Anna waited for the next bit, but nothing came. In the silence the words still hung in the air. He wants to die. She opened her mouth to get him to continue, but Josef got there first. ‘What were you thinking of doing on Thursday?’
‘On Thursday?’
‘Yes. When he comes round.’
It hadn’t occurred to her to do anything special on Thursday. She laughed. ‘You mean…what am I going to wear when I’m serving the food? Fishnet stockings, maybe?’
Josef turned up the corners of his mouth, turned them down again. ‘No, I thought…maybe you’d prefer not to be here.’
‘Don’t you want me to be here?’
He didn’t say anything. Which answered the question. She felt a sudden surge of fury: at his bloody secrecy, his nail biting, at the fact that he didn’t give a damn how she was feeling, and why was she showing such exaggerated consideration just because he’d been involved in an accident almost four months ago, for fuck’s sake, and she said, ‘Well, I was thinking of putting the heater on in the garage soon anyway, so I can do that on Thursday. I can sit out there and have a lovely time by the fire all on my own while you two…do whatever the fuck you’re going to do.’
She got up from the sofa, picked up the book on top of the pile on the coffee table—Leibniz’ Pre-established Harmony—and hurled it on his knee when he tried to get to his feet.
‘Sit down. Read a fucking book. I can go and see Gabriella on Thursday. What time am I allowed to come back?’
Josef looked tormented. He clasped his hands and held them out in front of him, pleading.
‘Anna…please. Don’t be like that. I…’ He closed his mouth abruptly. Then answered her last question as if she had meant it seriously.
‘It would be best if…if you came home on Thursday night.’
‘So I don’t need to stay over? Thanks very much.’
Josef sighed. ‘Please, Anna, if you could just…’
‘Thursday night. Right. Fine. That’s sorted then.’
She left him and went off to bed.
Wednesday passed in mutual silence. Anna started sketching out a new piece, a small island with a single, huge tree on it. From one of the tree’s branches dangled a woman, hanging from a rope. But her body was drawn so that roots were emerging from her feet, working their way down into the ground beneath the tree, and her skin was turning into bark.
She didn’t bother transferring it to a piece of wood. She realised nobody would buy it, because it didn’t have the black humour of the skeleton sheep. It was the kind of picture that might make the neighbours look away if they met her by chance by the mailboxes: And she always seemed so nice.
She rang Gabriella who of course said fantastic brilliant really looking forward to seeing you on Thursday evening kiss kiss.
Josef came home and they avoided an argument, kept out of each other’s way. He went down to the jetty and messed around with the boat. When she heard the engine start up her heart missed a beat. She ran to the kitchen window with a feeling that he’s leaving me… he’s disappearing…
But the boat was still moored by the jetty, and Josef was standing on board revving the engine. When he had finished she quickly moved back so that he wouldn’t see her watching. After all, she didn’t care about him.
In the evening they watched some stupid film with Jim Carrey in it, where he and another guy ran around being idiots. In a couple of places she noted, ‘I could have laughed here’, but didn’t.
When the film was over there was nothing to add, so they went to bed. Anna could feel Josef’s anger coming from his side of the bed like an electric cloud, but she took no notice. She’d tried. Enough was enough.
Instead she lay awake with her hands resting on her stomach. She could feel sleepy, fumbling movements from inside, and she pressed her hands down gently in response.
She had almost fallen asleep when Josef got out of bed and crept into the kitchen. The light went on, the fridge was opened. After a while she could hear the crunch as he ate a piece of crispbread. She drew up her legs, pressed her hands between her thighs. She wasn’t just angry. She was afraid too.
She wanted to go to Josef, sit beside him and talk, talk, talk until dawn. Sort things out, find some transparency. But she didn’t dare. Didn’t want to see his expression when she appeared in the doorway. His face might close down, rejecting her. Pushing her away yet again.
She would rather lie here and embrace the only thing she was sure of.
She fell asleep before Josef came back.
When she woke up on Thursday morning Josef had already gone, taking an early bus so that she could have the car. There was a note on the kitchen table.
Darling Anna.
It’s two o’clock in the morning and I’m going to bed in a minute to see if I can get some sleep.
I know I’ve been strange and difficult to be with lately, but from tomorrow everything will be better. Much better. I promise.
Can you come back around 11 or 12 tonight? Please. It’s important.
And remember I love you. Always and forever.
Your
Josef
Later Anna would wish she had followed her instinct and stayed at home. Grabbed Josef’s head, threatened him with divorce and forced him to tell her what he was up to. But she didn’t have the strength. She wanted to see Gabriella, talk to somebody outside the situation about how things were. She was wandering around in a porridge of pregnancy, darkness and slush. She needed some distance. So with a chorus of warning bells ringing in her ears she got in the car just after one o’clock and left Josef to his fate. She ended up in a convoy of trucks from Kapellskär that dragged her along with them all the way to Stockholm.
Gabriella’s one-room apartment was a time machine. Twenty-seven square metres in Midsommarkransen, cluttered with finished and half-finished canvases, photographs, flyers about exhibitions, pictures downloaded and printed from the internet, clothes. Anna caught herself thinking For God’s sake, grow up.
They were both thirty-one, and Gabriella was still in exactly the same place Anna had been eight years earlier. A sub-let apartment, no long-term relationship, no job. She probably read Nemi.
Maybe I’m just jealous?
Gabriella had made crêpes, which they ate in the tiny kitchen with a view of the carpark while Gabriella talked about her latest application to the University College of Art and Design, samples of her work, hassle with some Hungarian she’d met at a private view, how she’d started pinching stuff from shops as a protest. Anna sang the first line of ‘Shoplifters of the World Unite’ and Gabriella joined in for a few bars. She put down her cutlery and rested her chin on her hands.
‘And how are things with you two?’
Anna shrugged. ‘Fine.’
When Gabriella didn’t say anything, she added, ‘I’m not really in the mood for work, but that could be to do with the baby. Do you remember that series I started…’
They went back to talking about art. Anna didn’t feel like talking about her life. She knew what Gabriella would say. You can’t let your life be ruled by his nightmares. Set yourself free, for God’s sake. Easy to say when you’ve never been faithful to the same person for longer than a year. Easy to say when you’re not pregnant and you live in a one-room apartment in Midsommarkransen. Easy to say when you’ve never loved, expecting it to last forever. So they talked about art.
In the evening they went into the city and headed for Pelikan, their regular haunt from the old days. Perhaps that was a mistake; there they sat, the same people in the same place as before. It became painfully obvious that they weren’t the same people anymore. At least, Anna wasn’t.
They reminisced about school, talked about what had become of old friends. When the conversation flagged they both started looking elsewhere: Gabriella flirted with a guy with dreadlocks, Anna eyed up the clock above the bar. When it finally reached nine-thirty, she said, ‘Sorry. There’s something I have to do at home. I think I’d bett
er make a move.’
Gabriella finished off her third beer. ‘No surprise there.’
Anna got up with a mixture of relief and a guilty conscience. It hadn’t turned out the way she expected at all; she hadn’t said a word about her real problems. It felt like a betrayal of their friendship.
Fuck it all. As long as she got home.
They kissed and hugged and said they must get together again soon and it was all lies and as Anna hurried out of the bar she saw the dreadlock guy heading over to take her place and be much better company.
She almost ran the five blocks to the car. She would be home too early, but now she’d made the decision it felt more as if she would be home too late, whatever that might mean.
He wants to die.
She scraped the car in front with her bumper as she jolted out of her tiny parking space and headed across the city towards Roslagstull. Sweat trickled down her back from the running and her growing anxiety.
Right now Josef was sitting in their house with a man who wanted to die. She could see a possible connection, and hoped to God she was wrong.
When she turned into their drive her head was spinning after an hour listening to the din of the Toyota doing 140. The silence was intense when she switched off the engine and got out of the car. The outside light shone with a welcoming glow, and everything looked just the way it always did. She walked towards the house, thinking that if everything was OK she would…withdraw, somehow. Go and sit in the garage, perhaps.
What’s become of us?
The silence was just as palpable as she walked up the steps to the porch. No talking, no laughter. She opened the front door. The light was on in the hallway, and in the kitchen. On the kitchen table stood a half-full bottle of whisky and two glasses. A bag of ice cubes in a little puddle of water.
‘Hello?’
She looked out of the kitchen window. Impenetrable darkness.
From the magnetic holder above the sink she took the carbon steel knife they had invested in last winter, sharp as a razor blade. No reason, it just felt good to have it in her hand. In the bottom drawer she found the torch. She went back outside. Down towards the jetty.
The beam of the torch made the familiar somehow alien and threatening. She lit her way across the rocks, slippery with slush, saw the slimy backs of whales, an eye opening in a crevice. She went on, out onto the jetty, treading carefully on the wet planks. She shone the torch over the edge, and it was as she feared.
The boat was gone.
There wasn’t a sound to be heard out in the bay. There was only the lighthouse on Fårholm reef, sending out its monotonous, silent light signal, which made the darkness in between even darker.
She sat down on the jetty, feeling the dampness soaking through her trousers. Switched off the torch.
When she had been sitting there for maybe ten minutes, she heard the engine of a boat start up. She couldn’t judge how far away it was, perhaps five hundred metres. It sounded like their boat. The sound came closer. Her heart began to beat faster and she got up, fingering the torch. But she didn’t switch it on for fear of…frightening him away.
What’s become of us?
All of this could still be…normal. Josef had taken Kaxe out for a little trip to show him the boat. Or something. They were drunk and happy and felt like a little outing in the dark.
And I’m Claude Monet.
After a couple of minutes she was able to make out the boat as a vague white dot which grew in size and clarity. There was something ominous about the sound of the approaching engine across the dark waters. A monster making its way ashore from the seas. And yet she remained on the jetty, erect, almost standing to attention. The knife lay at her feet, and instead she clutched the reassuring weight of the old torch.
There was something wrong about the way the boat was coming in. It was moving too fast. The engine was switched off and the boat crashed into the jetty, which juddered beneath her feet.
‘Fucking hell…’
Josef’s voice. A slapping sound as his hand found the jetty. She could hear him panting in the darkness. She took a step forward, said, ‘Hi…’
Josef screamed. There was a dull thud as he lost his grip on the jetty and fell backwards into the boat; he screamed again, this time with pain. She switched on the torch. Josef was lying in the central well with his head against the gunwale. He looked like a terrified animal, paralysed by the headlights of a car. His hand shot up instinctively to shade his eyes from the light. Anna switched off the torch again, said, ‘Sorr—’
Before she got the word out of her mouth her brain had managed to register what her eyes had seen during those brief seconds of light. Next to Josef lay Karl-Axel with his mouth open, his eyes open, and an almost…ecstatic expression on his face. Pupils blown. Dead.
‘For fuck’s sake, you frightened the life out of me.’
Josef got to his feet and grabbed hold of the jetty once more. Anna shook her head. This couldn’t be happening. They were Josef and Anna who suited each other so well and had a house by the sea and were having a baby and this couldn’t be happening.
Josef crawled onto the jetty and made the boat fast. Anna was still shaking her head. As long as she kept on doing that, it wasn’t real. She whispered, ‘What have you done…what have you done?’
He came up to her, grabbed her by the shoulders and hugged her. She pushed him away because his body was in the way; it stopped her shaking her head.
‘Anna, this is what he wanted. I just helped him.’
‘You…you killed him.’
‘No.’ His hand squeezed her shoulder as if to emphasise the point. ‘I helped him to die. There’s a huge difference. Anna…’
‘But…why? Why? You’ll end up…it’s…’
Josef took hold of her face, forced her head to stop moving. Then he said, ‘Death is in him. It’s there. Now.’
‘Death…’
‘Yes. It’s in his body. It can’t get out. It’s ours.’
He pushed her gently downwards until they were both sitting on the jetty, facing one another.
A damp wind blew in off the sea, flicking a strand of her hair across her cheek. She grabbed it, wound it around her forefinger—a lifeline back to what was familiar. She pulled it; pain in the skin on her scalp.
She took a deep breath of the salt-laden night air, and it might have been the effect of the adrenaline pumping through her body, or it might just have been a final defence against madness, but she opened her arms as if to embrace the night, the sea, and suddenly experienced a limitless freedom.
What Josef said couldn’t possibly be true, but the very fact that they were sitting here together on the jetty in the cold night air, with a dead body just a few metres away…this was the end of everything, wasn’t it? Nothing would ever be the same again, nothing would be the way she had thought it would be. At that point all responsibility fell from her shoulders and she was…free.
Josef’s hand on her knee.
‘Do you want to know?’
‘I want to know.’
Her voice was clear, composed. She was simply here, now.
Josef said, ‘This is what we’d decided. He came to the house. We drank a little whisky to…well, to celebrate. Then we went out to the perch reef, you know, south of Tjockö. The water’s only three or four metres deep there. I tied the anchor rope around him and he jumped in. We said…what did we say? Goodbye…see you again… thanks for this…thanks for the whisky.’
He snorted; it was almost a laugh.
‘The atmosphere was…funny. I suppose we were scared, both of us. Each in our own way. Then he said I should throw the anchor overboard; I asked if he was sure and he said, “No, but throw it in anyway.” So I did. He disappeared beneath the surface, the rope played out a few metres, and then I sat there. Looked at the lighthouse. Counted the flashes.’
He cleared his throat. Anna could see the pale backs of his hands as he ran them over his face, could hear the soft ras
ping of stubble against his palms.
‘He was just below me. I could have pulled him up if I’d wanted to.’
‘But that wasn’t what he wanted,’ said Anna. ‘Was it?’
Josef’s voice had changed when he said, ‘After one minute, maybe. Eight flashes. Then the rope began to…play out.’
They sat there without saying anything for a long time. Eventually Anna said, ‘He was trying to pull himself up.’
‘Yes.’ Josef’s voice broke slightly as he added: ‘But I had plenty of rope. Thirty metres. And still…still he managed to use up the whole lot.’
Josef was weeping. Anna couldn’t bring herself to console him. She was cold inside, hard. The child in her stomach moved a hand or a foot, and it was as if it was happening to someone else.
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing. Nothing. He couldn’t pull himself up. After a while it…went slack. I waited another minute. Then I pulled him up.’
Afterwards Anna found it difficult to grasp that she did what she did. It was even more difficult to understand why she felt excited while it was going on. As if they were engaged in some spine-tingling party game. Sitting around a ouija board or something. It was the only explanation she could come up with. The fact that the whole thing was unreal.
And that—God forgive me—she and Josef were doing something together again, were fellow conspirators in the name of love as they had always said they were in the days when everything was good between them.
They carried Kaxe up to the house. His clothes were dripping wet, and Anna found herself mopping up with a dishcloth while Josef laid out some black plastic sacks on which to lay the body.
It wasn’t until they were standing side by side with their arms folded contemplating their efforts that repudiation sank its claws into her.
‘Josef. We can’t do this. We have to call the police. Or something. Someone who can…’
Josef shook his head and crouched down next to the dead body. He said, ‘Show yourself.’
Anna’s eyes widened. He really had gone mad. The here-and-now feeling evaporated, replaced by a succession of days as a single mother, explaining to her child that Daddy’s in a place where they’re looking after him. Josef was totally focused on the dead body. She was alone. A lonely accessory to a crime.