Part 6 (1/2)

'No,' he said. 'That was very clear.'

'Why didn't you say anything?'

'Because...' His hand moved slowly over her body. '...because I didn't know if you wanted to know. I mean, you've made a life for yourself. Adapted to the world of human beings. There's a great deal you don't know. A great deal you might not want to know. If you're going to carry on living as you have done up to now.'

'I don't want to carry on living the same way.'

'No.'

She thought he was going to continue. Tell her something. Instead he sighed deeply and folded his body into an uncomfortable position so that he could rest his head on her stomach. After a while he started shaking, and she thought he was cold. She leaned forward to pull the covers over him, then realised he was crying. She stroked his hair. 'What's wrong?'

'Tina.' It was the first time he had used her name. 'There aren't many of us left. It's better for you if you...forget about this. Don't let it influence your actions from now on.'

She carried on stroking his hair as she gazed at the ceiling. The cottage wasn't well insulated; the candles flickered and flared in the draught, making the shadows move across the ceiling. Life everywhere.

'You've had a child in here.' His body stiffened on top of hers. 'Haven't you?'

'Yes.'

'Who was it? Where is it now?'

He raised his head and slid down onto the floor by the bed; he knelt there gazing searchingly into her eyes.

She could just get up and leave right now. Go back into the house, have a hot shower and drink several gla.s.ses of wine until she fell asleep. Tomorrow he would go away. Roland would come back. On Monday she would go to work. She could carry on living within this- lie -security that had been her life up to now.

Vore got to his feet and opened the wardrobe. Moved the pile of hand towels on the top shelf. Reached in and pulled out a cardboard box, about the size of two shoe boxes. Tina pulled the covers over her. Vore's head almost reached the ceiling, he towered over her holding out the box. She closed her eyes.

'Is it...dead?' she asked.

'No. And it's not a child.'

She felt the bed dip under his weight as he sat down. She heard the lid being lifted off. A faint whimper. She opened her eyes.

Inside the box on a bed of towels lay a tiny baby, only a couple of weeks old. The thin chest was moving up and down, and Vore caressed the child's head with his forefinger. Tina leaned forward.

'It is a child,' she said. It was a girl. Her eyes were closed, her fingers moving slowly as if she were dreaming. There was a little blob of dried milk at the corner of her mouth.

'No,' he said. 'It's a hiisit. It hasn't been fertilised.'

'But it is a child. I can see it's a child.'

'I was the one who gave birth to it,' said Vore. 'So I ought to know, don't you think? It's a hiisit. It has no...soul. No thoughts. It's like an egg. An unfertilised egg. But it can be shaped into anything at all. Look...'

He prodded one eyelid and the eyes opened. Tina gasped out loud. The eyes were completely white.

'It's blind,' said Vore. 'Deaf. Incapable of learning anything. It can only breathe, cry, eat.' He picked off the white blob at the corner of the child's mouth. As if to reinforce what he had just said, he added, 'A hiisit. That's what they're called.'

'Is that what the...larvae are for? Food?'

'Yes.' He was rubbing the white stuff between his fingers. 'I thought you'd seen it. When you came in here.'

Tina shook her head. A slight feeling of nausea was growing in her stomach, crawling up into her throat. She tore her gaze away from the child's milky white eyes and asked, 'What do you mean... shaped?'

Vore pushed his finger hard against the spot where the child's right collarbone should have been, but the finger simply sank right in, leaving a dent behind. The child did not react. 'It's like clay.'

Tina stared at the hollow, which showed no sign of springing back, the shadowy dent in the child's chest, and she had had enough. She crawled out of bed, leaving Vore sitting there with the box on his knee. He made no move to stop her. She gathered up her clothes, which were strewn across the floor, and bundled them up in her arms.

'What...why have you got it?'

Vore looked at her. Where she had seen warmth and love just minutes before there was now only the loneliness of a tarn in the depths of the forest where no one ever goes. In a thin voice he said, 'Don't you know?'

She shook her head and took a single step to the door, opened it. Vore was still sitting on the bed. She walked out onto the porch and the wind showered her naked body with light rain. The candle flames flickered wildly inside the cottage, cascading patterns over the big man on the bed with the little box on his knee.

I was the one who gave birth to it...

The white eyes opening, the finger pushed into the chest.

She slammed the door and ran over to the house. When she got inside she locked the front door. She dropped her clothes on the hall floor and went straight into the kitchen where she knocked back the last of the wine straight out of the bottle. Then she opened another and went into the bedroom, put on a CD of Chopin's piano sonatas, turned the volume up high and crawled into bed.

She didn't want to know. She didn't want to know anything. When she had drunk half the bottle she ran her fingers over her s.e.x. She could feel a sticky wetness, and brought her fingers up to her nose. They smelled of germinating sprouts and salt water. She caressed herself. Nothing happened. She had another drink.

When the bottle was empty and the pattern on the curtains was beginning to move, wriggling around before her eyes, there was a knock on the door.

'Go away,' she whispered. 'Go away.'

She staggered over to the stereo and turned up the volume until the piano was reverberating off the walls. There might have been another knock at the door, there might not. She crawled back into bed and pulled the covers over her head.

I don't want to. Don't want to don't want to...

The pictures in her head became confused. Big hands grabbing at her. A forest of enormous tree trunks that disappeared into shadow, then everything was white, white. White hands, white clothes, white walls. Hands that seized her, lifted her. She travelled along a sloping chute down into the darkness, and fell asleep.

She opened her eyes and knew nothing. Grey light was pouring into the room, and her mouth was stuck together. She had a splitting headache, and her belly was hurting because she was desperate for a pee. She managed to get out of bed and into the bathroom.

When she was sitting on the toilet letting it all go, she remembered. She looked down to where the urine was pouring out of her in a jagged stream, tried to imagine what things looked like inside her. It was impossible. An ill.u.s.tration from her school biology lessons flashed through her mind.

It's not true. I'm a freak.

She leaned against the washbasin, turned on the tap, half pulled herself up and drank. The sharpness of the water was real. She clung onto it and drank until her stomach was cold. When she straightened up and walked into the kitchen, the water began to reach the same temperature as the rest of her body. The contours blurred once more. She sat down on a chair, thought: there's the coffee machine, there's the magazine rack, there's the clock. It's a quarter past eleven. There's a box of matches. All of these things exist. I exist too.

She took two painkillers out of the medicine drawer, swallowed them with another swig of cold water from a gla.s.s that was hard and round in her hand.

Quarter past eleven!

For a moment she panicked, thinking she was late for work. Then she remembered she was off sick. She went back to the bedroom, looked out of the window. The white car had gone. She lay down on the bed, gazed up at the ceiling for an hour.

She thought she understood everything. But she had to know.

At a quarter past one she was standing at the stop waiting for the bus to Norrtalje.

Her father wasn't in his room. She asked one of the care a.s.sistants, and was told he was in the dayroom. The carer's eyes flicked down to her feet as if to check that she hadn't brought any dirt in with her. No doubt she looked like s.h.i.+t.