The Farm (6 page)

My mum returned to the diary and seemed frustrated as she searched the pages.

I can’t be sure of the exact day. It was roughly a week after we’d arrived. At that point I wasn’t in the habit of taking many notes. The idea hadn’t occurred to me that my word would be doubted as if I were a fanciful child making up stories for attention. Of the many humiliations I’ve experienced in these past few months, including having my hands and feet bound, by far the worst has been the disbelief in people’s eyes as I make a statement. To speak, be heard, and not believed.

During our first week on the farm Chris’s state of mind was cause for concern, not mine. He’d never lived outside a city and struggled to cope. April was far colder than we’d expected. The farmers have a term called Iron Nights, when winter clings on and spring can’t break through. There’s ice in the soil. Days are raw and short. The nights are bitter and long. Chris was depressed. And his depression felt like an accusation, that I was responsible for bringing him to a property with none of the modern conveniences, away from everything he knew, because I was Swedish and the farm was in Sweden. In reality, we’d made the decision together as a desperate fix to our circumstances. There was no choice. We were there, or nowhere. If we sold the farm we’d have money to rent a place for two or three years in England and then nothing.

One evening I’d had enough of his misery. The farmhouse isn’t large – the ceilings are low, the walls are thick, the rooms are small – and we were spending all our time together, trapped inside by hostile weather. There was no central heating. In the kitchen there was a wrought-iron oven where you could bake bread, cook food and boil water – the heart of the house. When Chris wasn’t sleeping he sat in front of it, hands outstretched, a pantomime of rural drudgery. I lost my temper, shouting at him to stop being such a glum bastard, before hurrying out, slamming the door—

• • •

I
MUST HAVE REACTED TO THE IMAGE
of my mum shouting at my dad.

Daniel, don’t look so surprised. Your father and I argue, not often, not regularly, but like every other couple in the world we lose our tempers. We just made sure you never heard. You were so sensitive as a child. If we raised our voices you’d be upset for hours. You wouldn’t sleep. You wouldn’t eat. Once, at breakfast, I banged my hand against the table. You copied me! You started banging your little fists against your head. We had to hold your arms to stop you. Quickly we learned to control our tempers. Arguments were held back, stacked up, and we’d work through them when you were out.

• • •

I
N NO MORE THAN A BRIEF ASIDE
, my mum had swept away my entire conception of our family life. I’d no memory of behaving in this way – hitting my own head, refusing to eat, unable to sleep, disturbed by anger. I’d thought my parents had voluntarily taken a vow of tranquillity. The truth was that they’d been forced to shelter me not because they believed it for the best but because I demanded calm as though it were a requirement of my existence, the same as food or warmth. The sanctuary of our home was defined by my weakness as much as it was by their strength. My mum took my hand:

‘Maybe I made a mistake coming to you.’

Even now she was worried I couldn’t cope. And she was right to doubt me. Only a few minutes ago I’d felt an impulse to ask her not to speak, to cling on to silence.

‘Mum, I want to listen – I’m ready.’

In an effort to conceal my anxiety, I tried to encourage her:

‘You shouted at Dad. You walked out. You slammed the door. What happened next?’

It was shrewd to bring her focus back to events. Her desire to discuss the allegations was so powerful I could see her doubts about me disappearing as she was tugged back into the flow of her storytelling. Our knees touching, she lowered her voice as if imparting a conspiracy.

I set off towards the river. The waterfront was one of the most important parts of our property. We still needed a little cash to survive. We weren’t producing our own electricity and there were annual land taxes. Our answer was salmon. We could eat the salmon in the summer, smoke and preserve it for the winter. We could sell some to fishmongers, but I saw the potential for more. We’d fix up the farm’s outbuildings – they used to house livestock but they could easily be converted into rustic guest accommodations. We’d carry out the work with minimal paid help since Chris and I were both handy with tools. Once that was complete, we’d open the farm as a holiday destination, guests lured to our obscure location with the promise of freshly grown food, a picturesque landscape, and the prospect of catching some of the world’s most beautiful salmon at a bargain price compared to fishing in Scotland or Canada. Despite its importance, in those early days Chris wouldn’t spend any time down by the river. He said it was too bleak. He didn’t see how our plans were possible. No one would ever pay to come to our farm. That’s what he claimed. I admit that it wasn’t picture-postcard-pretty when we arrived. The riverbank was overgrown, the grass was knee high, and I’ve never seen slugs so big, as fat as my thumb. But the potential was there. It just needed love.

At the river there was a small wooden jetty. In April it was entangled in reeds. Standing on it that evening, with a smudge of light in the sky, I felt tired and alone. After a few minutes I pulled myself together and decided it was time to swim and declare this river officially open for business! I stripped naked, dropping my clothes in a heap, and jumped into the water. The temperature was a shock. When I surfaced I gasped and started swimming frantically, trying to warm up until suddenly I stopped because on the opposite bank the low branches of a tree were moving. It can’t have been the wind because the tops of the trees were motionless. It was something else – a person watching me, clasped around the branch. Alone and naked in the water, I was vulnerable. From this distance Chris couldn’t hear me even if I screamed. Then the branches on the riverbank began to move again, breaking from the tree, sliding towards me. I should have swum away, as fast as I could, but my body wouldn’t obey and I remained where I was, treading water as the branches drew closer. Except they weren’t branches! They were the antlers of a giant elk.

Never in my childhood years in Sweden had an elk been this close to me. I was careful not to splash or make a noise as the elk passed so close I could’ve reached out and hooked my arms around its thick neck, lifted myself up and mounted its back, just like in those stories I’d read to you where a forest princess rides naked on the back of an elk, her long silver hair catching the moonlight. I must have exclaimed in wonder, because the elk swung around, turning its face towards me – black eyes staring into mine, its warm breath on my face. Around my thighs I could feel the water disturbed by its powerful legs. Then it snorted and swam to our side of the river, walking out onto our farmland beside the jetty and revealing its mighty proportions, truly a king of this land. It shook the water off its coat, steam rising from its skin, before slowly heading back towards the forests.

I remained in the middle of the river for several minutes, treading water, no longer cold, blessed with absolute certainty that we’d made the right decision in moving here. There was a reason we were at this farm. We belonged here. I closed my eyes, imagining thousands of brightly coloured salmon swimming around me.

• • •

M
Y MUM REACHED INTO THE SATCHEL
and pulled out a knife. Instinctively I recoiled, a reaction that concerned my mum:

‘I startled you?’

It was an accusation. The manner in which she’d abruptly brandished the knife, without warning, made me wonder whether she was deliberately testing me in the same way as before, when she’d left me alone, and I made a mental note to be on my guard against any future attempts to provoke me. She flipped the knife around, offering me the handle:

‘Hold it.’

The entire knife was carved from wood, including the blade, painted silver to resemble metal. It was quite blunt and harmless. On the handle there were intricate engravings. On one side there was a naked woman bathing by the rocks of a lake, with large breasts and long flowing hair, her vagina marked by a single notch. On the other side there was a troll’s face, his tongue hanging out like a panting dog and his nose mischievously shaped like a grotesque phallus.

It’s a type of humour you probably recognise, popular in rural Sweden, where farmers craft crude figures such as a man relieving himself, a thin curve of wood chiselled to represent the arc of piss.

Rotate the knife on your palm, backwards and forwards—

Spinning it like this—

Faster! So you can see both figures at the same time, the troll lusting after the woman, the woman unaware she’s being watched – the two blurred together. The implication is clear. The fact of the woman being blind to her danger heightens the sexual pleasure of the troll.

The knife was a gift, a strange gift, I’m sure you’d agree, given to me by my neighbour the first time we met. Despite him being only a ten-minute walk from our farm, that meeting didn’t take place until we’d lived in Sweden for two weeks – two weeks, and in all that time, not a single introduction from any of the nearby farmers. We were being ignored. Instructions had been given not to approach us. In London there are countless neighbours who never speak to each other. But anonymity doesn’t exist in rural Sweden. It isn’t possible to live that way. We required the consent of the community to settle in that region, we couldn’t sulk in our corner of the countryside. There were practical considerations. The previous owner – brave Cecilia – had informed me that our spare land could be leased to local farmers. Typically they’d pay a nominal sum, however, I was of the opinion that we could persuade them to provide the foodstuffs we couldn’t produce.

Deciding that two weeks was long enough, I woke up one morning and told Chris we’d knock on their door if they wouldn’t knock on ours. That day I took great care over my appearance, selecting a pair of cotton trousers since a dress would’ve implied I was incapable of manual labour. I didn’t want to play poverty. We couldn’t admit the extent of our financial problems. The truth might make us seem pitiful, and they’d interpret the information as an insult, deducing that we’d only moved into the region because we couldn’t afford to be anywhere else. Equally we couldn’t give off the impression that we believed we could buy our way into the community. On the spur of the moment I took down the small Swedish flag hanging from the side of our house and turned the flag into a bandana, using it to tie back my hair.

Chris refused to accompany me. He couldn’t speak Swedish and was too proud to stand beside me waiting for a translation. To tell the truth, I was pleased. First impressions were vital and I was sceptical they’d react warmly to an Englishman who barely spoke a word of their language. I wanted to prove to these farmers that we weren’t hapless foreign city folk who placed no value on tradition. I couldn’t wait to see their faces light up when I spoke to them in fluent Swedish, proudly declaring that I’d been brought up on a remote farm, just like the one we now owned.

The farm nearest to us belonged to the largest landowner in the region and it was with this particular farmer that Cecilia had struck an arrangement to lease the fields. It was obvious that I should begin with him. Walking up the road I arrived at an enormous pig barn, no windows, a bleak steel roof with narrow black chimneys jutting out the top and a smell of pig shit and pig-fattening chemicals. Qualms about intensive farming were not going to win over the locals. What’s more, Chris had stated clearly that he couldn’t survive as a vegetarian. There was very little protein in our diet and almost no money in the bank, so if this was our only source of meat, aside from the salmon, then I couldn’t afford to turn it down on the basis of food ethics. A moral position would make me seem superior, fussy and, worst of all, foreign.

Their house was situated at the end of a long gravel drive. Every window on the front looked out onto the pig barn, odd when you consider that there were fields and trees in the other directions. Unlike our farmhouse, which was built two hundred years ago, they’d torn down the original property and put in its place a modern house. By modern I don’t mean a cube of glass, concrete and steel; it was traditionally shaped, on two floors, with pale blue timber cladding, a veranda, a slate roof. They wanted the appearance of tradition but all the advantages of modernity. Our farmhouse, despite its many failings, was more appealing, a genuine representative of Swedish architectural heritage rather than an imitation.

When I knocked on the door there was no reply, but their gleaming silver Saab – and Saab’s not even a Swedish company any more – was in the drive. They were at home, most probably out on the land. In search of them I set off, walking through their fields, absorbing the sheer enormity of their property, an agricultural kingdom – perhaps fifty times the size of our little farm. Nearing the river, I came across a gentle slope covered in weeds, a bump in the landscape. Except it was man-made. Under the mound was the roof of a shelter not dissimilar to the bomb shelters constructed in London during the war or tornado shelters built in America. There was a steel door made from the same material as the roof of the pig barn. The padlock was hanging open. Taking a chance, I knocked and heard a commotion inside. Seconds later the door was pulled open. That was the first time I came face to face with Håkan Greggson.

• • •

F
ROM HER JOURNAL MY MUM
produced a newspaper clipping. She held it up for inspection, her cracked nail slicing across the head of Håkan Greggson. I’d seen him before, in the photograph my mum had emailed – the tall stranger in conversation with my dad.