The Merman (20 page)

Snapshots from the feed room flashed back in my mind, but I suppressed them so as not to feel nauseated.

‘Nah. I swear! Everything's all right.'

He swallowed that lie with no effort at all. Because he needed it, I thought to myself. Because he wanted it. Because if I wasn't there, there was nothing at all. On the other side of me began the void.

‘Let me tell you a story,' I said. ‘Once upon a time there was a boy called Robert. He was growing up in Skogstorp, a little place near Falkenberg, in a street that was named after a flower, just like all the other streets in Skogstorp... '

‘You don't need to. It's enough that you're here.'

He squinted a bit when he smiled at me. His glasses were dirty. He was tired. Just the tension of having Dad in the house made us all exhausted.

It took another hour or so before things quietened down downstairs. Maybe they got tired of the music, or else they started to realise there was a risk one of the neighbours might ring the police. Mick Jagger's voice was gone. Nobody was screaming or making noise. I could hear Mum laughing and unfamiliar male voices joking about something.

Against my will, my thoughts kept returning to the mink farm. After they drove off we left the building, climbed over the fence and headed down to the Mill, the pinball arcade in Olofsbo. We stayed there for several hours discussing what we should do. I was really shaky and nauseous; I couldn't make my body stop trembling. We needed a plan. We just had to help him; anything else was out of the question. We had to get him out of there, to some place where he'd be safe and could regain his strength. But no matter how hard we thought, we couldn't figure out how we could do it. Finally it started to get dark and Tommy had to cycle home.

Everything would have been so much easier, I thought now, if I just could have ignored everything, just regard everything as a weird dream, something incredible that just happened but which had nothing to do with my life. But that's not how things were now. He existed. The merman. And he needed us.

I gave a start, as if I had been daydreaming. There were footsteps on the stairs, and someone pushed on the handle of my brother's door.

‘Robbie, are you in there? How come you've got the door locked?' It was Dad. He sounded drunk.

‘It was me who locked it,' I said hurriedly while the mental images were disappearing. ‘I didn't know who was here.'

‘Come out here. I want to talk to the both of you!'

The footsteps went downstairs again. It was no use protesting.

A minute later we were standing down in the living room. Besides Mum and Dad there were two men in the room. A tramp by the look of him, because he looked like he'd been sleeping in the same clothes for a week, and a younger bloke with a junkie's eyes. The same guy I'd seen at the mink farm, I realised, the one who had come in through the door first with Jens.

‘You know why the palms of niggers' hands are so pale?' he asked in Dad's direction. ‘Because they were stood on all fours when they got spray-painted. Damn, there were a lot of those jokes around for a while. I laughed my arse off when I heard 'em
the first time. How come they've got such big wallets? Cos they get paid in bananas. And how come they've got such flat noses?' He made a ‘halt' gesture: ‘Stop. Whites only! Or such big ears?' He pretended to pick something out of his ear: ‘So you got in there after all, you little rascal!'

Mum was dancing on her own over by the far wall.

She had her eyes shut and was swaying slowly in time with the music. I saw one other person bending over the record player in the corner: Leif.

‘And the jokes about the Jews. D'you remember all the ones about the Jews? How do you fit a thousand Jews into a VW? Two in the back seat, two in the front seat, and the rest in the ashtray. That's fucking brilliant!'

He was definitely on something, you could see it in his pupils and his jaw, which was tense and sort of gurned when he talked.

Dad suddenly turned towards Robert and me.

Ah, there you are! Relax, you look like you're scared shitless.'

He was wearing the same shirt he had on at the mink farm. There was a blood spot on the front pocket. I wondered what was wrong with them. What was wrong with my dad?

‘I need to use your room, Nella.'

I just nodded.

‘I need to store some things in there. For a few weeks maybe.'

The cigarettes, I thought. At least fifty cartons he didn't dare leave lying around. And probably other things as well that had to stay hidden for a while.

‘So go and clear out what you need from your room and move in with Robbie.'

‘Tonight?'

‘Yes, tonight. Robbie, you can help her.'

The junkie bloke was looking at me in a way I didn't like. He was undressing me with his eyes and doing things to me in his thoughts. I took my brother by the hand and went towards the door.

‘It's not so bad, Nella,' Mum slurred. ‘Just for a coupla weeks... then you can move back in again. Put your mattress next to Robert's bed. You'll be cosy in there. You can help him with his homework. And Robert, Dad's got a present for you.'

I would have preferred to get out of there. But my brother stopped in his tracks, smiling reflexively as Dad took a glasses case out of his trouser pocket, opened it and ceremoniously held out a new pair of glasses.

‘You know I don't like those glasses you go round in,' he said.

‘But these are reading glasses... '

‘So? You can't go round in a taped-up pair. Try 'em on!'

Robert was right. It was a pair of reading glasses, similar to the ones our English teacher had, but with thicker lenses. Dad removed Robert's old glasses and put the new pair on him.

‘I can't see anything,' he said. ‘Honest, Dad, I can't see anything.' ‘No whingeing now. I know the bloke I bought them off. He said they would work. I had your prescription with me.'

‘Close up yeah, but not far away, things are blurry. I'm going to feel dizzy.'

‘You'll get used to them after a while. Relax now, Robbie.'

‘Please, give me my old ones. I can't see with these.'

Dad gave him a chilly look. Then he took the old glasses and bent them in the middle until the frame snapped.

‘You're going to wear those if I have to glue them to your face. We should've got rid of this old crap a long time ago. And I don't understand why your mum didn't do it already!'

He turned towards Mum, but she took no notice as she danced with her back against the wall, while the junkie was undressing her, one item of clothing at a time, with that empty, spaced-out expression.

‘What the hell did you get up to while I was inside? Nothing but boozing... was that the only thing you did?'

But he wouldn't have been our dad if he weren't capable of turning on a sixpence.

‘Come on, kids!' he said cheerfully. ‘We're not going to carry on arguing in this family. I'm heading out tomorrow and I'll be away for a while. But tonight we're having a party. Now go upstairs and clear out Nella's room.'

W
e didn't see hide nor hair of Dad for a week. According to Mum, he was in Gothenburg. He, Leif and the junkie bloke had some business up there, she claimed, and she didn't know when they'd be back.

I had cleared out my room and moved all the stuff I needed into Robert's. Maybe it was just for a short time, or maybe I'd have to stay there all winter? Dad had demanded all the keys from me, put what he wanted to store into my room and locked the door. Mum gave us no support as usual. She was on Dad's side no matter what he did. Out of fear, I figured, or actually out of some messed-up sort of love for him.

But Robert wasn't doing very well. The whole situation with a load of criminals coming and going from the house was eating away at him. And then the new glasses. He really couldn't see anything with them. On Monday morning he declared that he was not going to school, he couldn't do it, and he was going to stay at home for the rest of the term. He still wouldn't be able to see properly, he said, couldn't keep up in lessons, and he'd rather choose to be blind than go round feeling dizzy. What I said didn't do anything to help. That his form teacher would go spare if he bunked off again. Or that the school might call in social services, with everything that entailed. Nothing had any effect on his determination. And after a while I didn't feel like nagging.

Everything that had happened recently had sapped my strength. I wanted to conserve what little energy I had left. Later, I thought, as soon as I'd finished helping the creature, I'd focus on Robert. Just a little while longer, then I'd be back to protect him.
Tommy and I spent the week trying to figure out what to do. We had some ideas, but the problem was we couldn't implement them. Work at the mink farm had started up again, the place was full of people getting ready for the next round of skinning, and at night the guard dog ran loose on the site. Tommy had gone round on a couple of evenings, and every time there were vehicles parked in the yard.

‘I think they're inviting people in to look at him,' he said. ‘There's loads of cars. And my brother's there every night.'

To do what they liked, I thought: mistreat him, gradually take his life. Without any particular reason at all. Because they liked doing it. Because some people were simply made that way.

Or maybe there was a reason, but we just couldn't see it? Smuggled cigarettes and the creature, Dad, Leif and the junkie guy, Tommy's brothers and a load of other dodgy blokes, maybe they were all connected in some way we didn't understand. And then it would just take a single movement at the outer edge of that fine-mesh net for things to go wrong.

Where Dad was concerned at any rate, I did find out what he was using my room for. One night that week I used the Professor's skeleton keys to unlock the door. There were cartons of cigarettes stacked up on the floor, hundreds of them, and not just the Danish brands I'd seen him buy at the mink farm. There were German fags as well, which he must have got hold of somewhere else. It seemed like he was in the process of building up a warehouse, because there were way too many cartons for him to sell himself.

There were also a dozen video recorders with labels from a video rental place in Halmstad. Strangely enough, I felt relieved. At any rate, there was nothing worse here than tobacco and stolen video recorders.

One bit of good news that week was that the caretaker was getting better. L.G. told us in our physics lesson. He'd woken up from his coma and was remaining in hospital for now, under observation.
L.G. had even been to visit him. Some of the vertebrae in his neck were damaged and he would have to wear a neck support for the rest of the autumn. But he would get well again, the doctors assured. Relief spread through the class when the information came out. It was like everybody was going round smiling for days.

Plus Gerard had been arrested, which was equally good news, at least for me. According to what I heard, they'd found him in a summer cottage that belonged to some friends of Peder's parents. They'd decided to go in heavy-handed. Because he was under age, he couldn't be convicted in adult court, so instead he would be sent to borstal after Christmas. He was still banned from the school grounds, same as the rest of the gang. I was relieved at that; I didn't have the energy to go round being scared all the time.

Maybe it was true what Jessica claimed about a whole ball of string being about to unravel, but if it was, we weren't hearing anything about it at school. People were gossiping, saying they'd broken into some houses down by the beach and set fire to a youth centre in town, but it was all just rumour.

And all the while people were distancing themselves from Gerard and the gang, it was like I was starting to be seen in a more favourable light myself. On Thursday after PE, Jessica waved to me from where she stood fussing with her hair in front of the changing room mirror.

‘Are you coming on Saturday?' she asked.

‘Coming where?'

‘Didn't you get our invitation to the Halloween party?'

She appeared to be serious. Or else she was just seriously good at pretending.

‘I thought it was meant for someone else.'

‘But it's our last autumn together as a class. Just one more term then everything'll be over and people will go off in different directions. We should stick together for these last few months. It's important to share. Minus Gerard and those guys. What sickos. The caretaker actually could have died!'

She took an aerosol can out of her bag, gave it a shake and sprayed a little cloud over her hair.

‘I promise, it'll be loads of fun. We've been planning it for over a month. You can wear whatever fancy dress costume you want, like in America. That's how they celebrate Halloween over there. Lovisa's sister learned about it when she was there as an exchange student.'

‘Can Tommy come too?'

‘Lovisa's mum said she doesn't want it to get too big, but I actually think we should invite people from the other rooms in our year as well. Not the losers, obviously.'

She had finished with her hair now and took a lip balm out of her jeans pocket and stroked the tube back and forth across her lips. Like a pro, I thought. A pro at acting like a girl.

‘Want some?' she asked, holding out the tube. ‘My lips get so rough this time of year. You haven't got any cold sores, have you?'

I took her lip balm, made two passes over my lips and handed it back. Like I'd seen girls in our class do all through the years, a thing that reinforced companionship and indicated that they were together. My lips felt rigid, as if I'd got candle wax on them.

‘I look totally disfigured,' she said, inspecting her face half an inch away from the mirror. ‘I don't understand how it's got like this. I don't even smoke. And I've stopped eating chocolate. Having spots is actually worse than cancer. You coming, then?'