Free Blackwater by Kerstin Ekman Page B

hands were clean. She vomited into the water and the current took away the mess she had heaved out of herself. The water was soon clean again, clear and swift-running. With her head averted and without looking at the tent, she went back up to Mia.
    ‘They weren’t there,’ she said. Roughly she grabbed the girl’s arm and hurried away towards the marsh. The sun was coming right through the white woolly tufts now, floating, apparently hovering above the sedge. The tent was no longer visible. She saw the river and its swift water, dark, foaming in whirlpools. And the ground on the other side.
     
    Afterwards, she was no longer sure of the place. It was not marked, had no boundaries. It wandered like a sunspot between shadows of clouds. It was an event, an event by water. As everything is.

He had read that an eel could live for a long time without food, making its way through shallow ditches to new waters and down towards the sea.
    If trapped in a pool with no connections with streams or lakes, it could wriggle its way through damp grass to reach fresh water.
    It was now lying quite still in the yellow plastic bucket.
    Early morning and clear sunny weather, warm indoors, so he had no need to get up and light the stove. He had been scared by the banging on the window, but that had gone now. As soon as he’d heard it was a woman’s voice, he had calmed down. Gudrun was looking for him. She could go on doing so for a while. But he couldn’t go back to sleep. That didn’t matter much; he wasn’t particularly tired now, and he needed to think.
    But he couldn’t. He was too hungry. He got up and rummaged in the cupboard above the sink. A packet of pancake mix. White pepper. Cocoa. How idiotic, the whole house at home was stuffed with food; both freezers, the larder, the fridge and the cold cellar. He would have to go back home without having done any thinking.
    Well, that wasn’t the end of the world. He had lain low in his room before, hunched over his desk. He could say to hell with them for hours on end. And it was only over the weekend that there would be as many as five of them. Five towers of muscle. The smell of aftershave and cigarette smoke. Drinks. Football on the shimmering blue screen, drawn curtains. Racing off in cars. And the unease that spurted out now and again. Gudrun like some kind of bloody incense in the room.
    Where did hatred come from?
    He got up and pulled on his jeans. They were dry but stiff from the clay. He stirred some water into the pancake mix and cocoa. It did not dissolve, sticky lumps swimming around, the cocoa dry on the surface. He lit the stove to heat up the unappetising mess.
    He had to climb out of the window to take a leak. It was all so silly, so much trouble. He had never liked things that wasted time and were tiresome. Like camping.
    As he was climbing back in, the cocoa gruel was boiling over, thick now and burnt to the the bottom of the pan. He ate it once it had cooled a bit, then cleared up behind him. No point going on with this. Gudrun had probably been really worried. She must have woken the whole household. No one had moved at first, he was sure of that. He wondered whether she had had to go and search on her own.
    They would grin a bit when he got back, then say nothing. Nor would he dare say anything. He would have to go on living there, curled up, one year at a time. Then military service.
    It struck him it would be the same then.
    Torsten and his real sons fitted in. They belonged, only sometimes they went a bit too far. Then there were fines to pay.
    It would be the same doing his military service, and at college. Though there he would have a better chance. There he could be just as confident as Torsten was up on the tractor and perhaps occasionally go a bit too far himself.
    He hunted out a cloudberry pail with a lid and put the eel into it. It didn’t thrash around, but he was afraid it was a deceptive old devil, so he firmly clipped down the lid before climbing