‘Why are we stopping?’
She stretched out her hand. I took hold of it. We sat there in silence. A lorry laden with logs thundered past, whipping up a cloud of snow.
‘I know you searched through my caravan while we were out. I don’t mind. You’ll never be able to find my secrets in drawers or on shelves.’
‘I noticed that you write letters and sometimes receive answers. But probably not the answers you’d like to get?’
‘I receive signed photographs from politicians I accuse of crimes. Most of them answer evasively, others not at all.’
‘What do you hope to achieve?’
‘To make a difference that’s so small it’s not even noticeable. But it’s a difference, for all that.’
I had a lot of questions, but she interrupted me before I had chance to ask them.
‘What do you want to know about me?’
‘You lead a strange life out here in the forest. But then, maybe it’s no more strange than my own. I find it hard to ask all the questions I’d like to have answers to: but I can sometimes be a good listener. A doctor has to be.’
She sat in silence for a while before she started speaking.
‘You have a daughter who’s been in prison. That was eleven years ago. I hadn’t committed any violent crimes. Only fraud.’
She half opened the door, and immediately it became cold inside the car.
‘I’m telling you the facts,’ she said. ‘You and Mum seem to have lied to each other. I don’t want to be like you.’
‘We were young,’ I said. ‘Neither of us knew enough about ourselves to do the right thing every time. It can sometimes be very hard to act in accordance with the truth. It’s much easier to tell lies.’
‘I want you to know the kind of life I’ve led. When I was a child, I felt like a changeling. Or, if you like, as if I’d been billeted with my mother by chance, while waiting for my real parents. She and I were at war. You ought to know that it’s not easy to live with Harriet. That’s something you’ve escaped having to go through.’
‘What happened?’
She shrugged.
‘The usual horror stories. One thing after another. Glue sniffing, thinner, drugs, truancy. But it didn’t get me down, I pulled through. I recall that period of my life as a time playing non-stop blind man’s buff. A life led with a scarf tied over my eyes. Instead of helping, all my mum did was tell me off. She tried to create an atmosphere of love between us by shouting at me. I left home just as soon as I could. I was trapped in a net of guilt: and then came all the fraud and deceit, and in the end I was locked up. Do you know how many times Harriet came to visit me while I was locked up?’
‘No?’
‘Once. Shortly before I was released. Just to make sure that I had no intention of moving back in with her. We didn’t speak to each other for five years after that. It was a long time before we got in touch again.’
‘What happened?’
‘I met Janne, who came from up here in the north. One morning I woke up to find him stone-cold dead in bed beside me. Janne’s funeral took place in a church not far from here. His relatives arrived. I didn’t know any of them. Without warning I stood up and announced that I wanted to sing a song. I don’t know where I got the courage from. Maybe I was angry to find that I was on my own again, and maybe I was annoyed by all those relatives who hadn’t put in an appearance when Janne needed them. The only song I could remember was the first verse of “Sailing”. I sang it twice — and looking back, I think it’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. When I emerged from the church and saw those apparently endless Hälsningland forests, I had the feeling that I belonged here, in the trees and the silence. That’s why I ended up here. Nothing was planned, it just happened. Everybody else around here is leaving and heading for the cities: but I turned my back on urban life. I found people here that I’d never realised existed. Nobody had told me about them.’
She stopped, and announced that it was too cold in the car to carry on talking. I had the feeling that what she had said could have been the blurb on the back of a book. A summary of a life, lived thus far. I still didn’t really know anything about my daughter. But she had begun to tell me.
I switched on the engine. The headlights illuminated the darkness.
‘I wanted you to know,’ she said. ‘One thing at a time.’
‘Let it take as long as it needs,’ I said. ‘The best way to get to know another person is one step at a time. That applies to you just as much as it does to me. If you go too fast, you can collide, or run aground.’
‘As happens at sea?’
‘What you don’t see is what you notice too late. That doesn’t only apply to unmarked channels at sea, it applies to people as well.’
I pulled out and continued along the main road. Why hadn’t I told her about the catastrophe that had blighted my life? Perhaps it was only due to exhaustion and confusion as a result of the astonishing revelations of the last couple of days. I would tell her soon enough, but not just yet. It was as if I was still trapped in that moment when I’d emerged from my hole in the ice, had the feeling that there was something behind me, looked round and saw Harriet, leaning on her wheeled walker.
I was deep in the melancholy forest of northern Sweden. But even so, most of me was still in my hole in the ice.
When I got back home, if the thaw hadn’t started and the ice was still there, it would take me a long time to chop it away again and open up the hole.
Chapter 4
The headlight beams and shadows danced over the snow.
We got out of the car without speaking. It was a cloudless and starry sky, colder now, and the temperature was falling. Faint light seeped out from the caravan windows.
When we went inside I could hear from Harriet’s breathing that all was not well. I failed to wake her up. I took her pulse: it was fast and irregular. I had my blood pressure monitor in the car. I asked Louise to fetch it. Both Harriet’s diastolic and systolic readings were too high.
We carried her out to my car. Louise asked what had happened. I told her that we needed to take Harriet to an A&E department where they could examine her thoroughly. Maybe she had had a stroke, perhaps something had happened in connection with her general condition: I didn’t know.
We drove through the darkness to Hudiksvall. The hospital lay in waiting, looking like an illuminated liner. We were received by two friendly nurses at the Emergency entrance; Harriet had regained consciousness, and it was not long before a doctor arrived to examine her. Although Louise looked at me somewhat oddly, I didn’t mention the fact that I was a doctor myself — or, at least, had been. I merely informed them that Harriet had cancer, and that her days were numbered. She was taking medicine to ease her pain, that was all. I wrote the names of the medication on a piece of paper, and gave it to the doctor.
We waited while the doctor, who was about my age, performed the examination. He said afterwards that he would keep her in overnight for observation. He couldn’t find anything specific that might have caused her reaction: it was presumably due to a deterioration in her general condition.
Harriet had fallen asleep again when we left her and emerged once more into the dark night. It was gone two by now; the sky was still cloudless. Louise suddenly stopped.
‘Is she going to die now?’ she asked.
‘I don’t think she’s ready to die yet. She’s a tough lady. If she has the strength to walk over the ice with her walker, I reckon she has a lot of strength left. I think she’ll tell us when the time comes.’
‘I always get hungry when I’m scared,’ said Louise. ‘Some people feel ill, but I simply have to eat.’