Samuel

It is warmer now.

My room on the top floor faces south, and even when I wake up at seven the air is hot and muggy and my sheets are sticky with sweat.

I get out of bed and turn my phone on. Promise myself I will be online for no more than one minute.

I scroll through the posts on Instagram, freeze when Alexandra’s face appears above the rim of a disproportionately large cocktail glass. She smiles, winks and forms her thumb and index finger into an ‘O’.

‘And I’m single again,’ reads the caption.

Fifty-two likes.

I slam my hand into the wall, grimace in pain and anger.

What does she mean ‘single’? She can’t write that. We were never together, for fuck’s sake.

It’s so damn hard sitting in this bloody house and not being able to communicate with anyone. I can’t even comment. Can’t send one message.

It’s starting to feel like I don’t exist anymore.

I take a couple of deep breaths and try to relax. Check my messages.

Nothing.

My heart rate calms down a bit.

Everything will be OK, I think. Even though she said she wouldn’t, I know Mum will get the money. Then I can stay away until Igor has calmed down, or left the country.

And Alexandra can go to hell.

I turn my phone off again and put it on the bedside table. Go up to the window and pull the cord of the old, bleached blinds. It retracts with a flick and I open the window. Lean out, inhale the scent of heather and pine and look out over the sea, which spreads perfectly placidly beneath me. Little skerries look as if they’re floating on the surface and the silhouette of the lighthouse is dark against the horizon. I can hear a boat departing in the distance and some seagulls crying.

Otherwise all is quiet and still.

I leave the window open, pull my jeans and T-shirt on and do my best to move through the house as quietly as I possibly can. I pad through the family room, down the spiral staircase and out towards the hall.

When I pass Jonas’s room I hear something.

First I think he is whining a little, one of those many small sounds that escape him, completely involuntarily, but then I hear that somebody in there is crying.

Rachel.

Something about her sobs makes my stomach knot. There is so much grief and hopelessness in her crying. So much fucking misery in every little sniffle that part of me just wants to rush out of the house, throw myself onto the bike and get as far the hell away from here as I possibly can.

Then I hear her say something, or mumble rather. Her voice is mushy from crying, but I can still make out the words.

‘Jonas, my darling child, I miss you so.’

I swallow hard and rub the sweat off my forehead.

This is just too much.

Poor, poor Rachel.

I mean, it isn’t exactly news that her son is a vegetable. But when I hear her despair; actually hear it straight through the door, of course it’s going to give me a horribly bad conscience for not having considered how completely fucking wretched this whole situation must be for her.

And I wonder something else: is there anything I could do for her? Anything besides just sitting in that room with Jonas reading from that deathly boring book?

Is there anything that would make her, like, happier?

I hear a thud from Jonas’s room and I quickly sneak over to the front door, pull my trainers on, unlock it and go outside.

I walk down the long wooden staircase towards the jetty. There are sixty-seven steps down to the sea, but it feels like an eternity to descend them.

On either side of me the cliff drops precipitously towards the water but the wooden structure seems stable – it clings to the granite and smoothly slithers along the rocks, like a giant snake.

The only visible vegetation is a few wind-beaten pines and some heather and moss growing in the deep, vertical crevices that cut through the rock like open wounds.

I slow down and take in the landscape. Poke a few rocks with my foot so that they roll off the cliff.

On the surface the rocks are barren, but if you look closely you can make out a swarm of life. Lichen spreads out like green and grey oceans across the stone. When I poke them with my foot they fall apart, become dry crumbs under the sole of my shoe only to be caught by the wind.

Grandpa Bernt used to say one shouldn’t do that, because my little boy foot destroyed in a minute what it took the lichen hundreds of years to create.

Grandpa.

When I think of him my breath gets kind of heavy. Like there’s a stone in my chest.

If I’m being completely fucking honest he’s like a dad to me. Still, I can’t deal with visiting him in that place they call a hospice – the place you go to die. It’s like a concentration camp for cancer patients.

Grandpa has always taken care of me, watched me when Mum worked, scolded me when I did something stupid. If you disregard the religious shit I respect him one hundred per cent.

The problem is he lets the religious shit dictate his whole life.

I look out across the rocks. Lean forward to look really closely at the rough stone.

A myriad insects move in different directions: small black ants, big brownish-red ants and minute orange spiders with legs so small and so fast they appear to float across the rocks.

I kick another rock.

It rolls down the cliff with heavy thuds and finally hits the ground below with a sharp bang.

Several insects become visible in the indentation where the stone lay; shiny copper earwigs and matte black creepy-crawlies that rush around dazed by the sun.

I take a step back, suddenly worried a large furry spider will emerge.

I hate spiders.

Grandpa was the one who taught me all the names of the insects and plants. When I was little I got to come along to the congregation’s summer camp on Ljusterö. Since I wasn’t able to concentrate I didn’t have to participate in Bible school and singing, but I tagged along for all the other activities.

We went sailing and camping and grilled sausages. And we learned about animals and plants.

Grandpa explained that spiders play an important role in the ecosystem and that they are definitely not dangerous to humans.

It didn’t help.

Spiders are still the worst thing I know.

All that stuff with Grandpa seems so distant to me now, almost like it happened in another life, or was just something I saw on Netflix.

I keep going down to the water.

For each step the memory fades of the summers at camp and is replaced by the other shit, the shit that is my real life.

I remember Igor’s expression when he realised that I didn’t have the package of product samples, and Malte’s skinny body and gleaming gold teeth.

I let them down.

Then I think about all the other people I have let down, like Grandpa Bernt and Liam whom I promised I would stop working for Igor. And Alexandra who stood there crying behind her front door and wouldn’t let me in.

For fuck’s sake, don’t call me baby.

I guess she had a point.

But most of all I think of Mum.

All the things she nagged me about, that she has been there for me over the years etc., etc. – it’s actually true. Without her I don’t know what would have become of me. Now things have gone to hell anyway, but it would have happened a whole lot faster without her.

I hope she hurries up, that she gets the money soon, because I can’t handle staying here for much longer. Zombie-Jonas gets on my nerves. Rachel, too, but in a completely different way.

It has been five days since I arrived and the day after tomorrow, Friday, it will be Midsummer.

I would like to be really far from here by then.

When I get down to the jetty I pull off my trainers and jeans. Take the T-shirt off and place it next to them.

The wood is warm and sticky under my feet. It smells of tar and seaweed. All I hear is a low, tinny lapping.

I look down into the water.

It looks deep.

All I can see is a wad of yellowish-brown seaweed floating past by the jetty and a couple of small fish darting past in the sunlit surface water.

I imagine what it’s like further out, where the water is deep and cold. Where the Baltic herring swims and the eels slither along the bottom.

I stretch out and am just about to dive in when I turn around for some reason and look up toward the house.

There is a man standing outside Rachel’s window. He is too far away for me to able to make out what he looks like, but it seems like this person is shading his eyes with his hand and looking in through the window.

I am guessing this is one of Rachel’s friends and think of the sobbing from Jonas’s room. For a second, I consider going back up but I decide to swim instead, so turn to the sea, take a deep breath and dive in.

It is colder than I thought it would be, but it is as if my entire body welcomes the cold, as if I am born again down there in the cold, greenish-blue stillness.

I open my eyes and squint at the surface. Bubbles rise, the sun crumbles into golden flakes that float on the waves, as if it were a Christmas tree ornament that fell from the sky and smashed into a thousand pieces.

When I come up to the surface I float on my back for a while and listen to all the sounds in the ocean, strange little snaps and thuds and the constant hum of all the invisible life that swims, crawls and floats in the water.

‘You look like you’re enjoying yourself.’

I turn to the jetty, treading water.

Rachel is standing at the very edge, dressed in a navy blue bikini. Her eyes are red and slightly swollen, but her smile is wide.

‘Are you going to swim?’ I ask and hear how fucking stupid that sounds.

Because she is standing there, on the jetty, in her bikini. Of course she is going to take a swim, not weed the bloody rose bed.

But Rachel just laughs.

She bends her knees slightly and dives into the water a short way to my right.

It is a near-perfect dive. There is barely a ripple on the surface. And just like the time I saw her from the window upstairs, she swims under water for a long time before she surfaces, at least twenty yards away.

Then she front crawls towards me with slow movements.

‘God, that felt good,’ she says and wipes her hair out of her eyes with one hand while treading water.

‘Yes,’ I answer.

She heaves herself up and sits on the jetty, but I stay in, suddenly very aware of the fact that I am only wearing boxers. White ones too, that are definitely see-through when wet.

Rachel watches me with amusement.

‘Are you going to stay in long?’

‘A while,’ I say and feel my cheeks get hot even though the water is ice cold.

She shrugs slightly, closes her eyes and turns her face to the sun. The pale skin on her arms has goosebumps from the cold and I can see the outline of her nipples under her wet bikini top. She lets her feet swing slowly in the water and holds on to the edge of the jetty with her pale, slim fingers. Water is dripping from her long hair.

She is so damn fit.

I would give anything to touch her skin, run my hand through that hair, stroke her lips with my finger.

My legs feel like pieces of frozen meat in the cold water and I swim up to the edge of the jetty, at a safe distance from Rachel and grab on to the wood.

She looks at my hand and asks: ‘What does your bracelet say?’

I meet her gaze.

‘It’s just something I did when I was a kid,’ I say, feeling ashamed of the childish bracelet.

‘I can see that. But what does it say?’

‘“Mummy”. It says, “Mummy”. I made it for my mum.’

‘So beautiful,’ she whispers, reaching her hand out and stroking the bracelet lightly with her finger.

I’m not prepared for her touch. My hand jerks and I swallow hard.

There’s a long silence. Rachel furrows her brow and looks like she is about to start crying again. She blinks a few times and turns her head away.

‘Who came by?’ I ask, mostly to say something.

She pulls her feet out of the water and turns to me again.

‘Somebody came by just now,’ I say.

‘Did they?’

Without rushing she lifts her feet out of the water and stands up. Then she pushes her hands to the sky.

‘Yeah, a guy. He was standing outside your window, I thought . . .’

‘Outside my window? What did he look like?’

‘Well, I couldn’t really tell from here.’

Now I am trembling with cold. And not just because I am in the water, it is also because I am realising that if the man outside the window wasn’t a friend of hers it may very well have been one of Igor’s men.

‘Shit,’ I say. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’

Rachel raises her eyebrows.

‘What?’

‘Well, it could be something to do with that guy I told you about.’

‘The Russian? Surely you would have recognised him?’

‘It wasn’t him,’ I say. ‘But he might have sent someone else.’

Rachel cocks her head.

‘Aren’t you being a bit paranoid now, Samuel? Isn’t it more likely that someone actually was looking for me? A neighbour, for instance? Or maybe you were mistaken. Maybe it was a deer. They like to stand there in the flower bed and feast on the flowers. If I had a gun I would shoot them.’

She looks up at the house on the rock.

‘Show me where he was standing,’ she says calmly.

I heave myself out of the water and quickly pull my jeans on.

But I needn’t have worried.

Rachel is not looking at me at all, instead she is staring intently at the house with her hands on her hips.

We walk up the stairs in silence.

It gets warmer for every step we take and before we’re all the way up I am sweating again. The sun is baking my shoulders and my heart is thumping in my chest from the effort.

When we get to the top we round the deck and walk over to the two windows with bars that face west on the ground floor – Rachel’s and Jonas’s bedrooms.

Below the windows there is a narrow flower bed with some kind of plant with large, round leaves.

Rachel sinks into a squat and I do the same.

With her hand she carefully pushes the juicy, shiny leaves aside, revealing large footprints in the moist dirt – prints that look like they come from a pair of heavy men’s shoes.