After Simon had argued back and forth for some time, mostly with himself, they agreed that this was the lesser of two evils.
Anders took the torch and went out to the shed to fetch a couple of plastic sacks. Once inside he stopped, and his knees gave way. He had a bowling ball stuck in the middle of his chest. A black, shining sphere of guilt. He had done nothing when they were murdering Elin, he had just stayed in his bed and watched.
'It's not my fault,' he whispered.
Say it once, twice, a thousand times. Eventually you might believe it.
He was finding it difficult to breathe, because the bowling ball was in the way, pressing on his lungs. Stiffly he swept the torch over the walls of the shed, and caught sight of the plastic bottle.
Wormwood…
He unscrewed the top, raised the bottle to his mouth and took two swigs. If there was a thought in his head it was burn away. What was to be burned away he had no idea. Maybe it was the ball, maybe it was he himself. The liquid coursed down his throat and he waited for the fire, but the fire did not come.
This wormwood was not dissolved in alcohol but in something else, and the substance running down into Anders' stomach had a thick, slippery consistency. Like oil. Only when he had finished swallowing did the taste come. It didn't explode on his palate as it had at Anna-Greta's, but came creeping along and squeezed his tongue, his palate, his throat, his chest.
Anders sank down into a crouching position as the upper part of his body was turned inside out. He lost all feeling in his fingers, and his breathing stopped.
Cramp. Cramp in my lungs. I'm going to die.
Poison. Not the instantaneous shock of a toxin that compels the body to spit it out immediately, but the treacherous effect of something that slips down and takes root, spreads through the bloodstream and kills.
Anders pressed his hands to his temples and his brain crackled with discharging electricity. He took a deep breath, and discovered that he could do it. His lungs were not paralysed, he had actually been holding his breath. The air he inhaled brought his tastebuds to life, and he was wormwood. It tasted so vile that it wasn't a taste at all, it was a state of being. He grabbed hold of the workbench and pulled himself to his feet.
I am wormwood.
The ball in his chest was gone. The revolting taste had encased it, and it had shrunk and disappeared. He blinked and blinked again, trying to focus his gaze. He fixed on a piece of rope with a frayed end. He shone the torch on it and he could see every single fibre. There were fifty-seven threads.
Fifty-seven. The same age as Dad was when he died. The same number of screws and plugs as there were in the cupboard Cecilia and I bought from IKEA for the bedroom. The same number of centimetres as Maja's height when she was two months old. The same…
The outlines of everything perceived by the eye of the torch were blurred, yet at the same time all too clear. He wasn't seeing the objects, he was seeing what they were. He reached out for the roll of plastic sacks and knew there were eight sacks left on the roll and together they would hold one thousand six hundred litres.
One thousand six hundred litres of things. Leaves, twigs, toys, tins of paint, tools, gramophones, pairs of glasses, pine cones, microwave ovens. One thousand six hundred litres of things…
As he picked up the roll he found a still point inside his head, a rock in the river where he could stand and think clearly as everything flowed past and around him.
Take the bags. Go to the house.
That was what he did. As the world continued to come adrift, dissolve and pour through him, he stood on the rock and watched his hands helping Simon to dress Elin's body in plastic for this final journey. Then the perception grew weaker and he began to shiver.
Anders crouched down in the prow, as far away from the plastic bundle as possible. Simon had to sit with his feet pushed underneath Elin's thighs in order to fit in the driving seat.
How can he do this.
Simon's lips were clamped together and his forehead was furrowed, as if he were concentrating hard the whole time. But he was doing it. Anders realised he ought to be grateful, but he had no room for any such emotions. The world had frayed like the rope in the shed.
Simon started the engine and they set off from Domarö, rounded North Point and set their course for the bay between Kattholmen and Ledinge. There was a light breeze, and Anders fixed his gaze on the horizon as the rising sun warmed his cheek.
A dozen or so metres ahead of the boat a gull took off from the surface of the water and soared away with a scream. Anders followed it with his eyes, saw it cross the disc of the sun and disappear in the direction of Gåvasten.
Daddy…
How many early mornings had Anders lain in the prow of his father's boat as the sun rose, on their way to the fishing grounds to lift their nets? Forty? Fifty?
Daddy…
He hadn't thought properly about his father for a long time. With the fleeing gull and the rising sun, it all came back. Including that time.
That time…
Fishing for herring
The summer Anders turned twelve he was saving up for a radio- controlled boat. He had seen it in the toy shop in Norrtälje, and had been seduced by the fantastic picture on the box. The white hull racing across the water, the blue go-faster stripes along the side. It cost three hundred and fifty kronor, and it would be his before the summer was over.
It wasn't impossible. He and his father would lay their net twice a week, then Anders would sell the fish outside the shop. Six kronor a kilo, and he got half. So the boat represented one hundred and seventeen kilos of herring, he had worked out. With one krona left over.
He was no Uncle Scrooge, saving every krona he earned, but he had managed to put away one hundred and ninety kronor. Every catch brought between thirty and forty kilos, but by the time it got towards the end of June and the herring were beginning to move further out to sea, each catch was slightly smaller. He still needed to sell fifty kilos of fish, and they were unlikely to put the net out more than twice before the end of the season.
So that was the first thing Anders thought about when he woke up that morning: fifty kilos.
He got out of bed and dug his fishing clothes out of the bottom drawer. The smell alone would have given his mother palpitations. Both his jeans and pullover were covered in old scales and dried roe, and had approximately the same aroma as the dried pieces of fish you give to dogs.
Finally he put on his cap. It was a cap with a logo from the shipyard in Nåten where his father worked, and it too was so full of scales and solidified herring gunge that a dog could probably have eaten it just as it was.
Anders liked his outfit. When he put it on he was no longer Anders-nobody-in-particular, he was Anders the fisher boy. This was not something he could share with his friends from the city, and he made sure he changed his clothes before he sat down outside the shop. But in the mornings when they were all still sleeping, he was just his father's son, the fisher boy, and he liked that.
It was a fine morning. Anders and his father sat opposite each other at the kitchen table with a cup of hot chocolate and a cup of coffee respectively, looking out towards the bay, which was dead calm. The reflector in Gåvasten lighthouse was bouncing back the first rays of the sun. The odd cloud drifted across the sky like swansdown on a puddle.
They each ate a sandwich and finished their drinks. Then they put on their lifejackets and went down to the boat. Dad cranked up the compression ignition engine, and it started first time. At the beginning of the summer Anders had asked to have a go, and had been frightened by the recoil in the crank handle when the engine didn't fire. He left it to Dad after that.