The American Girl (39 page)

“Look at this,” Järpe Rat said and drew a smiley face in the damn steam.

“Whatever,” said Solveig Rat and blew on the windowpane and drew a smiley face in the damned steam next to his. “And the two of us are here.” The latter meant what Solveig loved to say in the language of the District: “Now we’re two. It’s the two of us.”

“Go to hell!” One time when Rita Rat was too drunk she crashed her hand through a windowpane. But it was later and she was
wasted. And it was in the Glass House. The special thing with the Glass House and the Rats was that it was accessible to only a few of the Rats. Solveig and Rita, and so. So it was not the Rats exactly who made a lot of noise in the Glass House, who for example demolished what had once been the baroness’s Winter Garden.

It was only a few.

When Solveig got started she was hard to stop. She imitated the summer guests from the Second Cape, their speech.

And of course, it was easy to laugh at them: the summer guests, who strained to have what they called a “free and equal” relationship to “the local people,” were almost the best thing to make fun of when they were not there and were going to get involved in everything. The ones who “understood the barren conditions out at sea” and so on, though in actuality there was almost no real archipelago outside the Second Cape, just a few occasional fisherman who still lived in the municipality and they lived farther inland and got to have their fishing boats moored at the rented jetty next to the county’s new public beach because the beach by the sea was private.

Spoke about
these conditions
loud and clear, as if they knew exactly what it was all about. Rita would get to hear it with her own ears a few years later when she came to the city by the sea and lived with the Backmansson family. Not the Backmanssons, they did not talk that way (and that further strengthened Rita’s solidarity with the Backmanssons, they were from the same planet as her).

When she would hear that talk in the city by the sea then she would think what did they really know anyway. And it could make her feel so downhearted that she actually for a moment—but only for a moment—thought about leaving everything and going home.

But immediately, on the other hand. Home. What was home? Not the cousin’s house, not Solveig’s (when she was living in
the city by the sea with the Backmanssons, she would no longer think “Rita and Solveig’s cottage,” she would just think “Solveig’s”) cottage.

But still at the same time, Solveig who was going on like that with the Rats. It was so petty.

For her the Rats were almost a dead period during the fall. A pointless, and thus lacking in meaning, pastime.

Rita with Torpe in the boathouse
. She was lying there with her bra up by her neck and Torpe Torpeson had just come inside her in his insistent way that was rather arousing anyway. But still, she could not let herself go, not even then. She was lying on her back with her legs spread on the same bunk where the American girl had once lain. Though she did not think about that, she stared at the guitar on the wall, it was still hanging there and was cracking in the cold, the strings that had broken were curling like locks, and while Torpe was busy she thought maybe, “Everything is so necrophilic.” It sounded terrible and it was but she was also cold inside at the thought of it. And then tenderness welled up inside her because Torpe Torpeson, he was here after all, and he warmed you.

It happened to be one of the unusual clear nights that fall, and when she was lying there with Torpe she suddenly saw just the sky and the stars—it was still so beautiful, so wonderful.

But suddenly, almost simultaneously, it became so strangely dark. A dark figure covered the window. It was the shadow of a person. And it WAS NOT Bengt because Bengt was holding house in other places for a change.

“Who the hell was that?”

Torpe jumped up and tore open the door and called out into the darkness. But the Shadow was gone.

“For Christ’s sake . . .” Torpe started.

“Oh. Don’t worry about it. Come here.”

The Shadow, Rita knew it, was Doris Flinkenberg.

•••

Doris was following Rita. No one noticed, not even Solveig.

“You’re the one who’s seeing things. Has a screw loose. What would Doris . . .” but Solveig stopped herself.

“She’s following me no matter what you say,” Rita said almost in a long and tired sigh as if she did not care about Solveig’s opinions one way or the other. That made Solveig uncertain. When Rita did not even have the energy to fight her.

“It’s the two of us,” a sentence that was so infinitely important to Solveig. And now Solveig suspected there was a part of Rita that was not in the District anymore, that might not stay regardless of whether or not the Backmanssons had taken her with them. Rita was going away.

And Solveig would not be going with her. That seemed like the whole point of it. Solveig was not going to go with her.

Solveig herself worked at Four Mops and a Dustpan.

And when Doris was dead in about a month, Solveig would take over everything herself. The cousin’s mama would not be able to work for a long time, Rita would have run away, and “the dustpan” would, true to habit, come and go, gradually more and more go. And Solveig would be equal to the task: only a few years later Four Mops and a Dustpan would have its own office in the town center with four employees. Solveig would sit in her own office and decide over everything.

And Rita, she would go away.
She would really go away
and not come back for many years.

Rita attended the high school up in the town center; some days when she went home from school on the school bus she got off a few stops early in order to have some peace and quiet, think, be alone.

Then, if Doris Flinkenberg was on the bus, it happened that Doris noticed and got off as well, at the same stop, and followed at an adequate distance, dawdling after Rita. And if someone
could walk with slow, idling steps it was Doris Flinkenberg. That is to say when she was alone; in the company of other people, Doris got stuck in them. Imitated. If anyone was an impersonator it was Doris Flinkenberg.

The new Doris. Ha-ha. Micke’s Folk Band. Doris and her miserable boyfriend . . . or was it ex-boyfriend? There were rumors that Doris Flinkenberg had given Micke Friberg himself the boot. In favor of . . . whom, you had to wonder, then? For what? To, maybe, ramble around alone in the leafy woods and pursue other people.
I walked out one evening, out into a grove so green
.

Though. Doris, anguished, walked around at school as well, alone. The other girl, Sandra, could not be seen. “Ha-ha,” thought Rita in the woods, “maybe the dykes are having a lovers’ quarrel.”

And something there behind her in the woods. Yes, there she was. Doris. At the same time: another seed of, not panic, but certainly anxiety, was growing inside Rita.

What did Doris Flinkenberg want with her anyway?

And Rita continued walking. She walked and walked. Until she came to Bule Marsh. That was not where she had been headed. Though it would be wrong to say that it was Doris behind her who had driven her there. It was something between part compulsion and own will.

One day in the middle of October: Bule Marsh lay there so deep and solitary, so special, also on an otherwise sunny fall day like this one, where in other places it could still be warm and with a lot of color. But the warmth, the colors, it was as if they did not extend all the way to Bule Marsh.

And it was as if they had never really done so.

Now Rita walked up onto the highest cliff. Looked around. Could not help but be gripped by the strange beyond-time feeling and
the great loneliness
that ruled there at the marsh.

Otherwise Rita was not like Doris and Sandra or her brother Bengt who roamed around in the woods just because, roamed and roamed so to speak and still always ended up at Bule Marsh in the end.

For Rita there was for the most part a purpose and a goal.

With Torpe and Järpe and Solveig, a place where you could drink your beer in peace and quiet.

Or, with Solveig a long time ago, in order to swim. When they were little and the public beach had been there at Bule Marsh for a short time. Of course the opening in the reeds was still as public as you could get, but nowadays there were real public beaches in several places in the municipality. It had just been those years following the housing exhibition when the public beach had to be moved quickly from the Second Cape when that area became private. And it was as if no one in the midst of all the bustle had thought about somewhere other than Bule Marsh.

But what happened here, the American girl, all of that, had brought an end to everyone’s desire to swim in the marsh water, as if
swimming with a corpse
. Already that following year a new public beach with piers and diving platforms and all sorts of things had been opened by one of the larger lakes in the west. Rita and Solveig had also gone there in the beginning, continued with the swimming training they had devoted themselves to earlier, together, a while anyway. Because they had a plan, that they would become swimmers or world-famous divers like Ulrika Knape for example. Private plans, highly private. Something like that. With quite a bit left open in the details of the plans themselves. Something in that area anyway. Amaze the world in some way so to speak, both twins.

Stupid dreams. When the new beach by the lake in the west had been inaugurated the following year Solveig had made quite a nice leap from the thirty-foot landing, and it had been rather unforgettable. Rita herself had a cold and could not participate. She
sat in the audience on the newly built stands on wheels that could be pulled out when needed and caught her sister’s whirling jump in the palm of her hand; in a certain perspective she had, her sister Solveig looked so small. And been quite proud. But then the swim camp, which for the time being was being arranged in the neighboring municipality with participants from swim clubs from around the whole country, had its show. And really, you could see the difference. Rita anyway, and Solveig. So they had, little by little, actually that season already stopped with training and all of that. Not based on any verbal agreement, it just happened that way.

And, yes, at the marsh, in the end, she had also been there with Jan Backmansson sometimes. When they had strolled around a little bit everywhere and examined the flora and the fauna and all the natural phenomena in the woods. Jan Backmansson who had known so much about this and that, for example, regarding the hole in the bottom of the marsh that produced such strong whirling currents that could in no time carry a grown person to the brink and a certain death by drowning, which had happened with the American girl, Jan Backmansson also had a scientific explanation handy.

“For example. Let’s say,” said Jan Backmansson. For example. That was how he always started: pour water in a coffee cup with a hole in the bottom. What happens with the water? It runs out. But put your finger in the cup while it’s running. Do you feel anything? Doesn’t it pull? Doesn’t it flow? The hole sucks the water in.

“The
hole sucks you to it and you’re helpless
. You can also say it that way, but you don’t because it isn’t scientifically valid. But the effect is the same. The water is sucked into the hole, there where it’s filled with nothing.”

In some way Rita had liked hearing it. That is to say as an explanation. It was so plausible. And so calming.

•••

Jan Backmansson. She visited him yet again in his home in the apartment in the city by the sea. Every time she was together with Jan Backmansson in his beautiful home that was so large and filled with rooms with roughly thirty-foot ceilings, it struck her that there was no place else. There was no place else in the world to be. It was another world.

Yet: she was there less and less frequently.

And something else had started to gnaw on her lately. That also: how some parts of life were connected and how others hung loosely and that all of it was really rather arbitrary. How certain parts could be linked with each other at all.

More and more it had become so that on the one hand there were the Backmanssons in the apartment in the city by the sea, her with Jan Backmansson there. And there was also Susanna’s room, where Rita sometimes sat and read at the antique desk. A room that was so high that from its windows you could see out over the rooftops in the city by the sea, toward the city.
The wonderful room
, that was what she called it, in secret. A secret for Jan Backmansson also.

On the other hand there was the District. The Rats and Solveig. Solveig, Järpe, Torpe, and so on. There was Four Mops and a Dustpan, and the latter, the dustpan, who was absent for the most part. Bencku with his projects of which nothing ever came of any of them. He just talked. He was going to become an architect; he was going to become a cartographer, for real; he would also start a world revolution, though there had been less talk about that lately. He had also starting talking about “getting himself together,” because there had been a lot of beer lately. And about “the women;” to Rita’s and Solveig’s surprise he did not have a lack of them. He moved from woman to woman and played the lottery. Won unnecessary things. The latest: a water bed. It arrived at the cousin’s property on the bed of a truck and you thought it was some kind of joke.

And the cousin’s mama with the cousin’s papa in his room, where he had been for almost all of Rita’s conscious life, since childhood.
Something inside him has broken
, said the cousin’s mama, and yes, for lack of other explanations, you had to make do with that. But on the other hand, “damn it,” as you swore in the District. Damn it.

It was another world.

“You might have to decide WHO you’re actually with,” Solveig had said. “And not carry on with this double-dealing.” But Solveig did not understand.

Torpe in the District, Jan Backmansson in the city by the sea. It was not double-dealing. It was just two sides of life that had nothing to do with each other. At some point in time she had been able to talk to Solveig. Not anymore. Not now.