During the three weeks that had passed since the incident with the fern, he had once again set the boundary at eight o'clock, with an enormous effort of will, and had managed to stick to it. His face and eyes had regained at least some of their normal colour, after a year of being red from burst blood vessels.
Anders ran his hand over his face and said, 'I've got it under control.'
'Have you?'
'Yes. What the hell do you want me to say?'
Simon didn't move a muscle in response to this outburst. Anders blinked a couple of times, feeling ashamed of himself, and said, 'I'm working on it. I really am.'
Silence fell once more. Anders had nothing to add. The problem was his, and his alone. Part of the idea of returning to Domarö had been to get away from the destructive routines he had fallen into. He could only hope it would work. There was nothing more to say.
Simon asked if he had heard anything from Cecilia, and Anders shrugged.
'Haven't heard from her in six months. Strange, isn't it? You share everything, and then…pouff. Gone. But I suppose that's just the way it is.'
He felt the bitterness come creeping in. That wasn't good. If he sat here for a while longer he would probably start crying. Not good. It wasn't a question of suppressing his emotions, he'd wept bucketfuls.
Bucketfuls?
Well. One bucketful, perhaps. An entire fucking ten-litre bucket full of tears. Absorbed by tissues, sleeves, dripping on to the sofa, on to the sheets, rising like steam from his face during the night. Salt in his mouth, snot in his nose. A bucket. A blue plastic bucket filled with tears. He had cried.
But he wasn't going to cry now. He had no intention of starting his new life bemoaning everything that had vanished.
He finished his coffee and stood up.
'Thank you. I'll go down and see if the house is still standing.'
'It is,' said Simon. 'Oddly enough. You'll call and see Anna-Greta, won't you?'
'Tomorrow. Definitely.'
When Anders got back to the point where the track forked in two different directions, he thought: A new life? There's no such thing.
It was only in the magazine headlines that people got a new life. Stopped drinking or taking drugs, found a new love. But the same life.
Anders looked along the track towards the Shack. He could buy new furniture, paint it blue and change the windows. It would still be the same horrible house, the same poor basic construction. He could of course tear the whole thing down and build a new house, but how do you do that with a life?
Can't be done. When it comes to a life, all you can change is the equivalent of furniture, paint and windows. Doors, maybe. Change the things that are in too bad a state and hope the core holds. Despite everything.
Anders gripped the handle of his suitcase firmly and set off along the track to the Shack.
The Shack
A curious name. The Shack. Not the sort of thing you put up on a poker-work sign, like Sjdsala or Fridlunda.
But then the Shack wasn't the name its builder had given it, or the name on the insurance documents. It was actually called Rock Cottage. But the Shack was what everybody on Domarö called it, even Anders, because it was a shack.
Anders' great-great-grandfather had been the last pilot in the Ivarsson family. When his son Torgny inherited the pilot's cottage, he extended it and made it into a fine two-storey house. Inspired by his success, he also built Seaview Cottage, the house Simon now rented on a permanent basis.
When the first summer visitors arrived on the Vaxholm ferries at the beginning of the twentieth century, several of the islanders wanted to add extensions to their houses, or rebuild them completely.
The brothers fitted out old hen houses as small summer cottages, extended and re-roofed boathouses, even built new properties in some instances. The building that later became the ramblers' hostel was built to order for a textile factory owner from Stockholm.
When the son, Anders' grandfather Erik, needed a place of his own in the mid-1930s, he was allocated the empty plot out on the cliffs. People probably had their doubts. Erik had accompanied his father on various building projects, lending a hand and carrying out some of the simpler work. He showed no particular talent. But he knew the basics.
His father offered to help, but Erik was determined to build the house himself. He was a hot-headed boy who couldn't bear to be contradicted; he swung between periods of intense activity and gloomy introspection. Building the house was to be the proof that he could stand on his own two feet and make his own way in the world.
Timber was transported from a forestry company on the mainland; it was cut at the sawmill in Nåten and shipped across to Domarö. So far, everything was going well. In the summer of 1938, Erik began to lay the foundations. With autumn approaching he had finished the joists and the roof ridges, and the roof trusses were in place. He never once asked his father for advice, and wouldn't even allow him to visit the site.
And so the inevitable happened. One Saturday in the middle of September Erik went across to Nåten. He and his fiancée Anna-Greta were going to go into Norrtälje to look at wedding rings. They were planning to marry in the spring, and the young couple hadn't seen much of each other during the summer, as Erik had been so busy working on the house. The idea was that he and his wife-to-be would move into the completed house after the wedding.
Once Erik's boat had disappeared from view around the southern point, his father sneaked down to the building site with a plumb line and a spirit level.
He came out onto the cliffs and stopped to look at the wooden framework. It looked reasonable, but weren't the gaps between the upright posts for the walls a little too wide? He knew that the pine tree outside the front door grew at an angle of exactly ninety degrees to the ground. He crouched down, closed one eye and squinted. Either the tree had started to grow crooked during the summer, or…
He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach as he took out his folding rule and measured the distance between the posts. They were too far apart, and there wasn't even the same distance between them everywhere. In some places it was seventy centimetres, in others a little over eighty. He always went for fifty, sixty at the most. And there weren't enough horizontal supports.
He went to look at the stock of wood. It was as he had suspected: there wasn't a single whole piece of timber left. Erik had scrimped on the wood.
The bad feeling in his stomach moved up to his chest as he went around the building with the plumb line and spirit level. The foundations inclined slightly towards the east, and the framework inclined more strongly towards the west. Presumably Erik had realised that he hadn't got the foundations right, and had tried to compensate by making the house lean in the opposite direction.
Torgny walked around the foundations tapping them with a stone. It wasn't a disaster, but in places it sounded hollow. Erik had got air bubbles in the mortar. And there were no air vents either. If Erik put a slate roof on the crooked frame, it was only a question of whether the damp from underneath or the weight from above would wreck the house first.
Torgny slumped down on the threshold and noted in passing that the door measurements were wrong. And he was the first person to think what so many people would say in the future: What a bloody shack.
What could he do?
If it had been in his power, he would have pulled the whole lot down immediately and put up a new framework before Erik came home, confronting him with a fait accompli. He did actually consider for a moment whether he could keep Erik away from home for a week on some wild pretext, get together every single person he knew and do just that. But it wasn't that simple. Just to redo the foundations…
He teetered across the sparse floor joists and inspected the internal layout of the house. That was peculiar as well. A long, narrow hall ran through the house, with the incorrectly proportioned bedrooms and kitchen scattered along its edges. It was as if Erik had started with the living room, which did actually appear to be normal, then added each of the other rooms as they occurred to him, until he ran out of wood.