Johan Theorin - The Quarry

Per exhaled slowly and stayed where he was. He ought to go for a jog on the track along the shore, but it was too dark now.

Jerry’s persecution mania had simmered inside his head like a bubbling soup for as long as Per could remember. There had been a joyous lust for life too, but after the stroke that had completely disappeared. In the past Per had got the impression that Jerry needed these real or imagined conflicts to spice up his life, that they gave him fresh energy in his role as an entrepreneur, but the voice he had heard on the phone today was confused and weak.

For as long as Per could remember, his father had imagined that people were after him: usually the Swedish government and its tax inspectors, but sometimes the bank or a rival or a former employee from Jerry’s company.

Per couldn’t do much about his father right now. He probably needed some kind of supervision, but for Per it was more important to be a father to Nilla than a son to Jerry.

And Jesper, too. He mustn’t forget Jesper.

His son’s door was closed, but Per was a good father, he cared. He knocked and popped his head around the door. ‘Hi there.’

‘Hi Dad,’ Jesper said quietly.

He was sitting up in bed with his Gameboy, even though it was really too late to play.

Per chose to ignore it. Instead he told Jesper about a plan that had occurred to him as he was looking out of the window: why not build a shortcut down to the shore?

‘Shall we do some work tomorrow?’ he asked. ‘Build up our muscles and make something worthwhile?’

Jesper thought about it. Then he nodded.

They slept in until nine the next morning, and made a start on the flight of steps after breakfast.

Ernst had left only a rickety ladder leading from the cottage down to the quarry, and Per wanted something more stable. A flight of steps he and the children could use when they went down to the shore on sunny summer days.

At the southern end of the Mörners’ stony plot the edge of the quarry was several metres lower, and that was where Per had chosen to construct the steps. One by one he and Jesper threw some of Ernst’s tools down on to the gravel at the bottom of the quarry: crowbars, spades and pickaxes. Then they lowered the old wheelbarrow down, pulled on their thick gloves and climbed down after it.

It was cold at the bottom of the rock face, and there wasn’t a soul in sight. Nor were there many plants, just grass and the odd little bush determinedly clinging to the gravel or growing in crevices. Gulls were standing on top of some of the piles of stone, screaming at each other, their beaks stiff and wide open.

At about knee height in the rock face a strange layer of dark-red clumps ran through the pale limestone. Per remembered it from his childhood. The place of blood , Ernst had called it, but he had never explained why. It was hardly likely to be real blood.

‘What are we going to do, Dad?’ asked Jesper, looking around.

‘Right... first we’re going to collect some gravel.’ Per pointed over at the piles.

‘But is it OK just to pinch it?’

‘We’re not pinching it,’ said Per, realizing that he hadn’t a clue who owned the quarry. ‘We’re using it. I mean, it’s just lying here, isn’t it?’

Time to start work. Not too hard and not too fast — he had to think about his back — but hard enough to build a flight of steps up from the quarry.

For over an hour they pushed the wheelbarrow back and forth between the piles of gravel in the middle of the quarry and the rock face below their garden, and slowly they constructed a steep ramp leading upwards.

It was already half past ten, but Per had warmed up now, and besides, he had spotted a big stack of long, narrow blocks of stone about fifty metres away.

‘Shall we start with those?’ he said.

They went over to begin loading the limestone blocks into the wheelbarrow. Per avoided the biggest ones, but the medium-sized ones were heavy enough. He grabbed hold of the nearest block and got Jesper to take the other end. The surface of the stone was dry and smooth.

‘Always lift with your legs, Jesper, never with your back.’

They lifted together, and placed three blocks at a time in the wheelbarrow.

By the time they had unloaded the blocks by the rock face and placed them in position as steps, Per was panting — this was hard, heavy work. How had Ernst managed to work here day after day, year after year?

By about twelve o’clock they had finished the lower section of the steps, and Per’s back, neck and arms were aching. Despite the protective gloves, the skin on his fingers was badly chafed, and he had blisters. And the steps still reached less than halfway up to the top.

He smiled wearily. ‘Only the rest to go, then.’

‘We could do with a crane,’ said Jesper.

Per shook his head. ‘That’s cheating.’

They hauled themselves over the edge of the quarry and went back into Ernst’s house.

Their house, thought Per, and wondered about a name. Casa Grande?

No. Casa Mörner: that would do nicely.

That same evening, the wind started to blow ferociously across the island, and by the time darkness came, a gale was howling across the rooftops.

The telephone on Nilla’s hospital ward had been engaged all evening, but at eight o’clock Per had done what Nilla wanted and sent her a thought.

Love , he thought, and sent it away with a mental picture of the sunset over the sound.

No thoughts from his daughter popped into his head in return; it felt completely empty. He didn’t really believe telepathy worked, but they had nothing to lose.

Per went to bed and fell asleep to the sound of the howling wind; he dreamed that he had found a pale little wooden doll in the quarry. He put it in a cloth bag and brought it into the cottage, for some reason. The doll was angry, and because the bag was torn, he got some tape and tried to repair it so that the fingers wouldn’t stick out. The doll struggled inside the bag and Per kept on trying to tape the bag up; he could hear his father laughing at him.

No, it wasn’t Jerry’s hoarse laughter that was reverberating through his dream, it was a dull roar that was making the ground shake.

Per stopped fighting with the bag. He looked out of the window towards the quarry and discovered something unbelievable: a volcano had begun to form out in the sound between the island and the mainland. The water was boiling, the air was full of grey smoke, and a crater a hundred metres wide was rising towards the sky, higher and higher.

Lava poured down the sides, starting to fill the quarry.

Then he woke up, disorientated and confused, fumbling in vain for the doll in his bed.

The gale was still blowing over the house, but the dull roar had stopped. It didn’t come back, and eventually he fell asleep again.

Sunday morning was sunny, with a strange rushing noise in the wind. Per got up at about half past seven, and noticed something different as soon as he looked out of the window to the west: the sound was no longer greyish white, it was dark blue.

He realized what had happened. The roaring din that had woken him during the night was the noise of the ice being broken up by the strong wind. Now there were just odd ice floes drifting around out on the water, and a grey patch of slushy ice bobbing up and down among the rocks by the shore. The rushing noise was coming from the newly liberated waves.

The ice had left the sound — hundreds of tons of frozen water had been released, and Per had heard their thundering roar.

Terrific.

But last night’s dream had been strange and unpleasant. He didn’t want to think about it.

As Max sat pondering his cookery book, Vendela wandered around the new house thinking about not eating. She had decided to do two things here on the island: jog more and eat less. Not to lose weight — she weighed fifty-two kilos on the bathroom scales at home — but as a way of cleansing her body and getting closer to nature. So on the first morning in the new house she drank only a glass of water for breakfast, alone with Aloysius in her big new kitchen.