Midwinter Sacrifice

neither beautiful nor ugly, just one of the mass of normal women with passions to live out, to fulfil. She offered them coffee and home-baked buns. She told them she was single and unemployed, how she tried to fill her days while applying for any jobs she thought she might stand a chance of getting. ‘It’s hard,’ Peter Liedbergh’s lover had said. ‘You’re either too old or you haven’t got the right qualifications. But something will turn up.’

The woman confirmed Liedbergh’s story. Then she shook her head. ‘It’s a good job he went that way. Who knows how long that man might have been left hanging there otherwise in this cold.’

Malin looked at the porcelain figurines arranged on the kitchen windowsill. A dog, a cat, an elephant. A little porcelain menagerie for company.

‘Do you love him?’ Malin asked.

Zeke shook his head instinctively.

But the woman didn’t take against the question.

‘Who? Peter Liedbergh? No, not at all.’ She laughed. ‘You know, it’s just something we women need, isn’t it, a bit of company?’

Malin sinks further into the sofa. She thinks about Janne, about how difficult he finds it to talk, how he sometimes feels like a black outline superimposed over her own. In the window she can see the tower of St Lars, and waits for the bells to ring, tries to hear if there are any whispering voices in the darkness.

If you weren’t deaf you would hear the sound of the branch breaking. You would hear the sound of fibres splitting, hear my body slicing through the cold and the air; you who are standing directly underneath would throw yourself to one side, but none of this happens. Instead all my many kilos land right on the tent, smashing the aluminium frame as if it were made of matchsticks, and the whole construction collapses and you who are standing there when I fall, you poor uniformed policeman, at first you notice something hitting you, then you feel my weight, and then you are flattened to the ground by my frozen hardness, and something inside you, you don’t know what, breaks, but you’re lucky, it’s only a bone, nothing the doctors can’t put right, your arm will be fine. I’m perfectly harmless in that respect, even now I’m dead.

Because you didn’t get me down, in spite of my pleas, I had to persuade the tree, and to be honest it was tired of having me hanging on the oldest of its branches. It’s ready to be cast off, the oak said, so go ahead and fall, fall on the tent, to the ground, and stir things up a bit down there.

And now I’m lying here on top of the screaming policeman, in a muddle of words, tent-pegs and canvas. The heater is roaring in my ear. I can’t feel its heat but I know it’s there. Beneath my hands I can feel the earth, made damp by your heat; pleasantly wet and nice, like the innards of something, anything.

Malin is woken by Tove’s voice.

‘Mum? Mum, I’m home. Don’t you think you should go to bed instead?’

‘Oh yes, of course.’

Malin wakes slowly, grows doubtful. Whenever she had done anything silly, she always woke Dad to say that everything was all right. But before Malin has time to doubt Tove, her daughter says, ‘Have you been drinking, Mum?’

Malin rubs her eyes. ‘No, just a bit of tequila.’

The bottle in front of her, the half-bottle of cask-aged tequila, bought on the way home from the station, a third empty.

‘Okay, Mum,’ Tove says. ‘Shall I help you into bed?’

Malin shakes her head. ‘That only happened once, Tove. You only had to do that once. ONCE.’

‘Twice.’

Malin nods. ‘Twice.’

‘Well, goodnight, then,’ Tove says.

‘Sleep well,’ Malin says.

The clock on the sideboard says quarter to twelve. From behind Malin can see that Tove’s hair is now loose, and she looks like the little girl again.

A bit of tequila left in the glass. A lot more in the bottle. Another little one? No. No need. Malin gets up with an effort and stumbles towards the bedroom.

She can’t be bothered to get undressed and falls on to her bed.

And dreams dreams that might have been best undreamed.

7

Friday, 3 February

The jungle is at its most dense at night.

The damp, the insects, the damn wildlife, leaves, snakes, spiders, millipedes and mould growing in the sleeping-bag at night.

Then they land at the airport, endless masses of tiny lights, a starry sky on the ground and the Russian Tupolev plane plummeting straight down like a helicopter, the wings tear and he flaps with his soul in the cramped space, child and mother standing there, Tove, only little then, now: What are you doing here, Dad? You ought to be at home with me. I’m coming, I’m coming, and then they unload, break out of the plane’s innards: food, plumbing pipes, and they come towards them in the darkness; you can only see their eyes, thousands of eyes in the darkness, eyes to trust in, and the hungry scared muttering and the salvos from the automatic rifles. Back off or we’ll finish what the Hutus started. Back away and a millipede crawls over my leg, the mould grows, Kigali, Kigali, Kigali, the inescapable mantras of dream.

Get this fucking millipede away from me.