Drowned (6 page)

She turns to Gabriel.

“Not that I know of.”

I think of the water lilies, of their roots down on the bottom of the lake, sunk in the mud, sending their shoots up toward the surface like distress flares. It must be unpleasant to swim among water lilies, their stems around your legs, winding around your calves and thighs. Water lily roots and eels, that’s what is at the bottom of the lake. I poke at my meat, I can’t eat any more.

“No good?”

Gabriel looks at me for the first time the entire evening.

“Oh, yes … it’s just that I have a bit of a problem with red meat, that’s all.”

• • •

The thunderstorm does not come, it is still just as hot when I go to bed. My window is ajar, fixed with the catch, I would really like to open it wider but I don’t feel all that safe, since I’m on the ground floor. Someone could get in, or something—an animal. It might not make any difference if I opened the window anyway, the air is still, it hangs heavy and dead, just as sultry as it was this afternoon, the only difference is that it’s darker now.

I am just falling asleep when I hear noises from upstairs. Long, drawn-out sobs, I recognize them. Stella is crying, heartrending weeping, I can hear her gasping for breath, in my mind’s eye I can see her whole body shaking. Then I hear the muted sound of Gabriel’s voice, I can’t hear what he’s saying but from his tone it’s obvious that he’s angry but is controlling himself, then Stella’s voice, a note of accusation. I pull the covers over my head, try not to listen. When I close my eyes beneath the covers my thoughts race back and forth inside my head, replaying the kiss in the car over and over again. I did nothing to encourage him, I think. I only looked at him, he was the one who kissed me. He shouldn’t have done it, I shouldn’t have let him, I should have pushed him away. Immediately the thought of his hand gripping my wrist is there again. Imagine if I had tried to push him
away and he had stopped me, locking my hand with his, pushing himself against me, holding on to me. I wouldn’t have been able to do anything to stop him. I try to push away the thought but it forces its way back, in the end I almost believe that’s what really happened, it’s like in the mornings sometimes when I’m really tired and instead of getting up I imagine I’m doing it, I lie there half asleep and imagine so vividly that I’m getting up and going into the bathroom that I’m surprised when I do wake up and realize I’m still lying in bed.

I must have fallen asleep properly then because I am woken by a scream, shrill and long drawn-out. My first thought is that it’s Stella. That he has told her, that he felt bad, had to confess. I feel empty inside as I imagine hearing her footsteps on the stairs at any moment, what will she say to me? Or yell at me? I hear my own voice inside my head: “I didn’t want to say anything to you, but he held me so I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything, he held my hands so I couldn’t move and he kissed me.” I’m good at lying, good at hitting the right tone of voice, good at convincing myself that what I’m saying is actually true, that’s why it sounds so natural when I say it. It is almost true now. “I didn’t know what was happening until he kissed me.”

Then I realize the sound I’ve heard didn’t come from upstairs but from outside, from the garden. I
think it must be a cat, Nils is out at night and there are other cats around here, cats that don’t belong to anyone, cats that have been left behind by summer visitors or cats from some of the farms in the area. They hunt at night, there are plenty of mice here, the house is old, and then there are all the crops, ripe yellow fields in all directions, and the old barns where the grain is stored. In my mind’s eye I can see the mouse shrieking, it’s one of the tiny ones that live under the house, I’ve seen one, little dark eyes like peppercorns, I can see it in the clutches of a cat, fighting for its life, screaming, twisting and turning, its heart beating in a panic as the cat sinks its teeth into the small body.

I switch on the bedside lamp and several moths that have been attracted by the light begin to dance around it as I pad across the white-painted wooden floor and close the window, drawing the thin curtains. I can hear a different sound now, muffled at first but quickly growing louder, sighs and whimpers, I quickly get back into bed, turn off the light. It isn’t a cat this time, it’s coming from upstairs again and I realize it’s Stella, it’s hard to work out if she is experiencing pain or pleasure, it’s just on the borderline. I try to imagine what Gabriel is doing to her to make her sound like that, how he is touching her; the sounds she is making grow louder, faster. I close my eyes, thinking of his hands on the nape of my neck,
the violence of his kiss, his hands moving across my back, his breathing heavy and aroused, his hand sliding down across my bottom and my thighs, finding its way under my dress as the other hand closes around my wrist. I imagine the weight of his body on mine, imagine that I am the one he is kissing now, that he is pressing his body hard against mine, that those whimpering noises are mine.

The bus into town takes a different route this time, following narrow, winding roads past farms and whitewashed churches and little groups of houses where all the mailboxes are arranged in a long row by the roadside. No one gets on and no one gets off anywhere and it feels as if it is taking an eternity, it’s hot and there’s an unpleasant, stuffy smell on the bus. I make patterns with my fingertips in the upholstery, I draw a heart, rub it out, draw another one.

Stella looks annoyed when I get off.

“You’re very late.”

“The bus took this weird detour.”

She looks at her watch.

“I have to be back at one fifteen, we’ve got a meeting.”

We go to the same café as last time, Stella orders a Caesar salad with a mineral water, I have the same.
The waitress gives a little smile when I say I’d like the same, glancing quickly from one to the other, I presume she thinks we’re alike. Once when I was at junior high and Stella was at high school, a man in a department store asked if we were twins. I thought it was really funny, but Stella seemed annoyed more than anything when she explained that she was
much
older. She’s always looked young, she still does, you could still take us for the same age if it weren’t for her clothes, they’re much more elegant than mine these days, they look more grown-up.

“It’s good here,” Stella says when the waitress returns with our salads. “Considering it’s in a small town.”

She smiles, perhaps with a hint of resignation. I know she misses Stockholm, she was much happier there than I have ever been, but she couldn’t find a job. She was thinking of setting up her own business, helping rich people to design their gardens, but there’s not much work available. You need contacts and she doesn’t have any, no acquaintances who happen to know the acquaintances of the rich, or acquaintances of parents who might need to employ a garden designer.

“Was Gabriel awake when you left?”

“I didn’t see him.”

She sighs, pushes her sunglasses up onto her head, and leans closer to me across the table.

“I’ve been thinking about Erik lately,” she says.

It’s been such a long time since she mentioned Erik that I can’t help looking surprised when she mentions his name, and she looks down, as if she thinks it sounded bad coming out of her mouth, as if she suspects that’s what’s going through my mind.

“And what have you been thinking?”

She shrugs her shoulders.

“Oh, I don’t know …” she begins, then she clears her throat and suddenly sounds more sure of herself. “I’ve been thinking that things felt different with him. Safe, in a completely different way from how things are with … from how things are now.”

“Do you mean it was better?”

“No,” she says quickly, instinctively. Then she pauses and considers, twisting and turning her sunglasses in her hand. “I used to think it was boring. It was … stable. Gabriel is … well, things are more up and down now.”

I nod. Perhaps this is only the beginning of a conversation. Perhaps she wants me to ask more questions, draw confidences out of her, I’m no good at that kind of thing. But I do wonder if there are problems between her and Gabriel, more serious problems than the occasional quarrel, than the fact that they’re two moody individuals who can both get extremely angry. Problems that, even if they don’t
excuse something like kissing another person, might at least explain it.

When Stella puts her sunglasses back on I realize I’ve missed my chance to ask questions. Instead she starts talking about a girlfriend who’s moved abroad, and then about her job, as usual.

“By the way, would you like to see the greenhouses?”

“What greenhouses?”

She grimaces slightly as if to indicate that I ought to know which greenhouses she means, but she looks amused rather than annoyed.

“The ones at work, of course.”

She smiles, I nod.

“Sure.”

Stella pays for lunch before we leave.

“Thanks,” I say.

“You can treat me to lunch when you’ve got your own gallery,” she says.

I laugh, the idea is just absurd, but although Stella is smiling she doesn’t seem to be joking. It strikes me that her remarks about my assignment and the fact that I ought to study more are not just something she says in order to be difficult, but that she actually believes I could achieve something. I’ve never thought about it like that before. Suddenly I feel a rush of affection, just like when we were little and she would hold my hand when we were going somewhere and
I felt safe, certain that Stella could deal with absolutely anything, and the thought of Gabriel in the car makes me feel ashamed, I think once again that it wasn’t my fault, but I should have protested, I should have refused. I shouldn’t have wanted to do it.

We walk through the town center, which isn’t all that big. Stella’s office is in the town hall, but the greenhouses are a few blocks away.

“I’d like to be there all the time,” she says. “Then I’d have everything in one place.”

“Yes, that sounds better.”

“But they want all the departments together. I know everything about garbage now, I share my office with waste disposal.”

She continues her monologue about the organization of the town council. I find it difficult to concentrate on what she is saying, we have stopped in front of a gate and I look at the dense cypress hedges, they are dark, they look cool in spite of the heat, shady. The ground beneath them must be damp,
I think of a poem by Christina Rossetti that appealed to me when I read her for my assignment, I can hear it in my head: “When I am dead, my dearest, / sing no sad songs for me; / plant thou no roses at my head, / nor shady cypress tree,” there is a faint smell of resin, turpentine, an acrid smell, yet pleasant. Stella opens the gate and lets me in. There are three huge greenhouses behind
the hedges, surrounded by flower beds and vegetable plots.

“Isn’t it wonderful?”

Stella looks thrilled.

“Absolutely.”

She opens the door of one of the greenhouses, I follow her inside. Even though it’s warm outside the heat in the greenhouse is completely different, humid and sticky, it’s hard to breathe at first. I can almost feel my hair beginning to curl. There is a damp smell and I can hear the faint sound of running water, I look around. In one corner of the greenhouse there is a little pond with mosaic lining the inside, different shades of blue, like Gabriel’s ashtray, I think, like a little pool. Two big carp are swimming around in the pond, it is surrounded by rhododendron bushes, there are still a few flowers but they consist mostly of thick dark-green leaves, they look hard.

“You’ve got fish?”

Stella smiles.

“They’ve been here for a long, long time. This greenhouse goes back to the turn of the last century, that was when they made the fish pond, although at some point it had been covered over and built on, they found it when they were carrying out renovation work in the eighties. I’m sure those fish have been here since then, I think they can get pretty old.”

I am breathing heavily from the heat, I can feel the dampness on my back. “God, it’s hot.”

“It’s like South America. Peru, maybe. Look.”

She points to a bench covered in orchids. It looks like a little forest, stalks poking up out of green moss, the flowers in every shade from white and pale pink to a wine-red so dark it is almost black. Their petals are velvety, some of them patterned with spots or blotches. There is a faint scent in the air, perfumed, sweet.

“That’s my orchid collection,” says Stella.

She looks proud, she leans toward one of the flowers, touches it gently.

“Nobody thought growing them in here would work,” she says. “They’re so sensitive. The temperature and humidity have to be perfect for them to flourish. We had a power outage last spring, I think it was in March when the temperature was still below freezing, we had a late spring last year. The power was only off for about half an hour, so they nearly all survived, but they reacted immediately. I’ve sorted out an emergency generator that kicks in if we have a power outage now, I don’t know why there wasn’t one here already. Although they used to grow mainly pansies and pelargoniums before. And heather, rows and rows of heather for those pizzeria containers … Heather can cope with most things.”