The American Girl (20 page)

“Loved her more than himself. That sort of thing is never healthy.”

“But,” now Sandra joined in with as steady a voice as possible. She struggled to remain calm and businesslike because she had her hands full trying to hold back the images that were popping up in her head again, facts that were mixing with fiction in a horrid way. The boy, who showed up again. A voice somewhere at the very back, Lorelei Lindberg’s voice, from Little Bombay:
They say that the boy has murdered someone, I wouldn’t go so far as to believe something like that, but there is definitely something unpleasant about him. How he sneaks around the house
.

So from this marsh a bit of this and a bit of that, old, new, truth and lies, she forced out her own voice and said as clearly and soberly as possible:

“But what’s so unclear then? How is the mystery, so to speak, UNSOLVED? He pushed her into the water and she drowned. Everything was a mistake: he loved her so much he couldn’t live without her and then he went and hanged himself. There isn’t anything strange about that. I mean, there isn’t a mystery about that, is there?”

She also shouted the last part and heard how her voice sounded hollow in the emptiness by the marsh.

“Well, of course,” Doris Flinkenberg said impatiently. “It’s not just that in and of itself. There is a factor X.”

Factor X
. And there he was of course. But not alone. On the beach opposite. They had come up there with their bags of beer and their cigarettes, their talk and their sour teenage excitement, which was now being spread across the marsh and with a slap disrupted all of the excitement and the magic. It was a small group on the tiny beach in the opening, maybe sixty–seventy feet away, but you could almost hear what they were saying to each other across the water since it was so quiet otherwise; Doris and Sandra had quickly crept down lower in the crevice so as not to be discovered.

Though they had nothing important to say, it was mostly one big raucous. It was Rita and Solveig and the brothers Järpe and Torpe Torpeson who often hung out together as a foursome during this time, and then there were some others in their wake. Rita Rat was in a bad mood as usual, and you could hear it. Rita managed to spread her irritability for miles around. Solveig stayed calmer, that is how it always was. Besides now she and Järpe Torpeson had their arms around each other as if they were married: Järpe daubed her ear with his tongue, lick, lick, and Solveig let out small small cries that were supposed to represent indignation but that expressed nothing other than some kind of bored enchantment. “That crazy Järpe he can never keep his hands in check.” And it was Torpe, off to the side, who was sitting
on the sand and drinking beer from a bottle. And Magnus von B. from the Second Cape, former general of the child army the Lilliputs on the Second Cape, but nowadays like grease on bacon with Bengt, and yes, he was there too of course.

Factor X.

Bengt was standing a bit off to the side, away from the others. He had walked all the way up to the edge of the water, he was smoking a cigarette and looking around. His gaze wandered about as usual, but suddenly it looked straight over the water, straight to the other side, up against the cliff where Sandra and Doris were hiding, stopped, focused, and saw.

Rita Rat came up next to him. Rita and Bencku spoke with each other, but so softly that you could not hear what they were saying. Plus Järpe and Torpe and Solveig and so on were talking the hind legs off a donkey in the background. Midsummer Eve. Such splendid fun. Torpe smashed the empty beer bottle against a rock.
Crash
. Finished another bottle.
Crash
. Smashed that one as well. And another and another and another.

But factor X. He looked across the water. Straight at the girls.

Though Doris and Sandra were no longer there. They had headed off through the woods, Sandra first, Doris after. Sandra ran as fast as she could, heart pounding, temples flushed, when she tripped over rocks and roots way out in parts of the woods where she had never been before. It was the deepest wood, where there were no paths at all, the part that lay closest to the marshlands where the marsh people whom Doris descended from had lived up until only a short while ago—now the area had been fixed up and would become an outdoor area for the county residents.

“Wait!” Doris puffed behind her. “What’s wrong with you? Stop! I can’t keep up!”

And little by little actually Sandra calmed down, with Doris safely behind her and with the growing distance to the marsh and Lore Cliff. She slowed down and there, suddenly, the woods opened into a glade. A soft, green moss spread itself out invitingly and she threw herself down on the ground, rolled around on her back and lay there and panted with exhaustion. Doris had ended up a good distance behind but when she caught up with Sandra she threw herself resolutely on the ground and in doing so landed so close to Sandra that she almost fell straight down on top of her. Then, instead of pulling away Doris put her arms around Sandra and they rolled around on the soft mat together, completely entangled like two wrestlers in a match or, well, like two people who are hugging. A completely normal hug. And that was what it was.

Doris, suddenly so merry and filled with laughter, giggling and soft, and if there was a game then Sandra was drawn into it at once. Also because she wanted to get away from the fear and the panic she had felt at the marsh a little while ago, and this was something else, something important. “Hey, what happened?” Doris laughed, whispering softly while she continued hugging Sandra, not to mention harder, and Sandra, she undeniably hugged back. “What happened?” Doris Flinkenberg whispered again but no longer as a question that should be answered but as a mantra, an affectionate and soft one, she was suddenly a purring kitten, so small and so soft.

She had hidden her face against Sandra’s neck, nibbled on the Loneliness&Fear shirt with her teeth, sniffed Sandra’s hair and stuck her tongue deep inside Sandra’s ear and played with it there so that she had a prickly and tickling feeling in her stomach. So, what were they doing? What WAS happening? And what was Doris really whispering? Did she whisper
happened
or
hands
now?

Did she mean what had just happened at the marsh, that which had gotten Sandra to take off, or the other, that which was happening right at this moment?

But, an end to the puzzling. Because in the middle of the thought that barely had time to be thought, Doris’s lips landed on Sandra’s lips and all the uncertainty was dispersed in one blow. Because what it was could not be mistaken.

It was a kiss. A wet and true one, teeth against teeth and a rather lively tongue that wriggled in after, not to mention rather determinedly. Bursting from a relatively unorganized mouth to a highly well-regulated one, like a greeting from the one kind to the other. But who was visiting whom? Because what was it that was circling around the Doristongue if not another tongue, a Sandratongue? Not to mention that it seemed happy, just as enthusiastic.

So, a short moment, but just that, there was seriousness in the middle of the game.

The seriousness spread between the girls, so proud and, yes, so serious.

Sandra felt a real sensation and it was both true and interesting and important, but decidedly not amusing, not at all.

Because what did this mean now? Was this the step into adulthood? That moment when everything changed at once and became something else? The moment when the story about Doris and Sandra took another road? But in that case, then which one?

Was it the road toward the definite and the limited, which also had a name? That which was not so open to all possibilities like the winding road they were now on?

If it was like that, in that case, did you want to take that step? Already now?

Suddenly she felt decidedly that no, she did not even want to think about it now.

She did not want to grow up. Not yet. Not now.

But Doris, what would happen to her then, in that case? Would she be alone with the feeling and the d-e-s-i-r-e and so on? In
that case it also was not any fun at all. Doris was supposed to come
along
, wherever you were, whatever you decided to do. That was the idea so to speak, the idea with everything.

But delightful relief, maybe Doris Flinkenberg was thinking the same way. Because the seriousness in the kiss had barely started and it was over. During that hundredth of a second in which the seriousness remained Doris Flinkenberg lay on top of Sandra Wärn and looked her in the eyes and Sandra looked back. Unfathomably.

A wee bit. And that was that.

And during the remaining hundredths of that second everything became normal again. Doris opened her mouth and said, suddenly with a voice that unmistakably resembled the voice it was supposed to resemble:

“I’m factor X. My name is Bengt.”

And then Sandra was back to reality. She shook herself free and sat up on the moss like someone dazed with sleep.

“Hi,” said Doris. “It wasn’t anything. What’s wrong with you? It was just a game.”

And Doris, she remained lying on the ground. She looked up at the sky and now she was talking again.

“Sandra, when you’re as lonely as I was. You know. Long ago. With marsh mama and marsh papa. Then you see. A lot. I saw, Sandra. All kinds of things. Both this and that.

“And what I saw? A lot of stuff, which I don’t understand what it was, of course. I was so young. It was terrible for me. No place to be. No home, not a real one. I used to go to the cousin’s house, to the Second Cape, and to the house on the First Cape. Those trips almost cost me my life later when marsh mama was going to punish me for them though I’ve already told you about that. But, in other words. I was quite young, but I remember what I saw. Absolutely certain. I saw factor X and the American girl. In the boathouse. They were together then and were doing things with each other even though she was probably five years older.”

“Like what?” Sandra asked nonchalantly in order to conceal the lump in her throat.

“Well,” Doris said seriously, “pretty much what we were just doing in the moss. And even more.”

“And what’s so important about that then?” Sandra blurted out hurriedly and mechanically.

“Don’t you understand?” Doris got up from the grass filled with impatient energy. “That’s what almost nobody knows. That she wasn’t just with Björn. She was with him too. He was thirteen years old. As old as we are now. And she was nineteen. She lived two lives. Björn didn’t know anything about it. Not in the beginning in any case.”

And Doris’s own thoughts lit a fire under her as well.

“Come. Now we have a chance! I’m going to show you something!” Doris flew up out of the moss. “We’re going there now.” She started walking again, quickly and with determination, with Sandra behind her. Of course Sandra had no choice even though she already suspected what Doris was thinking, where Doris was going. She did not want to go there, not for anything in the world. But she did not want to be left here either, in the moss, in the woods, which was also filled with evil eyes that were watching her when she was not with Doris Flinkenberg.

Still she was a bit surprised when she realized how close they were to the cousin’s property. They were not at all as lost as she had thought; in reality they were not lost at all, just a few hundred feet from the cousin’s property, where they were now walking up to the back corner of Bencku’s barn. Again Sandra was struck by how much Doris actually knew about how you could move around in the District unnoticed, that she really knew a lot of places no one else knew. Despite the fact that it was a result of Doris’s horrible past over in the marshlands Sandra could not escape feeling a pang of jealousy; suddenly she saw the difference between them so clearly. Personally she was the small, spoiled one, the one you barely needed to breathe on and she had fallen
over and hurt herself and started crying.
Fall down, death die
. They had incidentally played a game like that on the bottom of the pool in the house in the darker part, she and Doris Flinkenberg. Sandra had fallen, fallen, over and over again, but then of course they had always had pillows under. And all the fabric, the suddenly almost so silly silk fabrics that had once been in Little Bombay.

She, the little harelip, while Doris had been out in the world, been moving in it, making it hers.

Here from the corner of the barn you could see the entire cousin’s property without being seen by anyone else. You could see up to the First Cape too, not right into the garden but certainly far enough so that you could distinguish life and movement, music and voices. The Midsummer Eve party that they had left a few hours before now seemed to have gotten going for real. It was the kind of party that everyone in the District would seek out little by little. Also Rita and Solveig and Torpe and Järpe and them; they would pass by the house on the First Cape anyway in their search for the ultimate fun, which would not exist anywhere else, but they would still keep going. And Magnus von B. and Bencku. It was unavoidable. They would show up and then they would not be in a hurry to go anywhere.

And if you could see from the barn to the garden you could see from the garden down to the barn—and help! Sandra did not even dare think that thought through to the end.

“Come on.” And now Doris Flinkenberg was already standing in the door opening and hissed, “Quick!” But Sandra dug in her heels and stood as though frozen in place and just shook her head. Did not want to. No.
Not in there
. N-e-v-e-r.

Doris almost genuinely surprised.

“You’re not saying you’re afraid? Of Bengt?”

Doris cleared her throat as if it were something extraordinary.

Sandra did not answer, she just continued shaking her head.

“Idiot!” Now Doris became impatient for real. “This is our only chance. Now Bencku might be a murderer, but he really isn’t that dangerous!” And with these words whose ambivalence Doris herself did not reflect further on because they were pressed for time, Doris Flinkenberg took a resolute hold of her friend and pulled her into the darkness of the barn.