The Merman (28 page)

As I stood there by the window in my room in a terraced house on the outskirts of Borås and read his letter, I couldn't
believe five months had passed. It felt like a lifetime. And I had no idea when I'd get to see him again, whether it would take months or years.

At school he'd been put into a remedial class, he wrote, and some of the pupils had violent tendencies. He was frightened of several of them. A big lad who went by the name of Hosepipe was particularly dangerous. He could fly into a rage at any moment, and my brother had borne the brunt on several occasions. The other pupils didn't pay much attention to him. But they might be nastier to him than he realised, because he couldn't understand everything they said. The Skåne dialect, he wrote, was like a whole different language.

One bit of good news was that he'd got new glasses, with thinner lenses. His foster parents bought them for him in Denmark. Everything was cheaper in Denmark – even glasses, he explained. They usually went to Helsingør once a month to go shopping, and sometimes he got to go along. So now at least he'd been abroad, and it wasn't such a big deal that he'd missed out on the class trip in Year Six.

I could see him before me as I read his letter, among those strangers, certainly a little taller now as he was growing, in hand-me-down brand-name clothes from his foster brother and a pair of stylish glasses from Denmark. I knew how much that meant to him, and yet it felt painful, as if being split up was the price we'd had to pay.

He'd got my address a week before when Mum went to visit. It was during the Easter break, and she only stayed for an afternoon before she got the train back to Linköping. It was like she was ashamed, he wrote. Not because she smelled of alcohol, because she did, but because she was such a failure she couldn't look after her own children. Robert asked after me, where I was living and how I was doing, and when we would see each other again. She gave a vague answer, there was a load of secrecy around everything, a custody case that was still under way, but finally – in secret –
she gave him my address. I found it completely incomprehensible, not only that they split us up, but that they were also keeping our locations secret from one another.

I had already known Mum was in Linköping. She'd phoned a few times, but didn't say what she was doing there or whether she was in contact with Dad. My new family didn't seem to know either, or else they weren't allowed to say.

The last time I'd heard from her she said she would try to regain custody of us, but it might take a while. Once you'd signed a document giving away your children, it could take several years of investigations before you got them back.

I folded up the letter and looked out at the garden patch. Robert hadn't mentioned any of the events at the abandoned cottage or with the merman, which I finally told him about, but maybe it was too painful for him to remember? We'd agreed not to tell anyone what Gerard and the others had done to him that day or how everything turned out. Not because we thought justice had been done, but to avoid a load of new investigations and being treated like victims in need of help. Of course, it hadn't helped: they still split us up.

Spring was approaching outdoors. Tulip stems were poking up through the flowerbeds. Gunnar was going round with a strimmer to tidy up the lawn. Unlike my little brother, I would never bring myself to use the term ‘foster dad' about him. Nor was it my ‘foster mum' who stood in the living room sorting laundry with an easy-listening radio station on. That was Annie, Gunnar's wife and the mother of Lars-Inge who was three years older than me and lived in a room in the basement.

I went to Lars-Inge's old school in the centre of town. I even had his old form teacher, a science teacher called Sonja. The pupils in the class came from the same neighbourhood of detached houses where we lived, and many of the boys knew Gunnar because he'd been their football coach in primary school. So that lent me a certain social status. Nobody was nasty to me, but they all stuck with their own kind, especially the girls in their usual cliques.

Within the family, Gunnar was the one I liked best. He wasn't talkative, worked at a factory in town and dedicated his free time to his car, a Mercedes he'd gone over and brought back himself from Germany. Occasionally he would give me strange looks, sort of as if he wanted to ask me something but couldn't quite figure out what. Annie was the one who decided I would live with them. She volunteered with the Red Cross, and suddenly one day she decided it was time to contribute to the welfare of society by taking in a girl from a problem family. Once I was there, she seemed to think it wasn't as exciting any longer; she was polite but avoided contact with me.

Instead it was Gunnar who tried to be helpful, with school and everyday problems and what I should do with my future. The day before my brother's letter arrived he told me they were looking for summer interns at his workplace, and if I was interested he would make sure my name was near the top of the list. I said yes. A summer job was a start, at any rate.

I lay down on the bed again, the place where I spent most of my time since I'd come to stay with this family. On the bedside table was my old school yearbook from Skogstorp, open to the page for Robert's class. I couldn't look at it without starting to blub. Other than an old passport photo from the booth at the Domus department store, that was the only photo I had of him. Kneeling in the front row in those incredibly ugly glasses with sellotaped arms and a plaster over one lens, surrounded by classmates who the other kids at school called idiots or retards. But still with a smile on his lips, as if he still had hope for this life in spite of everything, that things would get better sometime in the future.

Oddly enough, Ola was one of the last people I'd spoken to in Falkenberg. It was about a month after the events at the abandoned cottage, just before Robert and I were going to leave our temporary accommodation and each be sent to our new families. He was standing there waiting for someone at the Kronan shopping centre, and he said hello as I happened to walk past.

Gerard's death had already been written about in the paper – several articles, in fact, about the tragic accident in which a young boy suffocated when a root cellar collapsed. According to Ola, he and Peder had been so terrified they initially didn't tell anyone what had happened. For over a week people were asking about Gerard, his parents and the police, their own parents, but they didn't say a word, not until people started to direct suspicions towards them – thinking they had something to do with his disappearance. Then they decided to talk, but they would only tell a simplified story about an accident. They told the police it was a game that had got out of hand, that Gerard decided to set fire to the root cellar, and for some reason the roof fell in on him. They were scared they would get blamed for it, and that was why they hadn't said anything.

Soon after that, the fire brigade dug out Gerard's body. Maybe they came across the merman's corpse in there as well. In my mind's eye I could see some firemen discovering the remains of something that appeared to be a small whale, half-charred at the bottom of a flooded root cellar, with the body of a fifteen-year-old boy on top of it; they wouldn't have had a clue.

Neither the paper nor the local radio station mentioned anything about it. But maybe there wasn't enough of him left for them even to guess what it was? That's how I imagined it: his body must have been bloated with water in there, or charred. Or his remains ended up buried further down underneath the stuff that had caved in and so were not discovered.

Ola told me what happened during the last few moments while my brother and I were running for our lives. How Gerard poured petrol over the creature, and the creature yanked him quick as a flash into the cellar as it burned. Everything was ablaze, and finally the cellar collapsed.

Presumably they were in a state of shock, I thought. They didn't even try to dig Gerard out, just ran off.

It was strange to be standing there with him in the shopping
centre, listening to his story. I should have hated him, I thought, for everything they'd done to me and my brother. But I did not feel any hatred. Just a sort of resignation, a sense that we were born to become who we are and never had any real choice. In the end there was something that linked us: the merman. There were only a few of us who knew of his existence. Ola was one of them, and in some strange way it tied us together.

L
ater that spring I found out what had happened to Dad. It was via Tommy. I hadn't had any contact with him since I left Falkenberg. I wasn't up to it. But finally I rang him up.

It was in mid-May and he sounded overjoyed to hear my voice again. He asked me a million questions about how I was doing and when we would see each other again, and I couldn't answer any of them. We were heading in different directions, I thought, and maybe we would never see each other again.

Tommy told me what he was up to, about life in Glommen, how things were at school and that he could hardly wait until school was over. He was going to get a permanent job on a boat that summer, he said, not his brothers' – he didn't want that – but on a neighbour's. He told L.G., who seemed sad I had moved away, about Jessica and Carro who had been shocked about Gerard's death for several months, about Ola and Peder who got sent to borstal in Växjö after New Year. He said he'd bumped into the Professor in town. He'd got a new temporary job at the library and was still living with his mum.

It was towards the end of our conversation that he suddenly mentioned Dad. My suspicions about that junkie guy who was at our place one evening turned out to be right. It was him and Gerard who had forced Dad to leave town. According to what Tommy had heard from his brothers, they had taken him up to Gothenburg. In the car, Gerard suddenly held a slaughterman's bolt gun up to Dad's head and pulled a woolly hat over his face, and they drove off with him to a flat somewhere. Tommy didn't know what they did to him there, but at any rate it was
nasty enough to make Dad realise Gerard was capable of doing absolutely anything. Soon afterwards he cleared off. Gerard and the junkie guy took over some of his business dealings, including a whole distribution network for black-market cigarettes.

I was only half-listening to what Tommy was saying. I couldn't take in any more pain. And Dad was basically already gone from my life. Maybe he was in Gothenburg, where he knew loads of people, or maybe he was back in Falkenberg now that Gerard was gone, or maybe he was in prison? I hoped he was all right wherever he was – he was still my dad.

‘Don't you want to know what happened at the abandoned cottage?' I asked when Tommy stopped talking. ‘With the merman?'

Tommy hadn't said a single word about the creature, and that seemed strange after everything we'd been through.

‘I don't know,' he said, ‘but I figured you were there when I heard about Gerard.'

‘He died saving Robert's life.'

Tommy was silent, and I realised he didn't want to talk about it any more. Maybe he was scared; maybe it had something to do with his brothers. I didn't know. But that's how it was, I thought: we would never mention what happened again. He wanted to move on with his life there in Glommen. So one story had come to an end and a new one had begun – one that no longer included Tommy.

The sounds from the house were growing stronger as his voice faded out, as if he was gradually fading and disappearing from my life. Lars-Inge calling to Gunnar from the basement. Annie rattling around in the kitchen. I had no idea how long I'd be staying here. There was just over a month until school would be out, and after that everything was up in the air.

There was only one thing I was afraid of, I thought as I sat there with the phone pressed to my ear, and that was that I might not get to see Robert again. It was so typical of my brother to forget to write his return address on the letter or to enclose a phone number where I could reach him. I was afraid that little mistakes like those
could have huge consequences. That life would lead us so far apart that we'd never find our way back again. That was what terrified me. That there was no real beginning, and no real ending either.

I dreamt about my brother every night that spring, and whatever I did reminded me of him. He was the one I would choose before anyone else in any situation; he was like the whole meaning of my life. At the abandoned cottage I wouldn't have wavered for a second if I really had been faced with a choice. I would have given up the creature for Robert without batting an eyelid.

But I didn't have a chance. The creature did it for me. The merman made the choice. He was the one who got them to let Robert go; he was the one who lured them to him, even though he must have known how things would turn out.

Sometimes it was as if I didn't trust my own memories. As if I'd just imagined everything. But of course that wasn't true. The merman had existed; I'd met him and got to know him, and I was thankful. He had taught me something that could not be put into words, and I would never be able to explain that to anyone in an ordinary language.

As I lay on my bed in my room I could hear him within me. The voice that flowed through me and comforted me. And when I closed my eyes I could see him, luminescent in the water in the old root cellar... how he did tricks for me, reached out his arm and touched my hand. I could feel the warmth from his body as he floated a few inches below the surface, the warmth that filled the space, spreading into me like an ancient force. I saw the smile in his eyes, his big dark eyes, his gills, claws and that powerful tail fin... and I knew those images would be imprinted in me for the rest of my life.

THE MERMAN

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Translation copyright © 2013 by Ellen Flynn

Original copyright © 1988 by Carl-Johan Vallgren