Harbor John Lindqvist (grave mercy TXT) 📖

still hear the squeaking of the GB-man in the distance, but the sense of being watched had gone. Anders walked on quickly, passing the closed-down school, the mission house, which was as good as closed down, and the alarm bell in its white wooden tower.

After a few hundred metres his heart was still pounding, but by now it was because he was so unfit, not because he was afraid. He slowed down. Once he got in among the fir trees he stopped at the foot of the narrow path leading up to the rock, the erratic boulder. His hands were still shaking as he took out a cigarette, lit it, and took a deep, greedy drag.

What was that?

A strong sense of something unpleasant remained in his body, and he wished he had some wine with which to wash it away. The cigarettein his damp fingers tasted mouldy; he stubbed it out among the fir needles strewn across the track. He didn’t feel well. Something was shifting inside his body, and not in a good way.

He took a step towards the path up to the rock, then changed his mind. He didn’t want to go up there. The path belonged to him and Cecilia, and he and Cecilia no longer existed, so…

Memories. Bloody memories.

Everything on Domarö was steeped in memories. If not his memories, someone else’s. If only it were possible to get rid of all the memories. The path wound its way into the forest like a whispered promise of something else. Another place or another time.

I need to get away from here.

Anders followed the route of the path with his finger, drifting into a wave, a farewell.

I need to be here. And I need to get away.

He could see it with perfect clarity. That was the whole problem, in all its impossible simplicity. As he set off towards Kattudden again, a solution came to him. A practical solution for conquering his constant fear and anxiety.

Anders continued through the forest and passed Holger’s house, which lay there brooding in the darkness. He worked out the details of his plan for the future, and there was nothing left unaccounted for, nothing that couldn’t be solved. When he emerged from the forest his planning was complete, and he was breathing more easily.

Kattudden was desolate at this time of year. The houses were not insulated against the winter weather, and in most cases they were intolerably small without the access to the great outdoors that you had in summer.

Anders had spent a large part of his summers at Kattudden. Almost all his friends had been the children of summer visitors, and it was in rooms or cottages here that he had drunk spirits for the first time, watched forbidden horror films and listened to Madonna. Among other things.

Now it was no more than a deserted holiday village in the autumn gloom, and a pretty ugly one at that. Most of the houses were section-built. Ready-made packages delivered from the mainland on Kalle Gripenberg’s barge. Up with the walls, on with the roof, in with the windows and doors and then off to the cottage to have fun! The kind of houses that tend to age without dignity—although most of them were still better built than the Shack.

Anders strolled along the track down to the jetties, looking at the abandoned traces of summer, the covered garden furniture. In one garden he saw a half-finished game of Jenga just standing there, as if the owners had suddenly realised they had to set off for the city immediately, and had simply dropped what they were doing.

There was a light on in one of the houses closest to the jetties. Anders had been inside that house many times. Elin’s house. It must be ten years since he had actually seen Elin, almost twenty since they had stopped hanging out together. Until a few years ago he had seen her frequently on television and in the press, as had half the population of Sweden. Since then, nothing.

The house was one of the better ones in the area, with its own well and its own jetty. Unlike most of the others it had been built on-site, and Anders remembered how the hollow sound present in all the other houses was missing from Elin’s. The door he was knocking on now was quite solid, with a doorknocker and everything.

He waited. When nothing happened he knocked again. He heard footsteps inside, and a voice said, ‘Who is it?’

It could hardly be Elin’s voice, this one belonged to an older person, so Anders said, ‘My name is Anders. I was looking for Elin. Elin Grönwall.’

It was only when he said her name out loud that he remembered. Why they had stopped hanging out. Why they had all stopped hanging out, why the summers and their childhood had ended.

Elin. Joel.

He had managed to forget. An impulse had made him knock on the door, but now he was grateful that Elin wasn’t at home, thathe didn’t have to see her. He was just about to leave when the door opened. Anders attempted a smile, but it died away the moment he saw the person who opened the door.

If it hadn’t been for the more recent magazine covers and the pictures on the gossip pages, he would never have recognised the woman who had been his friend long ago, and if he hadn’t known her since she was a child, he would never have recognised the woman from the magazine covers.

What have they done to her?

He didn’t know who ‘they’ were, but it was impossible to imagine that anyone would have done this to their appearance voluntarily. Anders managed to hitch up the corners of his mouth a fraction.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

Even Elin’s voice had changed. When she was seventeen she had adopted a babyish voice that had appealed to certain boys at the time, and which had later been ridiculed in the press. Now her voice sounded deeper and rougher. The voice of an older person,