‘Daddy, you go round the back while we’re inside and see if you can see us through the cracks, OK?’ Vanja said, squinting up at me.
‘All right, then,’ I said, and walked round the shed. Heard them banging around and giggling inside. Bent my head to one of the cracks and peered in. But the difference between the light outside and the darkness inside was too great for me to see anything.
‘Daddy, are you outside?’ Vanja shouted.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Can you see us?’
‘No. Have you become invisible?’
‘Yes!’
When they came out I pretended I couldn’t see them. Focused my eyes on Vanja and called her name.
‘I’m here,’ she said, waving her arms.
‘Vanja?’ I shouted. ‘Where are you? Come out now. It’s not funny any more.’
‘I’m here! Here!’
‘Vanja?’
‘Can’t you see me, really? Am I really invisible?’
She sounded boundlessly happy although I sensed a touch of unease in her voice. At that moment John started screaming. I looked up. Linda got up clutching him to her breast. It was unlike John to cry like that.
‘Oh, there you are!’ I said. ‘Have you been there the whole time?’
‘Ye-es,’ she said.
‘Can you hear John crying?’
She nodded and looked up.
‘We’ll have to go then,’ I said. ‘Come on.’
I reached out for Heidi’s hand.
‘Don’t want to,’ she said. ‘Don’t want to hold hands.’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Hop into the buggy then.’
‘Don’t want buggy,’ she said.
‘Shall I carry you then?’
‘Don’t want carry.’
I went down and fetched the buggy. When I returned she had clambered onto the fence. Vanja was sitting on the ground. At the top of the hill Linda had left the restaurant; she was standing in the road now looking down, waving to us with one hand. John was still screaming.
‘I don’t want to walk,’ Vanja said. ‘My legs are tired.’
‘You’ve hardly walked a step all day,’ I said. ‘How can your legs be tired?’
‘Haven’t got any legs. You’ll have to carry me.’
‘No, Vanja, that’s rubbish. I can’t carry you.’
‘Yes, you can.’
‘Get in the buggy, Heidi,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll go for a ride.’
‘Don’t want buggy,’ she said.
‘I haven’t got any leeegs!’ Vanja said. She screamed the last word.
I felt the fury rising within me. My impulse was to lift them up and carry them, one pinned under each arm. This would not be the first time I had gone off with them kicking and screaming in my arms, oblivious of passers-by, who always stared with such interest when we had our little scenes, as though I was wearing a monkey mask or something.
But this time I managed to regain my composure.
‘Could you get into the buggy, Vanja?’ I asked.
‘If you lift me,’ she said.
‘No, you’ll have to do it yourself.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I haven’t got any legs.’
If I didn’t give way we would be standing here until the next day, for though Vanja lacked patience and gave up as soon as she met any resistance, she was infinitely stubborn when it was a question of getting her own way.
‘OK,’ I said, lifting her up into the buggy. ‘You win again.’
‘Win what?’ she asked.
‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Come on, Heidi. We’re going.’
I lifted her off the fence, and after a couple of half-hearted ‘No, don’t want’s we were on our way up the hill, Heidi on my arm, Vanja in the buggy. As we passed, I picked up Heidi’s cloth mouse, brushed off the dirt and popped it into the net shopping bag.
‘I don’t know what’s up with him,’ Linda said as we arrived at the top. ‘He suddenly started crying. Perhaps he’s been stung by a wasp or something. Look…’
She pulled up his jumper and showed me a small red mark. He squirmed in her grip, his face red and his hair wet from all the screaming.
‘Poor little lad,’ she said.
‘I’ve been bitten by a horsefly,’ I said. ‘Perhaps that’s what happened. Put him in the buggy though and we can get going. We can’t do anything about it now anyway.’
When he was strapped in, he wriggled about and bored his head down, still screaming.
‘Let’s get into the car,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ Linda replied. ‘But I’ll have to change him first. There’s a nappy changing room down there.’
I nodded, and we began to walk down. Several hours had passed since we arrived, the sun was lower in the sky and something about the light it cast over the trees reminded me of summer afternoons at home when we either drove to the far side of the island with mum and dad to swim in the sea or walked down to the knoll in the sound beyond the estate. The memories filled my mind for a few seconds, not in the form of specific events, more as atmospheres, smells, sensations. The way the light, which in the middle of the day was whiter and more neutral, became fuller later in the afternoon and began to make the colours darker. Oh, running on the path through the shady forest on a summer day in the 70s! Diving into the salt water and swimming across to Gjerstadholmen on the other side! The sun shining on the sea-smoothed rocks, turning them almost golden. The stiff dry grass growing in the hollows between them. The sense of the depths beneath the surface of the water, so dark as it lay in the shadow beneath the mountainside. The fish gliding by. And then the treetops above us, their slender branches trembling in the sea breeze! The thin bark and the smooth leg-like tree beneath. The green foliage…
‘There it is,’ Linda said, nodding towards a small octagonal wooden construction. ‘Will you wait?’
‘We’ll amble down,’ I said.
In the copse inside the fence there were two gnomes carved in wood. That was how the place justified its status as Fairytale Land.
‘Look, tompen!’ Heidi shouted. Tompen, or in correct Swedish tomten, was a gnome.
She had been fixated on gnomes for quite a time. Well into spring she had pointed to the veranda where the gnome had appeared on Christmas Eve and said ‘Tompen’s coming,’ and when she played with one of the presents he had given her she always stated first of all where it had come from. What sort of status he had for her, however, was not easy to say, because when she spotted the gnome outfit in my wardrobe after Christmas she wasn’t in the least bit surprised or upset. We hadn’t said a word; she just pointed and shouted ‘Tompen’ as if that was where he changed his clothes, and when we met the old tramp with the white beard who hung around in the square outside our house she would stand up in the buggy and shout ‘Tompen’ at the top of her lungs.
I leaned forward and kissed her chubby cheek.
‘No kisses!’ she said.
I laughed.
‘Can I kiss you then, Vanja?’
‘No!’ Vanja said.
A meagre though regular stream of people flowed past us, most wearing summery clothes — shorts, T-shirts and sandals — some in jogging pants and trainers, a striking number of them fat, almost none well dressed.