She went outside. There was a light in the window, but he didn’t look out at her. He sat at the table with the flowery wax tablecloth and played one game of solitaire after another. She climbed all the way to the edge. Wind in her eyes, wind in her mouth when she opened it wide, like at the dentist’s office.
But no scream came out.
“What do your parents say about you coming here?” he asked, and bent his head a little so that he could see her over his glasses.
She almost mentioned the witch woman. But she was older now, and the word was starting to fade.
“A single man has only one thing on his mind,” he muttered.
“I did it! Look! I won!”
“I’m not talking about that now.”
No, she knew that. He was having grown man thoughts which were filling his head and threatening to spill over.
She took her coat and left.
They hunted her down the cliff by the General Bathhouse, which was near her home. But she hadn’t reached home yet. The blonde archangel Berit with her flowing curls; after her, Evy and Gerd, a girl from Stockholm. She had come as a foster child. Her parents had split up and disappeared like smoke in the wind. At least that’s what Justine overheard Flora say to Pappa.
As smoke in the wind.
Gerd was tall, thin, and mouthy. She was drawn into Berit’s radius from the very first day. And she learned the rhymes.
They had not yet managed the worst, to undress her and show her secret to the world and make fun of it. She knew they might succeed one day, and that gave her the strength to flee.
Gerd, with her long, strong legs. She got closer, caught up, knocked her over. She screamed and defended herself, substances dragged under her fingernails.
“Look how she scratched you!” screamed Berit. “You’re bleeding all the way down your neck!”
Gerd sat on her stomach, keeping her arms under her back. She hit her face, one, two, one, two. Pulling her jacket over her head. They were doing something to her pants, roughly, and it was chilling.
It seemed like animal strength came over her and she threw herself to the side. When she tried to run and pull her clothes on at the same time, she sprained her ankle against the stones and fell off the cliff. As darkness came, she glimpsed their eyes, how they whitened and turned away.
Flora found her.
Two girls had gone to her house and had rung the doorbell. Justine has fallen off the cliff. Flora grabbed her coat and came.
“I grabbed my coat and came as soon as I could. Why were you girls running around near the cliff?”
Justine had come to. She was still lying on the ground and looked up in the mist; she couldn’t walk.
What could a person like Flora do in this situation?
“We have to work together, girls. You carry her legs and I’ll carry her shoulders.”
“We were playing here and then Justine slipped and fell, and we got really scared because she was so strange, she, like, didn’t answer us, and so we said, better run for her mom, and so we both ran and Evy was supposed to stay here.”
“I don’t know you,” said Flora looking at Gerd.
“No, I’m the new foster child at the Östman’s.”
“So you’re with them. What happened to your own parents?”
“They split up and no one wanted me.”
“They didn’t?” Flora sounded moved.
They carried her into the house, laid her on the blue rug. They didn’t look at her. They said that they had to run home now; it was dinner time.
“Go on, then,” said Flora.
When Pappa came home, he took Justine to the hospital in the car. She lay in the back seat, and Flora had turned to her, held her hand.
“They were playing like calves let loose in the meadow,” said Flora. “Aren’t they getting a bit big for that?”
Pappa kept quiet, driving like crazy over the Traneberg bridge. Once at the hospital, he lifted her up and carried her in.
The ankle was broken. Her leg was put in a cast that reached up to her knee. She felt heavy and happy.
“For six weeks, the girl needs to rest and not move around.”
Pappa said, “I’ll get a tutor for her. Summer vacation is almost here.”
Flora said, “I can teach her, if that doesn’t work out.”
Pappa said, “I’m sure you can. But I know a young man who is free right now. My cousin Percy’s son, Mark. I’ll give him some cash if he comes to our place for a few hours a day.”
Mark’s parents were diplomats. They had lived in Washington, D.C., for many years, but had just returned to Stockholm. They did not yet know where they would be going next.
Mark appeared the next day with a bouquet of yellow tulips.
“To the little sickie,” he said and stepped into the room carefully. He was slim and short; his hands were sweaty. His eyes were brown like nuts.
“What do you want to learn, cousin?” he asked with a grown man’s voice.
“Cousin?”
“Your dad and my dad are cousins and that makes us cousins. First cousins once removed, actually.”
She thought about that for a minute.
“All right,” he said. “What do you want to learn, cuz?”
She became mischevious.
“Nothing. I already know everything.”
“Really?”
“Nah… Just joking…”
Mark took out a book from his jacket pocket, thumbed through it, stopped at a page. The letters were tiny and practically jumbled together.
“Read this bit in English. Then I’ll quiz you on the vocabulary.”
She turned red, and couldn’t pronounce anything, neither in Swedish nor in English.
He smiled, with a little bit of scoffing.
“OK, the rumors about Swedish schools are true. They’re all shitty.”
“My foot hurts,” she whispered.
“I don’t believe you,” he said.
“It’s true!”
“Where’s it hurting, exactly?”
She pointed at the cast. Then he pushed her skirt up slightly, and held her leg right above the knee.
Once he left, she did the same thing as he had, placed her hand on the same place. Then she moved it slowly further upwards, and a hot and painful swelling appeared between her legs. A pain throbbing right to her brain.
Chapter SIXTEEN
That next Saturday, Berit returned to Hässelby. She bought a bottle of Gran Fuedo and a pot of tender crocus. She didn’t call first; she just went.
The day was foggy. She didn’t bother with the bus. Instead she walked from the last station of the subway and took the road along the beach. She felt a growing anxiety, which she couldn’t ignore, thinking that she was going to confront Justine again.
During the night, she had been dreaming. Tor had shaken her awake.
“Are you having a nightmare?” he said. “Or is the boss giving you a hard time?”
The dream had something to do with a company party. Everyone was there, and strangely, Justine was there, too. In the dream, Berit was wearing a dress that had been much too elegant for the situation, with décolletage and a deep back. Everything was wrong. She mingled and tried to talk with people, but they acted as if she were invisible.
Maybe it was the sleeping pills. She had continued to take them before bed. It was getting hard to go to sleep without them. Maybe it was all that old stuff from childhood.
Tor asked her to come with him to their summer house on Vät Island. He was planning to go there and stay overnight. It would be good for her, he thought, to get a little sea air.
“I can make blinies,” he said. “I think we still have some caviar in the freezer.”
“I don’t want to,” she said. “I just can’t. I don’t want to.”
There was a thin layer of water on the ice. Some ducks came flying. They landed on the ice and went sliding before they could stop themselves. An old-fashioned boat, a skuta, was tied to the pier. The water wasn’t frozen there because of the discharge from the thermal power station. Some men in dark clothes on the dock. She could barely make out the name of the boat, Sir William Archibald from Stockholm.