Harbour

'What are you doing?' asked Cecilia.

'Nothing special.'

'What's going on down on the jetty?'

Anders took a deep breath and asked, as if in passing, 'Would you like an ice cream?'

Cecilia looked at him as if he were joking, and smiled uncertainly.

'I haven't got any money.'

'I have.'

'Are you paying, then?'

'Yes.'

Anders knew perfectly well that it was a strange question to ask, a strange thing to do. But none of the others were around, and his pockets were full of money. He just had to ask her.

She pushed her bike up to the shop and he walked alongside her, still with his hands in his back pockets. She had put her hair up in two medium-length plaits, she had freckles on her nose and he was struck by an urge to touch her plaits. They looked so…soft.

Fortunately his hands were deep in his back pockets, which prevented him from giving in to that particular impulse.

Cecilia propped her bike against the wall and asked, 'So did you sell a lot of herring, then?'

'Yes, this morning. Loads.'

'I usually sell Christmas magazines.'

'Is that worth doing?' 'It's OK.'

Anders started to relax properly. This was the first summer he had really considered the fact that he was different from his friends, who were only summer visitors. That there might be something embarrassing about the fact that he sat outside the shop selling herring and ended up with his hands smelling of fish. That he was…a bit of a hick. But it turned out that Cecilia sold things too. Although presumably Christmas magazines didn't smell.

They went into the shop and studied the contents of the freezer.

'So what can I have?' asked Cecilia.

'Whatever you like.'

'Whatever I like?' She looked at him suspiciously. 'A Giant Cornet?'

'Yes.'

'Two Giant Cornets?'

'Yes.'

'Three Giant Cornets?'

Anders shrugged his shoulders and Cecilia opened the lid. 'What are you having?'

'A Giant Cornet.'

She picked up two Giant Cornets and when Anders leaned over to pick up another, Cecilia slapped him on the shoulder, said 'I was only joking, idiot!' and handed him one of the ice creams she was holding.

At the till Anders pulled a ten kronor note out of his pocket without managing to create that special rustle you always heard when the boy with the golden trousers took out his cash.

They sat down on the bench outside the shop to eat their ice creams. Anders told her what had happened that morning, and Cecilia was seriously impressed that he had seen a person drown himself for real.

While they were eating their ice creams, while Anders was telling his story, while they sat looking out over the water afterwards, a little prayer was running through Anders' head: don't let anybody come along, don't let anybody come along. He wondered if Cecilia was thinking the same thing, or if this sort of thing was perfectly normal for girls.

OK, it wasn't particularly embarrassing to be sitting here with Cecilia eating ice creams that he had paid for, but nor did he want the moment, the atmosphere to be broken. Even though he felt uncertain and didn't really know how he ought to behave, he was having such a fantastic time. It was just the best, sitting here with Cecilia.

When they had finished their ice creams and looked at the sea for a while, Anders' suspicion that girls were more used to this sort of thing was confirmed when Cecilia stood up, wiped her hands on her shorts and said, 'Shall we go back to yours?'

All he could do was nod. Cecilia picked up her bike and pointed to the parcel rack. 'Hop on. I'll give you a lift.' He sat astride the parcel rack and Cecilia kicked off and rolled the bike down the hill from the shop.

There was nothing else to do. It was completely natural. At first he tried to keep his balance by hanging on to the back of the parcel rack, but the track was uneven and he wobbled and nearly made the bike fall over. So he placed his hands on her hips.

He could feel the warmth of her skin on his palms, the sun was shining in the sky and the wind was caressing his forehead. They coasted through the village and he held on to her. The few minutes it took to coast and pedal to his house were the happiest he had experienced in his life, so far. They were…perfect.

Cecilia parked her bike by the woodshed and nodded in the direction of the smoker, which was still giving off a faint aroma.

'We were going to do some smoking, but we didn't get round to it.'

'Were you going to smoke buckling?'

'Mm.'

Anders didn't bother to correct her. Buckling was smoked herring. To say 'smoked buckling' was like saying 'a curved bend' or 'a cold ice cream', but this was probably the sort of thing a hick would know, and not something to show off about.

When Cecilia was with him he saw it so clearly: his garden didn't look like theirs. In his garden there was a woodpile and smoke and old rubbish his father had saved because 'it might come in handy'. No beautifully mown lawns or fruit bushes in neat rows. No badminton court and no hammock. He didn't usually notice. But now he noticed.

Cecilia walked towards the house and Anders thought that at least his room looked like the others' rooms, fortunately.

What are we going to do in my room? What are girls interested in?

He had loads of comics. He didn't know whether Cecilia read comics. He had books. Maybe they could bake something? He could bake sticky buns and scones. Did she like baking?

He didn't get any further in his pondering, because Cecilia had stopped and was looking down at something on the ground. He hurried over to her and when he saw what she was looking at, his lungs sank down to his thighs.

Beside the spindly gooseberry bush next to the house, his father was lying on his stomach with his arms by his side, face down on the ground. Cecilia was on her way over to him, but Anders grabbed her shoulder.

'No,' he said. 'Come on. Let's go.'

Cecilia pulled herself free. 'Don't be silly, we can't leave him like that. He could suffocate.'

Anders had never seen his father so drunk that he lay down and went to sleep like this in the middle of the day, but the drinking itself was nothing new to him. Sometimes when he got home in the evening his father would be sitting there with glassy eyes, talking rubbish, and at those times Anders tried to stay out of the house as much as possible. Right now he was so embarrassed he didn't know where to put himself.

Cecilia crouched down beside his sleeping father and shook his shoulder. 'Hey,' she said. 'Hello.' She turned to Anders. 'What's his name?'

'Johan. Look, just leave him. He's drunk.'

'Johan,' said Cecilia, shaking him more roughly. 'Johan, you can't lie here.'

Johan's body twitched and a deep cough rumbled up through his chest. Cecilia drew back as Johan raised his head and rolled over on to his side. He had been lying on a half-full plastic bottle that had been squashed out of shape by the weight of his body.

He caught sight of Cecilia and his eyes were made of dirty glass, a thread of saliva dangled from the corner of his mouth down to the grass. He smacked his lips, cleared his throat and slurred, 'Love one another.'

The humiliation crushed Anders into the ground and splashed his cheeks with red. His father's hand was groping for Cecilia's foot as if he wanted to get hold of it. When he couldn't reach he looked up at her and said, 'Just be careful of the sea.'

The shame of it all exploded into blind rage and Anders ran over to his father, aimed a kick. However, a faint glimmer of sense made him change the direction of the kick at the last moment, so that instead of his father's head he caught the plastic bottle, which bounced away across the overgrown lawn.

It wasn't enough. His father attempted a foolish smile, and Anders was about to hurl himself at him to beat the rage out of his body and into his father's when Cecilia grabbed his arm and pulled him away.