John Lindqvist - Harbour

He came out onto the cliffs and stopped to look at the wooden framework. It looked reasonable, but weren't the gaps between the upright posts for the walls a little too wide? He knew that the pine tree outside the front door grew at an angle of exactly ninety degrees to the ground. He crouched down, closed one eye and squinted. Either the tree had started to grow crooked during the summer, or…

He had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach as he took out his folding rule and measured the distance between the posts. They were too far apart, and there wasn't even the same distance between them everywhere. In some places it was seventy centimetres, in others a little over eighty. He always went for fifty, sixty at the most. And there weren't enough horizontal supports.

He went to look at the stock of wood. It was as he had suspected: there wasn't a single whole piece of timber left. Erik had scrimped on the wood.

The bad feeling in his stomach moved up to his chest as he went around the building with the plumb line and spirit level. The foundations inclined slightly towards the east, and the framework inclined more strongly towards the west. Presumably Erik had realised that he hadn't got the foundations right, and had tried to compensate by making the house lean in the opposite direction.

Torgny walked around the foundations tapping them with a stone. It wasn't a disaster, but in places it sounded hollow. Erik had got air bubbles in the mortar. And there were no air vents either. If Erik put a slate roof on the crooked frame, it was only a question of whether the damp from underneath or the weight from above would wreck the house first.

Torgny slumped down on the threshold and noted in passing that the door measurements were wrong. And he was the first person to think what so many people would say in the future: What a bloody shack.

What could he do?

If it had been in his power, he would have pulled the whole lot down immediately and put up a new framework before Erik came home, confronting him with a fait accompli. He did actually consider for a moment whether he could keep Erik away from home for a week on some wild pretext, get together every single person he knew and do just that. But it wasn't that simple. Just to redo the foundations…

He teetered across the sparse floor joists and inspected the internal layout of the house. That was peculiar as well. A long, narrow hall ran through the house, with the incorrectly proportioned bedrooms and kitchen scattered along its edges. It was as if Erik had started with the living room, which did actually appear to be normal, then added each of the other rooms as they occurred to him, until he ran out of wood.

Torgny stood with his legs apart, balancing on two joists in the middle of what would be the living room. And he was ashamed. It wasn't so much that it was his son who had built this, but more that he would have to spend the rest of his days with this monstrosity close by, on his property. That it would, so to speak, become a part of the family.

Torgny gathered up his things and left Erik's house without looking back. Once he was home, he put a decent slug of spirits in his coffee and a great gloom settled over him as he sat out on his balcony in the autumn sunshine.

His wife Maja came out and sat beside him with a pail of apples to be peeled and pureed.

'How was it?' she asked, as she produced a serpentine curl of peel from the first apple.

'How was what?'

'The house. Erik's house.'

'Well, let's hope it'll keep the wind off them.'

Maja's knife slipped and the serpent fell to the ground before she made it to the end. 'Is it that bad?'

Torgny nodded and gazed into the dregs of his coffee. He thought he could see the Tower of Babel, crashing down on to the screaming crowd. You didn't have to be clairvoyant to understand what that meant.

'Isn't there anything you can do?'

Torgny shook his cup so that the tower disappeared, and shrugged his shoulders.

'I could go up there with a can of kerosene and a match, of course, but…he might take it the wrong way.'

Erik came home that evening in an excellent mood. He and Anna- Greta were agreed on plain, simple rings, so that matter had been more or less a formality. But they had had a lovely day in Norrtälje, sitting by the canal and professing their love for each other while planning their wedding.

Torgny was sitting at the kitchen table mending nets; he listened to his son's unusual talkativeness, nodding and making the right noises as he agreed that Erik had got himself a fine girl there.

Maja stood at the stove stirring the apple puree, making little contribution to the conversation. After a while, Erik noticed that something was wrong. He looked from one to the other.

'Has something happened?'

Torgny looped the yarn through a hole, pulled it tight and knotted it; he didn't look up from his work as he asked, 'What were you thinking of doing about the slates?'

'What slates?'

'For your…house.'

'What do you mean?'

'I'm allowed to ask a question.'

Erik looked at his mother, who was stirring the apple with great concentration, keeping her back to both of them. His father still had his eyes entangled in the torn mesh of the net. After a short silence Erik asked, 'Isn't it right?' When his father didn't reply, he added, 'So what's wrong with it, then?'

Torgny cut off the loose ends with his penknife and rolled them into a little ball.

'Well, if I can put it like this…you ought to consider using sheet metal. If you're planning on having people actually living in that house.' Erik just stared at him. He went on, 'If we could just go through it together, there are a few things I think need taking care of, and perhaps we could…'

Erik interrupted him. 'You think I ought to pull it down, don't you? The whole thing?' Torgny opened his mouth to reply, but Erik slammed his hand down on the table and yelled, 'Fuck you!'

Maja spun around from the stove so quickly that a few drops of apple puree flew off the wooden spoon in her hand and landed on the front of Erik's shirt as he got up from the table.

'Erik!' she said. 'That's no way to speak to your father!'

Erik glared at her as if he were thinking of hitting her, then his gaze dropped to the warm amber drops on his chest.

'Two things,' said Torgny as Erik stood there with his head down. 'Two things. Then you can go wherever you want, and you can get as angry as you want. You are not putting slates on that roof. And you will put air vents in the foundations. After that you can do what you like.'

Torgny cut a piece of yarn to begin darning the next tear. But his hands were shaking and he cut his thumb. It wasn't a deep gash, but a few drops of blood oozed out.

He looked at the blood. Erik looked at the blobs of apple puree on his shirt. Maja was still standing there with the wooden spoon half-raised. A couple of seconds went by and something that was not a house collapsed between them, there was the sound of splintering wood, the squeal of protest as nails were ripped out.

Then Erik walked out of the kitchen. They heard his footsteps thundering up the stairs, the door of his room slamming behind him. Torgny sucked the blood off his thumb. Maja stirred the pan a few times.

Something had collapsed.

After that evening Erik lost all his enthusiasm. He carried on with his carpentry during the autumn and had the panels finished before the winter came, and he fitted a metal roof. He drilled air vents that were misshapen and ugly, but at least they let some air into the foundations.

He did all of this, but he did it without pleasure, without energy. He ate his dinner in silence and gave monosyllabic answers to his parents' questions. Sometimes he went to Nåten to meet Anna-Greta, and he must have made a bit of an effort on those occasions, because the wedding was still on.