The Merman (25 page)

The phone started ringing again when I went into the kitchen to sort out my brother.

‘Aren't you going to answer it?' he asked.

‘If it's L.G. or the school welfare officer, I still don't feel like talking. Much less so if it's some concerned woman from the council.'

‘What if it's Mum or Dad, though?'

‘It's not, so you might as well not get your hopes up.'

T
he Mill was a combined arcade and café on the edge of Olofsbo. Kids from Glommen and Skogstorp often hung out there at weekends. In the summer there was a miniature golf course too, and an outdoor dining area. During the tourist season it was usually rammed with people, but in the autumn it was quieter.

Gerard was sitting at a table down at the far end with a cup of coffee. My school bag bounced against my hip as I walked over to him between the rows of pinball machines. I'd brought along four cartons of cigarettes. Just as he'd promised, Dad had cleared out my room before he left, but he was obviously in a hurry because he didn't manage to take everything. I found them under the bed. Hopefully they would work as a down payment.

‘You're on time,' Gerard said. ‘I appreciate that. How's your friend doing, by the way – the Hungarian?'

‘He's at his mum's place.'

I sat down on the chair opposite him. He took a drink from his cup, put it down again and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘He was lucky. He could just as well have ended up in hospital with smoke inhalation. Or with burns in the worst-case scenario. There's not much left of the house.'

‘You're gonna do time for that.'

‘For what? I have no idea what you're talking about. I just want my money. And yet you still haven't come up with it.'

I took the cartons of cigarettes out of my bag and put them on the table. ‘They're worth two hundred,' I said. ‘And they're easy to sell. I need more time to come up with cash.'

Gerard looked at me with a concerned expression, as if he was sad about something, but I knew he wasn't, I knew that nothing was right behind those placid brown eyes; everything was, like, short-circuited in him. Then he bent down under the table and took something out of a duffle bag.

‘You can keep those,' he said. ‘I've got more than enough myself.'

He was holding a carton of his own – the same German brand that had been stacked up in my room. I felt a shudder run down my spine. What was it Tommy's brother had said to Dad at the mink farm:
You can't have young kids working for you, Jonas
.

‘I want cash, Ironing Board. I've already got loads of fags. By the way, where's your old man keeping himself?'

It was Gerard who'd caused him to leave, I thought. It was Gerard he was terrified of. I wasn't sure how, but they were connected in some way.

‘People are ending up in a bad way because of you. Even made homeless, and you don't want anything like that to happen again, do you?'

‘You'll get the money next week. I promise.'

That's how it was. Even adults were scared of him. Because he had no boundaries. Because he was capable of anything. I mean, I'd seen it myself, by the kiosk last winter, in the common room when he'd nearly killed the caretaker. And then the Professor's house that he burnt to the ground, even though he must have known he was asleep inside. And something had happened to make Dad realise as well.

‘Let's say the day after tomorrow instead. At the latest. Eight o'clock. Remember, I warned you, Ironing Board, but you didn't listen.'

He finished the rest of his coffee, peered out of the window down to where you could just make out the sea beyond the rows of summer cottages.

‘By the way, d'you know anything about something going missing from a mink farm?'

I made every effort to appear relaxed. Relaxed and surprised at the same time.

‘Huh?'

‘Just wondering. I know Tommy's brothers found this thing, or rather caught it, and now it's disappeared. So I thought you might know something about it. You and Tommy are best mates, so maybe you've talked about it?'

‘Like I said, you'll get your money.'

‘It was at a mink farm near Olofsbo, a living creature. I saw it once myself, really fascinating, I wouldn't have thought a thing like that actually existed. But somebody cut a hole in the fence and went in and took it.'

He saw the creature, I thought. Tommy's brothers showed it to him. So he knows them, he buys fags off them, and maybe other stuff as well. He's taken over loads of business from Dad, joined forces with other criminals, maybe with that junkie guy who was at our place? But he's lying about the other stuff. He's not even guessing, he's just plucking it out of thin air to see how I react.

‘I haven't got a clue what you're talking about,' I said.

‘Okay. Just wanted to check.'

I was just as good a liar as him. Maybe even better. His expression revealed that he believed me.

A
s I was sitting in my room that evening, it struck me how hopeless everything was, that my circumstances basically consisted of a dwindling number of choices.

Gerard wanted cash and I had absolutely no idea where I was going to get any From a shop, I thought, if I could get to an unmanned till. Or the teachers' lounge at school. The bags and jackets hanging outside the office would have money in them, but how much would that net, a hundred kronor at most?

But there was another possibility if nothing else worked. People were prepared to pay to have young girls take their clothes off or to touch them. In Year 7 I briefly knew a girl who got money that way. She had a hard time at home just like me, hung around in the town centre because she had no other choice, and went round with a load of dodgy people. She had lived in various foster homes in the area but was actually from an entirely different part of the country. All you have to do is stand around long enough outside the Klitterbadet pool, she'd told me once, or in the town square in the evenings.

Sooner or later some bloke would always come up and make a sleazy proposal. And then she'd accompany him into the Kronan multi-storey car park or the public toilets by the Domus department store.

She disappeared from town soon after that, and I couldn't even remember her name. But I did remember being frightened by the idea. But desperate times call for desperate measures. If you're really up against it, everything has its price.

The phone rang again. It was past ten o'clock so it couldn't be from school or social services. Maybe it was the Professor who
needed to talk about what had happened. Or Mum calling from a phone box, wanting to explain what she'd done. Come up with an excuse that didn't ring true, so she wouldn't be plagued by a guilty conscience.

I waited for the phone to stop ringing before going into my brother's room. He'd fallen asleep with the light on. I tucked him in and switched off the light. Then I went downstairs and got the torch out of the cleaning cupboard.

I could hardly see my hand in front of my face as I cycled down towards the sea. A new low-pressure system had moved in. If there were any stars up in the sky, I couldn't see them. I pulled up the hood on my raincoat. It was bucketing down, and the rain was falling diagonally in the wind.

I left my bike behind a bus shelter down by the coastal road and took a shortcut across a field until I came to the path that led to the abandoned cottage. I couldn't see the house, and could just make out a structure between the fields. The rain ran down my hood in little streams, meandering before the edge, and then dripped onto my eyebrows and cheeks.

It felt as if the world was getting darker the further away I got from the main road. At one point I trod awkwardly in a rut and nearly sprained my ankle. I didn't dare turn on the torch yet; it would be visible from far away.

I passed the north face of the house. It looked creepy standing there abandoned with broken windows and a collapsed roof. Other eras brushed against me as I went by, past times that had nothing to do with me. I forced myself to look the other way, into the darkness, towards the root cellar on the other side of the yard.

I didn't turn on the torch until I was shielded by the trees. As I pushed the branches away from the door I could hear the creature inside. He was awake. And he knew that it was me who had come.

I felt sort of dizzy when I opened the door. He was luminescent in the dark. It was like sea-fire, I thought, only much brighter.
His scales were phosphorescent, and so were his eyes. The whole pool was illuminated; the bluish-green light shone on the walls, ceiling and the water around him. Maybe that's how he could see so far down there in the ocean depths: his body functioned like a sort of lamp.

He remained still a few inches below the surface of the water and looked at me. I was welcome there, he said, he'd been waiting for me. Where'd I been all this time? And I told him that some things had been going on that prevented me from coming.

I sat down on the bottom step. His smell hit me; of sea and seaweed, and other things I couldn't describe. I just sat there thinking about what had gone on over the last few days, sort of got it all out, went over everything that had happened while the creature asked questions, questions that went beyond themselves, or were hidden in themselves, were both questions and answers, as if they were inextricably linked like pearls inside oysters.

At one point he reached his hand out to me, brought it out of the water and put it in mine. I felt the claws tentatively close around my palm, how the webbing between his fingers clung to my skin. His hand was warm, much warmer than mine. Then he closed his gills, floated up to the surface, breached it with his face, opened his mouth... the mouth that was both human and a sea creature's... and drew in air through his throat before slowly sinking back into the water.

Strangely, I didn't feel cold. The water had been warmed by his body and served as a heater. I noticed that I was getting warm, so I undid my raincoat. The sound of the zip made me aware of the silence outside. It had stopped raining. There were footsteps coming across the yard, shoes or boots squelching through the mud.

The creature looked calm: if he could hear anything, he was definitely not afraid.

‘Wait,' I said. ‘I'll come back.'

I went up the steps. Squatting down, I replaced the door over the opening. Darkness again. The wind had died down. But the
creature was still talking to me:
Don't be afraid
, he said,
it's not anyone who's going to harm us, you're safe, everything will be all right
...

Tommy was standing six feet away from me with his back to the farmhouse.

Is that you, Nella?'

‘Who else would it be?'

‘I don't know. You can barely see your hand in front of your face.'

He put something down on the ground.

‘Fish,' he said. ‘A whole crate, straight off the boat. He must be hungry.'

His teeth glinted in the dark when he smiled.

‘I've been worried about you. You haven't been in school all week. And nobody answers your phone.'

‘A load of stuff has happened. How did you know I was here?'

‘I went round to your house. Just now. I had to check if everything was okay. Nobody opened the door when I knocked, but you'd forgotten to lock the door so I went in. Robert was in bed asleep. Nobody else was there, and I could only think of one place where you might be.'

He pushed the crate aside with his foot.

‘So I went back home and got some food for him. As long as we're here, I mean.'

He came over and put his arm around me.

‘What's happened?' he asked. ‘Tell me.'

And so I told him, about Mum and Dad who'd cleared off, about my fear that Robert and I would get split up, about the fire at the Professor's place which he already knew about, about Gerard who was behind everything, who was now making deals with his brothers, and about how he wanted his money in less than forty-eight hours' time. I told him about my plans for the next few days, how I was going to come up with the amount he claimed I owed him and how I was terrified it wouldn't work out. I started to cry as I told him all this, and I hated myself for it, because I was taking
a liberty, because the worst might not have even happened, and so I was not entitled to be sad yet.

‘I'll speak to my brothers,' said Tommy. ‘They might be able to get him to calm down. And by the way, I've got money. You can borrow some off me if the worst comes to the worst.'

I
got to the Mill at the agreed time. Gerard was on his own this time as well. He was standing at a pinball machine, feeding coins into the slot. He nodded to me when I came in the door, pressed the start button and started playing. I sat down at the table and waited, the same table where we'd sat the last time, listened to the clatter of the pinball flippers, the sound the machine made for every bonus, and the rattle when he finally got a free play. He glanced at the counter to remember his score before leaving to sit down.

‘Have you got the money?' he asked.

I counted it out onto the table, fourteen hundred-kronor notes and the rest in tens.

The arcade was just as empty as last time, just one girl who was standing by the till counter drying cutlery. Gerard gathered up the banknotes and counted them one more time.

‘That's right,' he said. ‘Did you rob a newsagent's or something?'

‘It's a loan.'

‘From Tommy, I suppose? He spoke to his brothers about us, I heard. Makes no difference, Ironing Board. Business is business... '

He put the money back down on the table and looked over at the pinball game that stood flashing with a new ball in play.

‘If I'm honest, it makes me bloody furious that you're trying to get Tommy's brothers involved in this. Just like it makes me furious when somebody snitches to the cops or L.G. about something I've done. This is between me and you.'