From Backwater Beast

At times his sleep is so heavy that it is as though nothing exists. As though the world didn’t exist, as though he hardly existed himself. He is a being with neither brain nor consciousness. A plant. A single-celled organism floating aimlessly in the seas of prehistory. Would that be paradise?

On other nights he lies awake off and on. Like a little foretaste of all the sleepless nights to come. Sometimes his mind boggles at how small he is. One thought in particular takes hold: his insignificance in relation to the weltering immensity of the universe. He can’t get his head around it. The thought is never consciously formulated, it just appears there out of the blue and takes over completely, breathtaking yet indefinable. It seems to favour a certain weather and season. It rarely seeks him out on cloudy or rainy nights, nor in the half-light of those mosquito-guzzling summer evenings.

No, a harsh, deep-black winter seems to be its best stage.

A big moon. Countless whetted stars. Quiet glimmers over snow-covered expanses. Hills and valleys swept in white dunes. The arms of the conifers sagging under weighty masses.

It is as if the darkness becomes night’s own luminosity, extending endlessly every which way. In those waking nights, the cold, late hour and solemn air lend the bed’s farty warmth an almost sacred sharpness. A kind of clarity. As though made for the big, crucial moments. The ones for which he is still far from equipped.

It is then that this place feels inhumanly, timelessly desolate. As though he has landed on an alien planet. But this is far from some unknown site or eerie ghost town. Quite the reverse: the whole village is far more alive than it will come to be in a near future. Livestock stand dozing in every barn, while in the cottages children lie tucked up in bed, and the men and women enjoy the black rest that confirms they are working off the melodious vigour of their best days. They toil on in the knowledge that they are the last of their kind, since even the trimmest, most robust self-owned smallholdings have gone and fallen behind the times. They’re all on their way out, but the farmers keep ploughing and milking their way into the ground, as it were, like protesters or activists on a barricade.

In the mornings the post and the newspaper drop into the letterboxes. The milk float glides through the landscape. The phones jangle continually with issues and questions. The lakes sit, clear and brim-full. The insects swarm, buzz and hum. The fields luxuriate in a furiously green hue. Nature appears tamed, or at least adequately conquered: a beast that has been persuaded to obey and produce.

The machineries of the nation and state have reached their zenith. For the first and quite possibly last time in history, it is as though this country is made for kids just like him. For families just like these. Ordinary folk without dreams. People who would never have the audacity to set their sights any higher than doing their bit and taking each day as it comes. Here there are many of such stock.

But in the most nocturnal hour the isolation can ramp up to nightmarish proportions. That’s when it’s dark, see. And not because electricity is expensive – it’ll probably never be cheaper than now. Nor because generating it is destroying the planet – such matters are on no one’s mind. No, the lights are all off because folk around here show restraint.

It is this very restraint that lights up the night sky, making the firmament squanderously rich. Its stars are sharply speckled, in a way that in years to come you will only be able to see at remote national parks. No lamps dampen the moon’s splendour: its outline is clear, like a face in a portrait.

Perhaps that’s why his mind boggles, why he peers up at the universe instead of sleeping. Or is there something wrong with him? Perhaps he’s still too young, then. But soon the nights will send his mind awhirr with thoughts:

Who am I? Why am I me?

Why is he alive now? Why is he Sven Olov? Why that name? Why was he born on the thirteenth of July 1971? In a teeny tiny village heaped with forest? Why does he live with his mother Anna Maria, father Karl Erik, kid brother Lars Erik and a radio and a TV in a one-bedroom flat (plus sofa-bed in the hallway) under a sloping roof, while his ancient grandmother Anna lives below them with four big rooms all to herself? In his ancestral – grandmotherly? – home? Which stands as though centre-stage, the neighbouring plots like grandstands around it? In Eriksfors parish in Norberg municipality, but with a Sala postcode – so simultaneously on two peripheries – doubly excluded, as it were? At the northern end of the truncated Västmanland province (whose symbolic flower, the mistletoe, is a parasite that latches onto better plants and sucks their energy; in former times it was also chewed to relieve epilepsy), Sweden, Northern Europe, Planet Earth?

Why do they have a few hundred brown and white free-range hens, Tina the mutt, a basically nameless outdoor cat, the odd summer bunnies, a smallholding with all that that entails, a brook that weaves its way through the village, a smattering of undistributed common enclosures, forests, neighbours, barns, cows, others’ dogs and pets, shelves full of books, tables and benches overflowing with newspapers, reference books, instruction manuals, forms, letters, drawings, doodles, papers, note- and sketchpads, huge carrier bags packed with library books, and whole heaps of sorely afflicted pens and crayons?

Why does all of this lie neatly tucked under the garden canopy of overgrown pear trees, unpruned apple trees, wide-branched birches, sprawling maples and high-rise elms that keep watch over the land? Why are there whole hulks of vintage cars and agricultural machinery just lying around, generations’ worth of junk to explore? Why does he live in the wake of those who have been forced by death’s haste to leave everything behind?

Why can he roam as he pleases? What does that do to him? Why does he notice so much? Why does he see what others don’t see in themselves? Why does he hear everything they don’t say? Why does he squirrel everything away at the back of his memory? Where does his imagination come from? Is he crazy?

Why this spiral from hell? Where did it all come from? Why does it feel so frightening? Like falling into eternity? And since eternity is infinite, to never stop falling.

Falling falling falling.

It’s easy to go on like that of a winter’s night. To fret those thoughts again and again. Even though it bloody well is what it is.

And what’s to become of him?

You can wonder about all that when the sky is so abundantly strung with stars. He can pick out the Big Dipper, but not much more. What’s to become of such a lad? So chuckle the people who have to listen to what said lad has to say. There are plenty of windbags round these parts, and he’s one of them.

For the most part the question is asked indulgently, as one might do of a prattling child. But sometimes it comes out more caustic. No one has the foggiest. But nor does anyone seem all that concerned.

So what is wrong with him? So far probably nothing at all.

The answer is probably that he can become most things. Especially with his childhood privilege, he will later tell himself. With a whole village helping to keep him in line. With three generations under one roof. With kind, non-drinking grown-ups. With everything a farm has to offer a curious, grabby-fingered kid: animals, nature, fire, water, tools, chemicals, machines. Where he can discover the advantages and drawbacks of living creatures as well as physical laws. With adults who never say do this or do that, but who simply get to work.

Work, that’s both a thing and an action. Toiling, grafting, wearing.

‘I’m worked to the bone,’ Mamma might say.

‘A little hard work never killed anyone,’ says Grandma.

‘Lousy work, that,’ says Pappa.

Grunt work. Dirty work. Work!

Another key concept is the Law. Not the legal kind, mind, but Sod’s. If something can go wrong, it obviously will. That’s guaranteed, so they crack the phrase out a lot. ‘Sod’s’ is entirely redundant. It’s just the Law. That’s enough.

Home turf stretches far and wide. Out, kids. To pitching, puckered little fields, dirt roads with game tracks veering off to either side, and grizzled meadows dotted here and there. In all of them the feeling that a very long time has passed here. A feeling strong enough to last a lifetime.

When he is two he runs away. If you could call it that. Perhaps he simply walks away from the new situation. Or that said situation means no one’s watching to see him go.

He is found by their neighbours at Boney, happy and in one piece. Rooster’s parents reckon the little tyke must have tramped there through the pasture, surrounded by the cows.

Before long he wanders even further. To the obligatory sights of a provincial childhood. The puddles by the letterboxes, in ruts furrowed by the post van’s daily stops. In the standing mud-water lie whole worlds to be found. And, further in the forest, supported by a large rock, there is a big anthill to poke at.

He pays visits to the neighbours. Old folk, almost exclusively old women whose husbands have abandoned them through death. The grannies tend to see him coming; they’ll pre-emptively open the door just a crack, limiting his visit to a quick chat on the doorstep. If they aren’t on their toes he can make it all the way inside. Only occasionally does he suspect that his prattle doesn’t interest them.

If he has the energy he’ll head up to the forest. The hills are a challenge, particularly in spring. Squidgy underfoot, the slurping ground makes his legs weak. The feeling of being tugged under.

Down.

The barn is acluck. The cat shoots off at the sound of children’s voices. Oh, and she’s repeatedly gone, by the way. As in really gone. Forever. The fox must have been around. So they have to look for a new cat.

For a while they even keep a goat, Plonk. Why? An impulse buy? At first just a tiny, bottle-fed kid, she grows to a tethered thing that butts if you come too close. Has kids of her own. Tina, too, can charge out or snap at you. If you happen to step on her tail, say.

At one point kittens appear, a whole box of them. Teeny tiny. So cute! They are all gone the next morning. The grown-ups have no idea. They definitely don’t know, no matter how much he asks them. Pappa especially is perfectly oblivious.

For a few summers he is allowed to keep bunnies. Two brown-speckled fluffballs in a hutch of the classic style: triangular like a roof ridge and oblong at the base, made of offcuts from firewood, hardboard and fine-mesh chicken wire. It has no base, so the bunnies can nibble at the grass. He cuddles with them sometimes, until his attention wafts on.

One day he is poking blades of grass through the mesh wire for them when Grandma hobbles out to him. She asks:

‘When did you last feed them?’

Feed them? Impossible to say. Summer has no time, it just blazes and blooms and chirrups and mews, like a beautiful wall of colours, scents and sounds. He wouldn’t know if the days were going forwards or back, right or left. But its joy is now lost, he can feel it. Just looking at Grandma sends an ominous thrill running through him. She’s planned what she’s going to say. He’s in for it. Still, he stays put. Running off would only make whatever ‘it’ is worse.

‘No clue, eh? Well let me tell you. You haven’t fed your rabbits in three weeks. I’ve had to do it for you. I’ve fed and watered them, and if it weren’t for me they would’ve starved long ago. They’d be dead. Skeletons and tattered fur and nothing else. And it would’ve been all your fault. Yours entirely. Understand?’

Perhaps she repeats herself – that or the message lands so well the first time that it goes on echoing in his head of its own accord. It is as though he freezes in the August heat, as though he pales in spite of his tan under her glare. The light filters down through the canopy of the biggest pear tree, the one that stands taller than the house itself. Grandma goes on standing there. His shame is pounding inside. In his mind’s eye he sees the bunnies’ demise; sees them scampering desperately around in their hutch, ever-more ravenous, until they starve.

Shame can be an effective tool. If all goes to plan, it can give the shamed one a quick and thorough lesson, a lesson they aren’t likely to forget. Sometimes he feels shame when the grown-ups get angry and blow a fuse. Now, however, he remembers no agreement that only he was to look after the bunnies. Perhaps they said so, but he forgot? His carelessness blazes in his chest, itches in his head. He hardly dares look at the bunnies.

Grandma has been feeding the bunnies for weeks. She never reminded him, nor anyone else. Instead she schemed as to how to best make him see the error of his ways. She drew up a plan, composed her little speech. The shame will make him never again neglect a pet. Make him see that you can never know what Grandma has up her sleeve.

Either she doesn’t see that he sees that she’s taken the time to engineer this talking-to so that it turns the screws maximally, seizing her chance when he has no one to flee to. Or she doesn’t care if he does. Or she thinks that he might as well see that she can always plan unpredictable punishments for his shortcomings. So that he makes sure to pull his socks up more generally.

Either Grandma doesn’t see that the one thing you leave behind is the way you make others feel. Like now: miserable. Or she doesn’t care.

She just stares, trying to read his reaction. She seems tense from her educative efforts, yet also satisfied.

How does the conversation end? Grandma probably just walks away. And the bunnies are never forgotten.