The Merman (11 page)

I went over to the window. I could see the lighthouse a little way off. At night it shone into the room, but it never disturbed Tommy. It might be in his blood, I thought, that love of lighthouses. In every family down here there were tales of some ancestor who had run aground and drowned because of poor light from a lighthouse.

On the chest of drawers by the window was our school yearbook, open to the page with our class photo. Gerard was sitting in front on the left in his usual uniform: leather jacket, patched jeans and a bandanna round his neck. His scooter helmet was on his lap, and the gloves, as if he had something to hide underneath. Peder, who was seated next to him, seemed to be most inclined to agree in the presence of his boss. He had placed his hands on his thighs; if you looked closely, you could see he was giving the photographer the finger. Furthest to the right in the top row, as if we wanted to get as far away from them as possible, were Tommy and me: Tommy in his Tintin top and me in my usual T-shirt with a picture of a cat on it and a pair of trousers that were too small. My hair was unwashed. No make-up, of course, and my T-shirt was dirty. I had my eyes closed.

The fact we were standing next to one another in our class photo was as much of a given as spring following winter or the sun coming up each morning. Tommy had arrived in our school in Year Five, together with an entire class from Glommen. The pupils had been divided up among the old Skogtorp classes. We were assigned desks next to each other in our first lesson. I still remember the feeling of change then: as if the cards had been reshuffled and
I was dealt a new hand. From that moment onwards it was like I no longer held any interest for the others; I was invisible to them. Actually, it was hard to explain why we were drawn together. We didn't have all that much in common. Tommy was a little brother and I was a big sister; he was a boy and I was a girl; he came from a fishing family in Glommen, where his relatives had been living forever and he knew absolutely everyone, whereas I had only my brother and my parents.

But ever since that day we'd stuck together. We revised together, played during recess, chatted, discussed anything and everything that interested us: books we were reading, teachers and the other kids in our class, what they were like, why they thought and acted the way they did. I would go home with him after school as often as I could, but only if I knew that Robert was all right on his own. We were usually in the room where I was now, where I recognised every object, the exact position of the furniture and the smell of the wallpaper and the rug. We would usually listen to his brothers' records, play games or play down by the docks. And if my brother wanted to, he could come along. Tommy never raised any objection about that. He knew that Robert was part of the deal if he wanted to be friends with me.

That was what I was thinking about as I stood by the window and looked out towards the docks; how meaningless everything would have been if I hadn't been friends with Tommy.

It was deserted down by the quay. Hardly any boats were in. I could see the roof of their hut. Smoke was coming from the chimney. Presumably, I thought, he was down there helping his brothers.

There was a van parked in front of the hut when I went down to the docks. Its back doors were open. A man sat in the cab, smoking. The door to the building was closed but there were people inside; I could hear someone talking. I don't know what caused me to turn round and go over towards the turning area for vehicles instead. Something about the man in the van, I think: the way he carried on smoking, kind of aggressively, a little like Dad.

I carried on past the old storage halls and went round the corner to an old covered mooring. There was a fence at the rear, and I could see out to the quay between the slats. The man had got out of the van now, as if he had just been waiting until I was out of sight. He took a crate out of the back of the van and called out to someone who was inside. The door opened. I saw Tommy looking out. The man handed him the crate. Then the door closed again, the man got into the van, started it up and vanished in the direction of Glumstensvägen.

The area around the docks was dead quiet; the only noise was the sea, which sounded a constant drone in the background. Just off to the left, at the edge of my field of vision, something moved. When I looked over I spotted the mink again, the same mink I'd seen three days before. It was sitting on a rubbish bin thirty metres away, observing me. Then it leapt down and disappeared from sight.

I had just made up my mind to leave when the door opened again and Tommy's brothers came out. One of them took a tin of chewing tobacco out of his pocket and began rolling a plug. The other crouched down and dried off his shoes with a hankie. I couldn't figure out what was up with me: why didn't I just go over and ask about Tommy, or call out to him as I approached? Instead, I stayed there, crouching behind the fence.

It started to rain, a light drizzle that made me shiver. They were discussing something over there, gesticulating to one another. One of them rapped his knuckle significantly against his temple. Then they all burst out laughing and put their arms round each other's shoulders as they walked up towards the village. But Tommy was still there. I saw him close the door after them.

I waited until his brothers were out of sight. Then I climbed over the fence and followed the asphalt path down to the fisherman's hut.

‘Who is it?' he asked when I knocked.

‘It's me, Nella.'

‘What the hell are you doing here?'

He sounded angry and jittery at the same time.

‘Trying to get hold of you.'

‘Go away. Get lost!'

‘How come? We need to talk.'

‘Get away from the door, they can see you.'

‘Who's “they”?'

‘My brothers.'

‘I'm staying here until you open up.'

It was quiet, as if he needed to think it over. Then the latch was raised and he let me into the darkness.

I couldn't see anything at first; there was a piece of tarpaulin hanging over the window.

‘Did anybody see you?' he asked.

‘I don't think so... why do you want to know?'

Tommy stood on a stool by the window, turned up a corner of the tarpaulin and looked out. Seemingly relieved, he climbed back down and switched on the light.

I hadn't been inside their hut for several months, but everything seemed the same. Nets hung on hooks on the wall. A broken barometer indicated a storm. Coiled-up ropes lay on the floor. Lobsterpots were piled up in one corner. Bailers and floats lay jumbled up in boxes. And in the middle of the floor stood Tommy, looking pale, as if he were still running a temperature.

‘Why did you have the light off before?'

‘I was just about to leave. It's important that nobody sees anything when I open the door... and it can barely tolerate any light.'

The lamp, I now noticed, was angled towards the wall. Most of the space was still in darkness. I heard a sort of panting coming from over by the end wall.

‘Is there someone here?' I asked.

Tommy gave a laugh, a laugh I'd never heard from him before, not at all happy-sounding.

‘I guess you could say that, someone – or rather, something.'

He looked at me as if I were a complete stranger, as if he had never seen me before in his life.

‘There's way too much going on here, I don't even know where to start.'

The crate I had seen him take in earlier was right by my feet; it was full of fish guts, cod heads, roe sacs, fins and tails.

‘Who was the guy in the van?'

‘Jens, a bloke in the boat crew. He was with my brothers when it happened.'

Tommy bent down, picked up a cod head and looked at it in disgust.

‘We're not sure what it eats yet. Not every kind of fish, anyway. But it seems to like rubbish... fish guts and fins. It doesn't care for shellfish.'

He tossed the head back into the crate and looked as confused as what he had just said. I didn't understand any of it.

‘My family have brought up a load of weird things out of the sea,' he continued, ‘basking sharks, moonfish, porpoises, old mines from the war... in the Fifties there were tuna out there. My dad told me you could see shoals of over a thousand fish, and the biggest ones weighed over two hundred kilos. They brought them up with a hook, baited with mackerel, with steel cables and hawsers. Dad's got photos at home... ' Tommy gave another laugh, as if he were reassured by telling old fishing tales. ‘...where he's standing in the long side of the boat, hooking a tuna through its gills out by the Lilla Middelgrund bank. My Uncle John is standing by, ready to thread a line around its tail fin. Do you know how they located the shoal? With binoculars, a shoal a hundred and fifty metres across – the whole sea was churning. Then in the early Sixties, they just disappeared, the tuna, just as suddenly as they'd turned up.' He sat down on the stool beneath the window, but got up again straight away, as if he'd received an electric shock. ‘Dad was on the
Zentora
too, the neighbour's boat, 1977. They caught eighteen tons of cod in a single trawler net. It was in the newspaper afterwards. Seven people worked flat-out for twenty-one hours outside Laesö to clean
the fish. What I'm trying to say is that strange things happen sometimes, people get strange catches, but this is something else.'

I heard the noise again: a low whimper, followed by a sort of wheezing sound, like air being forced through something moist.

‘What on earth is that?'

‘I don't know what the hell it is. They brought it up in the trawler net outside Anholt. They panicked and hit it over the head until they thought it was dead... but it survived.'

I wondered if he was still ill. If he had a fever and was delirious. Nothing he was saying made any sense.

There was another box on the floor, I now realised, filled with bottles of medicines. There was a label from a veterinary clinic on it. Tommy pushed it aside with his foot. A large dark patch was visible on the concrete floor underneath. Oil, I thought. Or blood? The same blood his brother had wiped off his shoes?

‘Thank God it's asleep now,' he continued. ‘Doped up. it's impossible to handle otherwise. It's incredibly strong, the bastard. That's what we've got the medicines for. Jens knows a vet. There are syringes there, too.'

I don't remember what I was thinking, only that something was wrong and Tommy was shaken in a way I'd never experienced before. He didn't say anything else. Just took me by the arm and pulled me further into the room.

Over by the end wall was a wooden crate, maybe three metres long, a metre wide and about as deep, the kind you use for transporting a boat engine. That's where the noise was coming from. And the smells... the strange smells... of fish and sea and blood.

I looked down into the crate. And even though I saw what it was, I didn't take any of it in.

‘What is it?' I whispered.

‘If it were a female and I'd read about it in a storybook, I know what I would answer. But this... I haven't got a clue.'

W
hatever it was, it was big. It must have weighed several hundred kilos. Its arms resembled a human's or a large ape's. A sea-ape, if there is such a thing... long and slender, with small hands on the ends. But its joints faced the other way, and there was webbing between its fingers. There were sort of nails too, or rather claws, blue-black in colour. Its upper body was almost human: you could see a chest and an abdomen with something that resembled a navel. But its hide consisted of armour-like scales, like the skin of a large lizard. There was hair growing on its shoulders: long, bristly hairs, almost like horsehair. It's difficult to describe what I was seeing, so that's why my comparisons are strange. Its lower body was shaped like a hammer, a long cylindrical body that changed into a fin, almost a metre wide. It looked like the tail of a small whale. Its lower section was completely smooth, with no hair. But its scales were all black there, and appeared to be even thicker.

Its face was unlike anything I'd ever seen either: half fish, half mammal. Its forehead was low and pointy. It had no nose, instead a kind of nasal bone that stuck out in the middle of its face. Its eyelids were half closed, and behind them you could sense black irises and eyeballs as big as a horse's. It seemed to be asleep... or hibernating.

‘What on earth is it?' I asked again.

‘I dunno.' Tommy shook his head. ‘I really haven't got a clue.'

I stared at the creature as if entranced. Its jawbones were huge, its mouth horribly broad. I knew that it could open its mouth almost as wide as its entire face. It sort of had lips, too, with
horseshoe-shaped bones underneath; you could see them clearly because its lips were very thin. Its skull was pointy, as if it had grown skin over a curiously cone-shaped hat. Its head was covered in the same type of hair as its shoulders: like a cross between human hair and horsehair. On each side of its head was a narrow notch with flaps: like ears, I supposed. And then its neck: short, broad, and where the collarbones would have been on a person: two gills.

‘It's got lungs and a windpipe just like us,' said Tommy. ‘And gills as well. I don't get it.'

I couldn't get any words out. Just stared at whatever it was that I had never stared at before in my entire life. The puffing noise, I understood, was coming from its gills, but only when it breathed out. It seemed to be breathing in through its mouth.

Then, suddenly, it moved, a sort of shudder went through its body, and the movement resembled nothing I had ever seen either. There must have been bones and muscles involved that other animals do not have: simultaneously a light and heavy movement, incredibly clumsy and smooth at the same time. Its head turned towards us, the eyelids flickered and my instincts told me to back away and to run, but I stayed put, as if I no longer had the strength to move.