The Quarry

3

‘Do you want me to open the window?’ said Per Mörner.

His daughter Nilla nodded, her back to him.

‘Are there any birds out there?’ she asked.

‘Loads,’ said Per.

That wasn’t true; he couldn’t see a single one outside the hospital. But there were trees by the car park, and maybe some little birds were sitting in them.

‘In that case you can open the window,’ said Nilla, and explained: ‘My nature studies homework this week is to count different species of birds.’

Nilla was in Year 7, and all her school books were on the table next to her hospital bed. She had placed her favourite cuddly toy and lucky stones by her pillow, then climbed on the bed so that she could hang a big piece of fabric with NIRVANA on it on the wall above her head.

Per opened the window, and the faint sound of chirruping drifted into the room. But it was mixed with the whine of revving engines, and no doubt the birds would soon fall silent anyway; it was almost evening, after all, and shiny cars were leaving the car park as doctors and nurses set off for home. His own brown Saab was down there too, but it was nine years old and definitely not shiny.

‘What are you thinking about?’ said Nilla behind him.

Per turned his head. ‘Guess.’

‘You’re thinking about the spring.’

‘Spot on,’ said Per, even though he’d actually been thinking about his old car. ‘You’re getting better and better at this.’

Mind-reading, that was his daughter’s latest project. Before that she’d spent several months practising until she could write just as well with her left hand as with her right, but over Christmas she had seen a television programme about telepathy and had started experimenting with her twin brother Jesper and her father, sending thoughts to them and attempting to read theirs. It was Per’s task to send a special thought to Nilla every evening at eight o’clock.

He stood by the window, watching the setting sun glinting on the car windows.

It was probably spring now, in spite of the cold, but Per hadn’t really had time to notice. The birds were returning home from the Mediterranean and the farmers were beginning to sow their crops. Per thought about his father, Jerry, who had always looked forward to the spring. That was when his work really took off. Didn’t people say that spring was the time of youth? Youth, and love.

But Per had never had any real feeling for the spring. Not even when he and Marika had got married on a sunny day in May, after meeting at a marketing seminar fifteen years ago. It was as if he had sensed even then that she would leave him, sooner or later.

‘Did Mum say when she was coming?’ he asked over his shoulder.

‘Mm-hmm,’ said Nilla. ‘Between six and seven.’

It was almost five o’clock now.

‘Do you want me and Jesper to wait until she gets here?’

Nilla shook her head. ‘I’ll be OK.’

That was the answer Per had been hoping for. He had nothing against seeing Marika, but she was only coming to visit her daughter, and there was a risk that she would have her new husband with her — Georg, with his substantial income and his expensive presents. Per had got over Marika, but he had a problem with the fact that she had met a man who spoiled both her and the twins.

Nilla was in a private room, and seemed to be well looked after. A young male doctor had been in half an hour earlier, and had explained which tests they would be doing over the next few days, and in what order. Nilla had listened with her eyes lowered; she hadn’t asked any questions. She had glanced up at the doctor occasionally, but not at Per.

‘See you soon, Pernilla,’ the doctor had said as he left.

She had two long, hard days of tests and medical examinations ahead, and Per couldn’t come up with anything encouraging to say.

She carried on arranging her things, and Per helped her. It was never possible to make a hospital room look cosy — it was too bare and full of tubes and call buttons — but they tried. Along with her own pink pillow, Nilla had brought a CD player and some Nirvana CDs, a couple of books, and more trousers and tops than she really needed.

She was dressed in jeans and a black top, but soon she would be in the usual hospital garb: a white suit that was easy to fold back for all the examinations.

‘Right,’ said Per. ‘We’ll be off, then, but Mum will be here soon... Shall I go and get Jesper?’

‘OK.’

His son was sitting on a sofa in the waiting room. There were some books and magazines on a shelf, but Jesper was bent over his Gameboy, as usual.

‘Jesper?’ Per said loudly.

‘What?’

‘Nilla wanted to say goodbye.’

Jesper paused the game. He went into his twin sister’s room alone, and closed the door. Per wondered what they were talking about. Did Jesper find it easier to talk to Nilla than to his dad? Did they talk about her illness? He hardly spoke to Per at all.

When they were small, just a few years old, the twins had had their own language that nobody else could understand. It was a sing-song language, consisting almost entirely of vowels. Nilla in particular had found it difficult to start speaking Swedish; she preferred this secret language she shared with Jesper. Until Per and Marika found a speech therapist who was able to sort out the problem, it had sometimes felt as if he had fathered two aliens.

A door opened further down the corridor. The doctor who had spoken to Nilla earlier emerged, and Per went over to him. Per had always admired the medical profession — when his mother had refused to tell him what his father did for a job, Per had got the idea that Jerry worked abroad as a doctor. He had believed that for several years.

‘I’d like to ask a question,’ he said. ‘About my daughter, Nilla.’

The doctor stopped. ‘What would you like to know?’

‘She looks a bit swollen,’ said Per. ‘Is that normal?’

‘Swollen? Where?’

‘Her face — her cheeks, and around her eyes. It started on the way here. Does it mean anything?’

‘Maybe,’ said the doctor. ‘We’ll have a good look at her. ECG, ultrasound, a CAT scan, X-rays, blood tests... The works!’

Per nodded, but Nilla had already had so many tests for her mysterious pains. The results just seemed to lead to more tests, more waiting.

The door to her room opened and Jesper came out. He headed for the waiting room with his Gameboy, but Per raised a hand to stop him.

‘Don’t start playing again,’ he said. ‘We’re going up to the summer cottage now.’

When they drove off the Öland bridge quarter of an hour later and turned north on the flat island, the countryside around them was a kind of yellowish brown, a landscape on the borderline between winter and spring. The evening sun was shining across the ditches by the roadside where wood anemones and coltsfoot were beginning to raise their heads, but there were still drifts of sparkling snow on both sides of the road. The snow that had melted in the sun had begun to form large pools out on the alvar, with narrow spring streams bubbling along as they searched for a way to the sea.

A world of water. There wasn’t a soul in sight out there, just flocks of lapwings and bullfinches.

Per loved the emptiness and the clean lines of the island, and when the traffic thinned out once they had passed Borgholm he put his foot down.

The Saab hummed northwards through the open landscape, past forest groves and windmills — it was a little bit like driving through an oil painting. A painting of the spring. The green and brown fields, the vast crystal dome of the sky, the sound over to the west. The sea was still covered in dark-blue ice, but it looked thin, and there were black rifts further out. Soon the waves would be set free.

‘Isn’t it beautiful?’ said Per.

Jesper, who was sitting next to him, looked up from his Gameboy. ‘What?’

‘All this,’ said Per. ‘All this, the island... everything.’

Jesper looked out through the windscreen and nodded, but Per couldn’t see the fire in his son’s eyes that he himself felt here on the island. He tried to tell himself it was because of Jesper’s age; young people didn’t appreciate nature for its own sake. Perhaps it required a certain maturity, or even a deep sorrow, to become interested in the soul of the landscape.

Or maybe the problem was Jesper. Would Per rather have Nilla sitting beside him, healthy and full of anticipation? Would he rather Jesper was the one waiting for tests?

He pushed the thought aside and focused on the spring instead. Spring on the island.

Per had first started coming to the island as a little boy at the end of the 1950s, along with his mother, Anita. It was the summer of 1958, two years after her divorce, and she didn’t have much money for holidays. Jerry was supposed to pay maintenance every month, but he had coughed up only occasionally — although Anita did say that Jerry had once driven past her terraced house in his big flashy car, chucked a bundle of notes at the door and disappeared.

The shortage of money meant brief, cheap holidays not too far from Kalmar. But Anita had a cousin called Ernst Adolfsson, a quarryman who lived alone in a little cottage on Öland, and she and her son had always been welcome to catch the ferry across to the island in the holidays and stay as long as they wanted.

Per had loved playing in the abandoned quarry down below Ernst’s house. It was a world of adventure if you were nine years old.

Ernst had no children or siblings, and when he died a few years ago, Per had inherited the cottage. He had cleared it out the previous summer, and now he was intending to spend the next six months living there — perhaps he might even stay all year round. He couldn’t afford to keep two properties going, so he had rented out his apartment in Kalmar until the end of September.

The plan had been for his two children to come over to Öland as often as they wanted. But Nilla had started Year 7 as a tired, listless child, and had grown increasingly exhausted as the autumn went on. The school doctor had put it down to puberty, or growing pains, but after New Year she had started to complain of pains in her left side. The situation had grown worse and worse during the winter, and none of the doctors seemed to know why.

Their summer plans had suddenly become uncertain.

‘Do you want to ring Mum when we get there?’

His son didn’t look up from the game. ‘Dunno.’

‘Would you like to go down to the shore?’

‘Dunno,’ Jesper said again.

It felt as if he were as distant as an orbiting satellite — but that’s probably what it was like to be a thirteen-year-old these days. When Per was that age, his greatest wish had been for his father to come and visit and talk to him.

Suddenly he spotted a sign showing a petrol pump by the side of the road, and slowed down. ‘Would you like an ice cream? Or is it too early in the year?’

Jesper looked up from his game. ‘I’d rather have sweets.’

‘Let’s see what they’ve got,’ said Per, pulling into the car park.

They got out. It was freezing cold in spite of the sun. Per had thought it would be warmer on the island at this time of year, but the layer of ice out in the sound probably made the air cooler. The wind cut straight through his padded jacket, and a little swirl of sand blew up and into his mouth, crunching between his teeth.

Per walked quickly past the petrol pumps and sheltered by the kiosk. The front window was dark, but he knocked a few times anyway, until he spotted a note stuck inside, faded by the sun:

April was too early — the island hadn’t yet woken from its winter slumbers, and the number of shops that stayed open in the winter no doubt matched the demand. Per had worked in market research for fifteen years, and understood perfectly.

Jesper was sitting on a wooden box with SAND written on it, next to the car park. He was playing on his Gameboy again. As Per walked over to him he heard the sound of an engine in the distance. A white HGV was fast approaching from the north.

He took out the car keys and shouted to Jesper, ‘No sweets, sorry. They’re shut.’

Jesper merely nodded, and Per went on, ‘There are some more shops further north. We can...’

Then he stopped, because he suddenly heard a muted thud out on the road and the sound of tyres screeching across the tarmac. To the south he could see the dazzling reflection of the sun on a car.

It was an Audi, and the driver had lost control; the car veered across the carriageway, right in front of the oncoming truck.

Per could only stand and watch. The car must have collided with something; the bonnet was spattered with red, and the windscreen was covered in blood.

Whose blood?

The truck driver sounded his horn at the car. A male figure was just visible behind the smeared windscreen, leaning over the wheel and struggling to regain control of the car.

Per started to move just as the harsh sound of the truck’s horn died away. It had moved to the right, out on to the verge. Per saw the Audi straighten up for half a second, then veer off the other way.

The vehicles missed one another, because the car had skidded into the car park. The wheels locked and the car slid across the gravel, still travelling at speed. It was moving sideways across the tarmac, heading straight for the sand box.

‘Jesper!’ Per yelled out.

His son was still sitting on the box, pressing the buttons on the Gameboy with his thumbs. He didn’t even look up.

Per shot forward, hurtling across the tarmac.

‘Jesper!’

Now he looked up. He turned around, open-mouthed.

But the Audi was moving faster, the tyres spraying gravel and sand all around as it headed straight for Jesper.