Midnight Sun

Chapter 13

It was in Stockholm. A long, long time ago, before everything. I was eighteen years old, and had caught the train from Oslo. I walked around the streets of Södermalm alone. Waded through the grass on Djurgården, dangled my legs off a jetty while I looked across at the Royal Palace and knew that I would never swap what they had for the freedom I had. Then I got dressed up as best I could with the little I had, and went to the Royal Dramatic Theatre, because I was in love with a Norwegian girl who was playing Solveig in Peer Gynt.

She was three years older than me, but I had talked to her at a party. That must have been why I was there. Mostly because of that. She was good in the play, she could speak Swedish like a native, or at least that’s how it sounded to me. And she was attractive and unobtainable. All the same, during the course of the performance my infatuation withered away. Maybe because she couldn’t compete with the day I’d had, with Stockholm. Maybe it was just that I was eighteen and had already fallen for the red-haired girl in the row in front of me.

The next day I bought some hash at Sergels torg. I walked down to Kungsträdgården, where I saw the red-haired girl again. I asked if she had enjoyed the play, but she just shrugged her shoulders and showed me how to roll a joint in Swedish. She was twenty, came from Östersund, and had a little flat at Odenplan. Next door was a reasonable restaurant called Tranan, where we ate fried herring and mashed potato and drank medium-strength lager.

It turned out that she wasn’t the girl I’d seen in the row in front of me after all, she’d never been to the Royal Dramatic Theatre. I stayed with her for three days. She went to work while I just wandered about breathing in the summer and the city. On the way home I sat looking out of the window, thinking about what I’d said about going back. And thought, for the first time, the most depressing thought of all: that there was no going back. That now becomes then, now becomes then in an endless fucking sequence, and there’s no reverse gear on this vehicle we call life.

I woke up again.

There was something scraping at the door. I twisted over in bed and saw the door handle move up and down.

She’d changed her mind. She’d come back.

‘Lea?’ My heart was pounding wildly with joy, and I threw off the covers and swung my feet onto the floor.

No answer.

It wasn’t Lea.

It was a man. A strong, angry man. Because the force he was using on the door handle was making the joints of the bed-frame creak.

I grabbed the rifle that was leaning against the wall and aimed it at the door.

‘Who’s there? What do you want?’

Still no answer. But what were they going to say? That they’d come to fix me, so could I please unlock the door? The rope quivered like a piano wire, and the door was now open a crack. Big enough to stick the barrel of a revolver through...

‘Answer, or I’ll shoot!’

It sounded like the planks of the bed were screaming in pain as the big nails were pulled out of the frame, millimetre by millimetre. And then I heard a click outside, like a revolver being loaded.

I fired. Fired. Fired. And fired. Three bullets in the magazine and one in the chamber.

Afterwards the silence was even more oppressive.

I held my breath.

Fuck! The scraping sound was still there. There was a crash as the door handle was pulled right through the door and disappeared. Then a loud, plaintive bellow and that same clicking sound. Which I finally recognised.

I got the pistol out from under the pillow, loosened the rope and opened the door.

The buck hadn’t got far. I saw it lying on the heather twenty metres from the cabin, on the side facing the village. As if it were instinctively seeking people rather than the woods.

I went over to it.

It lay there immobile, only moving its head. The door handle was still caught in its antlers. Rubbing. It had been rubbing its horns against the door of the cabin and caught them on the handle.

It lay with its head on the ground and looked at me. I knew there wasn’t really any plea in its eyes, that I was just reading that into them. I raised the pistol. Saw the movement reflected in its wet eyeballs.

What had Anita said? You’re going to shoot the reflection. The lone buck, who had escaped from his flock and found this hiding place, yet had still reached the end of his days — was that me?

I couldn’t bring myself to fire. Of course I couldn’t.

I closed my eyes. Hard. Thought about what came afterwards. About what didn’t come afterwards. No more tears, no more fear, no regret, blame, thirst, longing, sense of loss, of wasting all the chances you’d been given.

I fired. Twice.

Then I walked back to the cabin.

Lay down on the bed. Kiss and death. Kiss and death.

I woke up a couple of hours later with a headache, a rushing sound in my ear, and a feeling that that was that. Gravity was pulling at my body, draining all light and hope. But I hadn’t yet been dragged down so far that I couldn’t pull myself out, if I was quick and grabbed onto a lifebuoy. There was only one way out, and when I sank again, the darkness would be even blacker, last even longer. But I needed that way out now.

In the absence of Prince Valium I grabbed the only lifebuoy I had. I opened the bottle of drink.