While Roger worked to get Marten's snowsuit off and wrap him in his own fleece, Ulla and Lennart Qvist, who had been aboard the tender, came to look after Maria and Arvid.
There was the sound of screaming from up on the jetty, and when Arvid managed to get to his feet with some support, he could see that two adults were holding on to Sofia, who was flinging herself from side to side, howling like an animal and trying to bite them. The gulls were circling above the scene like an excited audience at a boxing match, flapping around them, screaming and urging them on.
Marten wept in Roger's arms as he was carried home, and Maria was also sobbing, her lips blue with cold, as Ulla led her along by the hand. Arvid took off his pullover and Lennart wrapped him in a big overcoat, patting him on the shoulder.
'Well done, Arvid. Well done.'
Arvid's jaws were trembling so much he could hardly speak. He nodded stiffly towards the crazed gulls and Sofia, who was being dragged along swearing and kicking. 'Why. Is it. Like this?'
'Nobody knows,' said Lennart. 'Nobody knows. Let's get you home.'
On shaking legs Arvid allowed himself to be led around the sea buckthorn thicket and up towards the village. When he saw that his path was going to cross Sofia's, he stopped.
'Could you do me a favour?'
'Of course,' said Lennart. 'Anything.'
'Could you get my jacket?'
While Lennart went back for the jacket, Arvid stood there with the overcoat tightly wrapped around him, watching as Sofia was bundled towards her home. The gulls pursued them, circling above their heads as if they had spotted their prey and were just waiting for the right moment to swoop.
When Lennart came back Arvid returned his coat, pulled the leather jacket over his bare skin and said he would be fine now. Then he staggered homeward, with water squelching in his boots.
When he reached the shop he stopped and looked along the track where Marten was being carried home to his mum and dad, still wailing loudly, but alive. Arvid pulled his jacket closer and thought about how he felt.
It was strange, somehow.
For the first time it felt as if the jacket was warming him. And it was no longer too big. It fitted. Perfectly.
Back to Gåvasten
The cold nipped at Anders' cheeks and brought tears to his eyes. He had wrapped up as warmly as he could and was wearing a lifejacket under his padded jacket, but the headwind found its way into every nook and cranny and by the time he was halfway to Gåvasten, he was frozen through.
At first he had thought there was something odd about his eyes, that he was seeing dots, but from this distance he could see that the dots swarming across the sky around Gåvasten were actually birds. It was impossible to tell what kind they were, but it looked as if they were different sizes, and therefore different species.
Simon's twenty-horsepower engine hummed monotonously and the fibreglass hull slapped against the waves. Anders' face was so stiff with the cold that he no longer felt it when a few drops flew up and hit his cheeks or chin. He kept his eyes fixed on Gåvasten and his left hand clenched around the throttle, turned up to maximum. He was an arrow fired from Domarö, heading straight for his target: the lighthouse.
And yet he couldn't prevent something from seeping in and eating away at his deep-frozen resolve. An unpleasant, jelly-like quivering was growing in his chest the closer he got to the lighthouse and the teeming birds. A feeling as familiar as an obnoxious relative: fear. Good old fear, causing the arrow to veer off-course and slow down.
The resonance of the engine deepened as he cut the speed and allowed the boat to chug along for the last hundred metres. The birds around the lighthouse really were a mixture of species. The wildly flapping wings of golden-eyes, the heavy bodies of the eider ducks and the elegance of the gulls, soaring along on the air currents. There were even a number of swans bobbing on the sea off the lighthouse.
What are they doing?
Many of the birds were up in the air circling around the lighthouse, but even more were gathered on the surface of the water. Their behaviour didn't appear to have any purpose, other than to show a united front, to say: Here we are.
And yet it was unpleasant. Anders hadn't see The Birds, but he could well imagine what it would be like if such a large number of birds decided to attack. They were showing no inclination to do so at the moment, but perhaps when he stepped ashore?
When the boat slipped in among the first group of birds, they paddled quickly out of the way glaring at him aggressively, he thought. He decided to use the only weapon, or at least protection, to which he had access.
He let go of the throttle and allowed the engine to idle as he picked up the plastic bottle, took a deep breath then took a couple of swigs of the wormwood concentrate.
The nausea seared his mouth, his throat, his stomach, and the flames shot up into his head, licking around his brain. He fought back the urge to vomit, put the top back on and grasped the throttle. The birds swam away, leaving him a feather-free route up to the rock.
He hesitated for a few seconds before setting foot ashore. Then he climbed out of the boat and looked around. The birds were still whirling around in the air and it seemed to him that their screams were becoming more intense. But they weren't attacking. He pulled up the boat as far as he could and fastened the mooring rope to a rock.
And so he was standing on Gåvasten once again.
The first and last time he had been here before, the rocks had been covered in snow. Now he could see that they had been polished by the sea, and that veins of pink and white ran through the grey rock, forming a pattern beneath the spatter of guano. He stood motionless, his arms dangling by his sides and his mouth open, as the pattern freed itself from its foundation and drifted together, forming itself into…an alphabet.
A language.
The lines running vertically and horizontally, the separate dots and curlicues were all characters, parts of a system of writing that was so complex his brain was unable to encompass it; he could only establish that it existed.
Like a baby who has picked up a bible and tosses it aside when it proves impossible to chew, Anders tore his gaze away from the writing on the rock and carried on up towards the eastern side of the island. It was not his language, it meant nothing to him.
He didn't know how to look because he didn't know what he was looking for, but his consciousness was sounding out the area as if it were a knot that must be untied. He needed to find the point where there was a little slack, where he could get his finger in and start to work it.
He couldn't find any such point. The world was impenetrably solid and filled with messages he was unable to interpret.
The formation of the rock was like a broken flight of steps leading down into the sea, the individual free-standing blocks of stone and the lines of gravel in the crevices formed new characters that wanted to say something. When he looked up it was to the disorienting sight of the flocks of birds creating figures against the sky, figures that continuously dissolved and reformed into new beings.
Everything is talking to me. And I don't understand what it's saying.
Anders crouched down and dipped his hands in a puddle of crystal clear rainwater, rubbed his face and eyes, closed his eyes for a while.
When he opened them a little of the visionary impression had left him, and he was able to walk up to the lighthouse, screwing up his eyes as he went. The door was unlocked, as it had been on the previous occasion. One thing he was grateful for: the hallucinatory effect of the wormwood blocked almost all his memories. In fact, what it actually did was to place him so powerfully in the here and now that it was painful. But it was still better than the alternative.