We Know You Remember (47)

Magnus was wearing a pair of denim cutoffs and a vest. He was tanned, his fair hair down to his shoulders. There was an open can of beer in the grass by his side. Eira didn’t say a word about it, nor about the tang of marijuana she thought she could smell. Maybe it was just what she expected, or the memory of a scent. He hadn’t been on the list. The most recent thing Eira had found was an assault from five years earlier, an ordinary fight. It hadn’t led to a conviction, so it wasn’t exactly misconduct for her to leave him out.

“She’s getting worse and worse all the time,” she said. “You know that. People don’t recover from dementia.”

She sat down in one of the old-fashioned sun loungers, the kind she had loved as a child. A piece of striped fabric on a wooden frame that could be slotted lower and lower. It was impossible to sit up straight in them.

“She seemed OK when I was there,” said Magnus.

“And when was that?”

“I don’t know, maybe a week ago? We had coffee.”

“She didn’t mention it.”

“Or two. Weeks. It’s summer, kind of hard to keep track.” Magnus reached for his beer and took a couple of swigs, lit a cigarette. “You on holiday now, or what?”

“I’m working. Not right this second, but otherwise.”

“Lucky for us.” He laughed. Eira had always loved his laugh. It was so big, it spread right across the room. When Magnus laughed, so did everyone else. “What the hell though, sis. It’s July, are they really driving you that hard?”

“I like my job,” said Eira.

He raised an eyebrow. She expected a cutting remark or a lecture about how the cops spent their time chasing small-time crooks while the real criminals went free, the financial sharks and the corrupt politicians who let them wreak havoc, but he didn’t have time. Rickard shouted through the kitchen window, asking if she wanted coffee or anything. Eira said yes to coffee, asked for some water, too.

“I’m driving,” she added, as though she had to explain why she wasn’t drinking beer on a summer’s day when everyone else was taking it easy. Excusing herself for being so boring and conscientious all the time.

“Mum makes an effort when you’re there,” she said. “Can’t you see that? She doesn’t want you to notice anything.”

“So what do you want me to do about that? I can’t exactly rock up there and say ‘Hey Mum, you’re sicker than you think you are.’ That’d be lousy.”

Bees buzzed around them, happy in Ricken’s overgrown garden. He had a full-blown wildflower meadow sloping down towards Strinnefj?rden, a narrow channel of the river snaking between two hamlets.

Eira told Magnus that Kerstin had wandered off. About the bad days when she didn’t know where she was, the dangers filling an average home. She told him all of this.

Magnus tapped the ash into his can; the cigarette burnt out and hissed as he dropped it inside. He leaned back again, either nonchalant or relaxed, and looked up at the sky. Clouds drifting slowly overhead, silvery streaks.

“I don’t get why you moved home,” he said. “Mum doesn’t either. Says you’re constantly watching over her like she can’t take care of herself.”

“She can’t take care of herself.”

“You should’ve stayed in Stockholm, that’s what Mum thinks. You were supposed to make something of yourself. You were so good at school.”

“Stop. You’re not listening.”

“I’m listening.”

“You’re the one she asks after. All the time.” Eira regretted sitting down where she had, wanted to stand up, move closer to her brother, get through to him, possibly take his hand, pinch him and make him wake up, knock him to the ground and wrestle in the grass, tickling him or whatever else they hadn’t done in twenty years. But instead she just slumped ever deeper. “How often do you even go over there? Once a month?”

“You can’t force her to move, not against her will.”

“We,” said Eira. “The two of us need to deal with this together. She can’t make that kind of decision anymore.”

“A person’s life is their own business,” said Magnus. “Right down to the last fucking second. No one has the right to take that away from them.”

“She wets herself sometimes. She panics when she doesn’t know where she is.”

“Maybe she doesn’t want to hang out with a bunch of old fogeys, watching sing-along shows on TV. What happens if it’s awful there, if we’ve already sold the house and can’t do anything about it? Christ, haven’t you read about what goes on in places like that? How they lock them up and leave them in shitty nappies, how they’re not allowed out.”

“That was somewhere else, not here. It doesn’t have to be like that.”

“And you can guarantee that, can you?”

“She likes those sing-along shows. We watch them every Tuesday.”

“Seriously?”

Ricken came out with a chipped mug of coffee for her, interrupting their conversation. He had forgotten the water.

“I heard you guys picked up a bunch of people in Bj?rtr? this morning,” he said, tossing a new beer to Magnus and opening one himself. “I heard you were there.”