Let the Old Dreams Die (2 page)

With the help of Tina’s smallholding and her financial support, he had been able to increase his stock to two breeding males, four bitches and five young dogs that were next in line to be sold. One of the bitches was a real champion, and Roland often took her to shows and competitions where he made new business contacts and screwed around.

It happened as a matter of course, it had become part of their everyday life. Tina no longer asked him about it. She could smell when he had been with another woman, and never reproached him. He was company, and she had no right to hope for anything more.

If life is a prison, then there is a moment in a person’s life when she realises exactly where her walls are located, where the boundaries to her freedom lie. Whether there are walls, or possible escape routes. The end of year party when she left school had been one of those moments for Tina.

After everyone in the class had got fairly drunk in the hired venue, they drove down to the park in Norrtälje to sit on the grass and finish off the last of the wine.

Tina had always felt uncomfortable at parties because they
usually ended up with people pairing off. But not tonight. On this occasion it was the
class
that counted, this was their last evening together, and she was part of the group.

When the wine had been drunk and the in-jokes had been trotted out for the very last time, they lay sprawled on the grass, not wanting to go home, not wanting to say goodbye. Tina was so drunk that what she thought of in those days as her sixth sense was no longer working. She was just one of the group, lying there and refusing to grow up.

It was very pleasant, and it frightened her. The fact that alcohol was a kind of solution. If she just drank enough, she lost the thing that made her different from everyone else. Perhaps there was some sort of medication that could block it out, stop her from knowing things she didn’t want to know.

She was lying there thinking along these lines when Jerry shuffled over to her. Earlier in the evening he had written in her hat: ‘I’ll never forget you. Love Jerry.’

They had worked together on the school newspaper, written several things that had circulated all around the school, been quoted by their fellow students. They had the same dark sense of humour, took the same pleasure in writing poisonous articles about the teachers who deserved it.

‘Hi.’ He lay down next to her, resting his head on his hand.

‘Hi yourself.’ She was almost seeing double. The pimples on Jerry’s face faded away, became blurred, and he looked almost attractive in the semi-darkness.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said. ‘We’ve had so much fun.’

‘Mmm.’

Jerry nodded slowly for a long time. His eyes were shiny, unfocused behind his glasses. He sighed and adjusted his position so that he was sitting cross-legged.

‘There’s something…something I’ve been wanting to say to you.’

Tina rested her hands on her stomach and gazed up at the stars, piercing the foliage with their needles of light.

‘Oh?’

‘It’s…well…’ Jerry ran a hand over his face and tried to stop slurring. ‘The thing is, I like you. I mean, you know that.’

Tina waited. She had thought she needed a pee, but now she realised it was a kind of tingling feeling. A warm nerve trembling in a previously unexpected place.

Jerry shook his head. ‘I don’t know how to…Right. I’m just going to say it, because I want you know how I feel, now we…now we might not see each other again.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, it’s like this. I think you’re a bloody fantastic girl. And I wish…this is what I wanted to say…I wish I could meet someone who’s exactly like you, but who doesn’t look like you.’

The nerve stopped trembling. Grew, went cold. She didn’t want to hear the answer, but she asked the question anyway:

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well…’ Jerry banged his hand down on the grass. ‘For fuck’s sake, you know what I mean. You’re…you’re such a bloody fantastic girl and you’re great to be with. I…oh, what the hell: I love you. I do. There. I’ve said it. But it’s just…’ He banged his hand on the grass again, more helplessly this time.

Tina finished the sentence for him. ‘But it’s just that I’m too ugly to go out with.’

He reached for her hand. ‘Tina. You mustn’t…’

She got up. Her legs were steadier than she’d expected. She looked down at Jerry, still sitting on the grass holding his hand out to her, and said, ‘I don’t. Why don’t you take a look at yourself in the fucking mirror.’

She strode away. Only when she was sure she was out of sight and Jerry wasn’t following her did she allow herself to collapse
into a bush. The branches scratched her face, her bare arms, finally embraced her. She drew her body in on itself, pressed her hands to her face.

What hurt most was the fact that he had been trying to be kind. That he had said the nicest thing he could say about her.

She lay there in her prickly cocoon and wept until she had no tears left. No doors. No way out. Her body wasn’t even a prison, more like a cage inside which it was impossible to sit, stand or lie down.

The passing years hadn’t improved matters. She had learned to tolerate life inside the cage, to accept her limitations. But she refused to look in the mirror. The revulsion she saw in the eyes of other people when she met them for the first time was mirror enough.

When all hope was lost for the people she caught smuggling, they sometimes started screaming at her. Screaming about the way she looked. Something about Mongols, about the fact that she ought to be put out of her misery. She never got used to it. That was why she let others do the tough stuff once she had pointed out a miscreant. To avoid the horror when the acting stopped and the mask slipped.

An elderly woman was sitting on the steps of the little cottage, reading a book. A bike was propped up against the fence. The woman lowered the book as Tina went by and carried on staring for just a little too long after they had nodded to one another.

The summer had begun. The woman’s eyes burned into her back as she walked into the house and found Roland sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop. He looked up when she came in. ‘Hi. The first guest has arrived.’

‘Yes. I saw her.’

He turned his attention back to the computer. Tina looked at the guest book that lay open on the table and discovered that
the woman’s name was Lillemor, and her home address was in Stockholm. The majority of their guests came from Stockholm or Helsinki. Plus the odd German en route to Finland.

Renting out the cottage for the summer had been Roland’s idea, after he heard how well things were going for the hostel a couple of kilometres down the road. That had been early on in their relationship, and Tina had gone along with it because she wanted him to feel he had a role in deciding how the place was run. The kennels came six months later.

‘Listen, I think I’ll probably go down to Skövde this weekend,’ said Roland. ‘I think we might just do it this time.’

Tina nodded. Tara, the pit bull bitch, had been named Best in Class twice, but still hadn’t won Best in Show, which would really put Roland’s kennels on the map. It was like an obsession. And a good excuse for going away, of course. Having a bit of fun.

Even if Roland had been in the mood for talking, she wouldn’t have been able to tell him what had happened at work. Instead she went out into the forest, to her tree.

Summer comes late to Roslagen. Even though it was the beginning of June, only the birch trees were in full leaf; the aspens and alders were a pale green shimmer amid the eternal dark green of the conifers.

She went along the little track leading to the flat rocks. In the forest she was safe, she could think without worrying about pointing fingers or drawn-out looks. Even as a little girl she had been happiest in the forest where no one could see her. After the accident it had been several months before she was brave enough to go out again, but when she did go out, the pull was so much stronger as a result. And she went straight to the scene of the accident, then as now.

She called it the Dance Floor, because it was the kind of place where you could imagine the elves dancing on summer evenings. You went up a slight incline, then the forest opened out into a
plateau, a series of flat rocks with a single tall pine tree growing out of a deep crevice. When she was little she had thought of the pine as the central point of the earth, the axis around which everything spun like a merry-go-round.

Nowadays the pine was no more than the ghost of a tree: a split trunk with a few bare branches sticking out from the sides. Once upon a time the rocks had been covered with fallen needles. Now there were no needles left to fall, and the wind had blown away the old ones.

She sat down next to the tree, rested her shoulder on the trunk and patted it. ‘Hello, old friend. How are you?’

She had had countless conversations with the tree. When she finally got home from Norrtälje that night after the end of term party, she went straight to the pine tree and told him everything, weeping against the bark. He was the only one who understood, because they shared the same fate.

She was ten years old. The last week of the summer holiday. Since she didn’t really like playing with other children, she had spent the summer helping her father work on the cottage, and walking and reading in the forest, of course.

On that particular day she had taken one of the Famous Five books with her. It might have been
Five Go to Billycock Hill
. She couldn’t remember, and the book had been ruined.

She had been sitting under the pine tree reading when the rain caught her unawares. In just a few seconds it went from drizzle to a downpour. After a couple of minutes the rocks were a delta of gushing rivers. Tina stayed where she was, the dense crown of the pine tree forming such an effective umbrella that she was able to carry on reading, with only the odd drop of rain landing on her book.

The thunderstorm moved across the forest, drawing closer.
Eventually there was a crash so loud that she could feel the vibration in the stones beneath her, and she got scared and closed her book, thinking it might be best to try to get home in spite of the weather.

Then there was nothing but a bright white light.

Her father found her an hour later. If he hadn’t known that she often went to the tree, it could have been days, even weeks.

She was lying underneath the crown of the tree. The lightning had snapped off the top of the tree, raced down the trunk and continued on its way into the girl down at the bottom, at which point the crown had fallen and landed on top of the child. Her father said his heart stopped when he reached the plateau and saw the shattered tree. Exactly what he feared most had happened.

He pushed his way in among the branches and caught a glimpse of her lying there. With a strength he didn’t know he possessed he managed to overturn the crown and get her out. Much later he said that what had really stuck in his memory was the
smell
.

‘It smelled like…like when you’re trying to start the car with jump leads and you accidentally short-circuit the whole thing. You get sparks and…that exact same smell.’

Her nose, ears, fingers and toes had been black. Her hair had been a single clump stuck to her head, and the Famous Five book in her hand was almost burnt to a crisp.

At first he had thought she was dead, but when he put his ear to her chest he had heard her heart beating, a faint ticking. He had run through the forest with her in his arms, driven as fast as he could to the hospital in Norrtälje, and her life had been saved.

Her face, which had been less than attractive before the accident, was now actually ugly. The cheek that had been turned towards the trunk was so badly burned that the skin never healed properly, but remained permanently dark red. Incredibly, her eye had survived,
but her eyelid was stuck in a half-closed position that made her look constantly suspicious.

When she started to earn decent money she looked into the possibility of plastic surgery. Yes, skin could certainly be grafted, but since the nerve damage was so deep it was unlikely the new skin would take. They wouldn’t even consider touching the eyelid because an operation could damage the tear duct.

She gave it a go. Paid to let them scrape skin from her back and graft it onto her face. The result was as expected. After a week the skin was no longer getting any oxygen, and it shrivelled and died.

Plastic surgery had made great strides in the intervening years, but she had accepted her fate and had no intention of trying again. The tree hadn’t got better, so why should she?

‘I don’t understand it,’ she said to the tree. ‘There have been times I’ve had my doubts, when I thought someone might just be carrying an extra bottle or two, and I’ve let it go. But this man, he…’

She leaned her healthy cheek—the one that had today received its first spontaneous kiss since she was a child—against the trunk and rubbed it up and down on the rough bark.

‘I was absolutely certain. That was why I thought it was a bomb, that metal box. Something major. And after all, they do say there’s a risk that the ferries will be the next terrorist target. But why should anyone coming
off
the ferry smuggle a bomb, now there’s a question…’

She kept on talking. The tree listened. Eventually she got around to the other issue.

‘…and I don’t understand that either. It must have been a way of showing that he had the upper hand. A kiss on the cheek, there there, you have no idea what’s going on. Like some kind of revenge. What do you think? And it’s hardly surprising after what he’d been subjected to, but it’s a funny way of doing it…’

Dusk had started to fall by the time she finished. Before she got up she patted the tree and asked, ‘And what about you? How are you getting on? Aches and pains all the time. Life’s hell. I know. OK. I know. Take care of yourself. Bye bye.’

When she got home, Lillemor was sitting on the porch with a paraffin lamp glowing. They waved to one another. She would have a word with Roland. No more after this summer.

That evening she wrote in her diary:
I hope he comes back. Next time I’ll have him.