To the Top of the Mountain

21

THE UNEXPECTED FLAW in their plan dawned on them much too late. Two cars, each on a different course through Sweden. A rusty old Datsun and a dazzlingly white Ford Focus, one of last year’s award-winning models. Not until six hundred kilometres separated them did the fact that it was Midsummer weekend cross their minds. Not a single bank would be open in the whole of Sweden. They were left to their respective ghosts. The ones they had told themselves they would never have to be alone with again.

It would be a Midsummer weekend that neither of them would ever forget. And never again have to repeat.

He was lying in a sad hotel bed just outside of Orsa, listening to the distant Midsummer celebrations from down on the shore of Orsasjön. The sounds were being sent like severely distorted electrical impulses from his eardrums to his brain. They pierced almost mockingly. A sound that cut and ripped. Orsa’s musicians were stabbing at the taut strings of his nerves with their bows. Pressing a pillow to his ears didn’t help, either. The sound was being distorted from within, that much he understood. It echoed like festivities do for someone on the outside. He wondered how long the little boy would have to be tied to the tree while the party continued down by the beach. Midsummer. They were letting him take part. For the first time, he had been invited. He had actually been invited.

He had trembled with happiness as he walked through the stretch of woodland by the waters of Edsviken. This would be the turning point. He took the route past the den. He stopped, standing motionless alongside the pathetic little patchwork of boards that had shielded him from the world whenever everything collapsed in on him. When had it done anything else? He had sat there, whittling boats from bark with an urgency that blocked out everything else. He had filled the den with increasingly elaborate bark boats until there was almost no room left for him. He was like Emil of Lönneberga, carving away in the woodshed. Though utterly devoid of all humour and warmth. And now, he was on his way to a Midsummer party with the rest of his class. He had been invited and finally, finally, finally been accepted.

He stood in front of the den and knew that it had saved his life. He went up to it and pulled it down. It didn’t take much. A couple of kicks and it fell like a house of cards. A steady stream of bark boats came tumbling out. He said goodbye to that part of his life and welcomed another. A better one. Because it was impossible to imagine a worse one. He set off through the wood. He caught sight of the party down by the water. They were drinking. He stood still for a moment at the edge of the wood. Took a few deep breaths, straightened his new summer clothes and trudged over to them. They welcomed him with laughter and shouting. He welled up with happiness. They took hold of his arms, held them behind his back, tied him to a tree and forced him to drink until he was sick. He stood there like a half-dressed maypole, his smart new summer clothes covered with bright green vomit. The maypole was ready.

He turned over in the sad little hotel bed and fished a newspaper, Expressen, from the bedside table. He read the article that had caught his eye once again, drawing rings around the words in ballpoint pen. The headline said: THE SISTERS THAT VANISHED INTO THIN AIR. He picked up his mobile phone.

She was lying in a sad hotel bed in Falkenberg, on the other side of the country, and couldn’t hear a sound. The little west coast town seemed to be completely empty. Not a sound. She stared up at the ceiling and then at the briefcase, lying open on the floor. Imagine if she made contact. But there was no contact to make. There was only her and a bed. For several years, she hadn’t been able to sleep in beds. They had scared the life out of her. Almost literally. She could still hear. Something within her could still hear the footsteps on the stairs. Though the sound was faint now, almost gone, as though the hearing was the last thing to leave her. She didn’t hear the door opening in that unmistakable way that should have been soundless but wasn’t; on the contrary, it echoed through her, and she knew that it would echo through her for the rest of her life. That was why it was going to be so short. A short life. That was why she experienced such immense pleasure from not hearing the door open. She couldn’t feel the sheet being pushed to one side, either. Not that first scream, the quiet, almost silent scream of mad desperation, nor the other, more shrill, more wholehearted, but also more self-reproaching.

Actually, she didn’t hear anything at all before she suddenly glanced down at her near-naked body and saw that it was covered in clotted blood. She saw the bandages around her wrists, the bag of blood hanging from the stand – and she realised that she had failed. That was why she started to cry. Her family were gathered around her, and it was obvious, it was immediately obvious that they thought they were tears of joy. But they were tears of sadness. Sadness at still being alive.

He stood up and went over to the window. The musicians seemed to have halted their accordion playing. Perhaps someone had silenced them with a generous glass of schnapps. He could see right down to the shore of Orsasjön. If she had been by his side, it would have been a fantastic evening view. Now, it was quite unimportant. Like everything had been for so long. When had the turning point come? Was she the only turning point, or had there been other, smaller points along the way? He had left them behind once his compulsory education was over. No more school. He had continued tinkering about with things with the same all-consuming intensity as he had with the bark boats. He started to feel a certain pride over being able to fix anything, anything at all; being able to take something apart and then put it back together again. And he continued his whittling, though no longer making bark boats but abstract wooden sculptures. He hadn’t even understood that they were sculptures until someone told him. It was a kind of life, in any case, so long as he kept the others at a distance. Everyone else. And then that strange invitation had turned up. Class reunion. Meet his old classmates. As though they hadn’t already invited him one time too many.

He was convinced they had sent the invite by mistake, that he just happened to have been left on a list from which he should have been crossed out. Still, he felt like he really should go. He was almost twenty. It was far enough back in time that it didn’t bring him down. He would show them that he existed as a purely physical indictment. You didn’t manage to kill me. No hate, just his very presence as proof. He went, convinced that he would be mocked or left on the outside, if not tied up, abused and pissed on. But that wasn’t how it was. All of the old tormentors were there. All of them. And none of them seemed to have the faintest memory of how they had tortured him. They treated him well, even laughed at their memories. Together. Cheerily. Like happy children. And he realised that the torture had taken place almost incidentally, without much thought, that they actually had no idea what they had done to him. Worst of all would be meeting the girl that had been the driving force. The boys he could live with, but the degradation of meeting the girl who had been the first to come forward and piss on him would be awful, he had also been firmly convinced of that. He was wrong there, too. And then some. She had grown into a wonderful young woman. It was clear from her eyes that she was the one feeling guilt and shame, not him. She was the only one who touched upon the forbidden part of the past.

‘Shit, we treated you so badly,’ was the first thing she said, and he was able to meet her eyes as she said it. What he saw was something even worse. It was the first time he had seen anything like it. His eyes didn’t leave hers that entire evening. He sat, reading a terror beyond comprehension deep within her dark eyes. And in that moment, he knew that he wanted to know everything. Absolutely everything.

She stood up and went over to the window. People had slowly begun to return to Falkenberg. The town was no longer completely deserted. If he had been by her side, it would have been tempting to go out into town. Now, it was quite unimportant. What had stopped her from taking the step for so long? For the first time, a glimmer of light was peeping through from the past. There was someone she went to, someone she could tell anything to, someone who listened. Uncle Jubbe.

She remembered his expression, how his face had clouded over in that special way, the awkwardness in the way that he stroked her hair while she sobbed silently, how his tears fell into her hair and slowly made their way down to her scalp. But eventually, even Uncle Jubbe wasn’t enough. She had slashed her wrists, lengthways rather than crossways, not as a warning but as a final solution. One which turned out not to be final at all. She was invited to the class reunion while she was in hospital. It was almost like a taunt. As though the last part of her mask had been ripped off, exposing a corroded skull. The toughest girl in the class. Her wrists had healed, but she refused to leave the hospital. Every day, she begged the doctor to find a new complication, and her doctor had done it, with an increasingly troubled expression. Until finally, it couldn’t go on any longer. She went to her old school’s reunion party. At the far end of the bar in the unbearable golf club, she saw the person she wanted to meet least of all, the person she had vented her self-loathing on. He looked different. So alive, as though reborn, and so awfully, wonderfully different to the others. They were all the same. At the very moment she uttered her first words to him, she knew that they belonged together. She said: ‘Shit, we treated you so badly.’

The rest, as they say, is history.