I Am Behind You (19 page)

Lennart doesn't seem to have any objections to this explanation; he nods thoughtfully, and Peter finds himself doing the same. He has more questions, but can't think of a way of asking them without overstepping the mark, so they all sit there quietly for a while, nodding in unison, until they are interrupted by the crash as Stefan falls off his chair.

*

The bread bin is a sorry sight. It contains nothing but three dried-up slices of white bread, the kind that tastes good only if it is toasted. Carina considers making French toast instead. Then she remembers that they need to save the camping stove for essentials, in case they don't get the gas hose back.

She butters the bread and slices cheese, glancing over at Emil, who
is sitting at the kitchen table playing with his Lego. Carina has realised that she must proceed with caution. The issue of the hose is sensitive in a way she doesn't yet understand.

As she places the sandwiches in front of Emil with a glass of lukewarm milk, there is a thud on the roof as if Stefan is jumping on it. Emil looks up.

‘What's Daddy doing?'

‘He's trying to get his phone to work.'

Emil takes a bite of his sandwich. ‘So he can make calls.'

‘That's right.'

‘Is he going to call the police?'

Carina doesn't know what to say. Who should they ring? The person who marked their caravans with a cross. It's a pity whoever it was didn't leave a number.

‘The fire brigade,' Emil says and Carina smiles, which makes him add: ‘The bank. And the hairdresser.'

Carina knows that Stefan's main aim is to call his parents and reassure them. She has no one to call. No one at all. Both of her parents are dead, and she no longer has anything to do with her friends from the past. In any case, quite a lot of them are either dead or in jail. The people she has in her life are right here with her.

Emil manfully chews the dry sandwich. He can't help pulling a face when he takes a sip of the tepid milk, but he doesn't say a word. There is one slice of bread left, plus half a packet of crispbread.

We have to find a way out of here.

Carina's thoughts return to the impossible. To the fact that they are here at all, that they have been removed. Deleted. She picks up a piece of Lego, then three more. She stares at them in the palm of her hand, imagining a hand that lifted the caravans in just the same way, then dropped them on this incomprehensible field.

It is so counterintuitive that another possibility flashes through her mind: that she has got it wrong. That in fact it's all very simple; it's about a way of looking at things. An ant can grasp only two dimensions; if it is placed on a ball, it cannot understand that it will return
to its starting point if it just keeps on walking. Something along those lines. Grasping the concept of a ball when a ball is an unknown entity. But how can you imagine something that you can't imagine?

‘What's the matter, Mummy?'

Emil has finished his sandwich, and Carina realises that she must have been out of it for a few minutes. Her hand is tightly clamped around the Lego pieces, and when she tries to put them down, they stick to her skin for a couple of seconds before they drop, leaving red marks behind.

‘Nothing, sweetheart. I'm just thinking, that's all.'

‘Shall we build something?'

There isn't a sound from the roof, so Carina assumes that Stefan is still trying to get through. She doesn't want to go anywhere until he comes back and is there for Emil, so she nods. ‘What shall we make?'

‘A fortress. A strong fortress,' Emil says, placing the base in the middle of the table. He begins to construct a square frame. ‘With thick walls so it can withstand the attack.'

Carina selects pieces of different colours and adds them to the base. She leaves a space on one side, but Emil pushes in a couple of pieces and closes the gap.

‘Don't we need a door?' Carina asks.

Emil shakes his head. ‘We're not having a door.' He picks up three knights, puts them inside the square and carries on building up the walls.

Carina points to the trio. ‘So how did they get in, if there's no door?'

Emil looks at her, raises his eyebrows and shakes his head, as if he can't understand how he has ended up with such a silly mummy. ‘Obviously there
was
a door,' he explains. ‘But they've sealed it up.'

‘Okay. And why have they done that?'

Emil sighs. ‘I
told
you. Because of the attack.' His voice takes on a pedagogical tone beyond his years as he adds: ‘The door is the weakest point.'

Carina slots in a few more pieces so that the frame is two bricks
high before she asks another question: ‘What kind of attack are we talking about here?'

Emil stops building and twists a Lego brick between his fingers. ‘They don't know. That's what's so terrible.' His expression is grim as he resumes construction.

‘What…?' Carina begins, but Emil interrupts her. ‘No, Mummy. We have to finish the fortress. Keep building.'

They work in silence until the frame is four bricks high and the knights begin to disappear behind the walls. Carina points to them again: ‘Won't they have problems in there? What about food and water? How will they manage?'

‘It will be hard,' Emil confirms. ‘But if they stick together, everything will be all right.' He leans forward and peers over the wall, then suddenly looks up at Carina. ‘Mummy, what lives on blood?'

‘Why do you ask?'

‘I just wondered.'

‘Well…you know about vampires.'

‘Mmm. Like in
Twilight
. But in real life?'

‘There are various insects, I suppose. And there's a species of bat that…'

‘Bigger. Is there anything bigger that actually lives on blood?'

‘Not as far as I know.'

‘Are you sure?'

‘Pretty sure.'

‘But there
could
be?'

Carina runs her fingers over the knobbly top of the walls and asks: ‘This…attack. Is the fortress going to be attacked by those who live on blood?'

‘Yes,' Emil says, slotting in the piece in his hand. ‘But not the dangerous ones.'

Even though Carina assumes that this is something Molly has told Emil, the quiet simplicity in his voice has created an idea that makes her scream out loud when she hears a crash from the roof.

*

At first Benny thinks it must be thunder, which makes him nervous. He doesn't like thunderstorms. He pricks up his ears, scampers to the opening and peeps out. The sky doesn't look the way it usually does when there is going to be a storm. Something else must have made the noise.

Cat is lying in the window of her caravan, and her owners are busy with something on the ground. The door is ajar. Benny stretches and yawns without taking his eyes off Cat. He sniffs and is confused. The smell of Grandchildren that he picked up from the field is here now. It's very, very faint. Grandchildren coming closer. It's strange, but not too alarming. Grandchildren are not dangerous, just hard on the ears.

Benny takes a few tentative steps outside. Cat is watching him now. A couple more steps. Cat gets to her feet. Benny is approaching the area that is no one's territory. When he is a nose-length away, Cat jumps down from the window. There is a clattering sound from inside her caravan, and a second later she is out on the grass, racing towards Benny, who stops exactly on the borderline of his territory.

Cat stops on her own borderline, sits down. Benny stays where he is. Cat starts washing herself. Benny scratches behind his ear. He can't decide. Should he go for it, or bide his time?

He settles on a compromise, and embarks on a circuitous manoeuvre, edging towards Cat in a semicircle. Cat watches him, then gets up and begins to move away from him in a semicircle of her own. After a while Benny is in the spot where Cat started off, and vice versa.

He scratches behind his ear again, debating whether to cut across the circle, step across the borderline. Instead he sets off again in Cat's footsteps, moving a little faster this time. Cat does the same, keeping her distance. When Benny gets back to his own starting point, he breaks into a run. Cat does the same.

It is no longer possible to tell who is chasing and who is being
chased. Round and round they go; Benny lets out a couple of barks. Cat doesn't bark, but sometimes she fits in an extra little leap.

They carry on running until Benny starts to feel dizzy and can't go on any longer. He flops down outside his own caravan, panting heavily with his tongue hanging out. Cat lies down on the grass, her expression inscrutable as she stares uninterruptedly at Benny.

He fires off one last bark, then lumbers back to his basket. Before he goes and lies down he tries whimpering outside the door; something to eat would be nice. But no one comes.

*

Majvor is lying on the bed reading an old magazine by torchlight, since Donald will not allow her to open the blinds. Donald is sitting on the sofa, his hands constantly gripping, then releasing, the fabric of his sweatpants. His fists clench, then relax, clench, then relax. His mouth is filled with the taste of chocolate. The Bloodman is wandering through his mind. This is not a good dream.

Donald was the eldest child, born in 1943. Two sisters arrived shortly after him, and then his mother and father decided to stop, because they couldn't afford any more children. In spite of this, another sister saw the light of day in the spring of 1953.
A little accident
, his father said; Donald didn't understand what that meant.

The youngest member of the family was christened Margareta, and she was a real crybaby. There was no escape in a three-room cottage, so in the summer of 1953 Donald made sure he accompanied his father to his job at Räfsnäs Sawmill as often as possible. They even managed to find him an unofficial summer post as a kind of general dogsbody.

For twenty öre an hour, Donald sorted screws and nails, carried planks of wood to the storeroom and gathered up the waste timber which would eventually be shredded. He really enjoyed going on deliveries with his father, when they loaded timber for a building site
onto the truck, then helped to unload it at the other end.

Donald and his father got on very well, and he would have happily worked for nothing just to spend time with his dad, exchanging banter about his mother and his little sisters. There was nothing wrong with them, nothing at all—they just weren't proper blokes.

It was no secret that Donald was his father's favourite, or at least the child he paid most attention to. It was only natural. Donald was the one who would learn the ropes, so that one day he could work in the timber industry. However, his father made sure that Donald worked hard in school, and liked to say: ‘The boy has a good head on his shoulders.' If you were going to run your own business, it was important to be able to keep an eye on the figures.

One of their favourite games when they were driving the truck to some distant customer was to fantasise about the future, and what the sawmill or lumberyard Donald would own when he grew up might look like. Would he take care of the sawing himself, or contract it out? Would he perhaps have his own forest? What additional products should he sell?

June and the first half of July passed, and even if the work was sometimes physically taxing (a ton of battens to be distributed between five different storage areas) or boring (ten thousand nails to be sorted), Donald couldn't recall a better summer.

One very hot day in the middle of July, Donald and his father set off for the sawmill in Riddersholm. A small shipment of logs had arrived, and needed to be sawn into planks for a customer. Since the trunks were relatively slender, Donald's father decided they could do the job themselves.

When they had climbed up into the driver's cab, he nodded towards their lunch box and said he had a little surprise for Donald. The usual fare consisted of fried egg sandwiches which Donald's mother made in the morning, along with a small bottle of milk to share. There was rarely anything else. Donald couldn't guess what the surprise might be, so the lunchbreak hovered before him like a tempting mirage.

The circular saw used to split the logs was housed in a rectangular building with a corrugated iron roof. If it was hot outside, then it was boiling inside. Both Donald and his father worked with their shirts off, and the whirling sawdust combined with the sweat and the whining of the blade made for a less than pleasant experience. As Donald hauled away the cut planks and helped to load the logs onto the belt, he was really looking forward to that lunch.

After a while they just couldn't carry on. Only a few ugly logs remained, covered in gnarled, lumpy knots. Donald and his father stopped for a breather, wiping the sweat from their brows. Then they started again. Carrying the logs and dropping them onto the belt, sawing and lifting, carrying and dropping. Donald's head was spinning with heat and exhaustion, and even his father was blinking and shaking his head from time to time.

The penultimate log proved particularly difficult, and the blade of the saw got stuck twice in a root nodule near the end. Donald's father wrenched it free and told Donald to fetch the cant hook so that he could get a grip on the other end. If one of them pushed and the other one tugged at the same time, they ought to be able to force the bastard past the blade.

Donald used the metal hook to grab the narrow end of the log. His father was standing by the blade at the other end of the belt, ready to push. They nodded to one another and mimed: ‘One…two…three!' Donald pulled, feeling triumphant as the log shifted a metre towards him with unexpected ease; it had gone through.

He glanced over at his father, ready to give him the thumbs up—only one more log to go—but before he could raise his hand he gasped and dropped the hook. The sudden jerk had made his father fall forward over the belt.

All his life Donald would keep going over what had happened, examining every second in minute detail. It had been so hot; the sweat had been trickling into their eyes, clouding his father's vision among the swirling sawdust; they had been tired; his father had misjudged the situation; or perhaps the log had an unusual structure which meant
that the blade suddenly slipped through it like a hot knife through butter.