What is it? Real teenage love. Maybe. On the other hand, Rita has other boyfriends too when the Backmanssons are not home and they are not always around because the parents are field biologists and travel quite a bit: boys from the District, ones like Järpe and Torpe Torpeson, for example.
And it is hard to know with Rita, becomes harder all the time, she is not exactly someone who explains herself, in that respect she definitely does not become a speech maker with age. Says nothing about her business, gradually not even to her sister Solveig, not to mention Tobias who continues supporting her and Solveig as best he can. Opens his wallet, “gives scholarships,” just as fair with both of them.
But Rita, she slips away more and more… and there is something wild and unmanageable about her. More and more too, with time, as if Rita in some way is two people. One who spends time at the Backmanssons’ house when they are home and otherwise another who exists in the District, in school, outside class and makes several of her classmates afraid. Rita Rat, she who provokes, allows herself to be provoked, and does not hold back, the one who hits.
But at the same time, despite everything and all of the time: Rita does well in school, has good grades in just about every subject. “The astronaut,” “the nuclear physicist,” it still matters, at least to her. In reality Solveig is the one who starts fading away and it does not turn around either: later when Rita leaves the District in the middle of high school, Solveig becomes pregnant shortly thereafter by one of the Torpeson boys from the Outer Marsh. Drops out of school and it is left unfinished despite the fact that she miscarries after a few months. Starts cleaning full-time for the cleaning company Four Mops and a Dustpan, which the cousin’s mama leaves behind.
But Rita, still during that final period when she remains: drags certain youths with her from the District over to the Second Cape in the fall when the summer residents have gone home. Rita and the Rats: break into the abandoned vacation homes, make them theirs for the night, have parties, but mostly are just there, creepy crawling, invading. Do not destroy, vandalize to leave a mark behind: we were here.
Solveig is there too of course. Still, something in Rita Rat those final weeks that also makes Solveig keep her distance. Rita is always the one who keeps on to the bitter end, if someone goes too far it is always Rita. One of the last nights Rita is in the District: how she breaks into the Glass House, starts breaking the windows on the veranda, with a cane, furious. Solveig remains standing on the hill, smooth as glass, hard, shiny, as if frozen in the moonlight—and watches.
It is Rita’s last fall in the District, the Backmansson family has been gone quite a while, it is more than a year now actually. The house on the First Cape has burned, not completely but it was damaged in a forest fire that spread at a violent speed. The Backmanssons were not home then but the house has become inhabitable and it needs to be repaired, and in the meantime the Backmansson family is living in their apartment in the city by the sea again. The intention is that they will return as said, but time is passing—the renovation never gets started and for a long time, it will be many years, the house just stands there on the hill with a dark, open gaping hole on the side, deteriorating even more until it is torn down at the end of the 1980s.
But when the Backmanssons left they promised Rita that she might be able to come and live with them in the apartment in the city, finish high school there, in one of the city’s schools. But time is passing, as said, and nothing happens: the house on the First Cape stands where it stands, as if the Backmanssons have forgotten what they said to Rita before they left. It is not mentioned when Rita visits her boyfriend Jan Backmansson in the city by the sea and the visits have also become fewer and farther between the final months Rita is in the District. As said, the Backmanssons travel a great deal and then Jan Backmansson has his own hobbies that Rita does not share but that his parents suddenly think he should make time for in addition to his demanding schoolwork. Scouting and something called “convent activities.” Rita does not even know what it is, but things like that, similar things.
And she waits, waits—until she does not have the strength to wait anymore.
No one says out loud that Rita is the one who goes after the windows on the veranda of the Glass House, no one tells; a crime no one gets any clarity in. It is Solveig who explains to Tobias much later how it was.
And the baroness passes away that fall, never hears about it.
Besides, so many other things happen that fall—everything. Doris dies, Rita leaves.
As if everything culminated, but in an entirely separate story. That cursed October night when Doris Flinkenberg due to her unhappiness, her rejected, defrauded love, gets it into her head to go and shoot herself.
Doris, the amazing, who despite the darkness within her was so light on the outside: goes down to Bule Marsh, out onto Lore Cliff, has a pistol, presses the muzzle to her temple and fires.
And the night after Doris Flinkenberg’s funeral, that is when Rita heads off. To the Backmanssons in the city by the sea, without asking permission or telling anyone about her plans ahead of time.
One Saturday night in November 1976 Rita is suddenly standing below the Backmanssons’ third-floor balcony on a calm and civilized street in the chic southern areas of the city center. Dirty, slightly intoxicated, everything she owns in a shabby plastic bag.
Calls out to the people standing on the balcony, guests of Mr. and Mrs. Backmansson who are having a large party that night.
But Rita waits on the street, and is let in.
That is how it is told to Solveig later by a few youths from the District whom Rita bummed a ride from into the city after she wrecked Solveig’s tiny rickety old car that she had driven off in from the twins’ cottage while Solveig was in the shower. Certainly deliberately: out into the field, toward a tree at a low speed, then walked to the main country road with her things in a plastic bag.
Not even Solveig’s own car but her boyfriend’s at the time, Järpe Torpeson, who had fixed it up for Solveig so that she and her sister would be able to sputter around on the small roads and to the Outer Marsh, Torpesonia, where he lived.
Broom. How Solveig, in the bathroom, had heard the engine start. Gone out, seen the little car disappear into the darkness—the last of her twin sister Rita. Forever.
All of Solveig’s attempts at getting in touch were in vain. Rita cuts all cords, does not get in touch.
And what is left? At the cousin’s property, the cousin’s house?
Doris’s song, maybe. A voice on an old cassette tape.
“The folk song has many verses, the same thing happens in every one. Over and over again. Such a different way of looking at time.”
Doris’s voice, soft, a bit hoarse, just a few weeks before she takes her own life. Becomes the first in a long line of those who will go down to Bule Marsh and die at their own hand. Because it is, in real time and history, what Bule Marsh is gradually transformed into. A cursed place, a sanctuary for suicidals.
But no, it has nothing to do with any old stories anymore. Like, once upon a time, Rumba tones, the three cursed ones.
Just a darkness that falls over the cousin’s property, over and over again. Woe followed by woe, like pearls in a necklace. With some places, some people it is like that. They are cursed, so to speak. Things happen, and continue to happen.