The apartment where Jack used to live consists of a single room, which takes up the whole of the top floor. She helped with the conversion – well, Hedda and Jack did the construction work, while Laura’s contribution was painting the sloping ceiling and the beams. Jack even let her choose the colour – a white glaze that brought out the grain in the old wood, and made the room lighter.
Now the walls are grey with dirt and dust. All the windows are boarded up, and even though two of the bulbs on the ceiling actually work when she flicks on the light switch, the place still feels dark and gloomy.
She takes a few steps. The floor creaks, her feet leave marks in the dust. The air smells of dampness and desolation.
Hedda obviously decided to store some of her crap up here – minigolf clubs, a big ice-cream sign featuring a man in a striped outfit, and various other things from the kiosk. However, more than half the space is empty. Presumably Hedda didn’t have the energy to haul any more items up the steep steps, and started taking them into her house instead.
Laura pushes open the bathroom door. The water in the toilet bowl has dried up, and there is an unpleasant smell of drains. The cabinet is empty, except for an ancient rolled-up tube of toothpaste. The mirror is dotted with fly shit. The water has been turned off, both here and in the little kitchenette. The kitchen cupboards contain nothing but dead mealworm larvae.
Jack’s bed is at the far end of the apartment in an alcove, but it holds no attraction for her. The sheets are stained, and a huge cobweb extends from the bedhead up to one of the beams.
There is an American car magazine on the bedside table. The pages are curled, the cover faded with age, but she can still make out the date: December 1987.
Here – I bought you this at the airport.
She touches the magazine, smiles to herself. Remembers the journey from Kastrup with Jack and Iben. How young she was back then. How stupid.
The guilt comes flooding in, which is hardly surprising. She’s already missed her evening pill, and needs to dig her morning dose out of her bag pretty soon, or she’ll start having nightmares.
She closes the door behind her. There is no trace of Jack here – did she really think she was going to find something?
From the top of the steps the wretched state of the holiday village is even more evident. The roofs of Hedda’s house and the sauna block are covered in a thick layer of moss and algae. The sun has turned the red walls pink, and the door of the ladies’ changing room is hanging off its hinges. And yet there is something beautiful about it all. Beautiful, and sad.
This was once a much-loved place.
The crows resume their cacophony as Laura descends the steps. On an impulse she continues past the changing rooms and the sauna, and walks out onto the pontoon.
The thin covering of snow makes the green wood treacherous. The chains between the drunkenly leaning poles are rusty and make a screeching noise that upsets the crows even more.
She remembers sailboats and rowing boats being moored along the length of the pontoon in the summer. She and Iben were allowed to name them, and Tomas and Peter painted the names on the gunwales with the help of templates that Jack made.
She passes the mid-point, reaches the new section. Extending the pontoon was one of Jack’s many ideas.
People will want to sail out here, have an ice cream and play minigolf. We might even get a passenger boat from the village when there’s a dance on.
It had all become a reality.
Hedda had convinced the village committee to hire a flat-bottomed summer boat that shuttled passengers who wanted to go dancing back and forth on Wednesday and Saturday nights, but the berthing quay is gone. Maybe it tore itself free of its moorings during an autumn storm and ended up in the bay over by Alkärret, halfway between the holiday village and the castle? Lay there like a beached whale as nature slowly broke it down. Or maybe it just sank. Became an offering to the nymph.
She can still hum the song.
A sandwich for father, a sandwich for mother. And one for the nymph who lives down below.
Hedda claimed she’d heard it from an old fisherman who’d learned it from his great-grandfather. Pure fiction, of course, just like the swan’s feather. To think that she once believed such nonsense!
She gazes down into the dark water at the bottom of the ladder. The slight current driving towards Alkärret meant that the water at the very end of the pontoon rarely froze, and even if it did, it was easy to break a hole in the ice. Sitting in the sauna until the heat seared your skin and the sweat poured down, then a quick dash.
Don’t hesitate, just jump in!
And then the shock, the feeling of a thousand needles pricking your skin, your heart pounding against your ribs. And finally the endorphins racing through your bloodstream as you clambered back up the ladder, overwhelmed by the experience.
They always waited for each other before going back to the sauna and the shower, and afterwards they would drink hot chocolate in front of the fire in the living room. The bathing book would be filled in while the euphoria of the dip still lingered, added to the happiness of sitting there together.
Laura shivers. In spite of her thick jacket, she’s freezing again. The network of scar tissue on her back has woken up, reminding her that her last encounter with the icy waters of the lake was neither euphoric nor happy.
Laura sanitises her hands before asking the satnav to direct her to the nearest petrol station with a car wash. She starts the engine and tries not to think about all the bacteria only centimetres above her head, already eating their way through the car roof.
The holiday village looks even worse by daylight as she heads back to the main road. Vegetation is growing through virtually every one of the small cabins that were once so lovely. Some of the roofs have collapsed, either from the weight of the thick layer of moss and leaves that has accumulated on top of them, or because of fallen branches. Nature is well on the way to reclaiming the whole area. Maybe it’s for the best.
As she drives she thinks about Hedda. About the fact that she died in the lake she loved. That ought to be a consolation, and yet there’s something that doesn’t feel right. A vague, nagging sensation that she can’t shake off. It’s annoying.
At work she pulls up her colleagues when they talk about abstract concepts like instinct and intuition. Tells them to produce the facts, or let it go.
Good advice, which she ought to follow.
The petrol station is by the motorway. When the rotating brushes have removed the corrosive bacteria bombs from the car roof, Laura buys breakfast for herself and food for George. The shop assistant is a young woman in her twenties with an exaggeratedly friendly smile.
‘A yogurt drink and four tins of cat food. Will there be anything else?’
Laura mumbles a response, suppresses the urge to explain that the cat isn’t hers, she’s not a ‘cat lady’. Even though that’s exactly what she is. She digs out her bottle of pills and washes one down before starting the car. No one except Andreas knows that she’s on antidepressants – a weak dose that she’s been taking ever since her university days to keep the nightmares at bay. A dose she’s doubled over the past few years in order to avoid other thoughts. Thoughts that are linked to the box containing baby clothes and tiny hand- and footprints, which she’s locked away safely in her storage unit in the basement.
Back at Gärdsnäset she parks under a tree without nests. The birds greet her with the same deafening racket as this morning.