I Am Behind You (18 page)

*

‘What the hell are you doing?'

Peter hears Isabelle's voice behind him and slowly turns around. Her lovely mouth is contorted in a sneer as she contemplates the rounders pitch. Peter weighs the bat in his hands. Isabelle has probably failed to grasp that the field is endless. What that means. ‘Isabelle,' he says, ‘I want a divorce.'

Isabelle screws up her eyes as if she is having difficulty seeing him. ‘What did you say?'

‘I said I want a divorce. I don't want to be married to you any more.'

‘And you think this is the right time to mention that?'

‘I do, actually. That's exactly what I think.'

Isabelle's eyes scan the horizon, back and forth, until they eventually come to a stop somewhere near where the ball landed. Then she sighs and says: ‘I need something to eat.'

‘Did you hear what I said?'

‘Yes, I heard what you said. And? I need something to eat. You're friends with those weirdo farmers. They've got something.'

‘We're never going to get away from here.'

Isabelle rolls her eyes. ‘What is it you want? A blow job, maybe?'

‘Some chance.'

‘Can you sort it out?
Please.
'

Peter stares at Isabelle for a few seconds. She is so beautiful and so repulsive. He drops the bat and heads for the camp. He's said it. He thought he would feel better than he does, but he's said it. The words have been spoken.

He doesn't look up until he reaches the caravans. Stefan has put a folding chair on top of his caravan, and is in the process of clambering up onto it while holding his mobile phone above his head.

The field is endless.

The words keep going round and round in the back of Peter's mind like a mantra. It's as if there is some hidden meaning that he doesn't yet understand.

Lennart and Olof are sitting on the ground next to their caravan, and the mere sight of them makes something hard inside Peter soften slightly. He relaxes and walks over to them.

*

The folding chair is rickety even when someone sits on it. Stefan feels like an incompetent circus artist as he cautiously places one foot at a time on the frame while attempting to stabilise the structure of thin metal tubes with both hands. He daren't stand on the fabric.

Forty-nine kronor at Rusta. Serves you right.

At last he manages to straighten his legs. When he holds the phone at stomach height, the bar occasionally flickers into life; when he lifts it up to his face it becomes more stable, and when he raises it above his head, the bar is there almost all the time. He presses the button and hears a continuous dialling tone.

So? Now what?

There is one thing he definitely wants to do: call his parents and tell them that he and Carina and Emil are okay. That they might not be home tomorrow as planned. The opportunity to save his parents any anxiety would make this project worthwhile, even if nothing else comes of it.

But what next? Who else should he call?

The first thing that occurs to him is the distribution centre. That pallet of herring. He hears a grinding sound beneath his right foot, the chair moves slightly and Stefan almost loses his balance. He panics and jumps down, landing with a crash on the roof. He sinks down onto the warm metal, glaring at the telephone in his hand.

Who should he call?

Stefan moistens his lips with his tongue. There is one aspect of all this that he hasn't considered.
If
he manages to ring his parents and they answer…what exactly does that mean?

It means they are not lost. It means they are in a place that is in contact with the normal world, and that the normal world still
exists
. That makes a huge difference, if you think about it carefully.

Suddenly Stefan is afraid to make the call. It has become far too critical. He juggles the phone from one hand to the other as if it is a hot potato that needs to cool before he can deal with it. There isn't much battery left, and he ought to switch off the phone if he's going to sit here wavering.

Pull yourself together.

What is he so scared of? His parents will either answer, or they won't. If they don't answer he can ring the emergency number or something, just to check if he is able to contact another human being. Or even the speaking clock, for goodness sake.

There is, however, another possibility, and perhaps that is why he is still playing around with the phone. What if he calls…and
someone else
answers? Someone who is neither a person nor a machine? Someone who has been wanting to make contact with him ever since that day on the bottom of the lake.

Stefan stands up, picks up the binoculars and traces the horizon, looking particularly closely at the route he took with Emil. Nothing.

What was it he actually saw? A white figure, far away in the distance. How can he be so sure that this figure has anything to do with the one that beckoned him when he was six years old? What evidence is there? None. Nothing except that icy sensation in his
chest; he felt as if he had swallowed several litres of cold water from the lake when he caught sight of that figure through his binoculars.

Stefan rests his forehead on his wrists, closes his eyes and goes back to the memory of his sixth birthday. The bike, the jetty, the dark water. The cold in his lungs, the field opening out before him, the beckoning figure. He fixes it with his internal gaze and examines it carefully.

It is not dangerous to make the call. As he remembers it,
the figure had no mouth
. It's not going to say anything to him. It had only eyes, as far as he recalls.

Without any further deliberation, he climbs up on the chair once more, trying to distribute his weight differently this time. Then he keys in his parents' number while holding the phone just above his head.

He hears it ringing at the other end of the line. Once. Twice. Three times.

Please pick up. Please.

He pictures the push-button phone on the kitchen window ledge, its old-fashioned ring echoing through the house with every electronic beep in Stefan's ear. He sees his mother put down her knitting and get up from the sofa in the living room. His father is too ill to be up and about.

On the fourth ring he hears a crackling sound, then a voice. His mother's voice.

‘Hello? Ingegerd Larsson.'

Stefan wobbles and almost falls off the chair, but manages to steady himself without damaging it. He doesn't know what to say. He would like to press the phone to his ear instead of holding it above his upturned face, but he daren't risk it. The connection is fragile.

‘Hi Mum,' he says. ‘It's me, Stefan.'

‘Stefan?' His mother's voice is so faint. ‘Where are you?'

Stefan is looking up at the sky. He blinks a couple of times and realises that there are tears in his eyes. Where is he? If only he knew.

‘I'm…I'm a long way away. But we're all fine.'

The bar flickers and Stefan picks up only disjointed words: ‘… worse…home…'

‘What did you say, Mum?'

He raises the phone a little higher. The signal stabilises, but his mother's voice is now so distant that he can't hear a word.

‘Sorry, Mum—say that again?' He brings the phone down a fraction, and just about manages to hear her this time: ‘Your father is much worse. You need to come home.'

There is a loud crack as the crossbar of the chair snaps and the whole thing collapses. Stefan holds the phone close to his chest as he falls sideways and crashes down onto the roof, landing on his shoulder.

There is a certain amount of give in the metal and he doesn't break any bones, but when he looks at the screen, the contact has been lost.

You need to come home.

Stefan draws his knees up to his chest and whispers: ‘Oh fuck.'

*

Lennart and Olof have dug three holes of differing sizes next to their caravan. When Peter comes over they are just removing a house plant from its pot in order to place it in the largest hole.

‘Hi there,' Peter says. ‘Are you making a garden?'

‘Not really,' Olof says. ‘We just wanted to see what's going on with the soil around here.'

‘The thing is, we have our suspicions,' Lennart adds.

Peter sits down cross-legged beside them and looks at the items laid out on the ground. A trowel, an almost empty bag of compost, a bucket containing several litres of water, a wrinkled potato with two or three eyes protruding from the skin, a packet of dill seeds.

Olof follows his gaze: ‘You use what you have, as Kajsa Warg said.'

Lennart pours a little water into the hole and Olof inserts the plant, a pelargonium, then both of them backfill with compost before watering it again. Peter watches the procedure and allows himself to
forget that the field is endless. There is something restful in watching the two men work steadily, as if the world were normal, and all you had to do was carry on pottering as usual.

However, as Lennart and Olof place the wrinkled potato in the ground and begin to fill in the hole, Peter can't help asking: ‘What kind of suspicions?'

Lennart looks up at Peter as if he doesn't understand what he's referring to, but then he remembers his last remark. ‘We think that something isn't quite right about the soil here. It seems to be full of nutrients, yet nothing is growing. Apart from the grass.'

‘So what do you think that means?'

Lennart shrugs. ‘It could be toxic in some way.'

‘Or it doesn't work like any soil we've ever come across,' Olof says.

Peter has the impression that there is something they're not telling him. They are very pleasant, yet there is a part of him that is frightened by them. They are so impenetrable; theoretically, they could be sitting on all kinds of secrets.

He pushes the thought aside and tentatively asks: ‘Listen, guys, I don't suppose you have any sweets I could buy? My wife…' Peter stops, blinks and corrects himself. ‘
Isabelle
suffers from an illness which means she needs sugary things.'

Lennart and Olof look at one another, and after a silent conversation Olof raises his eyebrows meaningfully at Lennart, who sighs. ‘Yes, we probably have.'

Olof leans on Lennart's shoulder for support as he gets to his feet and moves towards the caravan. Lennart glances shyly at Peter before calling after Olof: ‘Just half, okay?'

Olof holds up a hand to reassure Lennart, who nods and turns back to Peter. ‘I'm sorry to be so mean, but it's our Friday treat, so to speak.'

‘What is?'

‘The thing is, we have a packet of Twist and we always…' All at once Lennart seems embarrassed, and pokes at the soil around the pelargonium as he goes on. ‘It's a bit of a special occasion.'

Tears spring to Peter's eyes: ‘I'm sorry, of course you must keep your sweets. Isabelle will be fine.'

‘No, no,' Lennart insists. ‘We're happy to share. One sweet can make a special occasion, after all, if Isabelle needs our help.'

The tears are no longer pricking, but Peter has a lump in his throat, and that lump is made up of
loss
. When he was a little boy, a packet of Twist was a treasure worth waiting for, and he could make it last for days, but that has been replaced by pleasures that cost a thousand times more, yet give him only a fraction of the satisfaction. He has lost something that Lennart and Olof have managed to hold on to.

‘I don't mean to pry,' Lennart says, ‘but you look upset. What's wrong?'

Peter has a sudden urge to tell him everything. If Olof had asked, he might well have done so. Lennart somehow has a thicker skin and a less inviting embrace, so Peter merely shakes his head and thinks:
Nothing exists and the field is endless
.

Packets of Twist and the memory of packets of Twist and the feeling evoked by the memory of packets of Twist and the thoughts arising from the feeling evoked by the memory of packets of Twist—it's all essentially meaningless if nothing exists and the field is endless. Peter straightens his shoulders and when Olof returns he takes the plastic bag holding a dozen or so sweets that Olof offers him.

‘I hope that will be enough,' Olof says, getting down on his knees once more.

‘Thank you so much,' Peter says, reaching into his back pocket for his wallet, but Lennart pulls a face and waves his hand dismissively.

‘Don't be ridiculous,' he says. ‘It would be silly to accept payment for such a little thing. And anyway, what use is money out here?'

Peter aborts the unnecessary gesture; his wallet is in the caravan anyway. He sits there in silence as Lennart and Olof scatter the dill seeds in the smallest and shallowest hole. Their movements are so much in tune, their closeness so self-evident. When they have finished, Peter says: ‘I'm sorry, I don't mean to pry, but…how come you're camping together like this?'

Lennart and Olof look at him with raised eyebrows, and Peter feels obliged to elucidate: ‘I mean, it's a bit unusual, that's all.' Perhaps he has destroyed the warm atmosphere; he doesn't know how sensitive the issue might be.

To his relief, Lennart simply says: ‘Our wives, Ingela and Agnetha, went on holiday together. To the Canaries. And when they came back…after a week or so…they just zoomed off. Both of them.'

The expression is so odd that Peter feels the need to repeat it: ‘Zoomed off?'

‘Yes. They must have talked it over while they were down there, and decided that was what they were going to do. And so they zoomed off. In different directions.'

‘Seven years ago,' Olof chips in.

‘But…You don't just…zoom off, surely?' Peter says.

‘Well, no,' Lennart agrees. ‘I don't suppose you do. But that's what they did.'

‘That meant we were both on our own,' Olof says. ‘And gradually we decided that…how shall I put it? That we didn't need to be alone. Not when we got on so well.'