Mayhem Read online

  Her favourite, as my brother was my mother’s favourite.

  At the same time—1971—her father was dying of lung cancer. My mother told me only recently that he was eventually moved to a nursing home known, she said, for being “merciful” towards their patients.

  “What do you mean, ‘merciful,’ ” I asked.

  “Well. They gave him a powder. And that was that.” I took in the implication of this.

  “Did he know that he was being given a powder?” I slowly repeated the formulation to make sure we both knew what it meant.

  “No,” she said, looking me in the eye. “He did not.”

  Was that true? I don’t know. Perhaps my mother misremembered. Perhaps there was no powder and no merciful way out for the terminally ill.

  —

  Sometimes it may be that it is better, or easier, to forget. But there is a cost to forgetting, too—a cost for the next generation, trying to make sense of the past. At best, that might mean a lack of hinterland, a paucity of stories. At worst, it can lead to the frozen grief now called complicated, marked by a prolonged state of extreme sadness caused by the inability to digest and assimilate what happened.

  3

  Summer of 2012. It’s two months since Eva died, a week after she was found. I am in Sweden, in our summerhouse by the sea. I drift to the window; I look out towards the water, the junipers, the fields of stone. Suddenly I see a brown hare on the cracked stone steps leading up to the house. It tentatively jumps up, step after step, sometimes sitting up, nose twitching. Where is it going?

  I stand stock-still, looking at it. Leo, my spaniel, is behind me, eyes level with my calf. He hasn’t seen the hare, or sensed its presence. This is what it must be like when we’re not here, I think, when this house is locked and still, the earth turning on its axis, spinning into another season.

  —

  We had joked, earlier, about the hares. My fascination with them infects the others.

  “Mum, we saw the hares boxing!” says Daniel, my son.

  “It was more like a dance,” says my nephew, looking at me, blue eyes like lamps.

  Later, my husband Eric and I are driving, alone. We stop the car on the back drive through the fields. We study the hares, running to and fro. Eric is from South Africa and doesn’t know the hares like I do.

  “Hare we are,” he says, mildly.

  “That’s neither hare nor there,” I respond, automatically.

  “Bye-bye, mein lieber hare,” he sings quietly, keeping up the game I am suddenly too sad to play.

  *

  The children have gone out. I am, for the first time since it happened, alone in the house.

  Eric went to get groceries, and some photographers and journalists who were on the lookout for members of our family spotted him. They took photographs and asked for comments; his nonresponse became a story in the newspapers the next day.

  “I am big in Sweden,” he said, laughing quietly.

  Big in Sweden. Eric is a producer and echoed the joke of his friend the Russian film director Sergei Bodrov: I am big in Kazakhstan.

  What was that all about? It seemed so funny at the time.

  —

  “What is your earliest memory?” Eric asked, to make me think of other things. I thought of the nauseating smell of a chauffeur-driven car, a Mercedes, and the alienation of being in the care of a driver. I thought of the bananas someone fed us to combat nausea. Where were we going? Here, probably. Why the driver? Who knows. One of the two company drivers, I assume, from Tetra Pak, the milk- and juice-packaging company founded by my grandfather, led by my father. He built it up from five employees to some thirty-six thousand people.

  —

  The bliss of summer. We would sing, euphorically, in the car all the way to our summerhouse:

  Way way back many centuries ago

  not long after the Bible began

  Jacob lived in the land of Canaan

  a fine example of a family man

  Jacob, Jacob and sons

  depended on farming to earn their keep

  Jacob, Jacob and sons

  spent all of his days in the fields with sheep

  —

  Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat—Lisbet and I knew it all, every song, and most of Jesus Christ Superstar, too. We knew the Beatles and Tom Lehrer and many Swedish songs. We sang the mournful Den Blomstertid Nu Kommer—“That Time of Flowers Is Coming”—sung at the end of every summer term in every school in Sweden and associated with deep happiness, therefore. We sang Uti Vår Hage, Där Växa Blåbar (“In Our Meadow, the Blueberries Grow”); we sang Kalla Den Änglamarken (“Call It the Land of the Angels”) and I Sommarens Soliga Dagar (“In the Sunny Days of Summer”); we sang “Summertime” and “Edelweiss”; Bellman and Bob Dylan; Simon and Garfunkel and Woody Guthrie.

  —

  Did my brother sing, too? I can’t remember. Perhaps he did, a bit.

  —

  My brother: straggly brown hair, green eyes, sooty eyelashes. A touch of something different about him; I am not sure what. He was a bit unkempt, perhaps—but this was the ’60s and ’70s after all. We were all a bit unkempt. Lisbet was pale and gangly, too, with green eyes. Same brown hair, same green eyes, same dark eyelashes. I was plain, Lisbet was pretty; I was rebellious, she was good. But there wasn’t really much in it. Twins and neighbouring countries maintain what Freud termed the narcissism of small differences. We maintained our separation, but people did sometimes mistake us for each other on the street. I could be pretty, too, in a good light. And Lisbet rebelled, in her time. My brother of course was a boy, so he was different. But still, the three of us were made from the same basic ingredients, the same shades of hair and skin, the same kind of minds, the same handicaps, the same talents.

  Or did I imagine that?

  *

  Summer. We threw ourselves into the sea. We threw ourselves into stormy waves. We threw ourselves off the rocks.

  We played lawn tennis with soft rubber balls. We pumped them up through a hardened patch of the rubber, with a scary syringe-and-needle pump. We paced out the tennis court on the lawn and marked the boundary corners, flour spilling unevenly.

  We staged gymnastics shows on the lawn with our cousins, in Marimekko T-shirts and shorts, in swimming costumes, in our pyjamas. We stood on our hands and descended into bridges; we stood up from the bridges; we stood on our heads; we turned cartwheels.

  We cycled to the village. I fell and cut my knee on a sharp stone; the blood coursed down my leg. I was proud of the scar, one of many.

  We went crabbing off the stones and brought back buckets of tiny crabs. My father cooked them with dill and we ate them. They tasted of sea with a lingering aftertaste of sweet dill; a celebration of summer.

  One summer my cousin Christina and I kept two of the crabs as pets, dutifully fetching small bucketfuls of seawater to the stone fountain where they lived. Mine was called Lola. They had stones to hide behind and fish to eat.

  Eventually we released them back into the sea. We assumed they preferred freedom over captivity, but perhaps they didn’t.

  —

  The summerhouse was closed for the winter, but we had a weekend house, too, not far from my grandfather’s estate farther south. He bred racehorses and kept two stallions, and we had a horse and two ponies there. The mares stood in their large foaling boxes; our ponies were at the end of one wing of the stable.

  We called our grandfather Ruben, I suppose because my father did too. If I try I can still hear his voice, though faintly now.

  Ruben taught us to play ping-pong and poker; he taught us about mushrooms and species of trees. I remember the smell of his house: carnation soap, geraniums, starched linen napkins, and a hint of dog. We were given pressed tomato juice with Parmesan biscuits before lunch; we ate roast chicken with black-currant jelly and finely sliced cucumber in vinegar and sugar. There was a ping-pong table in the basement, an old piano, hollow elephant feet with li
ds, and hundreds of paperbacks on shelves, an overflow from the library above.

  I remember a photograph: he is lying on the lawn wearing a toy Indian feather headdress. My brother, three or four years old, is in his arms, reaching towards the brightly coloured feathers. They are laughing, so intent on each other.

  I see in my brother my own son and time shifts and settles.

  —

  My brother didn’t ride. Nor did my mother, after trying my pony, which had originally been hers. Every Friday my father, my sister and I would ride the horses to our own stable, through the melancholy fields of southern Sweden, the fog coming and going, coming and going, past farmhouses with yellow lit-up windows, chained dogs barking, across gravel roads that must now be long since paved, making our way through the woods, one dirt road after another. On Sunday afternoons we would ride them back. Kol, our pointer, ran with the horses.

  In the summer, we brought the horses with us to the sea. I groomed them and cared for them; I devised schedules and polished bridles and saddles. I called them and they came for me. I meant good things, especially for my own pony with his sweet itch, his mane and tail rubbed bloody and bald. I put ointment on his wounds; I held his head, which turned heavy in my arms as he dozed.

  That heavy head.

  In distant summer childhood, we made pretend coffee with dock flowers in our playhouse—a gift from Ruben—which eventually turned derelict. It’s gone now.

  We played on the swings. I remember my mother on the double swing with my brother, singing, over and over, I love you and you love me—how did it end, that song?

  —

  We went out in the boat to watch the seals; to picnic on the island. The heady smell of petrol and fried chicken still makes me think of summer and freedom. I would stand next to my tall father at the wheel, jumping each time the boat hit the water, wave after wave, holding on to the wooden frame of the small windscreen. The rougher the better, jumping, jumping, the light 1960s motorboat bouncing from wave to wave.

  On the island we read as we ate on the rocks, we played in the clear water, we drank fizzy lemonade in Rigellos, the Tetra Pak rocket-shaped plastic bottle which eventually failed.

  I drifted on the common by the sea, back and forth, back and forth. You walked to the left, or you walked to the right. For years I walked, dreaming of spaceships, of abductions. I walked and dreamt; safe, so safe, climbing rocks, jumping from stone to stone.

  When summer was over and the time came to return to Lund, the town where we lived, I would swim one last time for the taste of sea on my skin and in my hair; I would sit in the car sucking my salty hair, contemplating school.

  —

  Some years ago, Hans gave me the summerhouse next door, which my mother had bought and given to him. He didn’t want it.

  I love you and you love me. That gift, that house, was how the song ended, or at least one verse of it. My mother tried to keep him here, but couldn’t.

  *

  The ancient common land below our house where the farmers graze their cattle is now designated a nature reserve. It’s a ten-mile strip or more of juniper and stone fields between the sea and the ploughed fields above; dry and springy short grass, miniature meadow flowers, and old stone walls. There are bunkers from the war, facing Denmark. There are stone mounds, Bronze Age graves, half a mile from the house. The sun sets in the sea beyond. From the low slabs of rocks at the edge of the sea you look straight into the setting sun. On hot days the air shimmers.

  Every summer, the farmers let their heifers out on the common to graze. The cattle wandered back and forth in my childhood, as they still do. Sometimes we forgot to close our gate, and they would get into the garden. Sometimes we were tempted to forget, for the excitement of what happened next. I would hear them first: the dawn clip-clop on the old stone paving outside my window; the heavy breathing of cows. My father, waking up, would place his children in key positions while he moved behind the heifers with his stick. My mother was not amused, but my father, I think, found it as exhilarating as we did.

  —

  Our summerhouse was an old fishermen’s cottage. My parents are still there, every summer. The house Eric and I stay in now, up above, was designed and built by our neighbour—he was an architect and spent every summer there. He had been married several times and had many children, some of whom were our age. Sometimes they ate with us—my father cooked—and sometimes we watched films at their house. I remember a glorious season of horror: The Body Snatchers, The Fly, Them, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Jekyll and Hyde, Frankenstein. One night that summer—we must have been about eleven and twelve—my brother ran ahead of me to scare me by a window: a white and ghostly face outside the small cottage where I slept, alone. I screamed, haunted by horror films, by bodies possessed or taken over.

  Another time Lisbet and Hans and I were alone in the house, together with some friends. We gradually fell into a panic about vampires, and cut garlic and painted crosses on every window.

  Apart from that one night I don’t think we were ever alone. One day followed another. We climbed onto the roof of the guest cottage next to mine and jumped down to the lawn below; climb, jump, climb, jump. In the evenings the stars, constellation after constellation, emerged in the long summer twilight and satellites crossed the sky in a steady pulse. We lay on the roof, watching.

  —

  I moved into my tiny cottage with my yellow teddy bear when I was five, to get my own room. I would always wake at three, at sunrise, then fall asleep again. I don’t remember being afraid.

  My teddy bear seemed half alive when I was a child. Now he is inanimate, propped up on a mantelpiece in London, leaking stuffing. He had a particular smell which I loved, a comforting smell, like a whiff from a live being. There is a faint hint of that smell—synthetic stuffing—around him still; I sniff him sometimes as I pass. I can’t have him restored: the smell, all that remains of his life, his spirit, would disappear. He has some old black stitches on his shoulder—my own inexpert stitching. When I broke my collarbone vaulting over the leather horse in gym we had the same fracture.

  That leather horse. It was set higher and higher and higher. There was no outcome other than a fall or a refusal. I jumped higher and higher, until I fell and crashed.

  —

  Sometimes I lost my teddy for months on end—the summerhouse was closed for the winter, but there was the house in the woods at weekends, and quite a bit of travel, too, and he sometimes got left behind.

  I also had a furry seal, small enough to fit into my hand. One year I lost my seal. For months I listlessly searched the attic of our house in Lund, a quiet space spanning the width of the old townhouse. One wall had slatted shelves, weighed down with old copies of Country Life and Krokodil, the Russian satirical magazine my father read. There were many cupboards and hidden spaces, and an extra attic above, which didn’t have a proper floor, only yellow insulation in between the beams. I had read The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers and longed for secret passages. I searched for them behind the tiled stoves in the drawing room and dining room, and in my parents’ bedroom. I searched my mother’s wardrobe, which connected to my own bedroom via a small internal window, through which a child could crawl. I went down to the cellar, past my father’s old golf clubs on the steep staircase into the smell of hot dust from the boiler. I searched for something, what? Some inner solution, perhaps, some explanation to the mystery. But what was the mystery?

  There was a cold room in the attic where my mother stored her furs and coats and perishables: crates of mangoes from friends in Pakistan, and flat foreign boxes of chocolates from Tetra Pak customers, which I would gradually eat my way through in secret.

  I searched for my seal and I searched for secret passages.

  Next to the cold room was a room with two vast freezers. Like deep sarcophagi, they held, for years, the remains of two feral cows my father had shot on my grandfather’s estate. Their hides ended up on one of our floors
, brown and glossy, and we ate beef stew for years made by our cook from Goa, John Menezes.

  Under one of those freezers in the attic I eventually found my dusty seal.

  —

  John made beef stew and bread pudding. He made fruit salad and homemade vanilla ice cream, packing the wooden barrel with ice and coarse salt, turning the creaky handle. I cycled home from school in the afternoon, and John would make me coffee with hot milk and sugar, dusted with cinnamon. I would cut two slices of bread and butter them, adding thin slices of cheese. I would prop myself up in bed, and read. Pony books and Astrid Lindgren, Edith Nesbit, Mary Norton, C. S. Lewis, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Tove Jansson, Anne Frank’s diary, Fairytales from Vietnam, the abbreviated Thousand and One Nights for children, Esther Hautzig’s The Endless Steppe, Tolkien, Katarina Taikon and Hitty, Her First Hundred Years.

  —

  I painted my old bicycle red. I remember the lovely smell of paint, the bicycle as quasi-animate as my teddy bear, old, stoic, and patient. I cycled slowly north on school mornings, the cathedral bells striking eight. By November the sun would hang like a blood orange in the fog as I cycled past the botanical gardens, up the road where I picked up my best friend Pamela, through the little park by the blocks of flats, then on to the brick-and-tarmac school, the harsh space.

  If it was my turn, I would take our dog Kol for a run in Lundagård, the dark and damp university park outside our house, with its tall trees and worn lawns in the shadow of the cathedral. Sometimes Kol would decide to run off to the larger city park, down the length of Södergatan, the main street of town. A certain tilt of the tail and nose to the ground signalled his decision to go. Once he made that decision, only my father could stop him. I read his body language and anxiously ran behind, pretending not to know him, hiding his lead. In the park he would graciously take note of me again, running gleefully across the sunny lawns.