Dead of Winter

12

Laura is woken by George the eighth, or whatever number the cat might be, rubbing her face against Laura’s own. It is light outside, and it takes a few seconds before she realises that she’s slept the whole night on top of the covers.

She needs a pee, her mouth is as dry as dust, and her jaws and teeth ache because she didn’t use her mouth guard.

She pushes the cat away and drags herself to her feet. The bathroom is more or less what she’d expected. A single dirty towel, yellow stains in the washbasin from the dripping tap. The toilet seat is broken. She puts paper around the rim of the bowl before cautiously sitting down. The bath tap is within reach, and she can’t resist trying to turn it, but it refuses to move. She can’t see any soap, shampoo or bath towels, so presumably Hedda used to shower in the sauna block by the pontoon.

Somehow the house looks even more depressing in daylight. The knowledge that she’s slept here makes her skin crawl. She ought to go to the hotel and scrub all this misery away, as she’d planned to do last night, but her curiosity has been aroused again, and mixed with a dose of nostalgia, it keeps her here.

She nudges open the doors to the remaining rooms. Hedda’s bedroom door barely moves because of all the crap. Judging by the blanket and pillow on the sofa, she’s been sleeping in the living room for the past few years. It’s possible to get into the studio/office, but it’s full of cardboard boxes, one piled high with blue bookkeeping files in no particular order.

Laura goes into the living room, gazes at the chaos. Most of the stuff has probably come from the holiday cabins. She thinks she recognises some pine chairs and various items of kitchen equipment, and when she spots several of Hedda’s home-made ashtrays on top of an old fridge, she’s certain.

Presumably Hedda had tried to salvage anything worth saving. She might even have had a plan for all this stuff, at least in the beginning – but that must have been many years ago.

Laura goes back to her bedroom, an island of tidiness in a sea of chaos. She runs her fingers along the bookshelf and finds only a thin coating of dust. Hedda must have cleaned in here quite recently, maybe only a few days before her death.

But why?

Why clean a room for someone who never comes? Someone whom Hedda has made no attempt to invite for thirty years, yet she still seems to have been expecting Laura.

Yesterday’s anger has given way to other feelings.

Mainly melancholy.

The faded photograph of her and Jack as children is still on the shelf. They are very much alike. Both blue-eyed, Laura with red hair, Jack blond. Her eight-year-old self is smiling, stealing an admiring glance at Jack out of the corner of her eye. He is three years older, and has just moved in.

This is Jack. He’s going to be living with us.

Why?

Because this is his home now. We’re his family.

She’s never actually heard the full story from Jack. Hedda simply said that Jack’s mother couldn’t take care of him, and that he’d been with a couple of foster families. At Gärdsnäset Jack had finally found a place where he was welcome. Loved.

She puts down the photograph and goes over to the wardrobe in the corner. Inside she finds a pair of dungarees and a T-shirt that must have been hers. It’s covered in a multitude of stains in different colours, and the sight of it makes her heart contract.

Oil paints, pastels, charcoal.

Even strokes, my little princess. Be patient.

She kneels down. The piece of foam rubber is still there. She lifts the plastic matting, opens the inspection hatch and uses the torch on her phone to illuminate the crawl space.

The first thing she sees is a large, unfamiliar object. Some kind of fan, humming quietly. Beyond it a metal ventilation shaft stretches all the way to a grille on the side of the house facing the lake.

Laura tries to find her treasure, but the cigar box is gone. It doesn’t really matter. She can hardly remember what was in it, apart from the black feather that her aunt claimed came from a black swan. A cygne noir.

These days Laura knows exactly what the term means. She’s heard it used in business circles. A black swan is an anomaly, something that is totally unexpected and has far-reaching consequences. Like getting pregnant when you’re over forty, even though the doctors had said it was impossible.

Nothing is impossible, my little princess. Not even the impossible.

As soon as Laura steps outside, the crows begin to caw loudly, sounding the alarm. The darkness of the previous evening had hidden all the nests in the trees near the house and the pontoon. The black birds with their almost ridiculously large beaks sidle to the ends of the branches, flapping their wings and staring at her. Some of the more nervous ones are already circling in the air above. To her annoyance she discovers that she has parked her car right under one of the trees. Needless to say, the roof is spattered with bird shit, which contains not only harmful bacteria, but also corrosive ammonia.

She must find a car wash, as soon as possible. But there is one more place she needs to check out before she leaves.

The steep wooden steps on the side of the boathouse are covered in snow, and the wooden handrail is broken in places. She begins to climb, then stops and flexes her knees to assess the stability. The steps don’t move, they merely creak a little.

The door to the upper floor is locked, and the window beside it is covered with a sheet of plywood. She tries the keys in the bundle Håkansson gave her, and finds the right one at the fifth attempt. The handle squeaks as she cautiously opens the door.

The apartment where Jack used to live consists of a single room, which takes up the whole of the top floor. She helped with the conversion – well, Hedda and Jack did the construction work, while Laura’s contribution was painting the sloping ceiling and the beams. Jack even let her choose the colour – a white glaze that brought out the grain in the old wood, and made the room lighter.

Now the walls are grey with dirt and dust. All the windows are boarded up, and even though two of the bulbs on the ceiling actually work when she flicks on the light switch, the place still feels dark and gloomy.

She takes a few steps. The floor creaks, her feet leave marks in the dust. The air smells of dampness and desolation.

Hedda obviously decided to store some of her crap up here – minigolf clubs, a big ice-cream sign featuring a man in a striped outfit, and various other things from the kiosk. However, more than half the space is empty. Presumably Hedda didn’t have the energy to haul any more items up the steep steps, and started taking them into her house instead.

Laura pushes open the bathroom door. The water in the toilet bowl has dried up, and there is an unpleasant smell of drains. The cabinet is empty, except for an ancient rolled-up tube of toothpaste. The mirror is dotted with fly shit. The water has been turned off, both here and in the little kitchenette. The kitchen cupboards contain nothing but dead mealworm larvae.

Jack’s bed is at the far end of the apartment in an alcove, but it holds no attraction for her. The sheets are stained, and a huge cobweb extends from the bedhead up to one of the beams.

There is an American car magazine on the bedside table. The pages are curled, the cover faded with age, but she can still make out the date: December 1987.

Here – I bought you this at the airport.

She touches the magazine, smiles to herself. Remembers the journey from Kastrup with Jack and Iben. How young she was back then. How stupid.

The guilt comes flooding in, which is hardly surprising. She’s already missed her evening pill, and needs to dig her morning dose out of her bag pretty soon, or she’ll start having nightmares.

She closes the door behind her. There is no trace of Jack here – did she really think she was going to find something?

From the top of the steps the wretched state of the holiday village is even more evident. The roofs of Hedda’s house and the sauna block are covered in a thick layer of moss and algae. The sun has turned the red walls pink, and the door of the ladies’ changing room is hanging off its hinges. And yet there is something beautiful about it all. Beautiful, and sad.

This was once a much-loved place.

The crows resume their cacophony as Laura descends the steps. On an impulse she continues past the changing rooms and the sauna, and walks out onto the pontoon.

The thin covering of snow makes the green wood treacherous. The chains between the drunkenly leaning poles are rusty and make a screeching noise that upsets the crows even more.

She remembers sailboats and rowing boats being moored along the length of the pontoon in the summer. She and Iben were allowed to name them, and Tomas and Peter painted the names on the gunwales with the help of templates that Jack made.

She passes the mid-point, reaches the new section. Extending the pontoon was one of Jack’s many ideas.

People will want to sail out here, have an ice cream and play minigolf. We might even get a passenger boat from the village when there’s a dance on.

It had all become a reality.

Hedda had convinced the village committee to hire a flat-bottomed summer boat that shuttled passengers who wanted to go dancing back and forth on Wednesday and Saturday nights, but the berthing quay is gone. Maybe it tore itself free of its moorings during an autumn storm and ended up in the bay over by Alkärret, halfway between the holiday village and the castle? Lay there like a beached whale as nature slowly broke it down. Or maybe it just sank. Became an offering to the nymph.

She can still hum the song.

A sandwich for father, a sandwich for mother. And one for the nymph who lives down below.

Hedda claimed she’d heard it from an old fisherman who’d learned it from his great-grandfather. Pure fiction, of course, just like the swan’s feather. To think that she once believed such nonsense!

She gazes down into the dark water at the bottom of the ladder. The slight current driving towards Alkärret meant that the water at the very end of the pontoon rarely froze, and even if it did, it was easy to break a hole in the ice. Sitting in the sauna until the heat seared your skin and the sweat poured down, then a quick dash.

Don’t hesitate, just jump in!

And then the shock, the feeling of a thousand needles pricking your skin, your heart pounding against your ribs. And finally the endorphins racing through your bloodstream as you clambered back up the ladder, overwhelmed by the experience.

They always waited for each other before going back to the sauna and the shower, and afterwards they would drink hot chocolate in front of the fire in the living room. The bathing book would be filled in while the euphoria of the dip still lingered, added to the happiness of sitting there together.

Laura shivers. In spite of her thick jacket, she’s freezing again. The network of scar tissue on her back has woken up, reminding her that her last encounter with the icy waters of the lake was neither euphoric nor happy.

Laura sanitises her hands before asking the satnav to direct her to the nearest petrol station with a car wash. She starts the engine and tries not to think about all the bacteria only centimetres above her head, already eating their way through the car roof.

The holiday village looks even worse by daylight as she heads back to the main road. Vegetation is growing through virtually every one of the small cabins that were once so lovely. Some of the roofs have collapsed, either from the weight of the thick layer of moss and leaves that has accumulated on top of them, or because of fallen branches. Nature is well on the way to reclaiming the whole area. Maybe it’s for the best.

As she drives she thinks about Hedda. About the fact that she died in the lake she loved. That ought to be a consolation, and yet there’s something that doesn’t feel right. A vague, nagging sensation that she can’t shake off. It’s annoying.

At work she pulls up her colleagues when they talk about abstract concepts like instinct and intuition. Tells them to produce the facts, or let it go.

Good advice, which she ought to follow.

The petrol station is by the motorway. When the rotating brushes have removed the corrosive bacteria bombs from the car roof, Laura buys breakfast for herself and food for George. The shop assistant is a young woman in her twenties with an exaggeratedly friendly smile.

‘A yogurt drink and four tins of cat food. Will there be anything else?’

Laura mumbles a response, suppresses the urge to explain that the cat isn’t hers, she’s not a ‘cat lady’. Even though that’s exactly what she is. She digs out her bottle of pills and washes one down before starting the car. No one except Andreas knows that she’s on antidepressants – a weak dose that she’s been taking ever since her university days to keep the nightmares at bay. A dose she’s doubled over the past few years in order to avoid other thoughts. Thoughts that are linked to the box containing baby clothes and tiny hand- and footprints, which she’s locked away safely in her storage unit in the basement.

Back at Gärdsnäset she parks under a tree without nests. The birds greet her with the same deafening racket as this morning.

She checks her phone before she gets out of the car. Discovers that while there’s hardly any coverage out here, one text message has made it through.

Hope everything’s OK down there in the provinces. Keep in touch! Love Steph

Everything’s fine, she replies. As usual she finds it hard to decide on an ending. Goes for a dutiful Love Laura, then puts her phone away and opens the car door.

She’s had a rethink. Instead of taking George with her, she’s going to feed her, then fill up the bowls so there’s plenty of food to last into next week. Then she’ll go to the hotel to have a shower and change her clothes before sorting out a wreath for Hedda. If she can get through the funeral tomorrow, she’ll be able to leave this sad place for good and return to her normal life.

Unless Jack turns up, of course. The thought is still strangely appealing. Or irritating, depending on your point of view.

Without warning her feet go from under her. She sees her toes in the air in front of her before she lands on the ground with a heavy thud. The sudden movement frightens the crows; they take off from the treetops in a flurry, filling the air with their discordant noise.

She lies there on her back gasping for air as she tries to assess the damage. Her lower back hurts; has she broken anything? Is she capable of crawling to the car and driving to the hospital, given how little coverage her phone has?

After a couple of minutes the pain begins to ease, and she manages to get to her feet. She brushes snow and frozen leaves off her jacket; her back really hurts. The patch of ice she slipped on is hidden beneath a thin layer of snow, but that’s not what catches her attention. Next to the patch, at the foot of a large beech tree, are several cigarette butts.

She crouches down, examines them closely. Five Prince Red on top of the snow. It stopped snowing around the time she arrived yesterday evening, which means that the butts are fresh.

She straightens up. From here she can see Hedda’s front door and some of the windows. So someone stood out here last night, or even this morning. Stood for long enough to smoke five cigarettes. She looks for footprints, spots them right away. Thick soles, heading this way from the forest in a meandering line, then back again.

A smoker who came here for only one reason.

To watch her.