An hour later we were all sitting around a properly stoked fire in what I assume was once a ballroom or something. Now it was mostly empty apart from a long wooden table that ran down the middle and three large leather sofas arranged around a massive stone fireplace at one end of the room.
The kids – and it turned out that the group we’d seen were only a sample of the girls and boys who were in residence – were sat around the table, eating dinner from a buffet that had been laid out on another table by the wall. Well, I say they were eating dinner, but they could have been initiating World War III. How can twenty kids make so much noise? My parents and Tomas didn’t seem to notice. The four of us helped ourselves to food and then we moved over to the sofas, where Mum and Dad went about getting all cosy despite the fact that our new home already seemed to be occupied.
“When the estate agent explained to us about the programme, we thought it was a wonderful idea,” said my mum. She’d got her feet tucked up under one of the sofa cushions, like she used to do back at home. “How long have you been running it?”
What programme? I asked silently. Can someone please tell me what the hell is going on? I wasn’t going to ask out loud, though. I still wasn’t talking to my parents.
“This’ll be my fifth year,” Tomas said. “It’s been pretty successful, I’m pleased to say. I’m from the region, and it’s important to me to get kids from further afield interested in what I’ve been doing here.” He leaned forwards, his elbows on his knees, hands clasped together, his face eager. “It might be too soon to bring this up, but do you have any thoughts about whether you’d be willing to continue letting us use the plantation? It’d be great if the programme could continue.”
I shifted in my seat. Seriously, what were they on about? What programme?
“We’ve already talked about it and we’d love you to continue,” said my dad as Mum nodded. “To be honest, we’ll probably need the income, at least to begin with.”
“Fantastic!” said Tomas, with a disturbingly wide grin. “There are so few places open to running conservation courses these days. The larger plantations don’t want to know – too many legal issues involved in letting non-employees loose on their land.”
Conservation. So that was it. Tomas was a tree-hugger and his purpose in life was to instil the noble art of tree-hugging into the next generation. Because, obviously, given that Sweden is only seventy per cent forest, we’re really struggling to get anything going in that department. That other thirty per cent could really use a helping hand before it’s too late.
“I love that you’ll be continuing the family-run tradition here. Storaskogen has such a fascinating history,” Tomas went on. “I’ve always thought someone should write a book about it. Back in the 1940s it almost went under – timber yields were too low to make it viable and it nearly ended up absorbed into one of the larger plantations. But somehow it turned a corner and it’s flourished ever since, which is remarkable for such a relatively small operation. I’m sure you’ll enjoy getting to know the place. I’m just sorry you’ve got to share your new home with these hoodlums for the next few days,” he added, glancing over at the chaos vortex that was in the process of swallowing the table.
Mum smiled but it was a bit lopsided, as if someone had stapled one side of her lips to her teeth. “It’s nice,” she said. “Nice to have the children here, I mean.”
Dad reached over and squeezed her hand as the door at the end of the room opened and an old lady tottered in carrying an empty tray. She gave us a look that suggested we smelled of boiled cabbage and then made straight for the kids’ table to start clearing the plates. She looked about ninety, but she moved too fast for that, with strange little jumping tiptoe steps as if she were about to break into a run but kept thinking better of it.
“Ah – that must be Dorothea, is it?” Dad asked brightly.
“The housekeeper – yes.” Tomas nodded.
“Dorothea,” Dad called, standing up and making to go to her, “we haven’t had a chance to meet you yet. Why don’t you leave that for a bit? Come and have a drink instead, then we’ll help you clear the table.”
The old woman kept her back turned as she continued to pile dirty plates on to her tray. She didn’t say a word.
“Dorothea?” Dad said again, a little louder this time. I guess he was assuming that she was deaf, which was a pretty fair assessment, under the circumstances. But the old woman could obviously hear perfectly well, because at that point she turned round and stared at him.
“Hi,” Dad said again, with slight uncertainty. “Come and have a drink – we’d love to say hello properly.”
The housekeeper looked over at the three of us still seated on the sofa. It felt a little like being stared at by one of those paintings whose eyes seem to follow you around the room. Then she turned on her heel and disappeared back through the door. It banged shut behind her. Dad came back to the sofa, a pained look crossing his face.
“Don’t worry about her,” Tomas told him. “She’s a strange old stick, but no one knows this place better than she does – she’s worked here for decades. She’s stuck in her ways, but she’ll get used to you.”
Dad smiled and sat down again. “I’ll have to launch a charm offensive against her. I’m famous for them, aren’t I, darling?”
Mum again. Not me. Just in case that wasn’t clear to you by now.
“In future, I can see us going back to Stockholm when the season’s over, but we’ll be staying here this winter,” Dad went on. “Mainly so I can go over the books and try to work out how to get the business restarted. I need to re-establish some of the sawmill contacts. I’ve been looking at the lay of the land and there’s a large swathe of unmanaged forest in our northern sector that I want to clear over the next year.”
Tomas’s smile froze. He stared at Dad.
“You can’t be serious,” he said.
“Sorry?” Dad asked.
“That’s the old-growth forest you’re talking about.”
Dad shrugged. “I guess it must have been there a long time, yes.”
“‘A long time’?” Tomas repeated with a slight edge of laughter to his voice that had nothing to do with humour. “Try thousands of years.”
Tomas was annoyed, I realized. Not only annoyed – he was angry. I sat up straighter. Things had suddenly become far more interesting.
“I’ve done the research,” Dad said, oblivious. “It makes far more economic sense to level that section of land and plant more managed forest.”
“Well,” said Tomas slowly. “Yes, I suppose that’s probably true – if you’re a complete Neanderthal with no sense of wider ecological responsibility.”
Dad opened his mouth, but at first no sound came out. His eyes bugged in surprise. “Now, hold on a—”
“Have you even seen what you’re planning to cut down? Actually, don’t bother to answer that, because I already know the answer. Of course you haven’t. Even if you did, you wouldn’t understand what you were looking at.”
“Tomas…” Mum began, in her placating tone of voice, but Dad cut in before it did any good.
“I’m pretty sure I don’t need to see an extra hectare or two of fir trees, however old they are, to know what they’re like. Why do conservationists assume that everyone else is a complete imbecile?”
“Well, for a start, they’re not fir trees,” Tomas said angrily. “Which, if you had truly done any meaningful research, you would know.”
“Of course I know that,” Dad laughed. “Up here they’ll be Scots Pine or Norway Spruce. It’s a figure of speech, Tomas. They all look the same. Most people wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, so what does it matter except to score some stupid self-righteous point?”
“It matters,” Tomas hissed, “if the person who is supposed to be caring for this area can’t tell the difference – or worse, doesn’t care.”
“They’re all trees,” Dad pointed out. “They’re all trees and they’re all on my land. Which, as you pointed out yourself, has been managed to produce timber commercially for decades.”
“Excuse me,” Tomas said. “I need to see to the children.” Then he stood up and walked over to the kids’ table, deliberately turning his back on us.
I was impressed. It usually takes longer for Dad to wind people up that badly. I got up, too.
“Well,” I said, “all this excitement is too much for me. I’m going to bed. Try not to piss off any more locals, Dad, yeah? They’ve probably all got pitchforks and flamethrowers.”
I left them there and went up to my room again. I’d only seen it for about five minutes so far, when I trailed along after the removal men with my single crate. Mum had already chosen where I was going to sleep.
“Just to begin with,” she’d said. “You can move later if you want to.”
It wasn’t a bad room, all things considered. It was big – of course it was, everything in this crazy house was big – and it was at the back of the house. It was pretty square – in shape as well as décor, but what else could I expect? There was a huge bed with duvets and blankets layered on top of it. My plastic crate was standing in the middle of the polished wooden floor. It was blue, floating on the ocean of wood like a confused Noah’s ark.
I went to the window. It was dark outside, with a fat moon and weak little stars hanging in the night sky. The trees surrounded the house, the forest starting a few metres from the back wall. They definitely looked like fir trees to me, whatever Tomas had said. They all had that triangular Christmas-tree look to them, although you’d have to have a pretty big house to fit one of these in the corner of your living room. A house like this one, in fact. I still couldn’t get my head around the fact that we were supposed to be living here now. That this was supposed to be our house. I mean, our place in Stockholm hadn’t been a shoebox either but this was something else. I wasn’t sure I liked it, and that wasn’t only because I was angry with my parents for disrupting my life. It was too big, too strange. It didn’t feel … right.
I stared out at the trees for a while. They were massive, all packed close together. There was a slight wind moving their spindly tops, but under that they were one dense, black mass. There was a sound, too. I thought it was the wind at first – but it was sharper than that: one single high note, rising through the trees to pierce the sky. It seemed to go on and on – more than a whistle, less than a song. It soared towards the stars and then suddenly dipped again, lower, lower, only to hike higher again.
Then the trees stopped moving. All of them.
They just … stopped.
It must have been the wind dropping but still, it was creepy. Then I realized that the sound was still there, rising and falling. So it definitely wasn’t the wind. Then it stopped, too. Everything outside my window was silent and dark. Empty. A void. A second later the fir trees started moving again, all at once, like they’d never stopped.
I tugged the curtain shut and turned my back on the window. Then I went to the bed and got in. I didn’t even undress. I pulled the duvet over my head and took my phone out of my pocket.