Mothers by Chris Power

Author:Chris Power [Chris Power]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571339709
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2018-03-23T04:00:00+00:00

RUN

On the long drive from Gothenburg to the farmhouse, Gunilla told David it was haunted. The owner had said so when she called to confirm the booking. ‘He didn’t believe it before,’ she said, ‘but people keep telling him things have gone missing, or been moved around with no explanation.’

‘Poltergeist,’ David said, doom-laden. ‘Or the cleaner.’ Rain crackled against the windscreen.

‘He thought I’d be excited,’ Gunilla said, tapping the heel of her hand against the steering wheel in time with a song on the radio. ‘But who wants to share a house with someone – something – that messes with their stuff?’

‘No one likes change,’ David said.

‘So you say. Always.’

David smiled and looked away to his right, where a long avenue of trees led to a large house painted white and yellow. Somehow it seemed to crouch on the land as if, after they had driven on, it might stand and stride away.

‘Hey,’ he said suddenly. ‘Maybe the farm was the site of a wartime atrocity, and—’

‘Enough.’ Gunilla made a wall of her hand in the space between them. ‘Ghosts I can take, but not more of your Nazis.’

At a rest stop they switched places. Gunilla fell asleep, and as the fields rolled past David wondered if this landscape had looked so different seventy years ago. It wasn’t only because he was reading a book about Stalingrad. Being anywhere on the Continent made him think of the war. When he ate lunch in an old town square, or crossed a railway line or passed any industrial plant, he thought of Nazis. Tram systems made him think of Nazis. Bicycles made him think of Nazis. Alpine passes and quiet forests – especially quiet forests – made him think of Nazis. He could never shake his amazement that an ordinary crossroads had been a battlefield; that a park had once been stacked with bodies; that a town hall had served as headquarters for a battalion, or even a division. All these places that had been one thing had suddenly become another, and both were as real as the wheel in his hands.

When they got to the farmhouse, a long, narrow, rectangular structure screened from the road by a tall hedge and trees, David said it was so big that even if it were haunted they would never encounter its ghost. The sun was setting, and through the patio doors, a couple of miles to the east, the buildings of a neighbouring village, Simrishamn, stood coated in red light. Beyond them, hidden from view, was the sea.

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