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

Anders was on the point of asking about Henrik and Björn, but Elin got there first. Since her lips weren’t working properly, all the consonants were weak and her tone was monotonous.

‘I have this dream,’ she said. ‘A recurring dream. I don’t sleep very well, because I have this dream all the time. I haven’t slept properly for several weeks.’

She poured herself more wine, and Anders fetched himself a glass to keep her company. Once again Elin sucked down half the glass, coughed, and went on:

‘There’s a man lying in a boat. A skiff, an old skiff. He’s lying in the bottom of the boat with his head up by the side, and he’s dead. His eyes are open. And around him…there’s a net in the boat as well, with fish in it. And some of the fish are loose, jumping around. Floundering and jumping. And the fish in the net are moving too. There are lots of fish, and they’re alive. But the man is lying there dead. Do you understand? The fish are alive, even though they’re in the boat, but he’s dead.’

Elin sucked up more wine and grimaced with pain. Perhaps one of her cuts was pulling.

‘That image is there, all the time. And I think I ought to get used to it, but every time it comes…I’m just as frightened every time, in the dream. I approach the boat and I see that man lying there dead among the fish and then it’s as if I fall apart, I’m so frightened.’

The last drop of wine was sucked into Elin’s mouth. It went downthe wrong way and she started coughing. She coughed and coughed, pausing only to whimper with pain, then coughed again until Anders was afraid she was going to throw up. But eventually the coughing subsided and Elin sat there panting for a while, gasping for air. Tears poured down the gashes in her cheeks.

Anders wasn’t particularly interested in Elin’s dreams. He took a swig of wine and closed his eyes, saw before him the unclear image of Henrik and Björn’s bodies in the moonlight, the ugly smile that had played around Elin’s full lips.

It doesn’t go away. Nothing goes away.

He opened his eyes and looked at Elin, who was hunched over, staring at the floor.

‘You said they disappeared. That they didn’t drown, Henrik and Björn. What did you mean?’

‘They didn’t find them.’

‘But they went through a hole in the ice.’

Elin shook her head. ‘That’s not what I heard.’

‘So what did you hear?’

Elin now had the same expression in her eyes as when they arrived at the Shack twenty minutes earlier, when she caught sight of the GB-man wrapped in the plastic sack. She had wanted to run away, but Anders had stopped her. The same expression now. Like an animal surrounded on all sides, with nowhere to run. The only solution was to implode, to disappear into herself.

‘It was them, Anders. They had that fucking plastic man on the platform and they were…no older, do you understand? They were just like they were when…when all that happened. They haven’t got any older.’

Anders leaned back in his chair. ‘What did actually happen? Back then?’

Elin clamped her lips together, blew out her cheeks and looked at him with a pleading expression that might once have worked, but now just looked revolting. She wound the rubber tube around her index finger, let her shoulders drop and said, ‘Joel’s in prison, did you know that?’ Andersdidn’t reply, and she went on, ‘It was some woman…he nearly beat her to death. I don’t know why. I don’t suppose she’d done anything.’

She snivelled and pulled the tube tighter around her finger. The top of the finger turned dark red like the skin on her face, and she said to the surface of the table, ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I suppose I was evil. Can a person be evil?’

Anders shrugged his shoulders, took a deep breath and exhaled. A fraction of the weight that had been lying in his stomach lifted. He got up and fetched a new carton of wine. ‘Would you like some more?’

She nodded and unwound the tube. They drank, or sucked, respectively, in silence. After a while Anders asked, ‘What did you hear? About them?’

A trickle of wine ran from the corner of Elin’s mouth, and she carefully wiped it away, then said, ‘Just that they rode out on to the ice on their moped. And then they were gone.’

‘You mean they didn’t fall through the ice?’

‘No.’

‘No hole, no…it hadn’t cracked, they…?’

‘No. They just disappeared.’

Anders pressed his fist against his lips so hard that there was a taste of metal in his mouth, then he got up and staggered around the kitchen. Elin followed him with her eyes, sucked up some more wine and asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

Anders shook his head to indicate that he didn’t want to talk, grabbed his cigarette packet and frantically smoked a cigarette as he paced back and forth, out into the hallway, into the living room.

What can I do? What shall I do?

There was no guarantee that the same thing that had happened to Henrik and Björn had happened to Maja. Perhaps they just…took off. Went somewhere else and started a new life.

And now they’ve come back without having aged?

Anders stopped by the window in the living room and looked towards Gåvasten’s flashing lighthouse far away in the distance. Tears welled up in his eyes.

Without having aged…

He saw Maja’s little hands reaching for the baby’s bottle with her juice in it, her thin fingers curling around the edges of a Bamse comic as she lay on her back in her bed, reading. Her feet sticking out from under the covers. Six years old.

Anders stared out into the vast darkness with its single, flashing point of light. The wine had gone to his head and the light was swaying, sliding across the sea, and he could see Maja in her red snowsuit. She was glowing in the darkness, and