Harbor by John Lindqvist (classic novels for teens txt) 📕

Cecilia parked her bike by the woodshed and nodded in the direction of the smoker, which was still giving off a faint aroma.

‘We were going to do some smoking, but we didn’t get round to it.’

‘Were you going to smoke buckling?’

‘Mm.’

Anders didn’t bother to correct her. Buckling was smoked herring. To say ‘smoked buckling’ was like saying ‘a curved bend’ or ‘a cold ice cream’, but this was probably the sort of thing a hick would know, and not something to show off about.

When Cecilia was with him he saw it so clearly: his garden didn’t look like theirs. In his garden there was a woodpile and smoke and old rubbish his father had saved because ‘it might come in handy’. Nobeautifully mown lawns or fruit bushes in neat rows. No badminton court and no hammock. He didn’t usually notice. But now he noticed.

Cecilia walked towards the house and Anders thought that at least his room looked like the others’ rooms, fortunately.

What are we going to do in my room? What are girls interested in?

He had loads of comics. He didn’t know whether Cecilia read comics. He had books. Maybe they could bake something? He could bake sticky buns and scones. Did she like baking?

He didn’t get any further in his pondering, because Cecilia had stopped and was looking down at something on the ground. He hurried over to her and when he saw what she was looking at, his lungs sank down to his thighs.

Beside the spindly gooseberry bush next to the house, his father was lying on his stomach with his arms by his side, face down on the ground. Cecilia was on her way over to him, but Anders grabbed her shoulder.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

Cecilia pulled herself free. ‘Don’t be silly, we can’t leave him like that. He could suffocate.’

Anders had never seen his father so drunk that he lay down and went to sleep like this in the middle of the day, but the drinking itself was nothing new to him. Sometimes when he got home in the evening his father would be sitting there with glassy eyes, talking rubbish, and at those times Anders tried to stay out of the house as much as possible. Right now he was so embarrassed he didn’t know where to put himself.

Cecilia crouched down beside his sleeping father and shook his shoulder. ‘Hey,’ she said. ‘Hello.’ She turned to Anders. ‘What’s his name?’

‘Johan. Look, just leave him. He’s drunk.’

‘Johan,’ said Cecilia, shaking him more roughly. ‘Johan, you can’t lie here.’

Johan’s body twitched and a deep cough rumbled up through his chest. Cecilia drew back as Johan raised his head and rolled over on tohis side. He had been lying on a half-full plastic bottle that had been squashed out of shape by the weight of his body.

He caught sight of Cecilia and his eyes were made of dirty glass, a thread of saliva dangled from the corner of his mouth down to the grass. He smacked his lips, cleared his throat and slurred, ‘Love one another.’

The humiliation crushed Anders into the ground and splashed his cheeks with red. His father’s hand was groping for Cecilia’s foot as if he wanted to get hold of it. When he couldn’t reach he looked up at her and said, ‘Just be careful of the sea.’

The shame of it all exploded into blind rage and Anders ran over to his father, aimed a kick. However, a faint glimmer of sense made him change the direction of the kick at the last moment, so that instead of his father’s head he caught the plastic bottle, which bounced away across the overgrown lawn.

It wasn’t enough. His father attempted a foolish smile, and Anders was about to hurl himself at him to beat the rage out of his body and into his father’s when Cecilia grabbed his arm and pulled him away.

‘Stop it! Stop it! There’s no point.’

‘I hate you!’ Anders yelled at his father. ‘I really hate you!’

Then he fled. He had no words to say to Cecilia, nothing that could excuse or explain. He was shit, with a shit father, and worse than that, he was a hick who was shit. None of the others had parents who did this sort of thing. They drank wine, they were fun. They didn’t lie there dribbling outside their cottages in broad daylight. That’s what the fathers of useless country kids did.

He ran across the rocks down to the boathouses in the harbour, he just wanted to get away, away, away. He would pick up a great big rock and jump in the sea, he would obliterate himself, he would no longer exist.

He passed the boathouses and ran out on to one of the small jetties where brightly-coloured leisure boats were moored, he ran all the way to the end and stopped, looking down at the sparkling water. Then he sat down, right on the edge of the jetty.

I’m going to kill him.

He’d been sitting there for a long time, weighing up different ways of killing his father, when he heard footsteps behind him on the jetty. He thought about jumping in the water, but stayed where he was. Then he heard Cecilia’s voice.

‘Anders?’

He shook his head. He didn’t want to talk, he wasn’t here, he wasn’t Anders. There was a faint rustle of fabric from Cecilia’s shorts as she sat down behind him on the jetty. He didn’t want her to console him or to say something nice, something to smooth over the situation. He wouldn’t believe it anyway. He wanted her to go away and leave him alone.

They sat like that for a while. Then Cecilia said, ‘My mother’s the same.’

Anders shook his head again.

‘She is,’ said Cecilia. ‘Well, not quite as bad. But almost.’ When Anders didn’t say anything, she went on, ‘She drinks a lot and then… she does the stupidest things. She chucked my cat off the balcony.’

Anders half turned around. ‘Did it die?’

‘No. We live on the first