Mons Kallentoft - Autumn Killing

White tights. Blue skirt, one leg crossed over the other. High heels, even at home.

Open up. Tell me. You want to, I saw your reaction when I told you what Anders Dalstrom had told us. About the rumours. The romance.

‘You’re mourning Jerry Petersson, aren’t you?’

The perfectly balanced upholstery from Svenskt Tenn behind her back, Josef Frank’s speckled, smiling snakes.

And Katarina’s mask falls. Shatters into a tormented grimace and she starts to cry.

‘Don’t touch me,’ Katarina sobs when Malin makes a move to put her arm around her.

‘Sit down again and I’ll tell you.’

And soon the words are pouring from the puffy, tear-streaked face.

‘I was in love with Jerry Petersson the autumn before the accident. I saw him in the corridors at school, I knew he was off limits for a girl like me, but you should have seen him, Malin, he was ridiculously handsome. Then we ended up at the same party, at the headquarters of the youth wing of the Moderate Party, by mistake, and I don’t remember why but we ended up sitting in the cemetery all night, and then we went down to the river. There used to be an abandoned pump house there, it’s been demolished now.’

Katarina gets up. Goes over to the window facing the river, and with her back to Malin she points, waiting for Malin to join her before she goes on.

‘Over there, on that little island, that’s where the pump house was. It was cold, but I still felt warmer than ever that autumn. Jerry and I used to meet without anyone else knowing. I was head-over-heels in love with him. But Father wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with him. And that was that.’

Then Katarina falls silent, seems to be trying to keep the moment alive, by keeping her memories to herself.

Malin opens her mouth to say something, but Katarina hushes her, giving her a look that tells her to listen, to listen to her, and not to herself.

‘Then he disappeared off to Lund. But he didn’t leave me. I kept an eye on him all those years, through my failed marriage to that idiot Father loved. I never forgot Jerry, I wanted to get back in touch, but I never did, I devoted myself to art instead, buried myself in paintings. Why, why, why did he have to come home again, why did he want the castle? I never understood. If he wanted to get back into my life, surely he could have just called? Don’t you think? He could have just called, couldn’t he?’

You could have called him, Malin thinks.

‘And I should have rung him. Or gone out there. Ditched all my useless lovers. He was there, after all, maybe it was finally time to do something about our wretched, lingering love.’

You always loved him. Like I’ve always loved Janne. Can our love ever end?

‘Did Jerry ever meet your father?’ Malin goes on.

Katarina doesn’t answer. Instead she walks away from the window and out of the room.

Katarina is standing in front of the mirror in the bathroom. Doesn’t recognise her own face.

Then she imagines that someone is holding pictures in front of her eyes, black-and-white pictures that were never taken by a camera but which somehow exist anyway.

Two young people walking beside a river.

A pump house.

Burning wood. And the voice is there, his voice, a voice she has been longing to hear.

‘Do you remember how beautiful you were then, Katarina? That autumn? When we would walk together along the Stangan, taking care that no one saw us, how we would have sex in the old pump house, warmed by the fire we made in an abandoned stove. I would stroke your back, caress it, and we pretended it was summer, and that I was rubbing suncream onto your skin to stop it burning.’

New pictures.

Snow falling. She in her room at the castle. A figure walking through the forest in the cold. The closed doors of the castle.

‘And then, against my will,’ the voice went on, ‘you wanted me to meet your father and mother. So I came out to the castle on the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, like we’d agreed. I took the bus as far as I could, then walked through the cold, through the forest and past fields, until I saw the castle almost forcing the forest aside, on a small rise surrounded by its moat.

‘I walked across the bridge over the moat.

‘Saw the strange green light.

‘And your father opened the door and I looked at him and he realised why I was there, and you came to the door, and he saw something in your eyes, and he shouted that there was no way in hell that someone like me was going to cross his threshold, then he raised his arm and knocked me to the ground with a single blow.

‘He chased me away, over the moat, brandishing an umbrella, and you were shouting that you loved me, I love him, Father, and I ran, I ran and I thought you were going to follow me, but when I turned around at the edge of the forest you were gone, the driveway was empty, the door wasn’t closed, but your mother, Bettina, was standing there, and I thought I could see her smiling.’

Images of herself turning away in the castle doorway. Running up the stairs. Lying on a bed. Standing close to her father. Adjusting her make-up in a mirror.

Shut up, she wants to shout at the voice, shut up, but it goes on: ‘I came to the party. You were there. Fredrik. He had drunk too much, was arrogant towards everyone and everything. It was as if I didn’t exist for you. You didn’t even look at me, and that made me mad. I drank, gulping it down, danced, fumbled with dozens of girls who all wanted me, I made myself unbeatable, I took Jasmin, who was in your class, just because it would upset you, I got behind the wheel of that car just to show the world who made the decisions, and that love really doesn’t matter. I was in charge, and not even love could take that power away.

‘And then, in the field, in the snow and the blood and the silence, I looked at Jonas Karlsson, begged him to say he was the one driving, promised him the world.

‘And do you know, he did what I said, I got him to do it, and I realised deep down at that moment that I could have almost anything I wanted in this world, as long as I was ruthless enough. That I could make the lawnmower blades shut up.

‘But not you, Katarina. I could never have you. Not the person you are.

‘So, sure, in a way I was both born and died on that New Year’s Eve.’

Images of a car wreck. Funerals, a wheelchair with a mute body, a man with his back to her in an office chair, a steady stream of images from a life she had never known.

‘And when I bought Skogsa, I wanted to breathe life into what had died,’ the voice goes on.

‘That was the very worst vanity, worse than any alchemist’s.

‘Soon I was standing in the very same doorway that I had been refused entry to for all those years. I walked bare-chested through the rooms, feeling the cold, rough surface of the stone against my skin.’

The images are gone. All that is left is the mirror, her eyes, the tears she knows are there inside them somewhere.

Linkoping, March and onwards

Jerry rubs against the walls of a room illuminated by the one hundred and three candles in the chandelier suspended five metres above his head. The stones are irregular and rough against his chest and back, like the surface of some as yet unexplored hostile planet.

The painting of the man and woman with the suncream is hanging in front of him.

The rooms of the castle. One after the other.

The telephones. She’s only a phone call away. He sits beneath his paintings and chants the number like a mantra.

It never occurs to him that she might be angry about what he has done, that she might think he has torn her family’s history from their hands.

But he never dials her number. Instead he throws himself into the practical business that comes with a property like this, sorting out the tenant farmers, and labourers of all different trades, visiting the whores he finds on the Internet, even in Linkoping, often middle-aged women with an unnaturally high sex-drive who may as well make a bit of money from satisfying their lust. He considers calling the young solicitor he bedded when the contracts were signed, but thinks that things might get a bit too close to home if he did that.