The Unexpected Find Page 10

  11

  Judy woke up and lay for a while under the warm duvet wondering where she was and how she had got there. The room was still dark, darker than before in fact, for the moon had set. But the sky was now a sombre purply-red. It was daybreak, so she couldn’t have slept very long; they had been so late getting to bed. But she felt rested. She got up and switched on the lamp that stood beside the sofa, seeing a neat pile of clothes on the armchair. Not hers. There was a checked shirt, sort of lumberjack-style, and a pair of baggy green trousers. It wasn’t the kind of stuff she would have chosen to wear, but she got dressed and combed her fingers through her hair in the hope that the result was acceptable. Sort of tousled was all right, but not dragged-through-the-hedge-backwards. She was thirsty. She made her way quietly to the kitchen and opened the door. To her surprise, it was warm and lit and the table already held the remains of breakfast. But now only William was still sitting there, eating a thick piece of bread and butter. Farmor was removing a big coffee pot from the stove. A silver-grey dog with friendly brown eyes left its place by the stove and came over to say hello, but returned and lay down again on a sharp word from Farmor.

  “Silla should be outside,” she said, “but I am glad of the company these days. And like me, she is not as young as she used to be. Good morning,” she went on, “We have some news. They have found him – your friend. Sven saw something sticking out of a snowdrift. The top of a red woollen hat.”

  “Is he…?” Judy couldn’t help imagining the deep-frozen lump that their odd travelling companion must have become.

  “He is alive…” Farmor hesitated. “Or he seems to be. It is very strange. They were sure he was gone – he should not be alive, it should be impossible. They were taking him away in the ambulance, and they found that his heart was beating. Very very slowly, like a bear in the winter. He may survive. Sven told me this morning…” Judy looked at the clock on the wall above the settle. It was half past ten. No wonder she felt rested.

  “Good. That’s good. But where will they take him?”

  “His case is so interesting and unusual that they will fly him down to Uppsala, I should think. We will hear if they think he will live. Try not to worry.”

  Judy wasn’t worried. She thought that Mr Balderson would be very hard indeed to kill.

  Farmor sat her down at the table and made sure that everything was within reach – bread and sour milk and jam and honey and muesli. Then she poured coffee into a mug.

  “Or perhaps you would like tea?” she asked. One of the things Farmor remembered most clearly about her stay in England was that everybody drank gallons and gallons of tea at every possible opportunity, and that what they called coffee tasted like old dishwater. Judy said that coffee was fine. Looking at the food she realized that she was ravenously hungry. In the quiet, it occurred to Judy that one of the really positive things about William was that if he didn’t have anything he wanted to say, he didn’t speak. No “How did you sleep?” or “I wonder what the weather will be like today?” No small talk. At breakfast this is a very fine quality, Judy thought. Being nice and polite and making conversation is all very well, but if you can avoid it during breakfast, that is even better. Farmor was also quietly busy at the sink, and slowly the light changed until a single pale ray of sun found its way through the window and made a bright spot on the wall beside the clock.

  “He will be back soon, I’m sure.”

  “Who? Back from where?”

  “Stefan. He went out to get your van.”

  “Oh.” Judy had vaguely imagined that he was still in bed somewhere.

  “We will see what Stefan can do. He is very good with machines. Young, but he is soon the best in the village.”

  “He mustn’t go to too much trouble. Perhaps he could tow it to a garage or something?”

  “A very long way. And he loves to do it. It is his best thing, much better than schoolwork. Even better than fishing, and anyway there is too much snow on the ice for fishing. Now, if you are finished, we will find some warm clothes for you. Then you can go outside and get some fresh air. Perhaps you could go down to the mailbox and see if they have managed to get the newspaper delivered today. It is not too cold. I think you found the hardest night of the year. Now it will change.”

  After breakfast they went out into the hall and Farmor kitted them out. She had made a huge heap of clothes on the hall floor – everything from hats and scarves to boots – and they rifled through. Judy’s feet were about the same size as Farmor’s, so she got a really nice pair of leather boots with funny pointed-up toes like the prow of a boat. William’s feet were positively huge for someone his age, and a pair of Stefan’s boots did well enough. There were down jackets and fleeces and lined overalls, and a vast array of hats, from proper fur-lined ones with earflaps to knitted woollen caps with bobbles and even a tassel or two. William stood there mostly while they tested various bits of clothing on him, only protesting when they tried to touch his head. He picked out a red woollen hat with a long pointy top that was more like a windsock than a hat. Judy said that it made him look like a garden gnome, but this just made him cheerful, and he wouldn’t wear anything else. It was the gnome hat or nothing.

  By the time they were fully clothed they were far too hot to stay indoors, so it was a relief to step outside. Farmor’s idea of “not too cold” was minus twenty-one degrees, and Judy had been expecting the worst, but with proper clothing and the light in their faces it was a world away from the trials of the night before. The sun had crept over the horizon, and its rays, almost parallel with the ground, arrowed through the pine trees that fringed the home acres, turning their trunks a rosy red. The weathered gable-end of the timbered barn was that warm deep reddish brown colour that only pitch and a couple of hundred years can create. And the snow! Every crystal of snow was a prism that flashed the colours of the rainbow as the light moved across it. In every snowdrift, in the great piles that had been heaped around the yard, in the billows of untouched snow on every roof, a million opals shone.

  The snow creaked drily under their boots as they walked across the yard.

  “I’m going to make a great big snowball,” said William. “It snowed once at home and I rolled a big ball. But it was full of muck. This is very white and clean. You start with a little one and then you roll it.”

  He scooped up some snow and tried to form it in his hands, but it was impossible. The snow was a dry powder and he might as well have tried to make a ball out of a handful of dust. They left the yard and walked down the track towards the road, their eyes half-closed against the light and their breath floating away like smoke into the sky, which was now the palest of blues. The mailbox was just visible, peeking out from its little niche in the ploughed-up snow at the roadside. When they were about halfway down they heard the sound of a heavy engine and the clink of snow-chains as Stefan’s tractor eased itself off the road and up towards the farm with Ari the camper in tow. Judy and William had to step off the track, standing up to their knees in snow as they were passed. Things didn’t look too good for the camper. It waddled like a drunken duck, and at least one of the rear wheels wobbled so much that it looked as though it might collapse at any moment.

  “Stefan will mend it,” said William, with complete certainty.

  Judy wasn’t so sure.

  When they returned with the newspaper, the camper had disappeared, swallowed up somewhere in the great barn that was the workshop, machine shed, hayloft, everything.

  Later Judy and William tried to help Farmor prepare the evening meal. At first she said, “no, no, you must rest,” which Judy thought meant, “please stay out of my way”. But she relented in the end, when she saw that they really did want to be some kind of help. William was allowed to go out to the woodshed with an empty wood-basket. He didn’t come back, but that didn’t seem to bother Farmor at all. Judy was allowed to peel potatoes, with Farmor hovering anxiously until she saw how neatly Judy worked – the result of living in a houseboa
t with a tiny kitchen. Eventually William did return, without the wood-basket.

  “Where’s the wood?” asked Judy.

  “I forgot it. Look what I found. It was hanging on the wall in the shed.” He held out a rusty iron object, a cruel-looking hook and spike combined.

  “I think it’s an old weapon. I’ve seen them in the museum at home.”

  Farmor turned from the stove where she was poking the potatoes.

  “It’s a timber-hook but I’m afraid it’s not as old as that. It was Stefan’s great-grandfather’s. They used to float timber down the rivers to the sawmill on the coast. If there was a big logjam, they walked out on to it and hooked the timber free. Very dangerous work. The shaft was three metres long, but it was used for kindling long ago.”

  “I’ll go and put it back in the shed,” said William, trying not to sound too disappointed.

  “If you want it, you can have it. No timber has been floated for years and years. It’s all road transport now.”

  “Thank you very much.” William’s face shone. “I bet no one in England has one. I’ll show it to Mr Greaves.”

  We won’t be seeing Mr Greaves any time soon, thought Judy, but there was no point in rubbing it in. William disappeared into Stefan’s room.

  Farmor turned to Judy.

  “What a lucky boy. He finds things, and they make him happy,” she said quietly.

  Judy had never thought of William as lucky before.

  “I suppose so,” she said doubtfully.

  “And he doesn’t just find things,” said Farmor.

  “How do you mean?”

  “He found you.”

  It had been dark for several hours when Stefan came in at last and they all sat down to eat boiled potatoes, pickled herring and sauerkraut.

  “Stefan thinks he can fix it,” said Farmor. “He has lots of tools. It will take some time, but you must wait anyway, to see what happens to your Mr Balderson.”

  “We can find somewhere to stay. Is there a youth hostel or something in the village?”

  But Farmor was having none of it. There was nowhere better to stay for miles around, and they had plenty of room.

  “You can of course sleep in the living room, and William can sleep in the kitchen, in the settle. Stefan’s grandfather slept in that settle as a child, and he died there too. You just lift the lid, and there you are.”

  Mr Balderson would have liked that, thought Judy. But William didn’t.

  “I want to stay in Stefan’s room.”

  “What about asking Stefan if he wants someone on his floor?” said Judy.

  “Do you want someone on your floor?” asked William immediately.

  Stefan looked at him seriously. “Of course I do. If you will not snore.”

  “Judy said—”

  “That’s it, William,” said Judy. “End of—”

  “Conversation, I know.”

  12

  Days turned into a week, and one week turned into two. The days were short, and the nights were endless. Stefan went back to school, and when he wasn’t in school he was in the workshop with the camper, and William. At first Judy was worried about that. But if he hadn’t wanted William there, he wouldn’t have shouted, “William, now we go to work!” in a cheerful voice as soon as he had got in and had something to eat. He didn’t seem to think he needed her out there, though. She didn’t mind that. The hard thing was that it was one thing to be on the move, travelling, but it was something else to be simply stuck, sitting in someone else’s house for days on end doing nothing much. Not that she was indoors all the time. Farmor lent her a pair of skis, and she was quick to pick up the smooth steady gliding stride of cross-country technique, covering miles of terrain in the tracks left by snowmobiles, or doing her own laborious pathfinding, picking her way carefully through dense forest. Once, from behind a snow-covered boulder, she thought she caught sight of a pair of tufted ears. A lynx, said Stefan. But mostly there was only the silence and the snow; sometimes the screech of a woodpecker or the raucous guffaw of a raven. Nevertheless there were many hours of darkness to fill, and a lot of them were spent in front of the tiled stove, reading and thinking.

  In the parlour there was a whole shelf of English books that Farmor had collected as a young girl in England. One evening Judy picked up Rewards and Fairies by Kipling and opened its pages at “The Thousandth Man”, remembering the envelope from Sweden that marked the poem’s place in her father’s book. She read the last verse lots of times,

  Nine hundred and ninety-nine can’t bide

  The shame or mocking or laughter

  But the thousandth man will stand by your side

  To the gallows-foot, and after.

  She didn’t like that line about the gallows one little bit. But she couldn’t help reading it again and again. If Rashid was in trouble, then her father would do anything to help him, even it meant getting in serious, dangerous trouble. The door opened and Farmor came in with a dustpan, although Judy couldn’t see a speck of dust anywhere in the room. She stood for a moment and looked at Judy, who was lying on her back on the rug with the book beside her. Then she sat down on the sofa.

  “Tell me some more about your father,” said Farmor. “What is he like?”

  Judy said nothing for a moment, then she sat up.

  “He goes on a lot about debts – and duties and values. He says that England is a wonderful country to be in. He says that when he hears grown-ups moaning about the National Health Service, or children whining for the latest smartphone, he wants to shout at them and say that every morning they should wake up and weep for joy because they live under an English sky, with English laws and English policemen and cupcakes.”

  “Cupcakes?”

  “He loves cupcakes. He loves England. But sometimes he says that too many people are alone in our country. That old men who have served their families all their lives are looked after by nurses, even though they have perfectly healthy kids. That some people don’t even know the names of their second cousins. That the duties of family are not a burden but a gift from God. He says that when I was born, he and my mum knew they had to leave. They couldn’t let me grow up there. He was so sad. When he cut himself off from his language and his people … for him it was worse than cutting off his own arm. But they told him to go, his family and his friends. They helped him, even though by then it was dangerous even to be seen with him. A friend is someone who is there even when everyone else has gone, even when your danger is their danger too. ‘And I know this, Judy, because otherwise I would not be here today, and neither would you,’ that’s what he says.”

  “True friendship is sometimes hard to bear, I think,” said Farmor. “Is it enough to make him leave his beloved child all alone? Is that the kind of man he is?”

  “Yes,” said Judy, with complete certainty.

  Farmor made a sound that was somewhere between a tut and a sigh, and got up to sweep away the invisible dust. When she had gone Judy stood up and found herself pacing the room.

  It was simple: she should have heard from him long ago. He had put himself in danger and he hadn’t come back. She’d always imagined a happy ending to her adventure, like in a book. But not all stories have happy endings. When it came down to it, what did she have to go on? Just an address in Sweden, and now they were stranded. If she had taken that bus ride instead, hidden up somewhere in England… But no. It was just too pathetic. At least they were doing something – or would be if Mr Balderson wasn’t lying in a hospital ward and the camper wasn’t in microscopic pieces in Stefan’s workshop. How much longer would it take to get it back on the road?

  Judy went out into the hall. Boots, mittens, jacket – it was already routine for her to dress like a spacewoman every time she left the house. She stepped outside. There had been no glorious sunset today, just the pale sky shading into blue, then deeper blue as the first stars appeared, then black. Now the whole cavernous vault of the sky was spangled with stars, the constellations – Orion
, Taurus, Leo – picked out to perfection, the lacy gauze of the Milky Way unfurled across it. It was amazing, to be able to see so clearly by starlight. Judy gazed upward, turning slowly round where she stood.

  “Not much in the way of twinkle, though,” she said to herself.

  At the horizon, a bit of twinkle maybe, but in the zenith the air was too crystal clear for that – the stars shone hard and bright. Nothing is ever quite as you expect it to be when you’re actually there. Judy had heard about the long dark winters of the far North, and they sounded pretty grim. But she hadn’t heard anything about how the snow looks like a million glittering diamonds, or that the brightness of moonlight on snow means that you can stand outside and read a book in the middle of the night.

  “Well, you could if it wasn’t so cold,” said Judy, and she headed off in the direction of the barn. She was going to visit the workshop, even though she hadn’t actually been invited in.

  Stefan was doing a thorough job on the camper. It wasn’t something he decided. He just didn’t know any other way. Luckily he had William. When William had followed him into the workshop, Stefan had been prepared to keep a careful eye on him, and perhaps reckoned on him not being able to concentrate properly on getting things done. But he had quickly discovered that William was the perfect workmate. William was an arranger, he was incapable of being bored, and he never chattered. He asked questions sometimes, but only if he wanted to know the answer, and most of what Stefan was doing didn’t interest William very much. William would stand and wait while Stefan removed nuts, bolts, screws and gaskets, and handed them to him one by one. Then he took them, cleaned them with fluid or a wire brush and arranged them all in perfectly straight lines on the workbench. Nothing was ever lost, everything could be put back in the reverse order that it had been taken out. If Stefan said, “Hold this,” then William held it until Stefan told him to let go. If Stefan, lying under the camper or buried up to the shoulders in the engine, asked him for a seventeen millimetre spanner, he went and got it, and when Stefan was finished with it he took it and hung it back on its peg in exactly the right place. But progress was slow. The whole package of leaf springs, rear axle, cardan – not to mention the entire rear suspension and transmission systems – was removed, taken apart, cleaned up and examined. It took Stefan a whole evening just to get the wheel bearings loose.