All at once the outside world was very close. It was as if a volume control in his ears had been slowly turned down over the course of several years and had suddenly been turned back to full strength.
‘I can hear everything,’ he said, blinking at Ulrik in astonishment. ‘Is that normal?’
‘How does your own voice sound? Is it echoing inside your head?’
‘A little bit.’
The audiologist clicked on his computer and the echo diminished.
‘I’m putting on four different programs,’ he explained. ‘That means you can adjust the hearing aid to suit you, depending on the context — whether you’re listening to the birds, chatting to someone, listening to the radio, or you just want to hear more distant sounds.’
‘You mean if I want to eavesdrop?’
Ulrik smiled. ‘In that case, you need to choose the setting for gossip.’
When Ulrik had gone, Gerlof remained sitting in the garden, amazed at all the sounds he could hear. He had regained a lost world.
An ear-splitting screech from the east almost made him jump, but it was only a lovesick cock pheasant wandering around the freshly mown meadow calling for hens.
Suddenly, Gerlof heard two voices from another direction, somewhere to the south. He turned his head but could see only trees behind him. The voices were coming through the forest, possibly from the coast road. Or from the shore? They sounded so close, but Gerlof had experienced this phenomenon before on Öland. Because the island was so flat, voices could sometimes be heard over a distance of several kilometres, if the wind was in the right direction.
He adjusted the hearing aid.
The eavesdropper’s setting, he thought, feeling slightly ashamed of himself.
The voices were much clearer now. A man and a woman were talking; Gerlof couldn’t hear what they were actually saying, but the man sounded calm, the woman more agitated. She was speaking much faster and louder; his responses were slow. It seemed like an intimate conversation between close friends. Friends, or lovers?
Gerlof tried to adjust the sound in his ear, improve his ability to eavesdrop, but he still couldn’t make out what they were saying. Were they speaking Swedish, or a different language?
Then the catch on the gate rattled and Gerlof saw that his grandchildren were back from the jetty. He sat up straight and quickly turned down the volume; their cheerful shouts were a little too much.
Jonas
Mats looked around as if to make sure that no adults were listening, then leaned closer to Jonas and lowered his voice.
‘You can’t come to Kalmar with us. You do understand that?’
Jonas was sitting next to him on Uncle Kent’s leather sofa. He wanted to protest, have the courage to stand up to his older brother, but he said nothing.
‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t understand it at all.’
‘Because you’re too young for the film,’ Mats said. ‘You have to be over fifteen to see Armageddon.’
Jonas looked at him. He knew that the battle over the cinema trip was already lost, but he went on anyway: ‘I’ve seen films like that in Marnäs. The two of us have... All we had to do was walk in.’
Mats waved a fly away from his ear. ‘Yes, but this is different. They check on everybody in Kalmar. They’ve got security, they ask for ID. You don’t have any, which means you wouldn’t get in and you’d have to sit on a park bench waiting for the film to end. You’d be hanging around Kalmar on your own all evening... Is that what you want?’
Jonas shook his head. Mats was eighteen, Urban nineteen, and he knew they’d got together behind his back and chosen an American action movie with a 15+ certificate so that Casper could go with them but Jonas couldn’t.
‘You’ll get the money for the ticket anyway, that’s no problem,’ Mats said. ‘But Dad and Kent and Veronica will think you’re with us in Kalmar, so try and stay out of the way until we get back.’ He smiled. ‘Go and play with one of your little friends.’
Play? Jonas didn’t have any real friends in the village. All the boys were either older than him, or much younger. He wasn’t allowed to hang out with the older boys, and the younger ones were boring.
Hiding away inside Villa Kloss wasn’t an option, because the adults were having a party. If he could have disappeared without a trace for the evening, he would have done just that.
‘Hi there, you two!’
Their father came into the big room. Jonas thought he was looking at his two sons as if they were no more than recent acquaintances, in spite of the fact that they had seen him several times over the past few years.
‘So you’re off to the cinema in the big city tonight?’
Jonas didn’t say a word.
‘Are you catching the bus to Kalmar, Mats?’
‘Urban’s driving.’
‘OK. Stay off the beer, in that case.’
Mats looked up at the ceiling, then down at his father.
‘But I expect you’ll be having a few drinks at the party tonight, Dad? Knocking them back?’
‘No,’ Niklas said, but he couldn’t look his son in the eye. ‘Have you ever seen me drunk, Mats?’
‘Mum has. She says you were often drunk when you were married.’
Jonas stared at the floor, wondering where everyone else was. Please let Veronica come in...
Niklas looked at Mats.
‘That was a long time ago. Before you were born. In our first apartment. We had a few parties that got a bit out of hand. And Anita... Anita wasn’t always sober back then either. I could tell you a few tales about her.’
‘Don’t start badmouthing Mum.’
‘I’m just telling it like it was, Mats.’
Jonas got up, slowly and silently. If he moved very carefully, perhaps no one would notice him. Like a ghost, he drifted towards the glass door leading to the veranda; he was almost there when the call came.
‘Jonas?’
He stopped, turned around — and saw that Dad had found a smile somewhere and plastered it on.
‘Fancy a swim?’
The sky was blue and the air dry and warm outside, but Jonas still felt chilled to the bone. And alone, in spite of the fact that he was walking next to his father. There was no trip to the cinema in Kalmar to look forward to tonight, just loneliness.
They walked across the baking-hot coast road and out on to the ridge. Niklas didn’t speak until they were passing the burial cairn. He pointed to the stones and said, ‘People think there’s treasure buried beneath the cairn. You know it’s an ancient grave, don’t you?’
Jonas nodded. ‘We learned about the Bronze Age in school. It came between the Stone Age and the Iron Age.’
‘Exactly. So there’s a Bronze Age chieftain buried here, just like King Mysing in his burial mound in the south of the island. But you’re not scared, are you?’
‘Not me,’ Jonas said.
Not at the moment, anyway, he thought; not when the sun was shining and his dad was here. The cairn was completely harmless right now. But he didn’t like being out here in the evening, when it became a portal to another world, and the ghost came out and turned people into killer zombies.
His dad had said something, asked a question as they started down the stone steps leading to the water.
‘What?’ Jonas said.
‘Is Mum OK?’
‘Yes... I suppose so. She spends a lot of time working.’
‘Good,’ his dad said. ‘It’s good that she’s got a job.’
He looked as if he wanted to ask more questions about Mum, so Jonas hurried down the steps.