The Unexpected Find Page 12

  “It is a wobbler,” said Stefan. “A floater. Of course you cannot use it now. Not for ice-fishing. But in the spring. For you.”

  “For me?”

  “Hold it carefully. If you get a hook in you it is hard to get out. You must cut yourself open with a knife.”

  Judy had never been fishing in her life, but she knew a real present when she saw it – something that has real value both for the giver and the receiver.

  She looked at it closely.

  “It’s beautiful. But… You’ve said sorry. And it was no big deal, you really don’t have to….”

  Stefan smiled.

  ”But it is not for the hit. For the maths.”

  “Oh…” said Judy. “Then, thank you, Stefan.”

  “It is good, yes? Better than in a shop.”

  “You made it?”

  “Yes, of course I made it,” said Stefan.

  Judy looked at the perfectly shaped little fish, the delicately painted eyes, fins and tail, the little scooped piece of copper fastened under the head so that it would move through the water like a living thing. How could those hands have done this?

  “I can’t take this from you. It’s too good for me. I mean … it needs to be used, not just looked at.”

  “Do not worry, we have lots of rods; in the spring…”

  He stopped abruptly. Spring was months away.

  “I think in England there are fish,” he finished lamely.

  14

  Stefan had announced the previous evening that he would have to go into the village to look for a piece for the camper at the scrapyard. Over breakfast the following morning he tried to explain what it was, and why it was past repair on the camper and had to be replaced. He talked at length about gussets, side rails and tower braces. He had looked up the words in one of his manuals the night before, but it didn’t help. Neither William nor Judy understood a word of it.

  “But I am talking English!” he exclaimed.

  “It’s not English to me, Stefan, sorry,” said Judy.

  “There is room for someone of you to come with me. Help me to look.”

  Judy waited for him to tell William to go and get ready.

  “Please come, Judy. It might be a bit boring for you though.”

  The idea that anything that got her out for a bit could be boring was so ridiculous that Judy laughed.

  “I think I can take it. I can always bring a book.”

  Stefan looked doubtful.

  “If you would like to stay here and read…”

  “No, no, for heaven’s sake, I was just—”

  “Making a joke?”

  “Yes.”

  Stefan frowned. He was trying to understand the English way of making little jokes all the time, but he still got tripped up. He had learnt something though; understanding a language was not the same thing as understanding the people who spoke it. He needed Judy to come because she was so unbelievably quick at working stuff out, and if he could only explain exactly what he was looking for, dimensions, curvature, she would see straight away if it would do the job. And he wanted to show off his car. It was a Volvo PV 544 that he had spent many long hours converting into an A-tractor registered farm truck, and it was the envy of the village. Theoretically it had a maximum speed of thirty kilometres an hour, but just like every other converted car in the Swedish countryside, that was theory. And he wasn’t actually old enough to drive it off the property, not quite. But this was the only thing that Farmor turned a blind eye to. She pretended not to know about the licensing age for farm vehicles, and he had never made a point of informing her.

  So that morning when Judy stepped outside she was confronted by the sight of a gleaming red vehicle, glinting in the morning sun. It had obviously once been an ordinary old-fashioned car. But it had been transformed. The back half had been shortened and replaced by a small flatbed; there were only two front seats for passengers. Everything that was not shining red was gleaming chrome. The tires were whitewalls, the rear suspension was raised, and the front almost stroked the ground. Judy was reminded of pictures of drag racers.

  Stefan stood beside it, trying to look nonchalant. Judy knew what was expected of her instantly, and this time there would be no mistakes.

  “Stefan, what an incredible car. You cannot possibly have bought this in a shop. Where did you get it?”

  “I got it from an old farmer; it was behind his barn in the nettles. Very rusty, very bad.”

  “You mean you did all this yourself? It’s unbelievable. It’s beautiful.” She was flattering him, but she meant every word of it, and Stefan could see that.

  “But I must have better exhaust pipes. It is too quiet.”

  “Too quiet?”

  “Yes, it must make a noise and make people angry. My friend’s is noisier. Now get in please.”

  Judy climbed into the front seat and Stefan got behind the wheel. When he started the engine, it emitted a growling roar that would have done justice to a heavy goods vehicle on a steep uphill gradient. And then they were off.

  It was a clear day. The village lay about twelve kilometres from Stefan’s home, along the same winding, tree-lined road that they had driven up in the freezing dark the night of their crash. Now, with the sun shining through the breaks in the trees, and birch saplings and scrubby alder bowed down almost to the ground under their great hoods of snow, it was beautiful. As the sun rose, the light became stronger and the snow was almost too bright to look at. Stefan showed off a bit, accelerating to almost fifty kilometres an hour, and going into a deliberate skid in the corners. Judy grabbed hold of the seat, but she didn’t say anything. If he thought he could make her start screeching then he had another think coming. They rounded the last bend and the forest fell away to reveal open meadows sloping down to the river, dotted with the occasional red-painted timber barn, and a few farmsteads. Further away, Judy could see the onion dome of the church bell tower, standing separately from the church building itself. They drove down the main street of the village, and Stefan lifted his hand in greeting to almost everybody he saw, or so it seemed to Judy. There was a general store, a petrol station and a café in the village, and that was about it. Stefan drove them over a bridge then swung off the road and up a rough track where they arrived at a pair of wire-mesh gates. Stefan stopped the car and got out, so Judy followed him, and they walked through the gates and into the scrapyard. She looked around her. Stefan was already wandering about, brushing snow off wrecked cars, bits of farm machinery and scrap iron. The place was filled with old boilers, tin roofing, a whole mountain of wheels and hubcaps, pipes, radiators… There was no end to it.

  The weather wasn’t too bad – it probably wasn’t much below minus ten – but there is nothing colder than scrap iron. The cold that seemed to hang around the abandoned metal objects of the scrapyard soon chilled Judy to the bone. She rounded an ancient decaying combine harvester, almost completely invisible under its icy coat, and saw Stefan deep in conversation with a stooped figure dressed in a filthy overall and a greasy peaked cap. Apparently immune to the cold, he wasn’t wearing a coat. The sight made Judy shiver. They were studying a twisted piece of steel girder that lay on the ground between them. Stefan saw Judy and called her over.

  “I think this is good. It is three-millimetre steel.” She came over and looked down at it. Stefan had given her a piece of paper in the car with the measurements and the rough curvature he was looking for.

  “Yes, it will hold. But you’ll have to reshape one end for a good fit.”

  “No I won’t.”

  “How much do you bet?”

  “I don’t want to take money from you.”

  “You don’t want to lose it, you mean.”

  “Ha! Five crowns, then.”

  “You’re on. Let’s go, Stefan, I’m freezing to death.”

  They loaded their find on to the back of the car, and drove back towards the village, but Stefan stopped the car just before the bridge.

  “Now
we have a piece of cake and a cup of coffee at the café,” he said.

  “Are we going to walk from here?”

  “Yes. When we drove in I saw Sven in the café. He is the policeman.”

  Judy waited, her eyebrows making a question.

  “If he doesn’t see me drive, it is all right. And he has not seen me. But if I park outside the café, he must do something, and he doesn’t want to make Farmor unhappy. It is not good for him.”

  “Why not?”

  “His wife is Farmor’s best friend.”

  So they walked.

  The café was warm, with a few small tables and a glass-fronted counter with cinnamon buns, cream cakes, and a lot more besides. Judy had already discovered that Stefan had a sweet tooth, when she had seen him wolf down eight or nine of Farmor’s cinnamon buns in one sitting, and now she saw him choose a slab of marzipan-coated cream cake. She contented herself with a bun, and practised her Swedish on the lady behind the counter, managing “Hello” and “One of those please” and getting a reply that she didn’t really understand. At a table by the window a grey-haired man in uniform was drinking coffee and idly leafing through the newspaper. He greeted Stefan and asked him a question. Stefan replied with the odd upward jerk of the head and indrawn breath, between pursed lips, that passes for “yes” in the North. There were other people at the tables and most of them said something to Stefan. Nobody met Judy’s eye, but she could feel eyes on her back as they sat drinking their coffee.

  “I don’t think they like strangers,” said Judy as they were walking back over the bridge.

  “They don’t know you, that’s all.”

  They crossed the bridge and got back to the car. Judy was already in the passenger seat, and Stefan was opening the door on his side when they heard someone shout Stefan’s name. Three people were on the bridge walking towards them. One of them waved a hand. Stefan lifted a hand in reply, then walked back on to the bridge to meet them. Judy stayed in the car and watched, sinking down a bit in her seat. She might be a thousand miles from home, but her visit to the café had reminded her that she was basically on the run. If people noticed her too much, why shouldn’t they start asking questions, and making phone calls? There were two girls and a boy as far as she could make out, though their down parkas and boots made it hard to tell. About Stefan’s age, school friends probably. The four of them stood for a while talking. Then the boy laughed and pointed at the truck. Stefan said something, and quite suddenly the atmosphere changed. The boy moved up very close to Stefan. Stefan took a step back, shrugged his shoulders and turned to go. But Judy knew it was too late for that. She could read the signs. The boy grabbed Stefan’s arm, swung him round, and took a wild swing at him with his other arm. Stefan half-ducked, avoiding the worst of the blow. He pushed his open hand into the boy’s face, punched him in the neck, and then moved round quickly to get an arm round his throat and a knee in his back. They were fairly evenly matched. Stefan’s opponent was shorter than him, but broad and long in the arm.

  The fight seemed to have blown up out of nowhere. Judy really did not want to get involved, it wasn’t her business; and if you want to avoid drawing attention to yourself then you can’t just turn up among complete strangers and get straight into a punch-up. Anyway, Stefan seemed to be doing all right; he was no William. In fact at this moment his opponent was on his back on the gritted icy surface of the bridge with Stefan sitting on top of him holding his arms down. The two girls had been standing to one side, not egging the fighters on exactly, but not trying to stop them either. But now one of them yelled, picked up a lump of frozen snow from the side of the road and advanced towards Stefan. She lifted it high, but before she could bring it down on Stefan’s head both her feet were swept from under her and she landed with an audible thump on her bottom. She squirmed round to find a black-haired, flashing-eyed figure standing quite still, balancing on her toes, knees slightly bent, staring down at her.

  “Sorry,” said Judy, trying to sound nice. “But that isn’t fair, we should stay out of it. Let me help you up.” And she stretched out a hand. This didn’t seem to satisfy the girl. She screamed something at Judy, scrambled up and launched a kick at her with her booted foot. But her foot, somehow, got itself stuck under Judy’s arm. And now, as Judy moved forward, she had to hop backwards, arms flailing in order to avoid landing on her bottom again. The bridge had a low metal rail, half-hidden under a hard ridge of old ploughed snow. The girl was pushed back towards it, bouncing idiotically on one leg. Her attacker gave a final heave, jerked the captured boot upwards, and with a high-pitched howl the girl flipped backwards and disappeared. Her companion let out a yell and rushed off the bridge to flounder down through the deep snow to the riverbank. This put a stop to Stefan’s fight. He climbed off the boy he was sitting on, who stood up and brushed grit and snow off himself. They saw Judy, with one knee on the rail, peering over the edge, and went to join her. All three of them looked down. The river had been frozen over since before Christmas, and deep untouched drifts of snow lay on the ice. The girl whom Judy had unceremoniously dumped was half-crawling, half-wading through the drifts towards the bank, looking like an animated snowman and trying to wipe snow out of her face. On the bank stood her friend, still producing an unbroken flood of hysterical Swedish, until the boy on the bridge shouted something at her. She glared up at him, but shut her mouth.

  “Now we go,” said Stefan.

  On the way back Stefan said nothing for a long time. Judy sat and stared out of the window as the pine-trunks slid past, an unbroken phalanx like soldiers on parade. She was annoyed with herself. The sitting-it-out bit hadn’t gone very well. She really had to stop chucking people into canals and rivers. She wondered what Stefan would think of her – probably not a lot, just when things had started to be easier between them; almost as though she had a friend. And now this. Beating up his schoolmates wasn’t going to go down well. Stefan spoke at last,

  “You are a pretty strong person.”

  “No I’m not; you don’t have to be strong, it’s not about muscles.”

  “I know that. I mean strong in the soul.”

  Judy had got used to Stefan and Farmor talking about soul – apparently all Swedes did. They didn’t mean anything to do with angels and heaven, or life after death. The “soul” was everything inside you that wasn’t just your brain – all the stuff that made you a person and not a computer, all the stuff that messed you up.

  “I don’t know about that. But I know I lose my temper sometimes.”

  “Anna was lucky.”

  “Lucky?”

  “Yes, going off the bridge is not good.”

  “But it was like landing on a feather bed.”

  “The water moves very fast under the bridge. Sometimes it hardly freezes at all. Or melts under, with the snow on top so you can’t see it. If it was a bit later, a few weeks maybe with some good weather, Anna would be dead. Pulled under the ice by fast water. It has happened before.”

  “Oh.”

  “You didn’t know that?”

  “No, how could I?”

  “I thought because you are so clever, perhaps you could think it.”

  “No.”

  “But if you had thought it … that it might be very bad for her … would you…?”

  “No, of course not… I mean, I don’t think so. I hope not.”

  “Is that what it is like when you lose your temper?”

  Judy turned her head and looked at him – his brow wrinkled, blue eyes on the road ahead, jaw pushed forward making lines at the side of his mouth. Was it possible that she was sitting beside someone who had never lost his temper? Then Stefan’s brow cleared, and he laughed out loud.

  “Anna called you a mad witch. Ha ha. Very scared. She never met some girl like you. Ha ha.”

  “What was it all about, anyway?”

  “Just stupid stuff. Look, big tracks. Some elk crossed the road here.”

  Talk about changing the subject, thought Ju
dy. Not very subtle. She remembered the boy laughing and pointing towards the truck.

  “It was about me, wasn’t it?”

  “Just stupid stuff. My friend Karl is quite stupid. His grandfather is not so nice. Karl just talks after him, like a…” Stefan’s English collapsed. “A bird that talks.”

  “A parrot.”

  “Yes, a parrot.”

  “So, what were they saying? How did they even know I’m here?”

  “Here everybody knows everything. Don’t worry.”

  Judy got annoyed.

  “Stop trying to look after me. I can look after myself. What is the matter with you? You get me into a fight and then you won’t even tell me what it was about. “

  “I did not get you into a fight.”

  “Yes you did.”

  “You were in the truck. I never tell you to come out.”

  “Is that what you would have done, just sat and watched?”

  “No, but you’re a…”

  “Don’t say it or I really will lose my temper. That stuff on the bridge will seem like a vicar’s tea party.”

  “A what, please? I don’t understand vicars.”

  Judy laughed.

  “Who does?”

  They drove on in silence. Already the light was going; the shadows of the trees reached right across the road and far into the forest on the other side. Stefan took a deep breath.

  “Here in Sweden now lots of people come from wars and bad things. Some people say it is too many. They use rude words. The government sends many of them up here. People here are good people, but they are not used to it, and some have bad ideas from long ago. Karl’s grandfather in the War… Farmor will not tell me, but she doesn’t like him very much…” Stefan’s voice trailed away. “Karl said something stupid. He often does. Then I said something back.”

  Judy stared out of the window. Why should it be different here? William’s Jerry was everywhere. Just another name and another country.