The Living and the Dead in Winsford (8 page)

But before Gunsan died – and before she was born – that’s when I had a childhood. That’s the period I’ve been trying to forget about for many years. It is also astoundingly good at disappearing again the moment it crops up. It was somehow so straightforward, so full of hope and light that I am blinded. Indeed, I have often been blinded and made to feel rather ill by that mirage that manifests itself for a fleeting moment and then fades away.

And nowadays, much later in life, when I unexpectedly bump into my old schoolmate Klasse, or Britt-Inger – or even Anton come to that, the first boy I ever kissed and the one who once massaged my pudendum in a people’s park that no longer exists – on such occasions I suddenly get a lump in my throat, and feel an urge to turn round and run away. Whatever happened to you? I think. I can’t bear seeing you. Surely you can’t be Anton Antonsson with that lovely laugh and those warm, gentle hands: whatever happened to him? Where does this miserable-looking middle-aged creature with a pot belly and a strained expression on his face come from? And then Gunsan comes into my head, as I am lying in her bed under the sloping ceiling and reading Astrid Lindgren stories to her and I think – have always thought – that I don’t want that bloody childhood any more, that damned romantic glow; I don’t want to recall her half-closed eyes and her arms around my neck when I lift her out of the water and onto the jetty down by the lake and she half sings, half whispers the old Swedish folk song ‘Who can sail when there is no wind’ into my ear.

Or my mother’s and father’s funerals, I can do without them as well – there was barely a year between them and I am well aware that you can create cancer inside your body at any time if you try hard enough. That’s what my mum did as she sat at home in that melancholy house: she created cancer in her own body by thinking hard about it – it took seven years but she managed it in the end. And since my dad was buried – cause of death: a broken heart – I have hardly ever set foot again in that central Swedish town. On the very rare occasions when I have done so, I have always found it difficult to breathe, and thought that it’s like eating breakfast in the evening even though you don’t want to.

We set off shortly after midnight. It was Martin’s idea that we should start with a night drive, get to a favourite hotel in Kristianstad, have breakfast there and then take the ferry from Ystad. And that’s what we did, from a geographical perspective at least. But for some reason or other we began talking about Gunvald.

‘There’s something I’ve never told you,’ said Martin.

We had just filled up with petrol at that garage near Järna that never closes. Ahead of us was four hundred kilometres of the deserted E4, then diagonally down through Småland and northern Skåne along various numbered roads. It was the night between a Thursday and a Friday in October, dawn was light years away, and we could equally well have been in a space capsule on the way to a dead star. Aniara.

‘What? What have you never told me?’

‘I didn’t think he was mine. In the beginning I simply couldn’t believe it.’

I didn’t understand.

‘Gunvald,’ Martin elaborated. ‘I was convinced that somebody else must be his father.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’ I asked.

He laughed in that good-natured way he had been practising ever since he was forty.

‘Well, like in that play of Strindberg’s,
The Father
. . . It’s the kind of thought that crops up in every man’s mind. Just think! What if the father is somebody else? How could you be certain? And you can’t very well ask, can you?’

He tried to chuckle. I had no comment to make. I thought it was best to let him go on. I started to toy with a very special thought, but it was too early to mention it yet. We had the whole night in front of us after all, maybe six months in fact: there was no hurry. No hurry with anything at all.

But as things turned out I never took up that thought.

‘Anyway, please don’t misunderstand me,’ he said after a few seconds of silence, drumming lightly with his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘It was nothing more than one of those obsessive thoughts, but it’s remarkable how they can take possession of you. And the fact is, he wasn’t anything like me at all – surely you have to agree about that? People commented on it, don’t you remember? Your brother, for instance.’

‘If there was ever a person who was like his father, that person is Gunvald,’ I said. ‘Not in his appearance, perhaps: but if you look inside him, you must realize that you . . . that you are looking into a mirror.’

Martin thought that over as we covered a kilometre of deserted motorway. I knew that I had offended him. That he thought it wasn’t worth the effort of trying to conduct a sensible conversation with me. That he had overlooked that fact, as usual. He was a level-headed and discerning man, an optimistic person who actually believed that language could be a tool rather than a weapon; but I was a woman who swam and sometimes drowned in an irrelevant sea of emotions. Yes,
irrelevant
is the right word for it.

Or perhaps I am being unfair to him. That’s not impossible, and I reserve the right to be so.

But I couldn’t understand what he was fishing for. Did he want me to agree with him? To confirm that it was perfectly reasonable for him to have suspicions about how our first child came into being? That this was a new and interesting insight into what it was like to be a man? That it perhaps was somehow connected with his need to rape – or at least to have sex with and spray sperm onto – an unknown waitress in a hotel in Gothenburg many years later.

‘I’m pretty sure he’s yours,’ I said.

‘What?’ said Martin.

The car swerved slightly.

‘I said that he’s yours,’ I said.

‘You didn’t say that at all,’ said Martin. ‘You said something quite different.’

‘I don’t understand what you’re getting at,’ I said. ‘How was it with Synn, did you have similar thoughts then?’

Martin shook his head. ‘Not at all. It was only in connection with Gunvald. I’ve actually spoken to a few friends about this phenomenon. Or I did so several years ago. They admitted that they’d had similar thoughts.’

‘When they had their sons?’

‘Yes.’

‘But not when they had their daughters?’

‘Come off it!’ said Martin. ‘None of them have any daughters, incidentally. But if you don’t want to talk about this, we can drop it. I just thought it might be worth mentioning.’

‘Were they academics?’

‘Were who academics?’

‘Those others who had problems with being a father. Were they university people?’

‘Why do you ask that?’

‘Because it needs a special sort of mind to come up with something so bloody stupid. Anyway, he is yours. I didn’t have any other men at that time.’

I hadn’t really intended to make a response as cutting as that, but it kept Martin quiet for several minutes. For several more dark kilometres along the E4. Further out towards that dead star – for some reason I found it difficult to shake off that image.

‘How do you think he is now?’ he asked in a somewhat more normal tone of voice as we passed the first turn-off to Nyköping. It was a couple of minutes past one.

I thought that was a justified question, at least. Gunvald had never been in good shape, not since puberty at any rate. He had difficulty in making friends, and started having sessions with psychologists and therapists while he was still at school. We suspect he tried to commit suicide a couple of times, but that has never really become clear. He was legally of age on both occasions, and hence everyone involved was bound by secrecy. If the patient gives permission then of course the veil of secrecy can be lifted: but Gunvald refused to do so. He lay there in his hospital bed, glaring apologetically at us, and pretended he had fallen by accident from a balcony on the fifth floor. What could we say?

On the second occasion he also spent time in hospital, but by then he had already moved to Copenhagen – it was when Kirsten had left him. It was labelled food poisoning, and he refused to receive visitors.

Kirsten had taken the children with her – my grandchildren – and moved back to her parents’ home in Horsens. And announced that if Gunvald made any claims on them, she would report him to the police. She wrote that in an e-mail to me.

I don’t know what she would have reported him for, she didn’t explain when I spoke to her a few days later. Neither did Gunvald, of course.

As we sat there in the car, driving through the night, it was exactly two years since that had happened, and Gunvald had moved into a flat of his own in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen – he had evidently got it through a colleague at the university. Martin had visited him twice in Copenhagen, and I had met him once in Stockholm when he gave a lecture at Södertörn. That was all. It occurred to me that if Martin doubted whether he was Gunvald’s father, I had as much justification for doubting that I was his mother.

I had met my grandchildren, the twin girls, once after their father’s food poisoning. I went to their home in Horsens on Jutland, and stayed for three days. I spoke a lot more to Kirsten’s parents than to Kirsten herself: they were pleasant and I had the impression we were on the same wavelength. But then, I don’t have anything negative to say about Kirsten either.

Which makes the equation somewhat problematic.

‘Maybe he’s sorting his life out now, despite everything,’ said Martin. ‘It’s not up to us to pass judgement.’

I knew they were in occasional contact by e-mail and on the telephone, but Martin never said anything about what they had discussed. Work, presumably. The academic duckpond, both here and there. Stockholm and Copenhagen. Probably not as you would expect between father and son, but more likely between two colleagues – one young and ambitious, the other old and experienced. An arts assistant lecturer and an arts professor. Linguistics versus literature history. Yes, I’m pretty sure they restricted themselves to that neutral playing field.

On my part I endured so many sleepless nights for Gunvald’s sake, from puberty and for about ten years thereafter, that it very nearly drove me mad. That was probably when I lost my good looks – that quality that first fitted the bill for television screens, but then no longer did. And over time I had also developed a thick skin, hard and effective, and I had no intention of peeling it off. Certainly not. The day Gunvald comes of his own accord and asks me to, I might consider it: but not off my own bat. The impotent, misdirected primeval powers of a mother: I’m not going through that again.

But I still wondered what Martin was after, and couldn’t resist pressing him a little harder.

‘Have you ever mentioned it to him?’ I asked.

‘Mentioned what?’

‘That you didn’t think you were his father.’

‘Bloody hell!’ barked Martin, smashing his hand hard on the instrument panel. ‘Are you out of your mind? I only raised it for a bit of fun. Let’s forget it.’

‘A bit of fun?’

He didn’t respond. What the hell could he have said?

And I had nothing to add. I reclined the seat, inflated my travel pillow and announced that I was going to try and get some sleep. He slid a Thelonious Monk disc into the CD-player, then neither of us spoke again for several hours.

*

But I didn’t sleep. Just closed my eyes and thought how odd it was that we were sitting in this same car, on our way southwards. After all these years. After all those occasions when we didn’t measure up to each other, all those manoeuvres to ensure we ended up in the same place. How odd it was that we were still together. And that my life had come to the point where I no longer wanted anything apart from being left in peace and quiet – I thought about that as well. Perhaps that was the price of being the person I have been. That we have been the people we have been. The premier league, as my brother Göran once said.
The premier league?
I remember wondering. What on earth do you mean by that? It’s as plain as day, Göran insisted. A literary colossus and a television presenter – you are playing in the premier league. You only have yourselves to blame.

He plays in division three. He explained that as well. He’s a secondary school teacher in a small town in central Sweden, which means that he’s slap bang in the middle of real life. Not the town he grew up in, of course not; and the business about divisions was something he’d got from a colleague, apparently. Martin disapproved of that: he had been on the list of Social Democrat election candidates a couple of times – never likely to be selected, but still – and such people mustn’t belong to an elite.

That was long before the incident in the hotel in Gothenburg. Martin ceased to be a social democrat round about the turn of the century, it wasn’t clear exactly when.

But the fact is that to a large extent both our lives have been lived in what is known as the glare of publicity – my brother was right about that. We have been standing on a stage – usually separate stages, but occasionally a shared one – and when you are on a stage you try to put on an act. To be good-looking and talk clearly, as I said before. Until somebody says it’s time to make an exit. And on that occasion when Gunvald came home drunk, the only time he had done so, and spelled out the truth for me, his analysis was more or less identical with that, it really was.

‘You’re a bloody nobody, do you realize that? A made-up cut-out doll, that’s what I had for a mother – thank you very much. But you don’t need to feel ashamed – I’ve been doing that for you all these years.’

He was seventeen then. A year later he reached the so-called age of maturity, and fell off that balcony.

I adjusted the pillow against the side window and started thinking about Synn.

9

‘Mark,’ he said. ‘My name’s Mark Britton. I can see that you have a shadow over you.’

Those were the first words he spoke, and I wasn’t sure I had heard them correctly.

‘I beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘What did you say?’

He had eaten the rest of his food. Now he slid the plate to one side and turned towards me. We were sitting at neighbouring tables, with about a metre between us. Rosie had switched the television on again, but turned the sound down to almost zero. Two men in white shirts and black waistcoats were playing snooker.