Юхан Теорин - The Voices Beyond

The voices were much clearer now. A man and a woman were talking; Gerlof couldn’t hear what they were actually saying, but the man sounded calm, the woman more agitated. She was speaking much faster and louder; his responses were slow. It seemed like an intimate conversation between close friends. Friends, or lovers?

Gerlof tried to adjust the sound in his ear, improve his ability to eavesdrop, but he still couldn’t make out what they were saying. Were they speaking Swedish, or a different language?

Then the catch on the gate rattled and Gerlof saw that his grandchildren were back from the jetty. He sat up straight and quickly turned down the volume; their cheerful shouts were a little too much.

Mats looked around as if to make sure that no adults were listening, then leaned closer to Jonas and lowered his voice.

‘You can’t come to Kalmar with us. You do understand that?’

Jonas was sitting next to him on Uncle Kent’s leather sofa. He wanted to protest, have the courage to stand up to his older brother, but he said nothing.

‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘I don’t understand it at all.’

‘Because you’re too young for the film,’ Mats said. ‘You have to be over fifteen to see Armageddon .’

Jonas looked at him. He knew that the battle over the cinema trip was already lost, but he went on anyway: ‘I’ve seen films like that in Marnäs. The two of us have... All we had to do was walk in.’

Mats waved a fly away from his ear. ‘Yes, but this is different. They check on everybody in Kalmar. They’ve got security, they ask for ID. You don’t have any, which means you wouldn’t get in and you’d have to sit on a park bench waiting for the film to end. You’d be hanging around Kalmar on your own all evening... Is that what you want?’

Jonas shook his head. Mats was eighteen, Urban nineteen, and he knew they’d got together behind his back and chosen an American action movie with a 15+ certificate so that Casper could go with them but Jonas couldn’t.

‘You’ll get the money for the ticket anyway, that’s no problem,’ Mats said. ‘But Dad and Kent and Veronica will think you’re with us in Kalmar, so try and stay out of the way until we get back.’ He smiled. ‘Go and play with one of your little friends.’

Play? Jonas didn’t have any real friends in the village. All the boys were either older than him, or much younger. He wasn’t allowed to hang out with the older boys, and the younger ones were boring.

Hiding away inside Villa Kloss wasn’t an option, because the adults were having a party. If he could have disappeared without a trace for the evening, he would have done just that.

‘Hi there, you two!’

Their father came into the big room. Jonas thought he was looking at his two sons as if they were no more than recent acquaintances, in spite of the fact that they had seen him several times over the past few years.

‘So you’re off to the cinema in the big city tonight?’

Jonas didn’t say a word.

‘Are you catching the bus to Kalmar, Mats?’

‘Urban’s driving.’

‘OK. Stay off the beer, in that case.’

Mats looked up at the ceiling, then down at his father.

‘But I expect you’ll be having a few drinks at the party tonight, Dad? Knocking them back?’

‘No,’ Niklas said, but he couldn’t look his son in the eye. ‘Have you ever seen me drunk, Mats?’

‘Mum has. She says you were often drunk when you were married.’

Jonas stared at the floor, wondering where everyone else was. Please let Veronica come in...

Niklas looked at Mats.

‘That was a long time ago. Before you were born. In our first apartment. We had a few parties that got a bit out of hand. And Anita... Anita wasn’t always sober back then either. I could tell you a few tales about her.’

‘Don’t start badmouthing Mum.’

‘I’m just telling it like it was, Mats.’

Jonas got up, slowly and silently. If he moved very carefully, perhaps no one would notice him. Like a ghost, he drifted towards the glass door leading to the veranda; he was almost there when the call came.

‘Jonas?’

He stopped, turned around — and saw that Dad had found a smile somewhere and plastered it on.

‘Fancy a swim?’

The sky was blue and the air dry and warm outside, but Jonas still felt chilled to the bone. And alone, in spite of the fact that he was walking next to his father. There was no trip to the cinema in Kalmar to look forward to tonight, just loneliness.

They walked across the baking-hot coast road and out on to the ridge. Niklas didn’t speak until they were passing the burial cairn. He pointed to the stones and said, ‘People think there’s treasure buried beneath the cairn. You know it’s an ancient grave, don’t you?’

Jonas nodded. ‘We learned about the Bronze Age in school. It came between the Stone Age and the Iron Age.’

‘Exactly. So there’s a Bronze Age chieftain buried here, just like King Mysing in his burial mound in the south of the island. But you’re not scared, are you?’

‘Not me,’ Jonas said.

Not at the moment, anyway, he thought; not when the sun was shining and his dad was here. The cairn was completely harmless right now. But he didn’t like being out here in the evening, when it became a portal to another world, and the ghost came out and turned people into killer zombies.

His dad had said something, asked a question as they started down the stone steps leading to the water.

‘What?’ Jonas said.

‘Is Mum OK?’

‘Yes... I suppose so. She spends a lot of time working.’

‘Good,’ his dad said. ‘It’s good that she’s got a job.’

He looked as if he wanted to ask more questions about Mum, so Jonas hurried down the steps.

They could hear cheerful cries from the jetty further north, but the shore down below Villa Kloss was empty and red-hot. The waves lapped gently against the flat, greyish-white rocks. Niklas pointed to a row of thick poles extending a couple of hundred metres straight out into the water, just to the south of the bathing area.

‘I see the fishermen have laid their gill nets this year, too. There must be some eels left in the Sound...’

A limestone boathouse near the bottom of the steps housed the sun loungers and swimming gear belonging to the Kloss family. It was padlocked, but Casper had given Jonas the combination.

Casper’s rubber dinghy was in there, along with a couple of plastic oars, but the air had gone out of it over the winter, and it looked deflated and a bit pathetic. Casper hadn’t used it for several years. Jonas must have grown seven or eight centimetres since he last sat in it, and he was definitely heavier. He probably wouldn’t be able to use it after this summer, but he dragged it out into the sun anyway.

‘Are you going out in that?’ his father asked.

Jonas nodded.

‘Well, don’t go too far... I’ll help you blow it up.’

While his father was pumping more air into the dinghy, Jonas quickly pulled on his trunks. He just wanted to get out on to the water, follow the nets and see if any eels were moving around down there in the darkness.

He didn’t want to spend any more time talking to his father. If he did, then sooner or later he would ask him what he had done to end up in prison; all Jonas knew was that it was something bad. Something to do with money and the customs office. Something Dad didn’t want to talk about.

‘Dad fucked things up for the whole family,’ Mats had once said when they were alone. As if the fault lay not in what their father had done, but in the fact that he had got caught.

The summer evening seemed to be ageing, turning as grey as the Homecomer as the light vanished on the west coast of the island. The sun began to go down, and the day’s short shadows quickly grew longer. The horizon disappeared, and sea and sky became a darkening curtain in the west. The figures moving beneath the trees were almost invisible.