Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

‘I sneaked up to the window and saw the newly varnished croquet balls gleaming in the wet grass, and the six players — Daddy, Nicky, Mrs Muehlhouse, Uncle Richard the old major and his two grown-up daughters, known to Nicky as the Giraffes — wending their way among the hoops like partners in some complicated formation dance. Daddy was at their head, and he kept turning round with a stern expression on his face, checking on how they were behaving and barking out advice they all pretended to follow with a smile, while their hands were in fact trembling with suppressed irritation. Kate, my giggling grown-up cousin who had to bend down in order to pat me on the head, had forgotten to fasten the belt of her pink dress, and it hung down behind her like a tail, switching and swinging in ridiculous fashion every time she hit a ball.

‘Oh, I was so high up and could see everything and everything was so silly that I burst out laughing and then I suddenly started crying because I thought they’d locked me up in the house and I felt so cooped up inside myself and so much excluded from everybody’s heart that I wriggled over the floor like a worm, back under the bed, and stayed there until it was evening and Mrs Muehlhouse picked me up and examined me under the light as if I’d been ill in some awful and mysterious way.

‘Oh, many times over the years I would lie there all alone under the bed, waiting for someone to come and pick me up and put me down carefully as if I’d been some nasty little animal that made their hands dirty as long as they were in contact with it. She’s stubborn, this little girl, people would say as they passed through the rooms, damned stubborn she is. And they were right: I was stubborn; I’d built up a saga all around me that I could creep into every night and I could defy the whole world from there. It was a saga about evening, about the longing of evening, and it was a long and stubborn saga. I would creep into it as if it were an incredibly big, blue shell, and right up at the top was a big, warm star. And every night Daddy would stand in the doorway of mine and Nicky’s room and say in that metallic voice of his: Time to go to sleep now, girls, it’s night now; and I would pull my shell over me and the most marvellous things would happen.

Sometimes, just imagine, the red star would come loose and fall slowly down towards me, and sometimes it would turn into a stallion’s eye, and the horse would start growing from it, with its neck and mane and hooves and lovely big tongue that it used to lick me with, all over my body as I lay naked so that it wouldn’t wet my pyjamas; but other times the evening star was a lamp on the top floor of a tall building, and the man said Hurry up as he helped me over the blue street full of red buses and flowering plants, hurry on up while your Mummy is still alive. And so I’d run like mad and I could hear a loud screeching noise behind me and I realized he’d been run over by one of the buses, but I hadn’t time to turn round ’cos the lift was just leaving. We flew up past all the storeys, and one after another the passengers would disappear through a hole in the floor, leaving behind big white rings of saliva that I’d try and keep clear of in my horror. But the lift just kept on rising, faster and faster, and it started rocking like a rowing boat and suddenly I saw somebody trying to force his way up through the hole, several long fingers were crawling in through the crack in the floor and at first I thought they were snakes and so I ran at them and jumped on them, only then they started squealing and when I looked down I could see they were fingers in fact and the littled screams were coming out from under their nails. Then they disappeared all of a sudden, and when I opened the lid over the hole I could see Daddy falling down the lift shaft, but slowly, very slowly and gently like they do in slow-motion films, and it all looked so ridiculous I started laughing so much I nearly fell out through the hole.

‘Daddy’s face was bright red, he was so furious, and he was trying in vain to fall a bit faster so he could catch up with his boots that were falling about three feet below him, but it was no good and the boots just wiggled annoyingly backwards and forwards. I must have done a good job on his fingers, though, ’cos they’d broken off his hand and were falling in a bunch a couple of feet above Daddy’s head, and the area between his head and the fingers was full of wobbly spots of blood.

‘Then all at once the speed of fall increased, not gradually, but with horrific suddenness and I’m convinced the fingers and the blood caught up with Daddy before the drum roll sounded, that drum roll they always have just before a trapeze artist launches himself into space. Anyway, the lift stopped now and I didn’t stop to listen to the crash, but leapt over the nasty saliva and found myself in the blue room, as high as a church nave, bathed in the blue light of evening. Draga, my own little girl, come on through to me, shouted Mummy from the next room, and I popped through an oval in the wall into this equally big, blue room, but there was nobody there, and I had to pass through a never-ending series of blue rooms, and Mummy’s voice got louder and louder, and suddenly there I was in the hall I’d seen from the road outside. It was also empty, but I could still hear the echo of Mummy’s voice, and in the big Gothic window was a lamp with my red star in it, and then the lamp called to me: Draga, I’m your mother, said the lamp, and the pink shade fluttered and suddenly I felt so cold I started shivering and I ripped open my dress and clutched the burning lamp tightly against my breast.

‘Then it started growing and it became heavy and warm and we fell over together and lay on the floor and the lamp was still growing, and it grew arms and legs and wrapped itself round me and it was so warm and nice and my eyelids were so heavy I just couldn’t see anything. But then the star fell out of the lamp and it slid over my breast, oh so lovely and warm, and down towards my stomach and then back again. Then all of a sudden, I seemed to have swallowed it, I could feel it floating through my guts like a red-hot bullet, through my stomach, and finally it came to rest between my legs and the light from it must have been so strong it shone out from the whole of my body when I got to my feet, but then the lamp had gone and I felt very strong and almost weightless, and the light followed me wherever I went.

‘I went over and lit up a solitary organ made of dark-stained wood right at the back of the room, sat down on the stool and played a pretty little tune that rose up like smoke into the blue evening, but I had to stop because the music was making me cry so much. Then Mummy said from inside me: Draga, my own little girl, now I’m inside you; and I replied: Yes, Mummy, now you’re with me, and I felt so warm all over, but warmest of all between my legs where the star still was.

‘Then I suddenly thought about Daddy and I said: Mummy, I feel so sorry. I threw Daddy down the lift shaft. That’s nothing to be sorry about, replied Mummy, he’s up here as well. And she directed my gaze at a window, and there was a statue of Daddy just on the point of jumping out with his boots and his sword-belt and a croquet mallet in one hand. Mummy, I said, can I push Daddy down into the street? Yes, my child, said Mummy, that won’t matter, there are so many of him.

‘Then I ran over to the window and opened it and I could see some children down below stop with their fruit baskets in their hands and point up at me, I expect they thought it was a bid odd to see a luminous girl. Then I gave the statue a hefty shove and it started falling, and first it fell about halfway down like a statue, but then it suddenly came alive and started waving its arms about, and when it hit the roof of the bus it seemed to have turned back into a statue again. The red bus didn’t stop as I’d expected it to do, but it just carried on calmly to the crossroads. When the crowds had dispersed, it looked as if someone had been having fun smashing flowerpots underneath my window, and a few men in bowler hats were waving excitedly on the pavement beside the pile of bits, and I realized it must be all that was left of Daddy. Then one of the gentlemen waved down a concrete lorry, one of those with a container spinning round and round on top of it, and the driver jumped out and all four of them helped to throw the bits in through a gap in the mixer. The lorry set off again and one of the men in a bowler jumped up on the running board and waved like mad with a red handkerchief, shouting to everybody to get out of the way, and with its horn sounding non-stop and the man in the bowler hat clinging to the side like a miniature devil, the lorry disappeared from view. Then the star started burning and I grew warm and heavy and fell over on to the floor and I was so happy at the thought that I need never get up again. We lay there, Mummy and I, as if we were on the bottom of a little blue sea, and I whispered: Mummy, you’ll stay with me now, won’t you? You’ll stay for a really long time, won’t you? Oh yes, said Mummy, all evening. I’ll stay all evening.