Summertime Death

A dog is barking, but everything’s dark, so dark and, if I didn’t know it was impossible, I’d free myself from my muscles, my body, and then the being that is me would drift off.

But that isn’t allowed in this dream.

No.

So instead, your happy cries. Up there? That’s right, isn’t it?

Earth and sand and a wet chill, a damp plastic chill, the grains close but not actually inside.

Is this a grave?

Have I been buried alive?

I’m fourteen, so tell me, what would I be doing in a grave?

Swimmers.

More than usual on a Sunday.

No entrance fee to the beach at Stora Rangen, you just leave your car further up and walk over the meadow where Farmer Karlsman has been kind enough not to put any bulls this year.

He did that one summer a few years back, before the kiosk was here. They wrote about it in the Correspondent. But the farmer didn’t back down that year.

The visitors are so carefree, with their families, children and women and men all enjoying the heat and the dubious cooling effect of the warm water, protecting their skin with expensive sunblock, their eyes with even more costly glasses.

And now, Slavenca Visnic thinks, now they’re queuing at my kiosk, waiting impatiently for me to open up. Just hold on a bit, you’ll get your ice cream. The children so happy to be getting ice cream, you can’t buy more happiness than that for seventeen kronor.

Just hang on, be grateful that I’m here at all.

Aftonbladet? Expressen?

Sorry, no newspapers.

Who are you really, you whom society has left behind, you who don’t have anywhere else to go? We share that fate at least. In one sense, anyway.

Slavenca puts the key in the door of the beach kiosk, tells the crowd in front of the shutters to calm down, I’m about to open up, you’ll get your ice cream in a minute.

Beyond the people, almost naked, she can see the water of the lake, sees them strutting in the sun, thinks that the reflections make the surface of the water look like transparent skin. And the big oak tree over there by the lake. Always so secretive.

Her kiosk at the Glyttinge pool is closed.

Spoiled youngsters who don’t want summer jobs. Future ministers of leisure.

Sometimes she thinks that the whole of Sweden is one big leisure committee consisting of people who’ve always had it too good, who don’t have the faintest idea about sorrow.

Then she opens the shutters.

An ugly kid, eight years old or so, a girl, is at the front of the queue.

‘A Top Hat,’ she says.

‘I’m out of those,’ Slavenca says, and smiles.

A dog is barking down by the oak, on the patch of ground where the grass has somehow vanished and been replaced by bare earth.

The dog has just peed up against the tree, but now he’s frantic.

Standing to attention, marking that there’s something there, something hidden that needs to be found.

He barks and barks and barks.

His paws digging, digging, digging.

I can hear noises, barking.

Slowly, slowly they drag me out of my dream, up, up. I want to wake up now, I want to wake up.

But I’m not going to wake up. Am I?

Am I going to wake up, Dad?

I’m stuck in something much worse, much stranger than sleep. But how did I get here?

Someone has to tell me, tell everyone, tell Mum and Dad. They must be worried; I don’t usually sleep this late. And what are those other noises? It sounds like digging, and someone, a woman’s soothing voice saying: ‘OK, Jack, OK. Come here now,’ and the barking turns into whimpering, and someone says: ‘OK, stay there, then, stay there.’

Slavenca is taking a break from the relentless selling of ice cream, ignoring the next customer, leaving the surprised woman to stand there glaring into the kiosk, at the fridge full of drinks.

Don’t be in such a rush, she thinks. If it gets even hotter you’ll buy more ice cream and drinks.

She’s put her prices up and people complain about her charging twenty kronor for a Coke, seventeen for an ice lolly.

OK, so don’t buy them, then.

Bring your own drinks with you.

But if the ice cream company gets to hear about her raised prices she won’t be allowed to sell their products any more. So what, there are other suppliers. Anyway, I ought to be in the forest with the other volunteers, tackling the flames.

And that dog over there.

He shouldn’t be barking like that, shouldn’t be there.

He’s frantic, as if there’s a bitch on heat buried by that tree.

Mad dogs. Mad men. Desire can lead to anything.

And that ugly girl who was first in the queue, she’s looking down into the hole the dog’s digging.

What on earth does she think she’s going to see?

The wet and the dark are getting thinner, and that dog barking is getting louder, the voices have died out behind the barking and am I waking up now? The light up there, and the digging, and then my view is clear, but fuzzy, grainy, as if there were soil or sand in my open eye.

Am I free now?

Can I go home?

And I see a black dog, its nose and teeth, and he’s barking excitedly and I want to get up, but my body doesn’t exist.

And the dog disappears and instead there’s a girl, the same age as me, no, younger, and her face changes, distorts, and I see her mouth form a scream and I want to tell her to stop screaming, it’s only me, waking up at long last.

My body does exist, but do I?

Slavenca rushes out of the kiosk and down towards the girl and the dog, people are rushing over, all the bathers, and the scream is contagious, yes, even the water and the trees and the cows up in the meadow seem to be screaming.

‘Out of the way,’ Slavenca says, then she’s standing on the edge of the hole, looking down.

A girl’s open eye beneath thin plastic, blue, curious.

The life gone from those eyes long before.

You poor thing, she thinks.

She’s seen a lot of eyes like that, Slavenca, and all those mute memories come back to her now, lifeless memories of a life that never happened.