The Darkest Room

22

Often when Joakim looked out of the kitchen window in the evening, he would see Rasputin slinking off to go hunting. But sometimes he thought he caught a glimpse of other black shapes moving out there-sometimes on four legs, sometimes on two.

Ethel?

The first few times, Joakim had hurried out onto the veranda steps to get a better look, but the inner courtyard had always been empty.

The shadows lengthened around Eel Point with every evening, and Joakim felt that the sense of unease in the house was also increasing as Christmas approached. The howling of the wind rose and fell around the eaves, and there was a constant tapping and creaking in the house.

If there were some unseen visitor at the manor, it wasn’t Katrine, he knew that. She was still keeping herself from him.

“I’ve brought the clothes back,” said Gerlof, handing over the brown package to Joakim on the other side of the table.

“Did you get anything out of them?”

“Perhaps.”

“But you don’t want to tell me what it was?”

“Soon,” said Gerlof. “When I’ve finished thinking.”

Joakim had never visited an old people’s home, as far as he remembered. Both sets of grandparents had remained at home until a ripe old age, and had spent their final days in the hospital. But he was sitting here now, drinking coffee in silence in Gerlof Davidsson’s room at the home at Marnäs. A candleholder with two lit Advent candles was the only sign that Christmas was coming.

A series of old objects hung on the walls: ships’ name-plates, framed ships’ certificates, and black-and-white photographs of two-masted sailing ships.

“Those are pictures of my cargo ships,” said Gerlof. “I had three different ones.”

“Are any of them still around?”

“Just one. She’s at a sailing club down in Karlskrona. The other two are gone… one of them burned, the other sank.”

Joakim looked down at the package of Katrine’s clothes, then looked out of the only window in the room. Twilight was already starting to fall.

“I have to pick up my children in an hour,” he said. “Can we talk for a while?”

“Of course,” said Gerlof. “The only thing on my schedule this afternoon was a talk on incontinence in the dayroom. It wasn’t all that appealing.”

For a long time Joakim had wanted to talk to someone about what had happened in the fall, someone who knew Eel Point. The pastor at the church in Marnäs seemed to have such rigid views, and Mirja Rambe thought too much about herself.

It was only when Gerlof Davidsson came out to the house and proved himself to be a good listener that he thought he might have found the right person. A kind of father confessor.

“I never asked you when you came out to the house, but… do you believe in ghosts?”

Gerlof shook his head. “I neither believe nor don’t believe,” he said. “I do collect ghost stories, but not in order to prove anything. And of course there are so many theories about ghosts… that they are part of the framework of old houses, or electromagnetic radiation.”

“Or just patches on the cornea,” said Joakim.

“Exactly,” said Gerlof. He was silent for a few seconds, then went on: “Of course, I could tell you a story I’ve never written about in any folk history book, but it’s the only real ghostly experience I’ve had.”

Joakim nodded.

“I took over my first cargo ship when I was seventeen,” said Gerlof. “I’d been at sea for a couple of years before that, saving up, and my father helped out with the finances. I knew exactly which ship I wanted to buy, a single-masted sailing ship with an engine; she was called Ingrid Maria, and her home port was Borgholm. The owner, Gerhard Marten, was in his sixties and had sailed cargo ships all his life. But then he developed heart problems and his doctor told him he couldn’t go to sea anymore. Ingrid Maria was for sale, and the price was three thousand five hundred kronor.”

“That was cheap, wasn’t it?” said Joakim.

“Yes, that was a good price even then,” said Gerlof, and continued: “The evening I was due to go and hand over the money to Marten, I took a walk down to the harbor to have a look at her. It was April, and the ice had just disappeared from the sound. The sun was going down, and there was hardly anybody around in the harbor… the only person I saw was old Gerhard. He was walking around on the deck of the Ingrid Maria, as if he was finding it difficult to part with her, and I went aboard. I don’t remember what we talked

about, but I took a short walk around the deck with him, and he pointed out a few little things that would need repairing. Then he told me to look after her, and we parted company. I went ashore and walked home to my parents’ house to have dinner and pick up the envelope containing the money.”

Gerlof fell silent, looking at the pictures of the cargo ships on the wall.

“At about seven o’clock I cycled over to the Marten family cottage north of Borgholm,” he went on. “But I arrived to find a house in mourning. Marten’s wife was there, her eyes red with weeping. Gerhard Marten was dead, it turned out. He had signed the purchase agreement the night before, then walked down to the shore early in the morning with his shotgun, and shot himself in the head.”

“In the morning?” said Joakim.

“That same morning, yes. So when I met Gerhard Marten down in the harbor, he had actually been dead for many hours. I can’t explain it… but I know that I met him that evening. We even shook hands.”

“So you met a ghost,” said Joakim.

Gerlof looked at him.

“Perhaps. But it doesn’t prove anything. It certainly doesn’t prove that there’s life after death.”

Joakim shifted in his seat and looked down at the parcel of clothes.

“I’m worried about my daughter, Livia,” he said. “She’s six years old, and she talks in her sleep. She always has done… but since my wife died she’s started to dream about her.”

“Is that so strange?” said Gerlof. “I dream about my late wife sometimes, and she’s been dead for many years.”

“Yes… but it’s the same dream, over and over again. Livia dreams that her mother comes to Eel Point, but can’t get into the house.”

Gerlof listened in silence.

“And sometimes she dreams about Ethel too,” Joakim went on. “That’s what worries me the most.”

“Who’s Ethel?” asked Gerlof.

“She was my sister. She was three years older than me.” Joakim sighed. “That’s my own ghost story. Kind of.”

“Tell me about her,” said Gerlof quietly.

Joakim nodded wearily. It was time.

“Ethel was a drug addict,” he said. “She died one winter’s night close to where we lived… two weeks before Christmas, a year ago.”

“I’m sorry,” said Gerlof.

“Thank you,” said Joakim, and went on: “I lied to you when I saw you last time… when you asked why we’d sold the house in Bromma and moved here. It had a lot to do with what happened to my sister. Once Ethel was dead, we didn’t want to stay in Stockholm.”

He stopped speaking again. He wanted to talk about this, and yet he didn’t want to. He didn’t really want to remember Ethel and her death. Nor Katrine’s long depression.

“But you miss your sister?” said Gerlof.

Joakim thought about it.

“A little.” That sounded terrible, so he added, “I miss her the way she used to be before… before the drugs. Ethel used to talk a lot, she always had so many plans. She was going to open a hair salon, she was going to be a music teacher… but after a while you just got so tired of it all, because none of the plans involved giving up the drugs. It was like watching someone sitting in a burning house, planning a party in the middle of the flames.”

“So how did it start?” asked Gerlof, sounding almost apologetic. “I know so little about that world…”

“For Ethel it started with hash,” said Joakim. “Weed, as they called it. It was cool to smoke at parties and concerts. And life was a party for Ethel in her teens; she played the piano and the guitar. She taught me to play a little too.”

He smiled to himself.

“It sounds as if you were very fond of her,” said Gerlof.

“Yes, Ethel was happy and funny,” said Joakim. “She was

pretty too, and popular with the boys. And she partied a lot; with amphetamines she could party even more. She must have dropped twenty pounds in weight, although she was already thin. She was away more and more. Then our father died of cancer, and I think it was around then she started with heroin… brown heroin. Her laughter grew harsher and more hoarse.”

He took a sip of his coffee and went on quickly:

“Nobody who smokes heroin thinks they’re a real user. You’re not a junkie. But sooner or later you switch to needles, because it’s cheaper… you need less heroin per dose. But you still need to come up with at least fifteen hundred kronor for supplies every day. That’s a lot of money, particularly when you haven’t got any. So you start stealing. You take your elderly mother’s money, or steal the jewelry she’s inherited.”

Joakim looked at the Advent candles and added:

“On Christmas Eve, when we were sitting in my mother’s house eating ham and meatballs, there was always an empty chair at the table. As usual Ethel had promised to come, but she was in the city center looking for drugs. For her that was routine, just everyday life. And routines are the most difficult thing to break, however terrible they are.”

He was deep into his confession now, not even aware if Gerlof was listening any longer.

“So you know that everything has gone to hell and that your sister is in the middle of the city gathering money for drugs, and her social worker never calls back… but you go off to your teaching job in the morning and have dinner with the family and work on your new house in the evening, and you try not to think and feel so much.” He lowered his eyes. “Either you try to forget, or you try to find her. My father used to go out looking in the evenings, before he got too sick. I did too. On the streets, in the squares, in the subway stations and the emergency psych wards…We soon learned where she might be.”

He fell silent. In his mind he was back in the city, among

the drug users and those sleeping rough, among all the lonely, half-dead souls who spent their nights chasing around out there.

“That must have taken a great deal of strength,” said Gerlof quietly.

“Yes… but I wasn’t out every night. I could have looked for her more often.”

“And you could also have given up.”

Joakim nodded grimly. He had one more thing to tell Gerlof about Ethel, the most difficult thing of all to talk about:

“What was in fact the beginning of the end happened two years ago,” he said. “Ethel had been in rehab that winter, and it had gone well. When she went in, she weighed less than a hundred pounds, her body was covered in bruises, and her cheeks looked completely hollow. But when she came home to Stockholm, she was much healthier. She had been clean for almost three months and had put some weight on… so we let her stay in our guest room. And it worked well. She wasn’t allowed to look after Gabriel, but she used to play a lot with Livia in the evenings, they got on really well.”

He remembered that they had begun to hope again at that time, he and Katrine. They had begun to trust Ethel. Not to the extent that they would dare to invite people to dinner when she was home, but they had started to go for long walks in the evenings, leaving Ethel to look after Livia and Gabriel. And it had gone well every time.

“One evening in March, Katrine and I went to see a movie,” he went on. “When we got back to the house after a couple of hours, it was dark and empty. There was only Gabriel there, sleeping in his cot with a soaking wet diaper. Ethel had gone, and she had taken two things with her: my cell phone and Livia.”

He stopped speaking and closed his eyes.

“I knew where she’d gone, of course,” he continued. “The craving had returned and she had taken the subway into the city to buy heroin. She had done it so many times before.

Bought a tab for five hundred kronor, injected it in some toilet, and rested for a few hours, until the craving came back again… The problem this time was that she had Livia with her.”

The memories of that night came back to Joakim-ice-cold memories of growing panic. He had hurled himself into the car and driven around the areas close to the central station. He had done it before, either alone or with Katrine. But then he had been worried about what could have happened to Ethel.

This time he was terrified for Livia.

“I found Ethel in the end,” he said, looking at Gerlof. “She was lying in the dark graveyard at Klara church. She had curled up next to a tomb and passed out. Livia was sitting beside her in thin clothes, ice cold and apathetic. I called an ambulance and made sure Ethel went into detox. Again. Then I drove home to Bromma with Livia.”

He fell silent.

“Katrine made me choose after that,” he said in a low voice. “And I chose my family.”

“You made the right choice,” said Gerlof.

Joakim nodded, although he would still have preferred not to make that choice.

“After that night I told Ethel not to come near our house anymore… but she did. We didn’t let her in, but in the evenings, two or three times a week, she would stand at our gate in her scruffy denim jacket staring at the Apple House. Sometimes she would open our mail, to see if there was any money or a check in the envelope. And sometimes she had a guy with her… some skeleton standing next to her, shaking.”

He paused and thought about the fact that this was one of his last memories of his sister: standing by the gate, her face deathly pale, her hair standing on end.

“Ethel used to just stand there yelling,” he said to Gerlof. “She yelled stuff about… about Katrine. Sometimes about me too, but mostly about Katrine. She would roar and bawl until the neighbors started peeping through their curtains, and I would have to go out and give her some money.”

“Did that help?”

“Yes… it worked at the time, but of course it meant that she came back the next time she was broke. It became a vicious cycle. Katrine and I felt… besieged. I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and hear Ethel shouting by the gate, but when I looked out, the street would be empty.”

“Was Livia at home when your sister turned up?”

“Most of the time, yes.”

“Did she hear Ethel yelling?”

“I think so. She hasn’t talked about it, but I’m sure she did.” Joakim closed his eyes. “Those were dark days… a terrible time. And Katrine started to wish that Ethel would die. She would talk about it late at night, in bed. Ethel might take an overdose, sooner or later. Preferably sooner. I think that’s what we were both hoping for.”

“And that’s what happened?”

“Yes, eventually. The telephone rang at eleven-thirty one night. When it rang so late, we knew it was about Ethel, it always was.”

A year ago, thought Joakim, but it felt like ten.

It was his mother, Ingrid, who told them the news. Ethel had been found drowned in Bromma, just below the area where their house was.

Katrine had even heard her earlier. Ethel had been standing there at the gate as usual at around seven o’clock, yelling, then the screaming had stopped.

When Katrine looked out, she was gone.

“Ethel had gone down to the walkway by the shore,” said Joakim. “She had sat down by a boathouse and pushed the needle in, then she had tumbled into the freezing water. And that was the end of her.”

“Weren’t you home that night?” asked Gerlof.

“I came home later…Livia and I were at a children’s party.”

“That was probably a good thing. For her sake.”

“Yes. And for a while we hoped that everything would settle

down,” said Joakim. “But I kept on waking up at night thinking that I could hear Ethel yelling out in the street. And Katrine just lost all her joy in life…We’d finished renovating the Apple House by that time and it was lovely, but she just couldn’t relax there. So last winter we started talking about moving out to the country, moving south, maybe finding a place here on Öland. And in the end that’s what we did.”

He fell silent and looked at his watch. Twenty past four. It felt as if he had talked more during this last hour than during the whole of the fall.

“I have to go and pick up my children,” he said.

“Did anyone ask how all this made you feel?” said Gerlof.

“Me?” said Joakim, getting up. “I felt terrific, of course.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“No. But we’ve never talked about how we feel in my family. And we never really talked about Ethel’s problems, either.” He looked at Gerlof. “You just don’t tell people that your sister is a junkie. Katrine was the first… you could say I dragged her into all this.”

Gerlof sat there in silence, apparently lost in thought.

“What did Ethel want?” he said. “Why did she keep on coming to your house? Was it just to get the money for drugs?”

Joakim pulled on his jacket without answering.

“Not just that,” he said eventually. “She wanted her daughter back as well.”

“Her daughter?”

Joakim hesitated. This was also difficult to talk about, but in the end he came out with it:

“There was no father… he died of an overdose. Katrine and I were Livia’s godparents, and social services awarded her care to us four years ago. We adopted her last year… Livia is ours now.”

“But she’s Ethel’s child?” said Gerlof.

“No. Not any longer.”