Dark Pines Read online

  So I have an open remit. The locals are whispering on street corners and in the newsagent, excited about having national TV crews and reporters here, maybe even a few faces they recognise. I know many of the Gavrik people and I know some of the local ways, so I have that on my side, but I’m no celebrity journo. I’ll escape here someday, and I’ll need a portfolio that’ll get me into meetings. No gaps in my résumé. I want a story that will open doors and get me fast-tracked. I’ve been here for three years and I’ll stay for as long as Mum needs me. After I moved here she got a little better but then it spread. The doc says she’s got one year, but I can’t even think about that, I can’t even begin to cope with that. One year, four seasons or maybe less, to say all the things I need to say and hear all the things I need to hear.

  It takes me all of five minutes to reach the gas station. I fill up the tank and buy a small shovel and a chocolate bar but I doubt they’ll do more than provide some background sense of reassurance. I’m going to be in that forest a lot. A forest the size of an English county, bigger than New York City, the area of an inland fucking sea. Utgard forest is thirty kilometres by twenty-eight. From the air, it’s almost six hundred square kilometres of dark green. I hate the size of it. Doesn’t need to be that big.

  As I drive under the motorway I switch on the radio so I can catch the three o’clock news. We’re the first story up; a snippet from the press conference. Björn’s voice now has a gravitas that comes from being recorded and played back and broadcast, that it didn’t have when I was sitting there right in front of him and his shiny tiepin. It starts to rain so I put on the wipers. Then it stops for a moment and hail starts to fall. As I turn onto the gravel track into Mossen village, tiny white bombs hit the truck. I switch off both aids when the tapping on the roof becomes unbearable. Now I can only feel the hail. Vibrations, like a sardine trapped inside a can being hit by machine-gun fire. And then it stops.

  I pass Hoarder’s house. He’s not Medusa, I didn’t get that vibe from him. But do you ever get that vibe? I drive on, the track narrowing and sprinkled with a fine coating of what look like mint imperials. The taxi driver’s house comes into view. No taxi. There’s a kid’s plastic car, taller than it’s broad, bright red and yellow, lying next to the front door at a jaunty angle with its tiny door wedged open in the dirt.

  I accelerate as I approach the hill. The Toyota takes it with ease and this is why I rented it. It’s early October. This is nothing. For me, living somewhere like this, I need a great vehicle. I can’t do nature, it scares the crap out of me, so I need the best that man has made to be able to skirt it and pass through it without actually ever having to face it. That’s the deal. If I live here, I need great boots, an all-wheel drive truck, a Gore-Tex ski jacket, a brand new phone, GPS, the whole caboodle.

  At the top of the hill there are less hailstones on the ground like this is a different place up here, a slightly different weather system at this altitude. The track narrows, and although it’s only mid-afternoon, it’s dark and my headlights are doing their thing. I pass the swamp and there’s a little more light here, albeit filtered through a million identical spruce trunks, and I drive on. There are no passing places this far in. It occurs to me that I have no idea what Mossen really is. Is it a village? It has no church, no store, and no bus stop that I can see. And if it is a village, then where is it exactly? Where’s the core?

  I pull up by the carpenters’ house and check the notes on my phone for names so that I can introduce myself to them. Cornelia and Alice Sørlie. I switch my aids back on.

  As I open the truck door, my nostrils fill with woodsmoke and it smells good, like a childhood Christmas, a cosy one, not like mine, but one from a book. I decide to leave my camera in the truck for now and walk over to the open-fronted workshop.

  I see two women, both about fifty years old, working at heavy pine benches with sawdust all over the floor. The one on the left is almost bald and the one on the right has shaggy home-cut grey hair. The one on the left looks up from her bench and nods without smiling. The one on the right licks her lips and says, ‘You lost, girl?’

  I smile. ‘Hi, I’m Tuva Moodyson, I work for the Gavrik Posten in town. Sorry to bother you unannounced.’

  ‘We was bothered already before you turned up.’

  ‘Can I come in, just for a few minutes?’ I look up at the grey sky, an appeal for shelter if nothing else.

  ‘Don’t know what good it’ll be, do you Alice?’

  ‘Nope,’ the other woman says.

  I step under the roof and walk towards the log-burning stove in the centre of the rectangular shed. The walls are timber but the roof’s corrugated iron.

  ‘Well,’ says Cornelia.

  ‘What are you making?’ I ask. ‘It looks very . . . intricate.’

  ‘Craft fair next weekend in Munkfors, ain’t there, Alice?’

  ‘Yep,’ says the other woman.

  ‘So we’re getting stock ready. This here,’ she holds up a smooth pine cylinder, ‘will be a troll, just a standard type. That one,’ she nods towards her sister. ‘That’ll be a special, won’t it Alice.’

  ‘Yep,’ Alice says, as she threads something through a small piece of fabric with a needle.

  Both women have large silver crosses hanging from their necks on chains.

  ‘Special?’ I ask.

  ‘Made to order,’ Cornelia says. ‘They take quite some time.’

  ‘Can I see a finished one?’

  Both sisters look at me and tut.

  ‘You don’t think we’re busy enough as it is?’ Cornelia says. ‘We don’t look busy to you out here, our fingers all cold and calloused. We don’t look occupied, girl?’

  I start to apologise but Alice is walking towards me holding her made-to-order troll. She hands it to me like it’s a newborn baby. I look down at it and everything about the doll-sized thing feels wrong. It’s too heavy for its size. It feels, not alive exactly, but animal, its features are too, I don’t know . . . I pass it back.

  ‘That is special,’ I say to Alice. ‘What’s it made out of?’

  Cornelia points to the little thing in her sister’s hands. Alice is wearing woollen gloves with the fingertips cut off.

  ‘Best Utgard spruce, that there’s the heartwood. We use real materials, so much as we can get hold of them. This one’s not done yet but it’ll have fingernails and toenails just like you and me. You can see Alice has started threading through the hair on that special.’ She touches her head. ‘This one got yours or mine?’ she asks, looking at Alice, but her sister only shrugs. ‘We used to get teeth from the local dentist but that all stopped a few years back, some nonsense about privacy and consent, they were just a few rotten old teeth for goodness sake. The men trolls get a little hair on their chests. They get real eyebrows, lashes, ear hair. We have one client who orders toe hair on his specials. They’re like little hobbits, ain’t they Alice?’

  ‘Yep,’ Alice says, walking back to her workbench.

  ‘It’s what the local council, the Kommun, it’s what they call “artisanal industry”: traditional local-folk products and ours is the best. We got prizes.’ She points to a not quite horizontal shelf behind her. ‘We take pride in our work.’

  ‘Those are your tools?’ I ask, pointing to a rack of antique chisels and files.

  ‘We do everything on site. We use machines, and then we use them hand tools that belonged to our Grandpop. We use carvers and mallets and fishtail gougers and coping saws and small chisels for every single one. Keep ’em all perfect sharp with the stones and the belts.’

  I stare at the gougers, each one clean and razor sharp. They look like surgical instruments.

  ‘How much would a troll cost, if I was to order one?’

  Cornelia snorted. ‘You want one or not, girl?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘How much?’

  ‘One of mine, one of the standards, about two thousand kronor. One of hers, well that’s a whole different world, girl.
She’s an artist, ain’t you Alice?’

  ‘Yep,’ Alice says, threading God-knows-whose hair to the padded skull of her half-finished troll.

  ‘All depends on what the client asks for. You want one of Alice’s, you tell me what you want and we’ll work out a price, okay, girl? We have some quite remarkable clients I can tell you, people from all over the country, but we never reveal names, do we Alice?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘I think they’re amazing,’ I say to Cornelia, and I do, just not in the way they think. ‘Really, amazing.’

  ‘You done here, girl?’ Cornelia asks.

  I hadn’t noticed, but Alice had placed a black, cast iron kettle on top of the log-burning stove on her way back to her bench. It starts to whistle and I touch my ears defensively.

  Cornelia frowns and I see that her eyebrows are thin and sparse, and her left eye has no lashes at all.

  I show her the aid in my ear. Cornelia nods. I point to the kettle. Cornelia smiles, then walks over to it and takes it off the stove.

  ‘It’s four o’clock,’ Cornelia says, her voice noticeably louder than before. ‘We take a ten-minute tea break at four, never longer, never shorter. Looks like you’re in luck, girl. You can ask us your questions but I can’t say for sure you’ll like what you hear.’

  She pours hot water into two tea-stained enamel mugs and passes one to her sister. They sit down on dark green plastic patio chairs. They don’t offer me a tea and I’m almost more taken aback by this than their hideous troll dolls.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Yesterday, the murder. Did you hear the gunshot?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid, girl,’ Cornelia says, blowing into the enamel mug clasped in her calloused hand. ‘We hear gunshots all day long this time of the year. It sounds like the Wild West most days this deep in the woods. They’re still out hunting today, even with all this going on. Anything south of the hill, anything west of the track, is still okay. Three-quarters of the wood, still okay to hunt.’

  ‘Did you notice anyone strange drive or bike up the track yesterday before your four o’clock tea break?’

  Cornelia turned to her sister. ‘Did we, Alice?’

  ‘Nope.’

  Cornelia drinks from her mug in noisy slurps and then moves her tongue between her lips and her teeth.

  ‘Listen, girl. This is the woods and sometimes people just die in the woods. The only people in these woods with any right to be here is woods people. If you meet us or people like us in this wood, we’ll be carrying a rifle or a shotgun and we’ll have a gutting knife and we’ll have a plan to do some killing and that’s about all I know.’

  ‘Do you two hunt elk?’

  Cornelia takes Alice’s empty mug. ‘Girl wants to know if we hunt elk, Alice.’

  ‘Nope,’ says Alice. ‘We make trolls.’

  9

  I get back to the office just before six and Lars has already gone. He’s done a great job. The stories are all written and they look fine but the subjects seem ridiculous now. Like news from some kid’s picture book. The real local news is as far away from this stuff it as it could possibly be.

  Lena’s in her office, door ajar, fact-checking and perfecting the layouts. I’ll write for two hours solid to get copy to her in time for the deadline. I nudge the tiny buttons behind my ears and switch off the world. This is a benefit of being deaf. I’m not hearing impaired. Fuck, no. I am not impaired at all. You can’t do this, can you? I can shut out almost all noise when I want to focus or relax. I don’t need noise-cancelling headphones on a long flight. My flatmates in Bethnal Green used to stockpile earplugs to counter the traffic noise. Not me.

  I’ve got a 500g chunk of Marabou chocolate in the top drawer of my desk. Each individual square has a raised M letter on the top. By the time I’ve drafted what will fill the first four pages of tomorrow’s paper, I have two rows left and I feel sick, but it’s done. I rub my eyes and hit print and walk over to Lars’s tidy corner desk. I pull out his chair, and with a red rollerball pen secure between my teeth, I read the warm pages. Has to be accurate, as accurate as I can get it. Dad’s death was misreported in three different papers; stupid, careless, heartless errors about his seatbelt and the speed he was driving. Errors that made people whisper and gave Mum a push when she was already standing right on the edge. One paper even wrote about his drinking, about his blood alcohol levels, which was bullshit, ancient history, and we only got an apology weeks later in the middle of the goddam paper. Another got his age wrong by two years. Details are important, they can have consequences. I edit and rewrite and double-check, and then I email it to Lena.

  ‘Thanks,’ she shouts from her office. I don’t hear the actual word, just a noise, but I know what she said because she always shouts ‘thanks’ from her desk on Thursday evenings. I click my aids back on and put the chocolate squares back in my desk drawer. I’m full of sugar but hungry as hell.

  I open Lena’s door. ‘You need anything before I go?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ll call you if I need you.’

  I crack my knuckles and sniff. ‘Night then.’

  The truck’s cold and when I start the engine the dash shows zero degrees. I see a cloud of breath form between my nose and the windscreen, and I realise that the flipchart of seasons has turned a new page. We’re still officially in autumn for another month or so but for me, zero means winter. We’ve had the leaves fall off and we’ve had the mushrooms and the gales and now it’s time for the white months.

  I switch the heat to max and wipe condensation from my windscreen and edge away from the kerb and then someone knocks on my window.

  ‘Tuva, it’s me, Ola, Aftonbladet.’

  ‘Hi,’ I say, opening my window a crack.

  ‘I’m going shit crazy in this town. Jesus, I don’t know how you manage living here full-time. You want to get out for a coffee?’

  I smile and shake my head and mouth no thanks and wind up the window and drive off. I’m too tired for what I know will come and have no interest in the bearded slick-back or his opinions on his life or my life. Window up, gone.

  It’s a six-minute drive from my office to Tammy’s takeout van, accounting for the three sets of speed bumps and two sets of lights. Tammy Yamnim’s parents moved to Sweden a few years before she was born. Her dad was a prick and ran off with a Barbie lookalike back in the ’90s, or so Tammy says. Her mum moved back to Bangkok. Tammy is probably the main reason I’ve endured three years here. Her and Lena.

  She’s serving a young guy with a mountain bike when I arrive. Looks like Thai green curry, the one on the menu without the spice or the Thai basil that she automatically adds to mine. Liberally. Her curry, the right way, is a thing of wonder. It’s silky and rich and fragrant and fresh and it almost blows my knickers off. This guy’s getting the PG13 version, for Swedes who’ve been to Phuket twice on holiday and enjoyed the all-inclusive hotel food. She winks at me and I wink back.

  Mountain-bike guy pays and leaves and I breathe in the scent steaming up from her six menu options. How she manages to cook and serve this stuff from what is essentially an old camper van is beyond me. She is a marvel.

  ‘Steamed rice with plain curry sauce, easy on the curry sauce?’ she says, pointing to the vat of mustard-coloured gloop that is her number one bestselling dish and that has nothing whatsoever to do with Thai cuisine.

  ‘You hungry?’ I ask her.

  ‘What do you think? Hang on a minute and I’ll shut down this money machine and then I’ll take you out for a fine-dining experience, how’s that sound? My treat. Gimme ten.’

  She clangs and bangs and turns things off, cleaning up and packing away as I stand outside shivering, eating unsold prawn crackers out of a brown paper bag. Tammy’s van is at the far end of Gavrik’s ICA Maxi supermarket car park and it backs onto farmland. I’m staring out into a field. It’s black. The night is clear and the stars are shimmery, greedy for attention. But the land, the world at my level, is so dark that I may as well be blind.
It’s a field and there could be a wolf fifty metres away or a mass-murderer fifteen metres away or both and I’d never even know it. It’s not even wild nature and still I hate it. I want to asphalt it and fence it and light it up from every angle.

  ‘All done,’ she says, stepping down from the van to greet me. My chin sits on her head as we hug and then she pulls back and punches me affectionately on the shoulder and starts walking. I race to catch her up.

  We walk side by side back towards town. There isn’t another human being on the street, just Tammy and me.

  ‘Fifth Avenue, baby,’ she says as we pass the wild boar sign outside Björnmossen’s gun shop. It has ammunition displayed in the window along with a poorly-stuffed brown bear. There’s a light on upstairs and I can hear music and men laughing and jeering. We pass a crosscountry ski store and a fishing supply shop before walking past my office, the lights still on, Lena still working. On the other side of the street, business isn’t so good. There’s Mrs Björkén’s dusty haberdashery store which is my sanctuary, and next to it stands Ronnie’s bar, boarded up, awaiting refurbishment.

  We walk briskly. Tammy hasn’t got the best boots on and I can tell she’s starting to shiver.

  ‘I’m tired of delicious Asian food,’ she says, opening the door to McDonald’s. ‘I’m twenty-two years old and cute as a bee. I live in Shitsville, Värmland, and right this actual moment, life’s okay. Let’s get some grease.’

  We sit down and I devour my Big Mac as Tammy picks at her two hamburgers. The problem with cooking for a living is that she’s always tasting, always grazing.