Part 22 (2/2)

What's become of us?

The silence was just as palpable as she walked up the steps to the porch. No talking, no laughter. She opened the front door. The light was on in the hallway, and in the kitchen. On the kitchen table stood a half-full bottle of whisky and two gla.s.ses. A bag of ice cubes in a little puddle of water.

'h.e.l.lo?'

She looked out of the kitchen window. Impenetrable darkness.

From the magnetic holder above the sink she took the carbon steel knife they had invested in last winter, sharp as a razor blade. No reason, it just felt good to have it in her hand. In the bottom drawer she found the torch. She went back outside. Down towards the jetty.

The beam of the torch made the familiar somehow alien and threatening. She lit her way across the rocks, slippery with slush, saw the slimy backs of whales, an eye opening in a crevice. She went on, out onto the jetty, treading carefully on the wet planks. She shone the torch over the edge, and it was as she feared.

The boat was gone.

There wasn't a sound to be heard out in the bay. There was only the lighthouse on Frholm reef, sending out its monotonous, silent light signal, which made the darkness in between even darker.

She sat down on the jetty, feeling the dampness soaking through her trousers. Switched off the torch.

When she had been sitting there for maybe ten minutes, she heard the engine of a boat start up. She couldn't judge how far away it was, perhaps five hundred metres. It sounded like their boat. The sound came closer. Her heart began to beat faster and she got up, fingering the torch. But she didn't switch it on for fear of...frightening him away.

What's become of us?

All of this could still be...normal. Josef had taken Kaxe out for a little trip to show him the boat. Or something. They were drunk and happy and felt like a little outing in the dark.

And I'm Claude Monet.

After a couple of minutes she was able to make out the boat as a vague white dot which grew in size and clarity. There was something ominous about the sound of the approaching engine across the dark waters. A monster making its way ash.o.r.e from the seas. And yet she remained on the jetty, erect, almost standing to attention. The knife lay at her feet, and instead she clutched the rea.s.suring weight of the old torch.

There was something wrong about the way the boat was coming in. It was moving too fast. The engine was switched off and the boat crashed into the jetty, which juddered beneath her feet.

'f.u.c.king h.e.l.l...'

Josef's voice. A slapping sound as his hand found the jetty. She could hear him panting in the darkness. She took a step forward, said, 'Hi...'

Josef screamed. There was a dull thud as he lost his grip on the jetty and fell backwards into the boat; he screamed again, this time with pain. She switched on the torch. Josef was lying in the central well with his head against the gunwale. He looked like a terrified animal, paralysed by the headlights of a car. His hand shot up instinctively to shade his eyes from the light. Anna switched off the torch again, said, 'Sorr-'

Before she got the word out of her mouth her brain had managed to register what her eyes had seen during those brief seconds of light. Next to Josef lay Karl-Axel with his mouth open, his eyes open, and an almost...ecstatic expression on his face. Pupils blown. Dead.

'For f.u.c.k's sake, you frightened the life out of me.'

Josef got to his feet and grabbed hold of the jetty once more. Anna shook her head. This couldn't be happening. They were Josef and Anna who suited each other so well and had a house by the sea and were having a baby and this couldn't be happening.

Josef crawled onto the jetty and made the boat fast. Anna was still shaking her head. As long as she kept on doing that, it wasn't real. She whispered, 'What have you done...what have you done?'

He came up to her, grabbed her by the shoulders and hugged her. She pushed him away because his body was in the way; it stopped her shaking her head.

'Anna, this is what he wanted. I just helped him.'

'You...you killed him.'

'No.' His hand squeezed her shoulder as if to emphasise the point. 'I helped him to die. There's a huge difference. Anna...'

'But...why? Why? You'll end up...it's...'

Josef took hold of her face, forced her head to stop moving. Then he said, 'Death is in him. It's there. Now.'

'Death...'

'Yes. It's in his body. It can't get out. It's ours.'

He pushed her gently downwards until they were both sitting on the jetty, facing one another.

A damp wind blew in off the sea, flicking a strand of her hair across her cheek. She grabbed it, wound it around her forefinger-a lifeline back to what was familiar. She pulled it; pain in the skin on her scalp.

She took a deep breath of the salt-laden night air, and it might have been the effect of the adrenaline pumping through her body, or it might just have been a final defence against madness, but she opened her arms as if to embrace the night, the sea, and suddenly experienced a limitless freedom.

What Josef said couldn't possibly be true, but the very fact that they were sitting here together on the jetty in the cold night air, with a dead body just a few metres away...this was the end of everything, wasn't it? Nothing would ever be the same again, nothing would be the way she had thought it would be. At that point all responsibility fell from her shoulders and she was...free.

Josef's hand on her knee.

'Do you want to know?'

'I want to know.'

Her voice was clear, composed. She was simply here, now.

Josef said, 'This is what we'd decided. He came to the house. We drank a little whisky to...well, to celebrate. Then we went out to the perch reef, you know, south of Tjocko. The water's only three or four metres deep there. I tied the anchor rope around him and he jumped in. We said...what did we say? Goodbye...see you again... thanks for this...thanks for the whisky.'

He snorted; it was almost a laugh.

'The atmosphere was...funny. I suppose we were scared, both of us. Each in our own way. Then he said I should throw the anchor overboard; I asked if he was sure and he said, ”No, but throw it in anyway.” So I did. He disappeared beneath the surface, the rope played out a few metres, and then I sat there. Looked at the lighthouse. Counted the flashes.'

He cleared his throat. Anna could see the pale backs of his hands as he ran them over his face, could hear the soft rasping of stubble against his palms.

'He was just below me. I could have pulled him up if I'd wanted to.'

'But that wasn't what he wanted,' said Anna. 'Was it?'

Josef's voice had changed when he said, 'After one minute, maybe. Eight flashes. Then the rope began to...play out.'

They sat there without saying anything for a long time. Eventually Anna said, 'He was trying to pull himself up.'

'Yes.' Josef's voice broke slightly as he added: 'But I had plenty of rope. Thirty metres. And still...still he managed to use up the whole lot.'

Josef was weeping. Anna couldn't bring herself to console him. She was cold inside, hard. The child in her stomach moved a hand or a foot, and it was as if it was happening to someone else.

'What did you do?'

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