The Merman (17 page)

But the Professor wouldn't be the Professor if he hadn't been one step ahead.

‘Is the fridge empty again?' he asked. ‘Take as much as you like, Nella. This new medication seems to make me lose my appetite. There's enough for Robert as well.'

I'd cut my brother's hair so many times I could do it in my sleep. His hair that had to be dampened first and then combed out before it could be cut. The whorl above his right temple that I needed to be
careful with, otherwise the hair wouldn't lie neatly. He sat stock-still on a stool next to the bathtub as big blond wisps fell onto the floor.

I sensed the smell of him, that special Robert smell that was sort of intensified when his hair was wet. It was like it had always been there, I thought, as if it was a part of me.

‘Do you think the police have caught Gerard yet?' he asked, sizing himself up in the mirror.

‘I dunno.'

‘I hope so. And I hope the caretaker will be okay again. I like him. Just like I like the Professor. Be sure to thank him for the food.'

I felt ashamed, even though I didn't want to. Once when I was in Year Six I read an article in a magazine about children who were poor because their parents were unemployed. I could identify with every situation they described. Not having a packed lunch to take along on school outings and claiming to have forgotten it. Going round in clothes you'd outgrown, being hungry during the school holidays, not going to birthday parties because you couldn't afford to bring a present. It was the shame itself that was worst of all, feeling ashamed to tell the truth when teachers noticed you had holes in your trainers or when they got angry you didn't bring a pair of wellies for the outdoor day as they'd instructed. Or that everybody else had school bags while you came with your schoolbooks in a plastic carrier bag, which is what Robert and I had done through the later years of primary school. Or the shame I felt even though I didn't want to, when the Professor put the leftover vegetable casserole into a plastic tub and gave it to me.

‘You know something, Nella?'

I ran my fingers through his hair. It was still so amazingly soft, just like when he was little.

‘What's that?'

‘I hope Dad ends up back inside. That he does something stupid so the police arrest him. Is it strange to think that?'

‘No. That's what I think too.'

‘Good. Then we think the same way.'

He grew silent and smiled at me tentatively in the mirror. But it was like I was somewhere else. Mermaids had never existed, I thought. And no mermen, either. Only in legends and people's imaginations. And yet he was there in Tommy's hut. Just as surely as my brother was sitting in front of me.

M
y school bag was hanging on my locker door handle on Friday morning, but no one was there. I'd overslept, and the corridor was deserted. My brother had left earlier. I'd asked him to wake me before he went, but apparently he forgot in his hurry.

Someone had put a note through the door: an invitation from Jessica and Lovisa to a party. Either they'd got the wrong locker, or else they wanted to play a trick on me. There was no name on the note. Presumably it was meant for Marcus Larsson, the minister of fun who had the locker to the left of mine. I folded it up and shoved it into the gap under his locker door.

To my surprise, everything was still in its place in my bag. My exercise books, pens, the lock picks I'd borrowed from the Professor. The diary where I'd marked my brother's lesson days and everything else he was too young to keep track of himself: dentist's appointments, appointments with the optician and the skin specialist.

‘Pure luck I found it first... '

It was Tommy. He was perching in a niche behind the coat racks.

‘It was underneath a chair that got knocked over. I don't know what might have happened if they'd found it.'

He hopped down onto the floor. The look he gave me was anything but friendly.

‘What were you doing there, Nella?'

‘I dunno.'

‘Dunno. That's no answer. I've had to stay home all week and help out because of you. Olof's in hospital.'

He took hold of my arm and squeezed it. He'd never done
anything like that before, never been violent. That didn't exist in our world.

‘Don't you get it? It could've killed him. God only knows how, but it had managed to work its way loose from the cable. And then it lay in wait, like a spider, for someone to get too close. And when my brother did, it broke his arm. Just snapped it, like a dry twig.'

It gradually dawned on me what had happened. When the brothers returned to the hut, Olof, the younger of the two, went over to see if the creature was awake. And before he knew what was going on, it had grabbed hold of his arm. The bone snapped up by his elbow. It also tore open a half-inch-deep wound along his whole forearm with its claws. Rickard, the elder brother, came to the rescue with a jack and beat the creature until it was unconscious. My bag fell off the chair in the melee.

They got in their van as fast as they could and drove to the hospital in Halmstad. Olof was still there because his arm was so badly injured the doctors had to operate several times. Rickard drove back to Glommen. Together with Jens, they moved the creature to a different place.

‘Where did they take it?' I asked.

‘I'm not allowed to tell.'

‘What does it matter now?'

‘It matters because of you, Nella. Somebody broke into the hut, and so that person might have seen what was in there. Things that shouldn't be seen. And now I'm not talking about a sea monster.'

He looked sort of doubtfully at me.

‘So what are you talking about, then?'

‘I said forget it!'

Tommy looked out of the window. The noise of tools could be heard faintly from the woodworking room. And the rattle of trolleys outside the dining hall.

‘Is it hurt?' I asked, and heard my voice quivering. ‘You said they beat it unconscious.'

‘Yeah. And I don't know why I'm telling you about it.'

‘Because you don't like what's going on either.'

‘It was you who loosened the cable, wasn't it? You could've just stood there and looked at it. And given it some food or water or whatever you wanted to do. But did you have to try and release it?'

‘But it's suffering.'

He was quiet again, just muttered something to himself, sort of forming his lips into words I couldn't catch.

‘It understands what I say, Tommy. And I understand it. It thinks in a way I can understand... or in a way that makes me understand. I don't know if I can explain.'

I tried to tell him what I meant. It was precisely as I put it, yet different. The creature had sort of made me know what it was thinking, even though it thought in a way that was so different it couldn't be expressed in words. And in the same way, it understood me. Even I could hear how messed-up that sounded.

‘You can believe what you want,' I said. ‘But it's true.'

‘I haven't got a clue what's true. It shouldn't even be there. It doesn't belong here. If there's anywhere it does belong, it's in the sea.'

‘Well then, we should take it back there!'

Tommy gave me a look that seemed to say he hadn't quite decided whether or not I was crazy.

‘We can't.'

‘Of course we can. First it just needs some treatment. Otherwise it won't survive with those injuries.'

‘The way you're talking, it's like we're talking about a person. But a real person is lying on an operating table in Halmstad right now, with injuries caused by that thing.'

‘What would you have done if somebody had locked you up and tied you down? You'd try to defend yourself, wouldn't you?'

I thought about what Lazlo had told me. The legends about mermaids only described female creatures, but the one I saw in the hut was a male. ‘Mermen' was the word the Professor had used –
a merman
. It still didn't matter. Whatever it was, I'd promised to help it. It was as if everything depended on that.

‘There's even a name for them,' I said. ‘Mermen.'

Tommy shrugged, as if he was giving up.

‘Where did they move it to?'

‘To the mink farm near Olofsbo. Where your dad used to work. Where Jens works now.'

‘If I can prove it understands what I say, will you promise to help me?'

‘I'm not promising anything. Come on. There's forty minutes left of art. The teacher's off sick. If we're lucky, the supply teacher won't record us as being absent.'

There was some sort of meeting going on in the art classroom. L.G. was standing in front at the lectern, looking out grimly over the class. The supply teacher was sitting in a chair behind him with a piece of chalk in her hand.

‘... so if any of you know where Gerard is hiding, I want you to tell me. You can do it anonymously if you want. Write a letter. Or ring me at home after school. I will not reveal anyone's name. It's important that we get hold of him. His parents are worried. And as I said, the police would like to have a chat with him.'

‘Is there a warrant out for him?' asked Sandra, appearing to relish the thought.

‘No, he's a bit young for that. It's more like they're searching for him.'

‘How's the caretaker doing? I heard it was serious.'

‘Not too good, if I'm honest. He slipped into a coma last night.' ‘Blood clots,' said a voice from the other side of the classroom. When I looked over, I noticed a policewoman who stood leaning against the wall. ‘That can happen after severe trauma to the head... large accumulations of blood that put pressure on the brain.'

‘And where are Peder and Ola?' someone asked.

‘They're at home,' said L.G., wiping the sweat from his forehead with his shirt sleeve. ‘Both of them have been suspended from school while the investigation is under way.'

‘So they're not allowed to come here?'

‘That's right.'

He was sweating under his armpits as well: two large patches were visible on his shirt. He looked really on edge.

‘What investigation? About what happened to the caretaker?' ‘Along with some other things,' said the policewoman by the wall. ‘But it's nothing to do with you pupils. It's nothing to do with things that have happened here at school.'

‘We just want to keep you informed,' said L.G. ‘You're entitled to know what's going on. And as I said, you can come and speak to me if there's anything worrying you.'

When they left the classroom, I tried to piece together what I had heard. So the caretaker's condition had worsened during the night. When he was taken to hospital he'd been awake, but then he had begun vomiting and lost consciousness. Gerard had been in hiding since the attack, and according to the police Ola and Peder were refusing to say where he was. They were certain they knew, but they hadn't said a peep, not even during a lengthy interrogation at the police station. Their parents had tried to talk them round, but their loyalty to their boss clearly outweighed that.

‘All three of them are gonna get locked up for this,' Tommy said as the class started to return to its usual routine.

‘What else do you think they've done?'

‘Haven't got a clue. But it must be some serious stuff. And anyway, you won't have to worry about the money for a while.'

But I was not nearly so sure about that.

The rest of the lesson continued in the usual fashion whenever a supply teacher tried to take command. Nobody cared about the assignment: a frame from a comic on the overhead projector that we were supposed to copy. Some people were sitting in groups around the tables, talking about what had happened. Petter Bengtsson and Markus Larsson were having fun drawing smutty pictures which they held up whenever the supply teacher looked away. Caroline Ljungman and her gang were discussing some lads
from the upper school who they were going to meet up with that evening.

I wondered where Gerard could be. Maybe it was as I suspected, that Peder and Ola had squealed about what he'd done... and there were more – and worse – things than setting fire to a cat.

But now the external pressure had been cranked up, and they were standing behind Gerard. Out of fear, I thought. What else drives people?

H
alfway between Olofsbo and the mink farm was the old abandoned cottage where Tommy and I used to play when we were younger. It was several years since we had been there last. The roof had caved in and the last few windowpanes had been smashed. Ragged curtains flapped in the wind. Long ago there had been an orchard round the house, but it was all overgrown now. It always used to feel creepy being there. You had a sensation that an earlier era was still in progress, with children still playing in the garden, dressed in old-fashioned clothes, just out of sight behind an invisible corner. When we were in Year Six we had a secret hideout in the old root cellar next to the barn. The entrance was overgrown with brush, but there was an opening at the rear if you dug out some of the earth. The groundwater had risen inside, forming a pool of stagnant water. There were tadpoles there in the spring; we used to catch them with nets, put them in jars and then try to raise them into adult frogs. But we never managed it.

I looked at Tommy walking ahead of me along the path. We'd met up in Olofsbo, parked our bikes behind the kiosk and cut across the fields. The mink farm was just a few hundred metres away, and no one would be there that day other than the guard dog. Tommy claimed he knew it because he went there regularly with his brothers to sell fish as feed for the mink. It was now or never, he explained. Skinning had just finished and the workers had been given the weekend off. The owners had gone off to the fur auction in Copenhagen. To be on the safe side, he phoned them up earlier that morning, and no one answered.

We went round the outside of the abandoned cottage and emerged on the other side of the fence. The mink farm loomed a hundred metres away. Like a picture of a prison camp, I thought, with its fence and the grey barracks beyond.