Free Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman

saw a beaver swimming, the last glint of sun on its head. It turned with a great slap of its flat tail and vanished almost simultaneously with the sun. Then it grew rapidly colder. The fish stopped rising, so they went back to the camping site. It was past one o’clock when Birger fried the small salmon trout. The cabin filled with grey fumes, but it smelt good. Åke had poured out whisky and put out crispbread and beer.
    After they had eaten, exhaustion hit them and they went to bed without clearing the table. As Åke started snoring in the upper bunk, Birger was suddenly overwhelmed by the poverty of it all; the smell of frying fish in the cramped cabin, the sound of cars driving on to the site, the drunken shouts and the squeals of girls. But those skidding around out there had at least got hold of women. Here were two old bachelors lying scratching themselves under the blankets. Not so much as a flower on the table, although it was Midsummer Eve. I must pull myself together, he thought. Tomorrow I’ll cook a proper meal.
    The moment he made the promise – it was a promise he would gradually come to keep – he realised he no longer believed she would come back.
     

The very ground itself frightened her. They kept falling into deep hollows. Mia was crying. They followed paths that tunnelled through the thick undergrowth or disappeared into large holes, and in the end she realised that these paths hadn’t been made by people. But she found the place where the river ran into the lake and they heard the small rapids between the stones talking and murmuring.
    The stony riverbed made it difficult to get across with Mia and she stumbled several times, water getting into her short boots. Once they were across, the path was distinct even where it was hard going, the undergrowth thick all round it. They stuck to the path almost without raising their eyes from the narrow strip, slippery with pine needles. At last they came to Nirsbuan, on a slope where buttercups were flowering in their thousands in the light of the night.
    Small timbered grey buildings. Not until they started walking up towards what must be the actual outfield cottage did she understand why the mat of grass and flowers was so thick and high. No one had mown it. But someone had recently walked through the tall grass.
    The cottage was locked on the outside, a padlocked bar across the door. She felt it and was unable to open it. Someone had been there and walked through the night-wet grass up to the cottage. But not through the door.
    She climbed up on a pile of bricks and peered through the window into the kitchen. Everything inside was low, the stove almost down on the floor. The light fell in so that she could see the maker’s label on the oven door. There was an empty sofa in there, perhaps called a bed. You could pull a drawer out from underneath and at least two children would have room to sleep in it. A rickety-looking table, two broken ladderback chairs. A yellow plastic bucket. On the wall, a framed picture of Jesus in his crown of thorns. Some rubbish – a tin and a torn newspaper – on the table. A soot-stained bowl. Nothing else. As she went round the house to look in through the other windows, she heard Mia crying. The moment she stood still, the mosquitoes and midges attacked.
    The curtains, blue check and rather dirty, were drawn across one of the windows at the back. She could see only a small section of a wall of blue floral wallpaper, on it a new pattern of brown patches of damp. A piece had loosened and hung down off the wall further down. Then there was a bit of a bed. It must be a bed because she thought she could identify a faded quilt. A foot sticking out at the end. So Dan was there!
    It was dim inside behind the drawn curtains. She knocked on the windowpane to wake him and saw the foot swiftly disappear.
    She waited, but nothing happened. Silence. She looked at the quilt. It was still and flat. Nothing moving. She didn’t dare knock