‘When were you going to tell me?’
When you visited the farm we planned to tell you everything. Our worry was that if we’d discussed being self-sufficient while we were still in London you’d have thought our plans far-fetched and unachievable. When you were on the farm, you’d see the vegetable garden, you’d eat food that had cost us nothing. We’d walk among our fruit trees. You’d pick baskets of mushrooms and berries that grow wild in the forests. You’d see a larder full of home-made jams and pickles. Your father would catch a salmon from the river and we’d feast like kings, with a stomach full of the most delicious food in the world and all of it free. Our cash poverty would seem an irrelevance. We’d be rich in other ways. Our lack of money wasn’t a threat to our well-being. That’s easier to demonstrate than explain. Which is why we were secretly pleased when you delayed your visit; it gave us time to make changes, to better prepare the farm and build a convincing case that we were going to be okay and you didn’t need to worry.
• • •
MY FIRST VISIT TO THE FARM would’ve been a feast of home-grown produce and home-grown deceit – theirs and mine. No wonder my parents hadn’t pressed harder into my vague reasons for delaying my visit. It was to their advantage too, buying time, the three of us getting ready to undress our lies. My mum’s insistence that I should be spared from worry was a further reminder of how incapable they considered me. Yet my mum’s attitude had changed. She was no longer protecting me. Whether I was ready or not, she would not spare me any upsetting detail today. She took my hand, guiding me back to my seat, her impatience suggesting that this revelation was a small matter compared to the crimes she wanted to address. From her satchel she tugged free a crinkled map of Sweden, unfolding it on the table.
How did we come to live in this particular region of Sweden – a region unknown to me, an area where I have no family or friends, where I’ve never spent any time?
The farm’s situated here—
Chris and I considered countless locations, mostly in the far north, beyond Stockholm, where prices were cheaper. During our search, Cecilia, the elderly woman who owned the farm, sought us out as buyers. I told you that it was a slice of remarkable good luck. We received a call from an estate agent asking if we wanted to view the property. More unusual, the seller wanted to personally meet us. We’d registered our details with the local agents, but the southern province of Halland is popular – many people have second homes there – and it’s expensive. After confessing to our limited budget we hadn’t been sent the details of any farms until this call. We examined the particulars. It seemed perfect. There was bound to be a catch.
When we visited, our expectations were confounded. It was perfect! Do you remember how excited we were? The farm was close to the sea, less than thirty minutes by bicycle, a region with white sand beaches, old-fashioned ice cream parlours and summer hotels. The land included a small orchard, a pontoon on the Ätran River, famous for its salmon. Yet the price was incomprehensibly low. The owner, Cecilia, was a widow without children. There was a pressing medical need for her to move into a care home, therefore she wanted a quick sale. During our interview we didn’t dig any deeper. I was so bewitched by the property that I interpreted it as a sign that my return to Sweden was blessed and that our fortunes had finally changed.
You must have wondered why I never got in touch with my father during this process. Part of me understands why you didn’t ask the question. I’ve given the impression that my childhood wasn’t a topic to be discussed. And you’ve always enjoyed the fact that it was just the three of us in our family. Perhaps you imagined three bonds were stronger than four or five. Nonetheless, I’m sorry that your grandfather is a stranger to you and has never been part of our family life. He still lives on the same farm where I grew up. That farm isn’t in Halland, where we’d bought our home, but in the province of Värmland, to the north of us, on the far face of the great Lake Vänern, between the cities of Gothenburg and Stockholm—
Here—
We’d be a six-hour car drive apart.
The distance speaks for itself. The sad truth is that I didn’t want to attempt a reunion with him. Too much time had passed. My return was to Sweden, not to him. He’s now in his eighties. Some might consider wanting to be far away cruel, but there’s no mystery to our estrangement. When I was sixteen I asked for his help. He refused. And it became impossible to stay.
Don’t concern yourself with my handwritten annotations. We’ll come to those later. On second thoughts, since you’ve seen them now it would be worth noting the scale of these crimes. The conspiracy stretches across the entire region and touches many lives, including local authorities and institutions, politicians and police officers. There’s so much to tell you and so little time. As we speak, Chris will be booking his flight to London. Very soon he’ll be arriving at your apartment, hammering on your door, demanding—
• • •
INTERRUPTED, RAISING MY HAND as if I were in class:
‘Dad isn’t flying over. He’s staying in Sweden.’
Is that what he told you? He wants you to think that he doesn’t need to be here and doesn’t need to make his case because there’s no doubt in his mind that you’re going to dismiss everything I say. He’s completely confident you’ll come to the only possible conclusion – that I am insane. Well, no matter what he claimed about staying in Sweden, that man will be in frantic conference with his co-conspirators. Together they’ll order him over to London at the first possible opportunity to make sure I’m institutionalised. Any minute now he’ll call to say that he’s changed his mind, he’s bought a ticket, he’s at the airport about to fly. He’ll disguise this about-face with some noble-sounding excuse, pretending to be worried as to how you’re coping. You wait and see! He’ll prove me right, which is why that lie was a miscalculation. I’m sure he’s kicking himself because soon you’ll have incontestable evidence of his deception—
• • •
WITHOUT FINISHING HER SENTENCE, my mum rose up out of her chair and hurried downstairs. I followed her to the front door, fearing that I’d done something wrong and she was about to leave.
‘Wait!’
Instead, she slid the chain across the door and turned to face me, determined to secure the apartment. I was so relieved she hadn’t fled that I took a moment to steady my voice:
‘Mum, you’re safe here. Please take the chain off the latch.’
‘Why not leave it on?’
I couldn’t think of a reason to disagree apart from the fact that the chain made me uneasy. It was a tacit acceptance that my dad was a threat – something that hadn’t yet been proved. To end the stalemate I gave in:
‘Leave it, if you want.’
My mum shot me a knowing glance. She could win a minor victory but it would count against her. She lifted the chain off and let it drop. Irritated, she shooed me upstairs, trailing behind.
You’re making the same mistakes I did. I underestimated Chris. Just like you, I gave him the benefit of the doubt, again and again, until it was too late. He’s probably already on a flight. There was one departing only a few hours after mine. He might not give us any warning.
• • •
BACK AT THE TABLE, HER DISSATISFACTION with me still lingering, my mum folded the map, picking up her diary again, reorienting herself after the interruption. I picked a different seat, closer to her, without the bulk of the table between us. She showed me the entry marked 16 April, the date they’d first arrived at the farm. All that was written on the page was the note, ‘what a strange fast-moving sky’.
On the drive to Sweden, in our white van, I was excited but I was scared too, scared that I’d set myself an impossible challenge trying to reclaim this land as my home after so many years. The responsibility rested on my shoulders. Chris didn’t speak a word of the language. He had no more than a passing acquaintance with Swedish traditions. I’d be the bridge between our cultures. These issues didn’t matter to him –
he was a foreigner, his identity was clear. But what was I? Was I a foreigner or a national? Neither English nor Swedish, an outsider in my own country – what name is there for me?
Utlänning!
That’s what they’d call me! It’s a cruel Swedish word, one of the cruellest words, meaning a person from outside this land. Even though I’d been born and raised in Sweden, the community would consider me a foreigner, a foreigner in my own home – I’d be an utlänning there as I’d been in London.
Utlänning here!
Utlänning there! Utlänning everywhere!
Looking out the window I was reminded of just how lonely this landscape was. In Sweden, outside the cities, the wilderness rules supreme. People tiptoe timidly around the edge, surrounded by skyscraping fir trees and lakes larger than entire nations. Remember, this is the landscape that inspired the mythology of trolls, stories I used to read to you about giant lumbering man-eating creatures with mushroom warts on their crooked noses and bellies like boulders. Their sinewy arms can rip a person in two, snapping human bones and using splinters to scrape the gristle out of their shrapnel teeth. Only in forests as vast as this could such monsters be hiding, yellow eyes stalking you.
Along the final stretch of deserted road before the farm, there were bleak brown fields, the winter snow had melted away but the topsoil was hard and jagged with ice. There was no sign of life, no crops, no tractors, no farmers – stillness, but overhead the clouds were moving incredibly fast, as though the sun were a plug that had been pulled out of the horizon and the clouds, along with the dregs of daylight, were being sucked down a sinkhole. I couldn’t take my eyes off this fast-moving sky. After a short while I began to feel dizzy, my head began to spin. I asked Chris to stop the van because I felt nauseous. He carried on driving, arguing that we were almost there and it made no sense to stop. I asked again, less politely this time, to stop the van, only for him to repeat how close we were, and finally I banged my fists against the dashboard and demanded that he stop the van right this very second!
He looked at me like you’re now looking at me. But he obeyed. I jumped out and was sick in the grassy verge, angry with myself, worried that I had ruined what should have been a joyful occasion. Too queasy to climb back into the vehicle, I instructed Chris to drive on, intending to walk the last distance. He refused, wanting us to arrive together. He declared the moment important symbolically. Therefore we decided that he’d drive at a snail’s pace and I’d walk in front. As if I were leading a funeral procession I began the short walk to our new home, our farm, the van following behind – a ridiculous spectacle, I accept, but how else could we reconcile my need to walk, his need to drive the van, and the shared desire to arrive simultaneously?
Listening to Chris boohooing crocodile tears to the doctors at the Swedish asylum, he presented this episode as evidence of an irrational mind. If he were telling the story now he’d almost certainly have started his version of events here, omitting any mention of the strange fast-moving sky. Instead, he would’ve described me as baffling and fragile, unstable from the outset. That’s what he claims, his voice strained with make-believe sadness. Who would have thought he was such an actor? Regardless of what he claims now, at the time he understood the emotions triggered by my return, an extraordinary feeling after fifty years, as extraordinary as the sky that welcomed me home.
Once we reached the farm he stepped out of the van, leaving it parked in the middle of the road. He took my hand. When we crossed over the threshold to our farm we did it together, as partners, as a loving couple starting an exciting new chapter in their life.
• • •
I REMEMBERED THESE PHRASES – ‘shrapnel teeth’ and ‘bellies like boulders’ – they were lifted from a Swedish collection of troll stories that we’d both loved. The book’s cover had been missing and there was only one illustration of a troll near the front, a pair of dangerous dirty yellow eyes lurking in the depths of a forest. There were glossier books about trolls, sanitised child-friendly stories, but this tatty old anthology, long out of print, found in a secondhand bookstore, was filled with gruesome stories. By far it was my mum’s favourite book to read at bedtime, and I’d heard each of the stories many times. My mum had kept the book among her collection, perhaps because it was in such a fragile condition that she feared it would fall apart in my hands. It was a contradiction that she’d always shielded me from trauma, yet when it came to fairy tales she’d wilfully sought out more disturbing stories, as if trying to compensate, giving me in fiction that which she’d tried so hard to take away from real life.
My mum unclipped three photographs from the journal and laid them side by side on the table in front of me. They matched up, forming a single panorama of their farm.
It is a pity that you never had a chance to visit. My task today would have been easier if you’d experienced the farm first-hand. Maybe with these photos you consider a description of the landscape unnecessary. That’s exactly what my enemies hope you’ll think, because they portray the countryside as being no different from the tourist-brochure stereotype of rural Sweden. They want you to conclude that anything other than an enthusiastic reaction is so bizarre that it could only be the product of sickness and paranoia. Be warned: they have a vested interest in presenting it as picturesque since beauty is easily mistaken for innocence.
Standing at the point where these photographs were taken, you’re immersed in the most unbelievable quiet. It’s like being at the bottom of the sea except instead of a rusted shipwreck there’s an ancient farmhouse. Even the thoughts in my head sounded loud, and sometimes I found my heart beating hard for no reason except as a reaction against the silence.
You can’t appreciate it from the photographs, but the thatched roof was alive, a living entity spotted with moss and small flowers, home to insects and birds – a fairytale roof in a fairytale setting – I use the word carefully, for fairy tales are full of danger and darkness as well as wonder and light.
The exterior of this ancient property hadn’t been altered since its construction two hundred years ago. The only evidence of the modern world was the collection of red dots in the distance, beady rat eyes atop wind turbines, barely visible in the gloom, churning a morbid April sky.
Here’s the crucial point. As the fact of isolation sinks into our consciousness we change, not at first but slowly, gradually, until we accept it as the norm, living day to day without the presence of the state, without the outside world chafing against our side, reminding us of our duty to each other, no passing strangers or nearby neighbours, no one peering over our shoulder – a permanent state of unwatched. It alters our notions of how we should behave, of what is acceptable, and, most important of all, what we can get away with.
• • •
THE MELANCHOLY IN MY MUM’S description didn’t surprise me. There was always going to be more than straightforward happiness bound up in her return to Sweden. Aged sixteen she’d run away from her family home and carried on running, through Germany, Switzerland and Holland, working as a nanny and a waitress, sleeping on floors, until she’d reached England where she met my dad. Of course, this wasn’t her first time back, we’d often holidayed in Sweden, renting remote cottages on islands or near lakes, never spending more than a day in the cities, partly due to expense but mostly because my mum wanted to be among the forests and wilderness. Within days of our arriving, empty jam jars would be filled with wildflowers. Bowls would be brimming with berries. Yet we’d never made an attempt to meet any relatives. Though I was content to spend the time with just my mum and dad, occasionally even I – naïve as I was – sensed sadness in the absence of other people.
My mum returned to the diary and seemed frustrated as she searched the pages.
I can’t be sure of the exact day. It was roughly a week after we’d arrived. At that point I wasn’t in the habit of taking many notes. The idea hadn’t occurred to me that my word would be doubted as if I were a fanciful child making up stories for atten
tion. Of the many humiliations I’ve experienced in these past few months, including having my hands and feet bound, by far the worst has been the disbelief in people’s eyes as I make a statement. To speak, be heard, and not believed.
During our first week on the farm Chris’s state of mind was cause for concern, not mine. He’d never lived outside a city and struggled to cope. April was far colder than we’d expected. The farmers have a term called Iron Nights, when winter clings on and spring can’t break through. There’s ice in the soil. Days are raw and short. The nights are bitter and long. Chris was depressed. And his depression felt like an accusation, that I was responsible for bringing him to a property with none of the modern conveniences, away from everything he knew, because I was Swedish and the farm was in Sweden. In reality, we’d made the decision together as a desperate fix to our circumstances. There was no choice. We were there, or nowhere. If we sold the farm we’d have money to rent a place for two or three years in England and then nothing.
One evening I’d had enough of his misery. The farmhouse isn’t large – the ceilings are low, the walls are thick, the rooms are small – and we were spending all our time together, trapped inside by hostile weather. There was no central heating. In the kitchen there was a wrought-iron oven where you could bake bread, cook food and boil water – the heart of the house. When Chris wasn’t sleeping he sat in front of it, hands outstretched, a pantomime of rural drudgery. I lost my temper, shouting at him to stop being such a glum bastard, before hurrying out, slamming the door—