Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

‘Evening’s over and it’s getting dark,’ she whispered or perhaps shouted. ‘We must hurry, I must hurry up and speak, you must hurry up and listen now.’

Some shadows flitted by, vague shadows with hard voices on the waterline.

‘This is no good,’ said one of the shadows before it disappeared into the darkness. ‘Everybody must see that we can’t go on like this. He’s been here long enough now.’

‘No, we’ve got to do it, and preferably as soon as possible,’ yelled the other one in a hoarse voice. ‘Not least for her sake.’

Both of them had disappeared as quickly as if they’d passed through a swing door into the darkness. Oh, she couldn’t afford to wait until it swung round again and some stranger came towards her.

‘Now listen to me again,’ she shouted or whispered. ‘Somebody’s been running around shouting and quietened everything down, but now you can listen to me again. You must listen because I’ve been longing for you to do that. I’ve been longing for that all my life, longing for you to hear me, but up to now there’s always been something getting in the way, like that mountain at home when we used to shout on a summer’s night and wait for the echo, or the croquet lawn where Daddy used to keep watch and make sure nobody cheated. We’ll have no cheating here, he used to say, banging his mallet against his boot, anybody who cheats at games is a bad person, yes, a very bad person. But you should have heard how he said that: I can’t imitate him now, but Nicky could, my only sister. She used to drag me into the arbour after every game, pick up a branch and knock it against her heel as she imitated Daddy. He’d retired by then, and every morning he used to go out and inspect the croquet lawn as if it were a battlefield, measure the distance between the hoops to see if anybody had moved them during the night, dry them off with a rag if it had been raining, and rub them until they shone. He’d lie down and look to make sure all the lines that were supposed to be straight really were straight, and that no obstacles had been placed on the lawn under cover of darkness.

‘“Do you think he’s all there?” Nicky used to say. She was two years older than me and pretty disrespectful already. She disgusted me actually, and used to chew gum from morning till night. She liked to hop between the two windows in our room, and suddenly fling herself on the floor and pretend our bed-ends were croquet hoops.

‘“Hey, this one’s out of line. Come over here and bring your mallet, and we’ll put this right. Disgraceful, this is, it’s absolutely awful. How can you play an honest game in these circumstances? Anybody who doesn’t play an honest game is a bad person.”’

‘Then she used to roll under the bed we both slept in and pull down the red cover so that she couldn’t be seen. She’d lie there in her red grotto, you see, and I’d have to go and fetch tea and biscuits and wait outside and pretend I was a eunuch. One day Daddy must have heard us ’cos he shouted through the window that we should go out at once and play croquet, but I shouted back that I couldn’t because I was Nicky’s eunuch. I could see how furious he was, and he hurled his mallet on to the ground and more or less ran towards the house. Then I got scared and crawled under the bed as well and flung my arms around the two years that Nicky was older than me and sobbed: “I’m so frightened. Daddy’s coming and he’s going to beat me. What is a eunuch when it’s at home?”

We could hear his boots thundering down the corridor, there were lots of big nail-heads in the floor and they always made a loud noise when Daddy trod on them. The door was flung open and he stood for a moment in silence on the threshold, breathing angrily, like hounds do when they come back after a hunt. I crept deeper into Nicky’s two years, but there was no place for my heart which kept on pounding away, and I grew sweaty and sticky and in the end Nicky pushed me away from her. Then Daddy slammed the door behind him and stood there threateningly and invisible somewhere in the room. It was like when you hear a snake slithering through the undergrowth somewhere but you can’t see it. I was trembling, and Nicky did nothing to console me. Then he walked slowly over to the bed, and although he was walking so softly and slowly, the floor shook underneath him. Then I tried to hide in Nicky one last time, I spread her long hair over my face because I didn’t want him to see my eyes, but she shook her head angrily so that her hair fell back in place, and held me away from her. “Beware, the elephant’s coming,” she whispered in my ear; it was all right for her, she hadn’t done anything after all.

‘Then Daddy flung the cover to one side; he’d known I was there all the time, but instead of coming straight up to me, he’d been playing soldiers, he always played soldiers: first recce, then attack. He always knew everything, of course, and the trouble with him was that he could never pretend he didn’t. I was eleven now and had had a difficult childhood; I thought so then and I still thought so afterwards, but it does often happen that somebody who’s really had a hard time and suffered unjustly as a child gets so depraved by it all that when the time comes to look back on it, he decides it must have been a marvellous childhood if it made such a marvellous man of him. That’s not how it was with me, though: I was very scared when I was little, and I remember well how the slightest little thing, in fact those little things more than anything else, practically scared me to death sometimes.

‘I was very frightened of little animals, you know, the sort you find under stones or old croquet mallets that have been left outside for weeks on end and got yellow grass underneath them. Big animals like eagles, St Bernards or bulls, couldn’t frighten me; but God, I was scared stiff of little ones, I daren’t go into the kitchen for weeks and could hardly eat anything just because a nasty little insect, no bigger than an ant, had crawled out from a crack in the sink surround when I went to the kitchen one night for a glass of water. It was quite late and all the others had gone to bed and the night train was going past outside, and just as I was going to turn the tap on, this horrible little insect came creeping out from under the copper surround and under the chopping board. I was so frightened, so awfully frightened, I thought I would faint and I ran out in panic and then stiffened up out of the same panic, jelly at first, then something much harder and firm. I imagined in horror what terrible things might happen if I so much as brushed against the chopping board with my fingernail, and though I knew how stupid and idiotic it was to think like that, I got it into my head that the creepy-crawly was breeding thousands and thousands more under the chopping board and before long, it would be lifted up on their grey backs, and in an endless procession they’d march over to the edge of the work surface, using the chopping board as a bridge to cross over on to the statue of me standing stock-still on the kitchen floor and then crawl in under my pyjamas and cover the whole of my body with their stinking bodies (they had to stink as well!) and in the end I’d suffocate and die with none of Daddy’s dignity.

‘I realized in the end the thing to do was to keep staring hard at the chopping board to make sure nothing of the sort happened, and I fixed my gaze so firmly on that chopping board covered in bits of onion that my eyes started burning and I had to close them just for a second and as soon as I blinked I was aware of how awful the consequences of my slip-up would be.

‘Well, I thought I was going to die. I didn’t dare look any more, but I thought I could hear the chopping board being slowly lifted up and starting to move. I was beyond help now, I could feel it, beyond help — and I screamed. Daddy came rushing down the corridor, he must have been sitting up reading his usual topographical handbook ’cos his boots clanked on the nail heads as usual.