Stig Dagerman - Island of the Doomed

‘And the evenings got longer and longer, and sometimes I couldn’t get to sleep until dawn. My dear child, Mrs Muehlhouse said, and I gave a start because no one but Mummy had the right to call me “My dear child”. But the people sitting in the lounge or walking through the rooms always said: She’s stubborn, that one is, and they were right: I noticed how my shell was getting harder and harder for every evening that passed, while deep down I was getting softer and softer, and I could see I had to have a hard shell as my inside was so terribly soft, but nobody else could see that and that was why I was so keen to keep everything that might possibly scratch it, knock it or stroke it with rough hands at a distance. With well-bred nonchalance I accepted everybody’s advice, took part in all the games people forced on to me, and behaved impeccably on the croquet lawn where on one occasion the jolly little general’s wife nearly made Daddy burst with anger when she actually kicked her ball through the double hoop, and when he told her off she just laughed and waved her mallet in his face so that he just had to smile in order to be polite, although his lips were tightly set and his ears red with fury; but later that evening I heard whispering coming from the arbour: My little buffalo, my little buffalo, and I was possessed by a curious indifference and peered between the branches, and saw her lying full length on the wooden bench with her head on Daddy’s knee, playing with his free hand.

‘That evening I jumped straight out of the lift and ran through all the blue rooms and with an urgency which startled me hurled the statue of Daddy down from the mantelpiece. And do you know what I did next? Mummy, I shouted in triumph when I heard the crash in the street down below, now you can. .

‘Not yet,’ the English girl went on, worried, ‘not yet, do you hear me, it’s still evening you see,’ but someone was standing in the darkness behind her, tapping something hard with his knuckles. Silently, she rolled a little closer to the boxer before whispering bitterly, ‘Now listen to me, Jimmie, I’m the one you should listen to and as long as you do it’s still evening.’

But whoever it was standing in the darkness behind her sat down in the sand now, still tapping away, and she could hear the others creeping up, slowly, slowly through the grating sand.

‘Then there was a time when the star got smaller and smaller, it lost some of its heat, and it wasn’t as bright as it used to be, either. When Daddy turned the light out, I used to burrow down into the pillow in desperation, and try to pull the shell over my head; but I felt so hollow and washed out, I just couldn’t keep up any more. Sometimes my tall cousin, one of the Giraffes, used to come out by car from town to pay us a visit, with her big, green parasol and her daughter Vivian. When Vivian and I were alone in the garden, I used to pick her up and whisper in her stupid ear: It’s your mummy, Vivian, it’s Mummy, and when we were alone in the lounge I used to lay her down beside me on the sofa and unbutton my dress and try and pull her head to my breast, but she used to kick and bite and my cousin would come running from wherever she was in the house. Mummy, Draga isn’t my mummy, is she? the silly thing would shout, and one evening I was listening outside a half-open door and heard the Giraffe say: I don’t like the way Draga plays around with Vivian, it seems really perverse.

‘Later on, when we were sitting round the tea-table in the drawing room and I was as stiff and cold as if someone had driven a frosty pole right through me, I suddenly broke right through all the conversation with my enormous chilliness. Daddy, I said, Daddy, what does “perverse” mean? Straight away, he turned just as red as I thought he would and bit through a sugar lump in frustration, while his hand just chewed and chewed away at the edge of the table; but Uncle Bennie, who’d lost twenty pounds on the horses that day, explained to me as loudly as he could. Now I’m going to give you a really good hiding, said Daddy that evening when we were on our own, and he did, and then the evenings started coming back again.

‘For a while, Nicky was out nearly every night, and if anyone asked where she was, I had to say something or other she’d told me to, I’ve forgotten what it was. I hated her, because I had a vague idea as to why she used to be so flushed when she crept into our room in the mornings, and I loathed the way she would lie and tell me she’d been running the last bit in order to get back home in time — when it was five o’clock in the morning. But one evening I sneaked out myself and stood trembling on the steps, but no one had heard me, and on the road near the dead oak tree was the young man waiting for me; he’d asked Nicky to tell me he’d be there waiting for me by the old oak tree at ten o’clock every night for a week, and if I didn’t come out and meet him one of those nights, a leaky rowing boat with him in it would sink in the middle of the lake and we’d be fishing him out on our stretch of shore a couple of weeks later. I went to the old oak tree just because I wanted to be polite, I went because I didn’t want a potential suicide to do anything rash, and when I came up to him I said: Well what do you want?

‘Then he grabbed me hard by the arm and marched me backwards and forwards in the woods for a whole hour, and I was freezing cold as I only had a thin dress on, I’d intended going straight back in again you see, and the dew started settling on us and all you could hear was a cuckoo saying something or other on the other side of the lake, but I’d had my evening ruined and wanted to yell out in protest, but every time we turned, his grip tightened and I realized it was a clenched tongue that was being punished. Then he suddenly burst out: Are you cold? and when I said I was he seemed to think he’d conquered me at last and dragged me half-running through the woods.

‘I could see the sky all white through the trees and I was horrified at the thought of it being so late, but as we came to the edge of the trees I could see a big tent in a little clearing. I thought at first it was a circus, but I could tell from the stale smell that hit you as you went in, and the long, silent pews and the ugly little altar on the podium that it was some kind of evangelical church marquee, abandoned by both God and man. A stove was crackling away on the podium not far from the altar, and we walked hand in hand down the aisle towards it. Are you still cold? he asked when we’d come up on to the podium and found ourselves at a complete dead end. No, I said, and he thought I was giving in and he put his arms on my shoulders like a dog and we fell down together.

‘I lay still on my back and could feel the heat from the stove creeping all over me, and the roof of the tent was rippling like the surface of a lake, and then all of a sudden I seemed to realize what he intended to do to me, and it was all so horrible I wanted to throw up, and I raised myself on to one elbow and started kicking him till he yelled out in pain.

‘“That’s not what I want,” I screamed, and it seemed as if somebody else had put those words into my inexperienced lips, “that’s not what I want.”

‘“What do you want, then?” he spat out scornfully as he staggered back towards the stove.

‘“I just want to be warm,” I said, “I want to get really warm, and I’ve got a star there that’d burn you if you tried.”

‘Then he started banging the stove doors and smoke billowed out and started us off coughing. He tried to keep me there by pretending to be suffering badly and spluttering and moaning away, but I ran through the church as fast as I could and managed to duck and avoid the lump of firewood that knocked a chip out of one of the pews instead.