Midnight Sun (12 page)

‘According to him, your name is Jon, not Ulf.'

‘Did you ever believe it was Ulf?'

‘No.'

‘But you still sent him off in the wrong direction. You lied. What does your book say about that?'

She nodded in the direction of the chopping. ‘He says we need to look after you. The book has something to say about that as well.'

We sat in silence for a while. Me with my hands on the table, she with hers in her lap.

‘Thanks for taking care of Knut after the funeral.'

‘Don't mention it. How is he taking it?'

‘Well, really.'

‘And you?'

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Women always find a way of coping.'

The chopping had stopped. He'd soon be back. She looked at me again. Her eyes had taken on a colour I'd never seen before, and the look in them had a corrosive intensity. ‘I've changed my mind. I want to know what you're running from.'

‘Your original decision was probably more sensible.'

‘Tell me.'

‘What for?'

‘Because I believe you're a good person. And good people's sins can always be forgiven.'

‘What if you're wrong, what if I'm not a good person? Does that mean I'd end up burning in that hell of yours?' It came out more bitterly than I intended.

‘I'm not wrong, Ulf, because I can see you. I can see you.'

I took a deep breath. I still didn't know if the words were going to come out of my mouth. I was inside her eyes, blue, blue as the sea below you when you're ten years old and standing on a rock and your whole being wants to jump, apart from your legs, which won't move.

‘I had a job that involved chasing drug-related debts and killing people,' I heard myself say. ‘I stole money from my employer, and now he's hunting me. And I've managed to get Knut, your ten-year-old son, involved in this as well. I'm paying him to spy for me. Well, not even that – he gets paid if he can report anything suspicious. For instance, if he sees the sort of people who wouldn't hesitate to kill a young boy if it was necessary.' I shook a cigarette out of the packet. ‘How am I doing on forgiveness now?'

She opened her mouth just as Knut opened the door.

‘There,' he said, dropping the wood on the floor in front of the stove. ‘I'm starving now.'

Lea looked at me.

‘I've got tinned fish balls,' I said.

‘Yuck,' Knut said. ‘Can't we have fresh cod instead?'

‘I'm afraid I haven't got any.'

‘Not here. In the sea. We can go fishing. Can we, Mum?'

‘It's the middle of the night,' she said quietly. She was still staring at me.

‘That's the best time to go fishing,' Knut said, jumping up and down. ‘Please, Mum!'

‘We haven't got a boat, Knut.'

It took a moment for him to realise what she meant. I looked at Knut. His face darkened. Then he brightened up again. ‘We can take Grandpa's boat. It's in the boathouse, he said I could.'

‘Did he?'

‘Yes! Cod! Cod! You like cod, don't you, Ulf?'

‘I love cod,' I said, meeting her gaze. ‘But I don't know if your mother wants any right now.'

‘Yes, she does, don't you, Mum?'

She didn't answer.

‘Mum?'

‘We'll let Ulf decide,' she said.

The boy squeezed between the table and my chair, forcing me to look at him.

‘Ulf?'

‘Yes, Knut?'

‘You can have the tongue.'

The boathouse lay some hundred metres from the jetty. The smell of rotten seaweed and salt water stirred some vague summer memories into life. Something about having my head poked through a life jacket that was too small, a cousin showing off because they were rich enough to have a boat
and
a cabin, and a red-faced uncle swearing because he couldn't get the outboard motor started.

It was dark inside the boathouse, and there was a pleasant smell of tar. Everything we needed for fishing was already in the boat, its keel held in a wooden cradle.

‘Isn't that a bit big for a rowing boat?' I estimated that it was five or six metres long.

‘Oh, it's no more than medium-sized,' Lea said. ‘Come on, we've all got to push.'

‘Dad's was much bigger,' Knut said. ‘A ten-oared boat, with a mast.'

We launched the boat, and I managed to clamber in without getting my legs too wet.

I fitted the oars in place on one of the two pairs of rowlocks, and began to row out away from shore with calm, strong strokes. I recalled putting a lot of effort into being better at rowing than my cousin during the one summer that I, poor, fatherless relation, was allowed to be a guest there. Even so, I thought I could see that Lea and Knut weren't impressed.

Some way out I pulled the oars in.

Knut crept towards the back of the boat, leaned over the gunwale, threw the line out and stared after it. I could see the distant look in his eyes as his imagination roamed free.

‘Good lad,' I said, taking off the jacket that had been hanging on a hook in the boathouse.

She nodded.

There was no wind, and the sea – or ocean, as Lea and Knut called it – was shiny as a mirror. It looked solid enough for us to walk towards the red cauldron of the sun sticking above the horizon off to the north.

‘Knut said you haven't got anyone waiting for you back home,' she said.

I shook my head. ‘Fortunately not.'

‘That must be strange.'

‘What?'

‘Not having anyone. No one thinking of you. No one looking after you. Or no one to look after.'

‘I've tried,' I said, loosening the hook from one of the lines. ‘And I couldn't handle it.'

‘You couldn't handle having a family?'

‘I couldn't handle looking after them,' I said. ‘I'm – as you must have realised by now – not the sort of man you can rely on.'

‘I hear you say that, Ulf, but I don't know if it's true. What happened?'

I pulled the spoon bait free from the line. ‘Why are you still calling me Ulf?'

‘That's what you told me your name was, so that's the name I use. Until you want to be called something different. Everyone should be allowed to change their name every so often.'

‘And how long have you been called Lea?'

She screwed one eye up. ‘Are you asking a woman how old she is?'

‘I didn't mean . . .'

‘Twenty-nine years.'

‘Hmm. Lea's a nice name, no reason to change—'

‘It means “cow”,' she interrupted. ‘I'd like to be called Sara. That means “princess”. But my father said I couldn't be called Sara Sara. So instead I've been called cow for twenty-nine years. What do you have to say about that?'

‘Well.' I thought for a moment. ‘Moo?'

At first she looked at me in disbelief. Then she started to laugh. That deep laugh. Slow guffaws. Knut turned round in the stern. ‘What is it? Did he tell a joke?'

‘Yes,' she said, without taking her eyes off me. ‘I think he did.'

‘Tell me!'

‘Later.' She leaned towards me. ‘So, what happened?'

‘I don't know that anything happened.' I cast the line out. ‘I was just too late.'

She frowned. ‘Too late for what?'

‘To save my daughter.' The water was so clear that I could see the shimmering spoon lure sink deeper and deeper. Until it vanished out of sight in the greenish black darkness. ‘When I finally had the money she was already in a coma. She died three weeks after I had scraped together the cost of the treatment in Germany. Not that it would have made any difference, it was already too late. At least that's what the doctors said. But the point is that I couldn't do what I was supposed to. I let her down. That's been the constant refrain to my life. But the fact that I couldn't handle . . . that I couldn't even manage when . . .'

I sniffed. Maybe I shouldn't have taken the jacket off; after all, we were close to the North Pole. I felt something on my lower arm. My hair stood on end. A touch. I couldn't remember the last time a woman had touched me. Until I remembered that it was less than twenty-four hours ago. To hell with this place, these people, all this.

‘That was why you stole the money, wasn't it?'

I shrugged.

‘You stole the money for your daughter, even though you knew they'd kill you if they got hold of you.'

I spat over the side of the boat to see something break the terrible stillness of the water. ‘It sounds good when you put it like that,' I said. ‘Let's just say I was a father who waited until it was too late to do anything for his daughter.'

‘But it was already too late, wasn't it, according to the doctors?'

‘They said so, but they didn't
know
. No one
knows
. Not me, not you, not the priest, not the atheist. So we believe. Believe, because that's better than realising that there's only one thing waiting for us down in the depths, and that's darkness, cold. Death.'

‘Do you really believe that?'

‘Do you really believe there's a pearly gate with angels and a bloke called St Peter? Actually, no, you don't believe that – a sect about ten thousand times bigger than yours believes in saints. And they think that if you don't believe precisely what they believe in, down to the smallest detail, then you'll end up in hell. Yep, Catholics believe that you Lutherans are heading straight down to the basement. And you believe that's where they're going. You really were pretty lucky being born among true believers up here near the North Pole instead of in Italy or Spain. Then you'd have had a very long road to salvation.'

I saw the line go slack, and pulled at it. It jerked, apparently caught on something; it must be shallow here. I tugged harder and the line came free of whatever it was caught on.

‘You're angry, Ulf.'

‘Angry? I'm fucking furious, that's what I am. If that god of yours exists, why does he play with humanity like that, why does he let one person be born into suffering and another into a life of excess, or one with a chance of finding the faith that's supposed to save them, while the majority never get to hear a thing about god. Why would he . . . how could he . . .?'

Damn cold.

‘Take your daughter?' she asked quietly.

I blinked. ‘There's nothing down there,' I said. ‘Just darkness, death, and—'

‘Fish!' Knut cried.

We turned towards him. He was already hauling in the line. Lea patted my arm one last time, then let go of me and leaned against the gunwale.

We stared down into the water. Waiting for whatever he had caught to come into view. For some reason I found myself thinking of a yellow sou'wester. And suddenly I had a premon-ition. No, it was more than a premonition. I knew for certain: he would come back. I closed my eyes. Yes, I could see it quite clearly. Johnny would come back. He knew I was still here.

‘Ha!' Knut said jubilantly.

When I opened my eyes, a large cod was wriggling in the bottom of the boat. Its eyes were bulging, as if it couldn't believe what it was seeing. Which was fair enough – this could hardly have been how it thought things would turn out.

WE ROWED TO
an island where the keel scraped softly against the sand. It was only a couple of hundred metres between the gently rounded island and the mainland, which tumbled abruptly and darkly into the sea from the heather-covered plateau. Knut took his shoes off, waded ashore and tied the boat to a rock. I offered to carry Lea, but she just smiled and made me the same offer.

Knut and I made a fire and lit it while Lea gutted and cleaned the fish.

‘Once we caught so many fish that we had to fetch the wheelbarrow to empty the boat,' Knut said. He was already licking his lips.

I couldn't ever remember being that fond of fish when I was a boy. Maybe that's because it was mostly served in the form of deep-fried fritters or fish fingers, or shaped into balls in a white, semen-like sauce.

‘There's a lot of food here,' Lea said, wrapping the entire fish in silver foil and placing it directly on the flames. ‘Ten minutes.'

Knut clambered onto my back, clearly excited at the prospect of food. ‘Wrestling match!' he cried, clinging onto me even when I tried to stand up. ‘The southerner must die!'

‘There's a mosquito on my back,' I yelled, and bucked, tossing him back and forth like a rodeo rider until he landed on the sand with a happy yelp.

‘If we're going to wrestle, we'd better do it properly,' I said.

‘Yes! What's properly?'

‘Sumo wrestling,' I said, then picked up a stick and drew a circle in the fine sand. ‘First one to make the other person step outside the circle wins.'

I showed him the ceremony that preceded each bout, and how we should squat opposite each other outside the circle and clap our hands once.

‘That's a prayer for the gods to be with us in the fight, so we aren't alone.'

I saw Lea frown, but she didn't say anything.

The boy followed my actions as I slowly raised my palms, looked down, and then put them on my knees.

‘That's to crush evil spirits,' I said, then stamped my feet.

Knut did the same.

‘Ready . . . steady . . .' I whispered.

Knut twisted his face into an aggressive grimace.

‘Go!'

He leaped into the circle and tackled me with his shoulder.

‘You're out!' he declared triumphantly.

My footprint outside the circle left no room for doubt. Lea laughed and clapped.

‘It's not over yet,
rikishi
Knut-
san
from Finnmark
ken
,' I snarled, and squatted down again. ‘First to five is Futabayama.'

‘Futa . . .?' Knut quickly crouched down on the other side.

‘Futabayama. Sumo legend. Big fat bastard. Ready . . . steady . . .'