only person I saw was old Gerhard. He was walking around on the deck of the
about, but I took a short walk around the deck with him, and he pointed out a few little things that would need repairing. Then he told me to look after her, and we parted company. I went ashore and walked home to my parents’ house to have dinner and pick up the envelope containing the money.”
Gerlof fell silent, looking at the pictures of the cargo ships on the wall.
“At about seven o’clock I cycled over to the Marten family cottage north of Borgholm,” he went on. “But I arrived to find a house in mourning. Marten’s wife was there, her eyes red with weeping. Gerhard Marten was dead, it turned out. He had signed the purchase agreement the night before, then walked down to the shore early in the morning with his shotgun, and shot himself in the head.”
“In the morning?” said Joakim.
“That same morning, yes. So when I met Gerhard Marten down in the harbor, he had actually been dead for many hours. I can’t explain it… but I
“So you met a ghost,” said Joakim.
Gerlof looked at him.
“Perhaps. But it doesn’t prove anything. It certainly doesn’t prove that there’s life after death.”
Joakim shifted in his seat and looked down at the parcel of clothes.
“I’m worried about my daughter, Livia,” he said. “She’s six years old, and she talks in her sleep. She always has done… but since my wife died she’s started to dream about her.”
“Is that so strange?” said Gerlof. “I dream about my late wife sometimes, and she’s been dead for many years.”
“Yes… but it’s the same dream, over and over again. Livia dreams that her mother comes to Eel Point, but can’t get into the house.”
Gerlof listened in silence.
“And sometimes she dreams about Ethel too,” Joakim went on. “That’s what worries me the most.”
“Who’s Ethel?” asked Gerlof.
“She was my sister. She was three years older than me.” Joakim sighed. “That’s my own ghost story. Kind of.”
“Tell me about her,” said Gerlof quietly.
Joakim nodded wearily. It was time.
“Ethel was a drug addict,” he said. “She died one winter’s night close to where we lived… two weeks before Christmas, a year ago.”
“I’m sorry,” said Gerlof.
“Thank you,” said Joakim, and went on: “I lied to you when I saw you last time… when you asked why we’d sold the house in Bromma and moved here. It had a lot to do with what happened to my sister. Once Ethel was dead, we didn’t want to stay in Stockholm.”
He stopped speaking again. He wanted to talk about this, and yet he didn’t want to. He didn’t really want to remember Ethel and her death. Nor Katrine’s long depression.
“But you miss your sister?” said Gerlof.
Joakim thought about it.
“A little.” That sounded terrible, so he added, “I miss her the way she used to be before… before the drugs. Ethel used to talk a lot, she always had so many plans. She was going to open a hair salon, she was going to be a music teacher… but after a while you just got so tired of it all, because none of the plans involved giving up the drugs. It was like watching someone sitting in a burning house, planning a party in the middle of the flames.”
“So how did it start?” asked Gerlof, sounding almost apologetic. “I know so little about that world…”
“For Ethel it started with hash,” said Joakim. “Weed, as they called it. It was cool to smoke at parties and concerts. And life was a party for Ethel in her teens; she played the piano and the guitar. She taught me to play a little too.”
He smiled to himself.
“It sounds as if you were very fond of her,” said Gerlof.
“Yes, Ethel was happy and funny,” said Joakim. “She was
pretty too, and popular with the boys. And she partied a lot; with amphetamines she could party even more. She must have dropped twenty pounds in weight, although she was already thin. She was away more and more. Then our father died of cancer, and I think it was around then she started with heroin… brown heroin. Her laughter grew harsher and more hoarse.”
He took a sip of his coffee and went on quickly:
“Nobody who smokes heroin thinks they’re a real user. You’re not a junkie. But sooner or later you switch to needles, because it’s cheaper… you need less heroin per dose. But you still need to come up with at least fifteen hundred kronor for supplies every day. That’s a lot of money, particularly when you haven’t got any. So you start stealing. You take your elderly mother’s money, or steal the jewelry she’s inherited.”
Joakim looked at the Advent candles and added:
“On Christmas Eve, when we were sitting in my mother’s house eating ham and meatballs, there was always an empty chair at the table. As usual Ethel had promised to come, but she was in the city center looking for drugs. For her that was routine, just everyday life. And routines are the most difficult thing to break, however terrible they are.”
He was deep into his confession now, not even aware if Gerlof was listening any longer.
“So you know that everything has gone to hell and that your sister is in the middle of the city gathering money for drugs, and her social worker never calls back… but you go off to your teaching job in the morning and have dinner with the family and work on your new house in the evening, and you try not to think and feel so much.” He lowered his eyes. “Either you try to forget, or you try to find her. My father used to go out looking in the evenings, before he got too sick. I did too. On the streets, in the squares, in the subway stations and the emergency psych wards…We soon learned where she might be.”
He fell silent. In his mind he was back in the city, among
the drug users and those sleeping rough, among all the lonely, half-dead souls who spent their nights chasing around out there.
“That must have taken a great deal of strength,” said Gerlof quietly.
“Yes… but I wasn’t out every night. I could have looked for her more often.”
“And you could also have given up.”
Joakim nodded grimly. He had one more thing to tell Gerlof about Ethel, the most difficult thing of all to talk about:
“What was in fact the beginning of the end happened two years ago,” he said. “Ethel had been in rehab that winter, and it had gone well. When she went in, she weighed less than a hundred pounds, her body was covered in bruises, and her cheeks looked completely hollow. But when she came home to Stockholm, she was much healthier. She had been clean for almost three months and had put some weight on… so we let her stay in our guest room. And it worked well. She wasn’t allowed to look after Gabriel, but she used to play a lot with Livia in the evenings, they got on really well.”
He remembered that they had begun to hope again at that time, he and Katrine. They had begun to trust Ethel. Not to the extent that they would dare to invite people to dinner when she was home, but they had started to go for long walks in the evenings, leaving Ethel to look after Livia and Gabriel. And it had gone well every time.
“One evening in March, Katrine and I went to see a movie,” he went on. “When we got back to the house after a couple of hours, it was dark and empty. There was only Gabriel there, sleeping in his cot with a soaking wet diaper. Ethel had gone, and she had taken two things with her: my cell phone and Livia.”
He stopped speaking and closed his eyes.
“I knew where she’d gone, of course,” he continued. “The craving had returned and she had taken the subway into the city to buy heroin. She had done it so many times before.
Bought a tab for five hundred kronor, injected it in some toilet, and rested for a few hours, until the craving came back again… The problem this time was that she had Livia with her.”
