Drowned (3 page)

She works for the local council in the parks and gardens department, it’s her job to decide which flowers should be planted in which containers around the town, which shrubs in which beds, when and how the trees should be pruned, and where to put the Christmas lights in December. She is the youngest person ever to hold this post, and the first woman as well, my parents usually mention this with great pride whenever they are talking to anyone about her.

She is waiting for me at the bus depot next to the train station.

“God, it’s so hot,” is the first thing she says. “How can you stand wearing those?”

She nods in the direction of my jeans.

“I’m fine.”

“Shall we see if we can find you a skirt?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

I sigh, suddenly remembering how stubborn she can be, even though she doesn’t appear to notice it herself.

“I’ve brought a dress with me, I just didn’t want to wear it today, that’s all.”

She nods and seems to give in. We wander around the town center for a while, in silence at first, but then Stella starts to point out the planting she was responsible for this morning, showing me some concrete containers filled with lavender and some other purple flowers I don’t know the name of. She looks pleased when I say they look lovely. She stops outside a café.

“Shall we have a coffee?”

She looks at me.

“Sure.”

Stella chooses a table in the shade and asks the waitress for a mineral water and a coffee. I’m hungry, and when I realize Stella is paying I order a sandwich.

“Have you spoken to Gabriel today?” she wonders.

“No, I didn’t want to go upstairs in case I might be disturbing him.”

She nods, leans back in her chair, and pushes her sunglasses up onto her forehead, her pupils contracting even though we’re sitting in the shade. Our eyes are the same color, a grayish blue which is difficult to put a name to. Although we’re not particularly alike, I think our eyes are.

Stella clears her throat.

“So how are things with Peter?” she asks.

I don’t know if she’s asking how he is, or how things are between the two of us, but it doesn’t really matter because I don’t know anyway.

“I don’t know.”

She looks at me in surprise, almost annoyed, as if she hadn’t expected an honest answer.

“He’s in Spain with some friends.”

“Without you?”

I shrug my shoulders. I don’t want to talk about Peter, I’ve been thinking how nice it is that he’s barely crossed my mind since I came here. Stella seems to understand.

“I thought we could do some shopping before we go home,” she says instead. “Anything in particular you’d like for dinner?”

“Not really.”

“Gabriel does a wonderful grilled salmon, it’s absolutely delicious. He uses a secret marinade.”

She smiles, I nod.

“We could do some potatoes in a dill sauce to go with it,” she adds. “Dill grows like a weed in our garden, we could make enough dill sauce for everything.”

She picks up her bag, pulls down her sunglasses.

“Right then. Off we go.”

I’m alone in the house. Gabriel has gone into town with Stella to do some shopping and go to the bank.
It’s almost eleven thirty when I wake up. I haven’t slept well even though I’ve slept late, in fact I haven’t slept well since I arrived. It’s an uneasy sleep, I wake up several times during the night, and in between I sleep so deeply that I feel disorientated when I do wake up. I think I start to dream as soon as I get into bed and close my eyes. The air in the room is bad, even though I keep the windows open all day and all evening; I think maybe there’s something in the walls, or in the foundations. Mold, something wrong.

The weather is still relentlessly beautiful. I take a long shower, even though Stella has asked me to be careful with the amount of water I use. The bathroom mirror is misty with condensation, I wipe it with the palm of my hand and contemplate my face. It looks somehow strange, as if my features are too round, too weak, as if they are in the process of disintegrating. Stella and I are different in that way, everything about her face is sharper, clearer, and I have always thought it makes her look more refined, more elegant, more intelligent. I stare at my mouth, thinking that my lips look swollen, fleshy, in a way that is vulgar, almost disgusting.

I take a stroll around the garden to dry my hair in the sun. It’s too hot for jeans now, the heat has forced me to put on the only dress I have with me, and I glance down at my legs, my feet in the grass. I look pale. This is the first time in ages I’ve gone barefoot.
Bumblebees are buzzing among small flowers on the lawn, and I take great care not to step on any of them. Once, a long time ago, possibly on the last occasion when I walked barefoot on grass, I happened to step on a fallen apple with a wasp inside it. We were playing croquet in the garden at my parents’ house, it was when Stella was still with Erik, so it was Stella and Erik and me. Stella was winning when I stood on the wasp and we had to stop playing. I can still feel the stabbing pain in my foot at the memory, and I can hear Stella’s voice in my head, she kept on saying “It’s fine, it’s only a wasp sting,” but my foot swelled up and in the end I started to cry. At that point she gave up, and she and Erik drove me to primary care. The doctor said I was probably particularly sensitive to insect bites and stings.

I go indoors, wandering aimlessly through the living room and back out into the hallway, upstairs to the first floor, through Stella and Gabriel’s bedroom and onto the glassed-in balcony where Gabriel has his desk. It is old and made of dark wood, it looks heavy and is cluttered with books and piles of paper and several blue-and-white china cups with dried coffee dregs in the bottom. Balanced on a heap of old newspapers is an overfilled mosaic ashtray in shades of turquoise, with a brass dolphin leaping up from a foaming wave. It makes me smile, it’s just so kitsch.
In a terra-cotta pot on the floor there’s an enormous angel’s trumpet, the flowers will be out soon, and the swollen buds look like big green pupae with something trying to force its way out. A number of postcards are pinned up on a pillar between two windows: Hokusai’s
The Great Wave
, a hollow-eyed Madonna by Munch, one of Rossetti’s red-haired women—Gabriel and I are equally taken with them. On the windowsill below lie several dead flies. It’s warm and damp like the inside of a greenhouse, little drops of water trickle slowly down the inside of the panes of glass.

Gabriel has left his computer on. A blue cube is spinning around on the screen, slowly changing into a sphere. I move the mouse a fraction to remove the screen saver, and a Word document appears. I glance over my shoulder, an instinctive movement to check that no one is watching me. Then I perch on the very edge of the chair, which looks as old as the desk, it’s an office chair with wheels and slats across the back and a seat made of dark-green leather held in place by small copper upholstery nails. Only two lines of text are visible on the screen, it looks like the end of a poem: “floats very slowly, lying in her long veils /—In the far-off woods you can hear the call of the hunters.” I don’t recognize the words and am about to scroll up the page when I hear the muffled sound of a car door
closing. I stiffen for a moment, then get up so quickly that I almost tip over the chair, one of the arms hits me hard on the thigh, and I just have time to think that I’m going to have a bruise. I have to activate the screen saver again, I click on the desktop, properties, screen saver, what’s it called, the cube that turns into a sphere? I realize I’m not going to have time to apply it, I can already hear the crunch of footsteps on the gravel path and I hurry through the bedroom and try to calm myself before setting off down the stairs. At that very moment the door opens and Gabriel steps into the hallway, his hands full of shopping bags, the bamboo curtain dancing merrily behind him. He looks at me.

“Hi there,” he says, sounding slightly surprised.

“Hi.”

I smile at him.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“I was looking for Nils.”

“He’s outside. I’ve just seen him in the flower bed at the front.”

I nod, he carries on looking at me, puts the bags down on the floor.

“How was town?” I say.

“Good, it was nice to see a few people. How are you—you look a bit pale?”

I raise my hand to my forehead in a pure reflex action.

“I’ve got a slight headache,” I say. “I think it’s the heat.”

I am tired of my pale body, which feels like Stockholm’s last hold on me, the proof that I have spent far too much time indoors instead of having fun. I have dragged one of the chairs from the patio onto the lawn, which is in sunlight all day. A bikini would be too embarrassing, I’m still too pale, I don’t want to show that much flesh. Wearing a pair of short shorts and a tank top feels sufficiently undressed, and after I have been sitting in the sun for a while I feel a little braver and pull up my top slightly, exposing my stomach to the sun. Behind me the last of the roses are flowering in the borders, along with lavender and Sweet William. A small currant bush is weighed down by the heavy bunches of shiny red berries, I have eaten a few, it must be just as long since I last ate them as when I last ate sugar snap peas, and yet the taste was completely familiar, as if it had been only yesterday. I like redcurrants even though they taste of little more than sourness, I like the consistency, the sensation of crushing a berry in my mouth, biting through the skin and feeling all the rough little seeds dispersing.

I fall asleep in the sun, when I wake up I look at my watch straightaway and realize I have slept for almost
half an hour. The clouds that were in the sky when I sat down on the lawn have completely disappeared, and instead the sky is open and blue, everything I can see has a surreal sharpness. Even in the distance, on the horizon beyond the fields, the perspective does not blur land and sky into a pale-blue mist. It’s the same with the smells. Sharp, acrid, as if there is absolutely no resistance to them in the air. As soon as I wake I am aware of the clean, chemical smell of paint. It is obtrusive and cold, as if it wants to be inhaled, and I obey, avidly drawing it into my lungs. I have always liked those pungent aromas: the smell in the garage, gas and exhaust fumes, the smell of thick black felt-tip pens, turpentine, glue, it smells like Dad, I think to myself, and I suddenly realize that all my memories of smells like this are linked to him. We were painting my room together once, I must have been about twelve or thirteen, just between junior high and high school, I suddenly decided that everything in my room that I hadn’t chosen for myself was hopelessly childish. I wanted everything that was pink painted white, and Dad and I were going to do it together. I remember the tin of white paint, the strong smell filling the entire room, I remember lying down on the bed, closing my eyes and inhaling the acrid smell, feeling slightly dizzy as my cheeks grew warm, I almost felt drunk even though I didn’t realize
it at the time. I remember thinking it probably wasn’t a good idea to breathe in the paint fumes, but I liked doing it anyway.

I close my eyes now, thinking that such a pure smell has to come from white paint, the whitest of white, almost fluorescent, like white under ultraviolet light. But this paint is actually a grubby Falun red, Gabriel is painting the old henhouse where Stella keeps her garden tools, along with a whole lot of clutter that has been in there for fifty years, maybe a hundred, maybe more. I watch him from a distance, he looks as if he is concentrating hard, and I imagine that he is not thinking about the painting at all, but about something else. I watch him until I begin to feel ashamed of spying on him, then I go over to speak to him.

“Gabriel?”

He jumps and turns around.

“You gave me a fright.”

He looks almost embarrassed, as if he has been somehow caught out.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

“It’s okay.” He smiles. “How are you?”

“Fine … except I fell asleep in the sun. I’m afraid I might have burnt myself.”

He gazes at me, looking at parts of my body that are not covered by clothes: my arms and legs, a quick glance at the low neckline of my top.