We Know You Remember (36)

The road is quiet, just the occasional car passing by. He rubs his palms against his trouser legs and notices a rip in one knee.

Twigs snapped wherever he put his feet, as though the trees were growing in all directions, overturned with roots straining upwards. They hit him in the face, but he no longer felt any pain, couldn’t see his feet, which had now lost both socks; he was thinking about snakes, about everything crawling among the dead trees, the way his father had broken one of them in two and showed him that it was teeming with larva and disgusting bugs inside. Here, you see, there’s life in things that are dead, that’s the cycle of nature.

They’re still standing by the road, the whole gang. Waiting for him or for something to happen, just standing there with their mopeds, doing nothing the way you do at that age, when you’re at that point, once you’ve grown out of playing but don’t know what is going to happen next.

The silence is thanks to the magazine they are huddled around, one of Ricken’s porno mags, of course. Olof just wants to go home, but one of them spots him before he has a chance.

Hey, mummy’s boy Olle, you took your time, you run into a bear in there or what?

So he shoves the cardigan beneath his sweater and walks over to them, what else can he do? Muddy and dirty, his face burning, scalding hot.

Look at him, man. Fuck me, you two must’ve been rolling about.

Haha, look at his pants, did you get her on her knees, you bastard?

He feels a thump on his back. He sees their wide eyes.

Oh shit, says Ricken, is that a hickey?

And Olof grins and stands tall. He is damn close to being the tallest, though he is younger than every one of them.

Yeah, damn, he manages to reply. Trying to wipe the dirt from around his mouth, though that makes his face sting even more.

Man, Lina was great. Fuck me, she was great.

The ground gave way beneath his feet. Suddenly there was nothing there. Olof groped for something to hang on to, but all he found was a thick root that broke away, making him fall headlong, hitting his head on something sharp that jabbed him close to his eye. The forest crashed in on top of him. Something heavy on his head, and then there was no more air.

Just the taste of earth again.





Chapter 18





The black roll blinds were down, meaning she couldn’t tell whether it was morning or still night. Nature itself seemed just as confused: eternal light outside, compact darkness where she lay.

Eira groped for her phone on the nightstand, knocked it to the floor. The screen lit up with a name.

“Sorry for waking you.”

That voice. There was no escaping what it did to her.

“What’s going on?”

“Do you believe in divine justice?” asked August. “A vengeful God?”

He sounded excited, slightly short of breath, as though he were out running. So this was why she hadn’t seen any sign of him the day before: he was working nights. In her last memory he was still naked, stretched out in a room at the Hotel Kramm.

“Did you really wake me at three in the morning to discuss religion?” Eira kicked back the covers. It was far too warm.

“There were a few lightning strikes last night,” he said.

“Yeah, I heard on the radio,” she said. “Up by Saltsj?n and somewhere in Marieberg. Where do you need me?”

“Not just there.” She heard him inhale, the wind crackling down the line. A roaring sound somewhere in the distance. “I’m standing outside Sven Hagstr?m’s place,” he said. “Or what’s left of it.”

“What?”

“We’ve got the fire under control now, I just thought you might want to know.”

Eira tugged at the blind, letting the sunlight flood into the room. She snatched up her clothes from the chair. It wasn’t until she had made a thermos of coffee, saving Kerstin from having to mess about with the electricity, and was driving over the Sand? Bridge, that she remembered the dream his call had interrupted.

It was a nightmare she had been having since she was a girl, about logs that turn out to be dead bodies floating downriver. Frothing, furious water tossing them around. She wades out and tries to grab clothing, a hand, but loses her footing and is dragged beneath the surface; she swims among the dead.

Maybe it first started after Lina, or possibly earlier. Log driving was already a thing of the past by the time Eira was born, but there was still plenty of sunken timber in the river, logs trapped in the mud and at the shoreline. They could break free during the spring floods and knock a child unconscious. That was why you were never allowed to swim alone.

The nightmares might have worsened after she heard the story about the Sand? Bridge collapsing. When she learned that bodies really had been carried away by the current. In 1939, there had been plans to build a bridge to replace the last ferry crossing the great rivers, finally linking the two halves of the country together—from the southern tip to Haparanda in the far north. The world’s biggest and most modern arch bridge would begin in Lunde and climb fifty meters into the air over Sand? and Svan? in a huge arch, the likes of which had never been seen, stretching all the way to the far shore. But on the afternoon of the last day of August, the bridge had collapsed. A twenty-meter wave rose up above Sand? as the steel and concrete plummeted into the water below. Eighteen people died. World War II broke out the very next day, drowning out all news of the catastrophe in the press. But for those living in the area, the image of bodies being tossed like dolls through the air endured, as though in double exposure, around the bridge that was eventually raised.