Then the storm arrived. It started close by; she only had time to count one thousand and one, one thousand and two, one thousand and thr—between the lightning and the crash of the thunder. The rain started pouring over the gutters, hammering on the window ledges. She clenched her teeth, folded her arms over her head and stared at the floor so she would be able to see the flash of the lightning.
The next one was closer. She only got as far as one thousand and two. As soon as she stopped clamping her jaws together, her teeth started chattering. The storm came rumbling in from the sea, an enraged, gigantic ghost getting closer and closer, wanting to crush her, to sweep her away in its white light.
When the next crash came she didn’t know if it was the floor or her own body shaking. It was close now. Soon it would be on top of her.
She leapt to her feet. Without bothering with a coat or shoes she ran outside. The rain plastered her blouse to her back, splashing up around her bare feet as she sprinted across the grass to the drive.
Vore’s car was a blurred, white shape behind the veils of rain, and she ran towards it as if the ground were electrified, which was exactly what she was afraid of all the time.
She opened the passenger door, threw herself inside and slammed the door shut. The rain pelted against the metal, the landscape burned in the phosphorescent flash and the trees were riveted to the sky. The crash came only a second later; two coffee cups in the space below the glove compartment clinked against one another.
Beneath the hire car aroma of upholstery cleaner she could pick up his smell. Her heart slowed down slightly, the worst of the shaking abated. It was an unexpected relief. She had been looking for the insulation of the rubber tyres against the ground, but his smell was here and it calmed her more than technical considerations. She took a deep breath, then gave a start as the driver’s door opened and Vore folded himself into the car.
His eyes were wide open. He was just as scared as her. With some difficulty he got into the driving seat and slammed the door shut. The car was like a suit four sizes too small for him. Even though the seat was pushed back as far as it would go, his knees were rubbing against the steering wheel. She realised what he must look like when he was driving, and laughed out loud.
He turned to face her with a wan smile. ‘A thunderstorm,’ he said. ‘Most amusing.’
‘No, I just…’ She pointed to his head, which was almost touching the roof. ‘Wouldn’t you be better with a bigger car?’
He said something in reply, but she couldn’t hear him. A deafening clap of thunder drowned out everything else. She clenched her fists, felt the tears welling up. Vore grabbed hold of the wheel and stared fixedly out through the windscreen.
She did it without thinking. She shuffled closer to him. The handbrake dug into her hip as she leaned her head against his chest and inhaled the smell of his shirt. He placed one hand on her cheek, her ear. She closed her eyes.
The storm continued to rage around them, but after a while she could hear his heart slowing down too. The solace was mutual, and the thought calmed her even more. Which made him feel calmer. By the time the storm started to move away, they were almost not afraid anymore.
They were sitting in their seats like normal people. Didn’t know where to start. The storm was far away now, a mumbling reminder of what they had gone through. Eventually Vore said, ‘Roland.’
Tina pulled a face. ‘What about him?’
‘He’s unfaithful to you.’
‘Yes,’ said Tina. ‘How do you know?’
‘The smell.’
Of course. Why had she asked? She nodded and looked out through the windscreen. Now the lightning had stopped it was almost pitch-black outside. The light inside the car picked out the odd dancing raindrop on the bonnet, nothing more. Vore opened his door.
‘Come on,’ he said.
She took his hand and they walked to the cottage. When they got inside, they both sat down on the bed. They didn’t switch on any lights, and there was nothing but sounds, smells. Tina had a lump in her throat. She fumbled in the darkness and found his cheek, stroked his rough beard.
‘Vore,’ she said. ‘I want to. But I can’t.’
‘Yes, you can.’
His answer was so definite that it should have been enough to convince a stone. But still she shook her head. ‘No. It hurts too much. I can’t.’
‘You’ve never done it.’
‘Yes I have.’
He took her face between his hands. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not your way.’
‘What do you mean?’
He ran his hand over one breast and a swarm of ants ran through her body, gathered in her diaphragm, grew.
‘Trust me,’ he said.
He undressed her. The feeling in her diaphragm was something she had never experienced before, as if a previously unused part of her body had suddenly blossomed. When he took off his shirt and vest and she pressed her face to his bare chest, she felt a throbbing, pulsating sensation down there.
Her eyes were wide open in the darkness. It was as if something was being turned inside out, unfolding in her belly. When he pulled away from her for a moment to take off his trousers, she ran her hands over her sex. She gasped out loud.
A stiff erection was pointing upwards from what she had thought was her vagina. She groped along its root and found no opening. The sensation had been exactly right: she had been turned inside out.
Vore’s hand touched her. ‘Now do you understand?’
She shook her head. The bed creaked as Vore lay down. ‘Come here,’ he said.
She lay down on top of him. He gently guided her, and she pushed into him. The bed made a terrible noise as she pulled back, pushed in again. She ran her hands over his chest. The pleasure she was getting from this new part of her body was terrifying. Like phantom pains, but in reverse. She was experiencing pleasure in a place that didn’t exist.
How…how?
After a while she stopped worrying. Stopped thinking. She fell on him and thrust into his wet, soft darkness. Vore groaned, grabbed her bottom and caressed the scar, the dead skin. They were no longer man or woman, just two bodies finding one another in the darkness. Moving apart, reuniting, rolling on each other’s waves until the white light poured through her body, her belly cramping and contracting; she screamed as the burning ants were hurled out of her and into him.
He lit candles. Tina lay on the bed feeling her sex as it softened, withdrew inside her. When Vore stroked her breasts it hesitated for a moment, then disappeared into her.
She looked at his back. The big, curved scar at the bottom of his back was dark red in the candlelight. She touched it with her middle finger.
‘I didn’t know,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘That was very clear.’
‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Because…’ His hand moved slowly over her body. ‘…because I didn’t know if you wanted to know. I mean, you’ve made a life for yourself. Adapted to the world of human beings. There’s a great deal you don’t know. A great deal you might not want to know. If you’re going to carry on living as you have done up to now.’
‘I don’t want to carry on living the same way.’
‘No.’
She thought he was going to continue. Tell her something. Instead he sighed deeply and folded his body into an uncomfortable position so that he could rest his head on her stomach. After a while he started shaking, and she thought he was cold. She leaned forward to pull the covers over him, then realised he was crying. She stroked his hair. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Tina.’ It was the first time he had used her name. ‘There aren’t many of us left. It’s better for you if you…forget about this. Don’t let it influence your actions from now on.’
She carried on stroking his hair as she gazed at the ceiling. The cottage wasn’t well insulated; the candles flickered and flared in the draught, making the shadows move across the ceiling. Life everywhere.
‘Yo
u’ve had a child in here.’ His body stiffened on top of hers. ‘Haven’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who was it? Where is it now?’
He raised his head and slid down onto the floor by the bed; he knelt there gazing searchingly into her eyes.
She could just get up and leave right now. Go back into the house, have a hot shower and drink several glasses of wine until she fell asleep. Tomorrow he would go away. Roland would come back. On Monday she would go to work. She could carry on living within this—
lie
—security that had been her life up to now.
Vore got to his feet and opened the wardrobe. Moved the pile of hand towels on the top shelf. Reached in and pulled out a cardboard box, about the size of two shoe boxes. Tina pulled the covers over her. Vore’s head almost reached the ceiling, he towered over her holding out the box. She closed her eyes.
‘Is it…dead?’ she asked.
‘No. And it’s not a child.’
She felt the bed dip under his weight as he sat down. She heard the lid being lifted off. A faint whimper. She opened her eyes.
Inside the box on a bed of towels lay a tiny baby, only a couple of weeks old. The thin chest was moving up and down, and Vore caressed the child’s head with his forefinger. Tina leaned forward.
‘It is a child,’ she said. It was a girl. Her eyes were closed, her fingers moving slowly as if she were dreaming. There was a little blob of dried milk at the corner of her mouth.
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s a hiisit. It hasn’t been fertilised.’
‘But it is a child. I can see it’s a child.’
‘I was the one who gave birth to it,’ said Vore. ‘So I ought to know, don’t you think? It’s a hiisit. It has no…soul. No thoughts. It’s like an egg. An unfertilised egg. But it can be shaped into anything at all. Look…’
He prodded one eyelid and the eyes opened. Tina gasped out loud. The eyes were completely white.
‘It’s blind,’ said Vore. ‘Deaf. Incapable of learning anything. It can only breathe, cry, eat.’ He picked off the white blob at the corner of the child’s mouth. As if to reinforce what he had just said, he added, ‘A hiisit. That’s what they’re called.’
‘Is that what the…larvae are for? Food?’
‘Yes.’ He was rubbing the white stuff between his fingers. ‘I thought you’d seen it. When you came in here.’
Tina shook her head. A slight feeling of nausea was growing in her stomach, crawling up into her throat. She tore her gaze away from the child’s milky white eyes and asked, ‘What do you mean… shaped?’
Vore pushed his finger hard against the spot where the child’s right collarbone should have been, but the finger simply sank right in, leaving a dent behind. The child did not react. ‘It’s like clay.’
Tina stared at the hollow, which showed no sign of springing back, the shadowy dent in the child’s chest, and she had had enough. She crawled out of bed, leaving Vore sitting there with the box on his knee. He made no move to stop her. She gathered up her clothes, which were strewn across the floor, and bundled them up in her arms.
‘What…why have you got it?’
Vore looked at her. Where she had seen warmth and love just minutes before there was now only the loneliness of a tarn in the depths of the forest where no one ever goes. In a thin voice he said, ‘Don’t you know?’
She shook her head and took a single step to the door, opened it. Vore was still sitting on the bed. She walked out onto the porch and the wind showered her naked body with light rain. The candle flames flickered wildly inside the cottage, cascading patterns over the big man on the bed with the little box on his knee.
I was the one who gave birth to it…
The white eyes opening, the finger pushed into the chest.
She slammed the door and ran over to the house. When she got inside she locked the front door. She dropped her clothes on the hall floor and went straight into the kitchen where she knocked back the last of the wine straight out of the bottle. Then she opened another and went into the bedroom, put on a CD of Chopin’s piano sonatas, turned the volume up high and crawled into bed.
She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to know anything. When she had drunk half the bottle she ran her fingers over her sex. She could feel a sticky wetness, and brought her fingers up to her nose. They smelled of germinating sprouts and salt water. She caressed herself. Nothing happened. She had another drink.
When the bottle was empty and the pattern on the curtains was beginning to move, wriggling around before her eyes, there was a knock on the door.
‘Go away,’ she whispered. ‘Go away.’
She staggered over to the stereo and turned up the volume until the piano was reverberating off the walls. There might have been another knock at the door, there might not. She crawled back into bed and pulled the covers over her head.
I don’t want to. Don’t want to don’t want to…
The pictures in her head became confused. Big hands grabbing at her. A forest of enormous tree trunks that disappeared into shadow, then everything was white, white. White hands, white clothes, white walls. Hands that seized her, lifted her. She travelled along a sloping chute down into the darkness, and fell asleep.
She opened her eyes and knew nothing. Grey light was pouring into the room, and her mouth was stuck together. She had a splitting headache, and her belly was hurting because she was desperate for a pee. She managed to get out of bed and into the bathroom.
When she was sitting on the toilet letting it all go, she remembered. She looked down to where the urine was pouring out of her in a jagged stream, tried to imagine what things looked like inside her. It was impossible. An illustration from her school biology lessons flashed through her mind.
It’s not true. I’m a freak.
She leaned against the washbasin, turned on the tap, half pulled herself up and drank. The sharpness of the water was real. She clung onto it and drank until her stomach was cold. When she straightened up and walked into the kitchen, the water began to reach the same temperature as the rest of her body. The contours blurred once more. She sat down on a chair, thought: there’s the coffee machine, there’s the magazine rack, there’s the clock. It’s a quarter past eleven. There’s a box of matches. All of these things exist. I exist too.
She took two painkillers out of the medicine drawer, swallowed them with another swig of cold water from a glass that was hard and round in her hand.
Quarter past eleven!
For a moment she panicked, thinking she was late for work. Then she remembered she was off sick. She went back to the bedroom, looked out of the window. The white car had gone. She lay down on the bed, gazed up at the ceiling for an hour.
She thought she understood everything. But she had to know.
At a quarter past one she was standing at the stop waiting for the bus to Norrtälje.
Her father wasn’t in his room. She asked one of the care assistants, and was told he was in the dayroom. The carer’s eyes flicked down to her feet as if to check that she hadn’t brought any dirt in with her. No doubt she looked like shit.
He was alone in the room, sitting in his wheelchair facing the window. At first she thought he was asleep, but when she walked around him she saw that his eyes were open, looking out towards the sparse pine trees outside the window. He quickly rearranged his features into a smile.
‘Hello, love. Another surprise visit!’
‘Hi, Dad.’
She pulled over a chair and sat down.
‘How are things?’ he asked.
‘Not so good.’
‘No. I can see that.’
They sat in silence for a while, looking into one another. Her father’s eyes had acquired the transparency of old age. The clarity, the wisdom were still there, but somehow diluted, like blue water colour. Tina’s mother had had brown eyes, so she had never thought about it. But she was thinking about it now.
‘Dad,’ she said. ‘Whe
re did I come from?’
Her father’s gaze sought out the pine trees. After a while he said, without looking at her, ‘I presume there’s no point in…’ He frowned. ‘How did you find out?’
‘Does it matter?’
Back to the pine trees. In spite of the fact that he lived in a nursing home, in spite of the fact that he was confined to a wheelchair and that his hands, once so capable, could no longer even wave away a fly, Tina had managed to disregard his age. Now she was aware of it. Or perhaps it was just that old age had taken hold at this particular moment.
‘I’ve always loved you,’ he said. ‘As if you were my own daughter. You are my daughter. I hope you realise that.’
The lump in her stomach was growing. It was the same feeling as when Vore held out the box. The moment before the lid is opened. When you can still run away, close your eyes, pretend there’s nothing to see. She had thought she would have to coax her father, hadn’t been prepared for the fact that they would reach this point so quickly. But perhaps he had been ready since the day she asked about the scar. Perhaps he had been ready for many years. Ever since he…took her in.
He said, ‘I see you didn’t bring any juice.’
‘No, I forgot.’
‘You will still come and see me, won’t you…in the future?’
She placed a hand on his arm, then on his cheek, and held it there for a few seconds. ‘Dad. I’m the one who should be afraid. Now tell me.’
He leaned his cheek almost imperceptibly against her hand. Then he straightened up and said, ‘Your mother and I couldn’t have children. We tried for many years, but it never happened. I don’t know whether you ever thought about the fact that…well, we were ten or fifteen years older than your friends’ parents. We’d started the process of applying to adopt a child three years before…before they found you.’
‘What do you mean, found?’
‘You were…two years old at the time. When they found this couple deep in the forest. Only five kilometres into the forest from where we lived. Where you live now.
‘I think people knew they were there, but it was only when it turned out they had a child that…steps were taken.’