuse a
Jonsok
party incident would never have happened.

 

It was Dave. Jonas's new friend Dave from
The Hand and Shears
. Dave went from sober to stagger-drunk without passing go. By ten o'clock he had poured a can of Ringnes on the bonfire because it
tastes like piss
, by eleven he was shouting about
fuckin
fish
, and by midnight he had pinned the Good Host against the kitchen wall for reasons no one could interpret.

Jonas brushed it off as the price of party success. More people filled with booze meant more chance of a gibbering maniac.

Enter the Eggers, an intervention as decisive as Jonas's goodwill was naive. He dragged Dave off, who left without a word after a final stare-down. Smiling Jonas watched him go, ignorant of the relief of those onlookers who knew that Dave was a feral swine who'd done time for ABH a few years back. All Jonas saw reflected in that savage face was his own good nature. Here was another Big Haakon, he'd be round to apologise soon enough.

Like after the Garden Incident. Jonas closed his eyes, the beat of traffic becoming memory's pulse.

He was thirteen, coming back from football practice one evening, the whole team straggling along. They reached his house to find Haakon and his father in the front garden. Big Haakon was laughing, holding his father by the head at arm's length, his father's arms frantically windmilling. As bizarre as it was humiliating, a devastating moment in young Jonas's life.

For the week he needed to bunk off school to brace for the taunts, Jonas wondered how an accountant and street-sweeper had become entangled. He never found out. Maybe there was no reason. Sometimes the world just happened. Like his hard-on when he saw Anja Petterson.

Two days after the Garden Incident Haakon had apologised. Came round with a side of smoked salmon for his father and flowers for his mother. Later, when Jonas got to know him properly, Haakon would regularly apologise to Jonas too, no matter how many times he told him to stop going on about it. Yep, Big Haakon alienated most people at one time or another but always apologised. Maybe it was inevitable that when Jonas saw him that last time, years later, Haakon of the Never-Empty Bottle had been
Born Again
, Haakon of the Cross.

And as with Haakon so with Psycho Dave from
The Hand
and Shears
. Eggers begged to differ with disbelief verging on slapstick when Jonas assured him that Dave would be round soon enough to say sorry.

‘Jonas!' Eggers was leaning out of the cab.

‘What?'

‘You gotta see this.'

‘No I don't.'

‘She's gonna knock herself out with all this jiggling!'

‘Amazing.'

‘It
is
amazing. A marvel of engineering. You should appreciate the skill.'

He left behind Eggers's grinning face and walked down the central reservation into petrol fug.

The patterns of place, once established they were locked in. Pervy Eggers, Psycho Dave, Haakon of the Never-Empty Bottle. And Jonas the Viking. If no one wants you to be someone different then let what you are be
good
. Redemption was the prerogative of the sceptic.

Big Haakon knew all about it. The man who every year got butt-naked and danced round the bursting barrels of the midsummer bonfires. It would suddenly come over him, a wild look in the puffy eyes and off with the clothes. Perhaps it was resignation to the role that made him do it, the realisation that no one would ever accept what Jonas came to know.

He and Axel were twelve. They'd been given permission to get the bus to Stavern and walk the coast, two nights camped out then home. Little parental persuasion was required, it being a more innocent time, perhaps, before we all became potential mugshots in a tabloid newspaper. They bought ice cream, made a den in the woods and fished around on the shore. That first afternoon they drowsed to the sea, Jonas twirling a long-stemmed plant with a pinkish head.

‘Armeria,' said a booming voice.

‘
Jesus
!'

They turned to see Big Haakon and scrambled to their feet, ready to run. Haakon was a nutter. Always on the booze. He'd beat up Jonas's dad and they'd
watched it happen.

‘A herbaceous perennial. Also known as Sea Pink.'

Thirty plus years later Jonas was still certain this is what Big Haakon said, the memory so vivid for being so unexpected. No need for any embellishment. Haakon took the flower, holding it up to the sun with an almost mawkish look of unfiltered delight. ‘You shouldn't pick wild flowers boys, everything has a place and you should let well alone. You listening?'

Vigorous nods.

‘You want to know about flowers?'

More nods.

Big Haakon didn't just tell them about the plants. He introduced them to wild food: sea moss and kelp, cockles and limpets. He yelped with glee when he came across a huge colony of winkles, big scary Haakon, the village idiot, Haakon of the Five-Times Broken Nose, yelping like an excited little girl. He sent them for fresh water so he could soak the grit from the shellfish.

‘Well, boys, are you ready to learn man's fundamental skill, the skill that made society possible?'

Jonas had never seen a fire-drill in action. It was like coming across an ancient secret. As Haakon made them a dinner of dulse and mussels, Jonas and Axel tried and failed to even keep the spindle in the hearth, never mind catch an ember.

‘You'll get it, boys. Nothing special, in the end.'

Those days in Stavern were an epiphany. A vast landscape had opened up and Jonas came home flushed with the excitement of a new knowledge of which his parents were utterly dismissive. They had no idea about Haakon's skills. Didn't trust them. Didn't
believe
them.

He and Axel would go round to Big Haakon's ramshackle house on the edge of town in secret. They listened to him talk about stepping back and tuning in, to the turns of seasons, the weather, all the other myriad details of your particular place in space. They went on plant walks. They learned how to use a crook knife and how to tie a dozen different knots.

They also knew when not to go. When the fairground-lit windows were dark Haakon would be inaccessible, on a bender, roaming his rooms like a big cat. And they discovered Haakon's heartbreak, the girlfriend who drowned one sunny afternoon, waved and drowned. So Jonas learned that everyone had a hinterland, places others could not enter and explanations they would not offer.

 

A horn suddenly blasted. Jonas became aware of the traffic again. Two thirty in the afternoon and already nose to tail. He scanned the line of cars, back down the road, towards the big intersection where he'd already spent lifetimes, stuck in the rush hour. Always that hopelessness, the world burning as we stare at the flames from our air-conditioned boxes, buy a couple of eco bulbs and re-use a plastic bag. Maybe the kids from The Hub would figure it out.

And maybe to them he would be more than
the Viking
. How about Jonas of the Plants? Haakon would approve. He put out the
Men at Work
sign and watched the drivers watching him.