The Shapeshifters (3 page)

‘I think there might be a bat around here somewhere,' she says. ‘A dead one.'

‘Is there really?' he asks, and moves closer.

They help each other to look, and he is the one who finds it.

The little animal is suspended in the grass. It does not have the weight to slide down so it stays there, trapped, like a brown leaf. He has never seen a bat before. To think they could be so small. A long and oddly curved claw is sticking out from the wing, and his mother pinches hold of it. The skin opens out, a net of folds and wrinkles, criss-crossed by fine veins. The abnormally large eyelids are covered with the same sheer, ancient-looking skin.

‘It's got a ring,' he says.

She holds up the bat and the thin wing turns pink as it is hit by the sunlight. A tiny silver ring shines in one ear.

She touches it gently with her index finger.

‘Why has it got a ring?'

‘I don't know,' she says, reflectively.

She has taken hold of the ring and is studying it closely.

‘It must be marked in some way . . .'

‘Why is the bat dead?'

His mother does not reply, so he asks again.

‘Why is it dead, Mum?'

‘It collided with me in the night,' she says, letting go of the ring. ‘I went out to pee and it flew at me. Here.'

She puts her fingers on her temple.

‘I expect it got confused by my nightdress,' she says. ‘They're attracted by light colours. It fastened in my hair and I snatched it out and threw it away from me. Right against that wall. That killed it. It's so tiny. I didn't mean it to die, I just wanted to get it away from me.'

She twitches her hand and the bat bobs up and down.

‘Do you want us to bury it?'

The boy leans up close to the ugly little snout. Deeply set in
the crumpled face are black eyes like beads. The teeth sticking out of its mouth are like shards of glass.

He shakes his head.

‘Sure?'

He nods.

His mother walks over the grass and throws the bat into the nettles growing like a green sea on the other side of the wooden fence. Then she cranks water out of the pump and rinses her hands, and as she walks towards the boy she smiles, drying her hands on her nightdress, which is hanging down below the old jacket.

They eat breakfast outside, in sunshine that makes them squint their eyes. They have to make the most of it, says his mother, laying out a bedspread. The grass is so stiff that it makes the bedspread stand up in peaks, and together they stamp them down to make it flat and comfortable to sit on. The mosquitoes that are flying around in the morning sun are no bother. There are so few and they do not seem to know what they want.

They have a loaf of white bread and a tube of cod roe spread. They munch, looking at each other. He is crouching and she is sitting cross-legged with the sun falling like a banner across her legs. Between bites she tells him that his grandmother was not affected by the mosquitoes because one day when she was out picking blueberries she was bitten so terribly that she lost her way and went down with a fever. Ever since that day she had been immune and was never bothered by mosquitoes in the slightest.

‘But what about bats?' he wants to know. ‘Can you be immune to them too?'

She explains that bats do not suck blood.

‘It's only in stories,' says the boy. ‘Isn't it?'

‘Yes. And not in Sweden.'

She wipes away a blob of the cod roe spread from her upper lip with a fingertip.

‘Bats here only eat old butterflies and things like that,' she says.

That information disappoints the boy. He has seen for himself that bats have sharp teeth. Like needles. He thinks it is likely they
can
drink blood, if they want to.

‘Yes,' she says. ‘If they are really hungry.'

‘Then perhaps you are immune now, Mummy.'

‘Except it didn't bite me.'

‘But think if it had!'

‘Yes,' she says, nodding with her mouth full of bread. ‘Well then, maybe I am.'

There is a beach on the nearby lake, and now that the sun is motionless in the sky and beating down they decide to go swimming and then do some shopping. They pack their swimming things and a mask in a canvas bag and hurry down the path. The boy carries his bathrobe and flaps it about. He allows the mosquitoes to get up close before he hits them.

The sun has been baking the car for hours and a strong smell of upholstery and overheated rubber hits him as he climbs into the back seat. It is so burning hot that he has to sit on his bathrobe, crouching like a monkey.

It is not far to the beach and he is surprised when after only a short while they pull up in a gravel car park. Pine cones crunch under their feet as they follow the path down towards the water.

Alders with large shiny leaves hang down over the jetty and entangle themselves in the reeds. The boy and his mother are
alone, but someone has been there recently because in the grass on the lakeside is a glittering pile of shells. All the shells are tiny and fragile. The boy does not dare to touch them. He does not want to spoil anything.

The water has a strange red colour which he tries to collect in his cupped hands, but the red does not come up with the water. It is only in the lake, which is not actually a lake but part of the Dal River, his mother tells him, as she sits on the jetty with a towel draped around her shoulders and her hand like a sun visor above her glasses.

Using a stick he dredges up dripping seaweed, which he collects in a pile. It is a silent game. The only sound is the water trickling back into the lake. From time to time the sun shines through patches of wispy cloud. Later he tries the swimming mask, seeing the undulating gravel on the lake bed. Something is swimming there, a tiny fish. He tries to catch it in his mask but it darts away.

The shop is located in an old wooden building with empty advertisement boards on the walls and sun-bleached awnings. It looks shut but his mother says it is not. There are steps up to the door and the metal railing is encrusted with rust. His mother is walking quickly. She is in a hurry all of a sudden.

They both fill the basket, the boy putting in a Falu sausage which he thinks they should have for dinner. He goes to fetch milk cartons too, but they are difficult to find because they do not look like the ones at home.

In the queue for the checkout they stand behind an old woman who is buying a bottle of elderflower cordial, and his mother lays her hand on his head, feeling how his hair has begun to dry and stand up from his scalp.

‘Was it nice to go swimming?' she asks, but he does not answer. He is engrossed in the comic he has been allowed to buy, guessing what it says in the speech bubbles.

With both hands he hauls the heavy paper carrier bag up the veranda steps and in through the door, which he quickly closes behind him. The air has turned warm in the cabin and he can hear an insect buzzing against one of the windows. He puts the bag down by the fridge, takes out a carton of milk and opens the door. And recoils.

It is lying there on the rack, next to the tube of cod roe spread.

Small, shaggy and greyish-brown, with crumpled wings drawn up tight to its body, its head like a shrunken dog. Strange cupped ears.

He races out so fast the hood of his bathrobe falls down.

His mother is on her way back from the outside toilet. She is carrying a folded newspaper and looks at him in surprise.

Panting and shrieking, he tells her what is in the fridge. But she refuses to believe him. Without a word she walks ahead of him into the cabin.

She stares at the bat and is suddenly angry. She says, ‘What the hell . . . ?' and blames him. He is the one who has put it there.

Then he bursts into tears, and when she realises that he is distraught and the crying stems from anger, she crouches down in front of him. She asks him if he is sure it was not him.

‘Yes, honest!'

He rubs his tear-filled eyes with the palms of his hands and sniffs.

‘Well then,' she says, ‘someone's playing a joke on us, that's all.'

She tears off a sheet of kitchen roll and uses it to pick up the
bat, then walks outside and throws it from the same place, this time hurling it far in among the trees. The paper falls away and floats like a leaf to the ground.

Then she goes in and gets the fridge rack and stands with it under the pump, scrubbing it with a washing-up brush. The boy asks if there is blood on the rack, but she does not answer.

The pine needles which have collected in the folds of the tarpaulin fall off in huge slabs as they uncover the lawnmower. Spread over the hood is a layer of flattened cardboard boxes. When the boy lifts them off, the earwigs race around like brown sparks.

‘What are they doing? What are they doing?' he shouts, excited and alarmed at the same time.

His mother shakes the handle, and when she hears the splashing in the petrol tank she pulls the starter cord. After a couple of attempts she straightens up, grimacing at the sun.

The boy scratches his cheek where he has a row of mosquito bites.

When the motor finally starts with a rattle he runs out of the way and sits on the veranda. He covers his ears with his hands and watches as she forces the machine through the overgrown grass. It is a struggle. The motor keeps stopping. It growls and then falls silent. He squints. The sun has wedged itself between the tree trunks and is shining directly at him now. She crouches down to clear out the clippings from under the hood. He studies his kneecaps and the downy hairs shining on them. Where there was once a scab the skin has turned light red and is slightly raised and there might be a scar, so his mother has said. He presses his thumb against the redness and then immediately starts scratching his calves until he breaks the skin. He has been careful to shut
the door of the cabin, but the mosquitoes come in anyway. It is worst on his calves and ankles—they really feast there while he is asleep. After that they go and sit on the wallpaper and the ceiling and no one knows they are there until night comes. Then they let go and drop down.

‘Magnus!'

His mother is half standing and pointing to the edge of the forest diagonally behind the cabin, where the brush-like branches of the trees weave together and make everything dark. What is she pointing at?

At first he can see nothing, but then he notices that something is moving, and the next second a grey head sticks out. Knobbly ears, pointing backwards, and whiskers hanging straight down from its mouth like long strings of saliva. A matted, flattened forehead turned towards them.

‘Can you see?' she shouts. ‘Can you see the hare?'

It feels exciting having a forest animal on the doorstep, exciting that it wants to be with them, and because they do not want to frighten it they go indoors. Cutting the grass can wait. There is no rush, and perhaps it has its young in the grass? Baby hares so small that they are rabbits?

His mother opens a can of vegetable soup and heats it up on the stove, while the boy sits glued to the window, giving reports about where the hare is and what it is doing. Not that there is much to report. Its jaws move from time to time but mostly it sits looking straight ahead.

When they are sitting with the soup bowls in front of them, blowing on their soup, he asks her who put the bat in the fridge.

She does not know.

Is it the man they borrowed the cabin from?

‘It was just someone,' she says quietly, moving her spoon among the steaming pieces of vegetable. ‘Someone who walked past in the forest and saw us throw away the bat. There are lots of people here, fishing and camping. It's just someone having a joke.'

Does she think it is a good joke?

‘No,' she replies. ‘I don't think so.'

‘Neither do I,' he says to his plate.

They play cards.

‘Snap!' he yells, and shuffles the cards with the blue chequered pattern on the back. His mother rests her elbows on the table and pretends to be annoyed. He likes that.

She is wearing a strappy top with horizontal stripes. The skin shines on her jutting collarbones, and the outside of her upper arms are sunburned. You can see where the towel covered her. It has left a line.

When she wants to stop playing he becomes sulky and tries to play cards on his own, but it is not the same. He finds a fountain pen and scribbles in some of the comics, on the white spaces between the squares. Then he draws on his knuckles, mainly to see if it works, but the ink rubs off.

It is only when he looks to see if the hare is still there that he catches sight of the fox. It is standing at the bottom of the path, staring with round, shiny yellow eyes at the window.

The boy leaps up and shouts out loud.

‘Come here! Quick!'

His mother puts down her book and walks to the window.

‘Well, look at that,' she says, leaning forwards and resting her cheek against the boy's.

In silence they study the fox for a few moments, until she says:

‘It knows there has been a hare around here. The smell stays in the grass for a long time. It thinks the hare is here somewhere.'

‘It is,' he says. ‘It's there!'

He points and she cranes her neck, seeing that the boy is right. The hare is like a dark-grey patch behind the tufts of grass beside the woodshed.

‘I'm sure it's all right,' she says. ‘It'll get away, you'll see.'

The fox has opened his ears so they stand like two scoops on top of his head. He directs his black nose towards the hare.

‘Now he can sense it,' she says. ‘The trail.'

Behind the dipped back and skinny dog's body, with ribs defined like bars, the fox's tail projects like a grey and bushy burden. The corners of its mouth point downwards. The animal starts to creep closer, edging forwards with its head to the ground. The quick, slender legs are dark at the front, as if it has stepped in a forest pool.