The Quarry (13 page)

She spent a couple of minutes stretching on the steps outside before heading off northwards, in a wide semicircle around the edge of the quarry.

Vendela noticed a strange kind of gateway to the north of the quarry – two substantial hazel bushes growing a couple of metres apart. She ran between them. Hazel was always special; it was used for both magic wands and divining rods.

It felt as if she was in a new world now. Her goal was to return to her childhood home after almost forty years – if she could find her way. A great deal had changed since then. Houses had been built, tarmac roads had appeared, meadows and fields had become overgrown.

She increased her speed and ran out on to the coast road above the shore. It was late afternoon and the sun was low in the sky, just as in October, but its light was sharper in the spring. The narrow strips of snow still remaining on the grass and in the ditches were melting fast.

The rocky landscape was silent and still. The only thing that was moving was Vendela herself, her arms and legs swinging back and forth. Slowly she began to find her rhythm, and was able to relax. When she came to a fork in the coast road she turned right, inland. The air she inhaled was fresh and cool. There was no sign of her allergy.

It took about twenty minutes to run to the place where her childhood had begun and ended. She ran virtually straight there, without getting lost. First of all along the wide tarmac road, then on to a narrower gravel track which she thought she recognized, past a grove of ash trees that had grown tall and dense over the years since she had left the island. In the middle of the grove was a short, narrow track, and Vendela turned on to it. She was hot and sweaty by now, and tense with anticipation.

When she had run another fifty metres she reached the end of the track, and there was the farm. She breathed out and tried to compose herself.

It was slightly set apart at the edge of the alvar, a couple of kilometres north of Stenvik. There were two new white-painted iron gates in front of the stone path leading into the garden. Vendela couldn’t see anyone moving about, so she opened the gates.

The sun had slipped lower in the sky to the west, and the garden lay in shadow. But the sun’s rays were still shining on the house, and the windows gleamed at her. Vendela had been afraid that the place would be deserted and falling apart, with broken windows and the doors hanging off their hinges, but the house was well maintained and had recently been painted yellow. Someone with time and money had bought the place.

There was a lawn below the house, and to the left a slight rise in the ground was visible, a long rectangle. Forty years ago a little barn had stood there, but it was gone now. Grass and moss had crept up and covered the foundations.

For appearances’ sake Vendela walked up the path to the house and knocked on the kitchen door, but no one answered. The farm had become a summer residence, like so many others, the lawn uncut and the blinds lowered. Presumably the place was empty and deserted from autumn through to spring.

She thought about the family who would soon arrive and quickly clear away all traces of winter. On the very first evening they would be busy raking up the leaves and cutting the grass. Young, carefree people; perhaps they had children. But could they feel echoes of the unhappiness that had existed in this house?

Vendela walked through the garden. At the far end, there were still fragile patches of snow and the ground was sodden, like a marsh. She looked over at a thicket of bushes and spotted an old shed. It was standing in the shadows, and didn’t fit in with the rest of the well-cared-for holiday idyll at all. It was scruffy and unpainted and was leaning slightly to one side, as if it were in the process of sinking down into the ground. The shed looked hidden and forgotten, and Vendela suddenly remembered that her father had used it as his tool shed. He had left some tools down in the quarry at the end of the day, but the rest he had brought home and locked up here.

She went over and tugged at the rickety door, and it opened reluctantly on stiff hinges. There was no unpleasant smell. Just a faint aroma of earth. It was dark inside, dark and cramped. Old tools and bags were piled up on top of one another. In the corner nearest the door stood a slender stick made of chestnut, with the bark scraped off. Vendela recognized it at once. She hesitated, then picked it up.

The cow stick.

It was hers. Her father had given it to her when she was responsible for tending the cows. The stick was shiny and well used.

The flies are buzzing lazily and sleepily above the path, woken by the spring sunshine. The wind is soughing in the trees, and Vendela raises her stick and hits the three cows, over and over again.

‘Go on! Get a move on!’

She is walking barefoot along the path, wearing a white dress, and she hits the cows as hard as she can. Three blows each. She measures the distance and swings the stick sideways at their flanks, just above the back legs. When she hits them there, it goes
smack
! Further forward on their bodies the sound is duller,
smock
!

The blows can be heard in long, rhythmic sequences along the path between the meadow and the farm, where she and Henry and the Invalid live.

‘Go, go, go!’

The bell on a strap around the leading cow’s neck clonks rhythmically. It is hot, and hitting the cows is tiring. Vendela is only nine years old and the stick is heavy. She is sweating. Her dress is stuck to the skin under her arms, her hair hangs in her eyes and bluebottles circle around her and the cows. She blows her nose on some grass and raises the stick once again. ‘Get a move on!’

When she turned eight, Vendela was given the responsibility of moving the cows between the farm and the meadow. It was a proper job, but there was never any mention of Henry paying her – he doesn’t even have enough money for electricity, even though the cables were brought as far as the farm several years ago. Her only reward was to be allowed to name the cows, and she called them Rosa, Rosa and Rosa.

That made her father laugh. ‘We might as well just give them each a number,’ he said.

The cows’ names mean nothing to him; he has marked them with a clear snick in the ear so that anyone who comes across them on the alvar can see that they belong to him. But he must have found the idea amusing, because the names stick.

Rosa, Rosa and Rosa.

Vendela is not in the least amused. It doesn’t matter what the cows are called, because she can’t see any difference between them. To her they are merely three brown and white things that have to be driven back and forth between the meadow and the barn. It’s a daily obligation that begins with the start of the spring farming and the arrival of the sun in April. That is when Henry, in keeping with tradition, gives each cow a herring dipped in tar for its first meal outside the barn. Then he lets them out on to their spring grazing land and tells his daughter to take care of them.

The cow stick is smooth and beautiful, slender and flexible. Henry removed all the bark before he gave it to her.
Use this to guide the cows
, he said.
Walk behind them and prod them in the side occasionally, just to make sure they’re heading in the right direction
.

The cows are as big as great lumps of rock, and Vendela prodded them tentatively when she first started driving them between the meadow and the farm. For the first few days she was afraid they would turn on her, but the cows didn’t react at all. It was as if she didn’t exist. So she prodded harder and harder, and after a month or so she started hitting them with the stick.

Finally she took to beating them.

By now, hitting the nearest cow as hard as possible with the stick has become a habit. Rosa, Rosa and Rosa have such thick brown and white hide, as hard as leather, and she wants to penetrate it and see it bleed; most of all she wants to
frighten
the cows. But the Rosas just carry on lumbering along, their great heads swaying as Vendela’s stick swishes through the air. Occasionally the blows make them give a little skip or two along the gravel track. The cow bells lose their rhythm, then they settle back to their normal, lumbering gait.

The lumbering along, the swaying heads, the brown eyes with their indifferent expression – Vendela regards all this as part of the daily struggle. Rosa, Rosa and Rosa try to show her that she is of no significance, but they are wrong.

Last summer Henry gave her responsibility for the henhouse as well, and she thought she would start hitting the hens and chickens too, or at least kicking out at them when they got in her way. But the cockerel went mad when she tried. He crowed and flapped his wings and stabbed at Vendela with his beak, chasing her out of the henhouse and halfway across the farmyard.

She wept and screamed for help, but she had to look after herself. Henry was down in the quarry, the Invalid was in his room, and of course her mother, Kristin, was gone.

Henry no longer talks about his late wife, and Vendela barely remembers her – not her face, not even her perfume. All that remains is a gravestone in the churchyard at Marnäs, an oval photograph of her that hangs in the kitchen, and a box of jewellery in Henry’s bedroom.

There is an ache inside Vendela’s body too, but that is probably just a result of all the times she has raised the arm holding the stick.

Since her mother died, Henry always seems to be on the way out, both mentally and physically. In the mornings he sings on the steps as he sets off for the quarry; in the evenings he often stands gazing up at the stars.

He leaves most of the work on the farm to Vendela. She has to do the cleaning, and she washes her own clothes so that she doesn’t smell of cows when she’s at school. She has to carry food between the earth cellar and the kitchen, because they can’t afford electricity and a fridge. She grows potatoes, French beans and sugar beet. And she milks the Rosas and drives them back and forth along the track.

Every single day she walks along behind them, back and forth, before and after her lessons at the village school down in Stenvik. But before that she has another job to do: she has to go upstairs and give the Invalid his food.

That’s the worst job of all.

Vendela doesn’t remember exactly when the Invalid came to the house, just that it was an evening in late autumn when she was six or seven years old and Henry could still afford to run a car. He had been pacing up and down in the kitchen all afternoon, then suddenly he went out and drove off, without any explanation. Vendela went and lay down in her little room behind the kitchen.

Several hours later she heard the car coming back. It drove right up to the steps in the darkness and stopped. The front doors opened, first one, then the other. Vendela lay in bed listening as her father helped someone out,
carried
someone out of the car, marching up the front steps in his boots, opening the door and stomping upstairs with something heavy in his arms.

He was up there for quite a while, and Vendela could hear him talking quietly to someone. And she heard someone laughing.

Then he came back down and went out to the car again. He struggled with something large in the boot, and eventually managed to get it out and bring it into the kitchen. Vendela could hear squeaking noises, like some kind of heavy machinery.

She got out of bed, opened the door and peeped out. Her father was pushing a wheelchair across the kitchen floor. He had a blanket over his arm, and there was a transistor radio on the seat of the wheelchair.

He set off up the stairs, pulling the chair behind him. After a couple of steps he stopped to rest, and met Vendela’s gaze.

He looked embarrassed, as if he had been caught out, and mumbled something.

Vendela took a step towards him. ‘What did you say, Dad?’

Her father looked at her and sighed. ‘He couldn’t stay in that place,’ he said. ‘They tied them down with leather straps.’

That was the only explanation he gave. He doesn’t tell her who this relative is, this person he has brought to the farm.

And Vendela dare not ask. It doesn’t matter, because from now on Henry refers to the new resident upstairs only as the Invalid. Most of the time he doesn’t even say that, he simply nods up at the ceiling or rolls his eyes. But that first evening, when Vendela heard muted laughter from upstairs and glanced at the ceiling, her expression fearful, he asked her a question across the kitchen table: ‘Would you like to come up and say hello?’

Vendela quickly shook her head.

The new duties quickly become routine; there is no need to spell them out. Vendela has to look after the Invalid, just as she looks after the cows, but the difference is that the Invalid never shows himself. The door of his room upstairs remains closed at all times, but the sound of music and news bulletins on the radio can be heard through it from morning to night. She sometimes wonders if the Invalid has locked himself in, but she is never brave enough to reach out and check.

All she does before she sets off for school each morning is to walk slowly up the dark staircase with his breakfast tray and place it on the little coffee table outside the door.

Always knock when you bring the food
, Henry said.

Vendela knocks, but never waits for an answer. She hurries back down the stairs.

It takes time for the door to open. Vendela has often managed to put on her outdoor shoes by the time the hinges up above her begin to squeak. Sometimes she remains standing in the porch, holding her breath; she hears the door open, followed by the sound of heavy breathing as the Invalid emerges from his room. Then comes the clink of china as the tray is picked up.