A Summer of Drowning Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by John Burnside

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Seeing Things

  The Fisherman’s House

  Huldra

  Notes and Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  At a critical point in her career, painter Angelika Rossdal suddenly moves to Kvaloya, a small island deep in the Arctic Circle, to dedicate herself to the solitary pursuit of her craft. With her, she brings her young daughter, Liv, who grows up isolated and unable or unwilling to make friends her own age, spending much of her time alone, or with an elderly neighbour, Kyrre Jonsson, who beguiles her with old folk tales and stories about trolls, mermaids and—crucially for the events that unfold in the summer of her eighteenth year—about the huldra, a wild spirit who appears in the form of an irresistibly beautiful girl, to lure young men to their doom.

  Now twenty-eight, Liv looks back on her life and particularly to that summer when two boys drowned under mysterious circumstances in the still moonlit waters off the shores of Kvaloya. Were the deaths accidental, or were the boys, as Kyrre believes, lured to their deaths by a malevolent spirit? To begin with, Liv dismisses the old man's stories as fantasy, but as the summer continues and events take an even darker turn, she comes to believe that something supernatural is happening on the island. But is it? Or is Liv, a lonely girl who has spent her entire life in the shadow of her beautiful, gifted mother, slowly beginning to lose touch with reality?

  About the Author

  John Burnside has published seven works of fiction and eleven collections of poetry, including The Asylum Dance, which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award. His Selected Poems was published in 2006, alongside his memoir, A Lie About My Father, which was the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Non-Fiction Book of the Year. The second volume of his memoir, Waking Up in Toytown, was published in 2010 by Jonathan Cape.

  By the same author

  FICTION

  The Dumb House

  The Mercy Boys

  Burning Elvis

  The Locust Room

  Living Nowhere

  The Devil’s Footprints

  Glister

  POETRY

  The hoop

  Common Knowledge

  Feast Days

  The Myth of the Twin

  Swimming in the Flood

  A Normal Skin

  The Asylum Dance

  The Light Trap

  The Good Neighbour

  Selected Poems

  Gift Songs

  The Hunt in the Forest

  NON-FICTION

  A Lie About My Father

  Waking Up In Toytown

  A SUMMER OF

  DROWNING

  John Burnside

  Among friends I argue that the true inventor of painting was Narcissus, that youth who, according to the poets, was transformed into a flower. And, since painting is the flower of all the arts, this story of Narcissus is most apt. For what is painting, if not an attempt, through the discipline of art, to embrace the surface of the pool in which we are reflected?

  Leon Battista Alberti, De Pictura

  The study of the visible universe may be said to start with a determination to use our eyes. At the very beginning there is something which might be described as an act of faith – a belief that what our eyes have to show us is significant.

  Arthur Stanley Eddington, Science and the Unseen World

  Late in May 2001, about ten days after I saw him for the last time, Mats Sigfridsson was hauled out of Malangen Sound, a few miles down the coast from here. They say he must have gone into the water at Skognes, then drifted back down to the pier near Straumsbukta, not far from where he lived – and I like to think that the sea took pity on the puny child it had killed, and was in the process of carrying him home, when a fisherman caught sight of that distinctive, almost white shock of hair through the summer gloaming and, with due care and sadness and habitual skill, fetched him to shore. Later, they found a boat drifting in the Sound, halfway between Kvaløya and the shipping channel where the great cruise and cargo vessels from Tromsø glide out into the open sea. The boat, it turned out, had been securely moored half a mile from Mats’s house, which seemed to confirm that he must have stolen it – but that really was beyond explanation, for there was no less likely thief than Mats Sigfridsson, and nobody could think of a reason why this quiet, well-behaved boy would even be out on the water in the middle of the night. The whole thing was a mystery and everyone had his own theory about why Mats was in that boat, or what his intentions might have been. There were those who spoke of suicide: it was the end of the school year and, like me, Mats had just completed the exams that would decide his future – a stressful time for any eighteen-year-old – but he hadn’t left a note and there was nothing to indicate that he had been depressed in the weeks leading up to the incident. If anything, he had seemed happier than usual. Some of the adults said it was just a prank that had gone wrong, one of those acts of adolescent folly that boys get up to from time to time, for reasons of their own – but nobody who knew Mats put any credence in that theory. Some of the kids in town hinted at foul play, though none of them had even the ghost of a reason for why anyone would want to hurt a boy like Mats Sigfridsson.

  As for me, I didn’t have any theories – not at the time. Mats was a classmate of mine and I had always liked him, if only from a distance. Mostly, I liked his blanched, Struwwlepeter hair and the odd half-smile he would put on when one of the teachers asked him a question he couldn’t answer. He and his brother Harald went around together all the time, like twins. People would say that they were inseparable, almost indistinguishable, in fact, though Harald was a year younger and it wasn’t that hard to tell them apart. It was an illusion, that twin-ness: an illusion that they had created, by force of will, because they wanted to be the same. For reasons only they understood, they needed to be identical. Naturally, they were together that last time I saw them: it was Grunnlovsdag and they were watching the parades on Sjøgata, two white boys in a river of Norwegian flags on the other side of the street from me, their eyes following the parade in exactly the same way, their heads turning and craning to see in unison, so it made them look mechanical, almost, like automata at an old-fashioned fairground. They always stood out and it always seemed, even in a crowd, that they were alone in their own world, a world that nobody else could enter. Only they weren’t alone that day, and they weren’t really together any more, for, where there had once been two, and only two, there were now three: Mats, Harald, and that other one. Maia. I knew who she was, of course; she had been in Harald’s class for a while, coming to school pretty much when she felt like it, before she dropped out altogether, and I could see right away that, as unlikely as it seemed, she actually was with them. That came as a surprise, but evidently it was no accident that they happened to be standing there, three where there should have been two, vanishing and reappearing in all that red and blue and white, and I remember wondering about it at the time.

  I had no reason, then, to suspect her of any ill will towards those boys, however. That was over a week before Mats died, and a month or more before Kyrre Opdahl started telling his crazy huldra story – so I really had no reason at all to think badly of the girl. It was just odd, her being there with those beautiful, white boys, and I remember wondering what had brought the three of them together. I didn’t suspect Maia of actual mischief, though – not then. Not on that day, and not later, when Mats died. I didn’t think she was actively malicious, I just thought that something wasn’t right about her. She was too dark
, too attentive, too solid. Those boys moved through the world in their own homespun dream, and they didn’t care about anything else: they weren’t bright, they weren’t sporty, they weren’t into anything. Maybe they were a little wild, but wild like animals – horses, say – not wild like some of their classmates, kids doing crazy things to get noticed, or trying to prove that they didn’t give a shit about all those people who didn’t give a shit about them. There were a few like that at our school, makeshift rebels with no obvious cause, over-the-counter vampires and goths, but Mats and Harald didn’t belong with that crowd, and they didn’t belong with this dark, intense girl, either. So, obviously, I noticed how odd they looked as a threesome – but I didn’t think any more about it, and they soon moved on, walking off into the crowds that had gathered for the coldest and snowiest Independence Day parade in years, definitely together, three instead of two. Naturally, I had no idea that, by the time of the midsummer bonfires, both of those boys would be dead, first Mats and then, ten days later, his little brother, inexplicably drowned in water that was too still, too calm and far too indifferent to have wanted them in the first place.

  I didn’t see Harald during the days that followed Mats’s death. By then, classes already seemed long done with, and we were all dispersed across the islands, waiting for results and thinking about what would come next. I didn’t go into Tromsø much, and I didn’t keep up with anybody from school. I was glad to be away from the world of classroom politics and teenage gossip, and I’d never been much for sleepovers or going out with the girls on a Saturday afternoon to look at make-up and shoes. I could imagine how painful it must have been for Harald, losing his brother like that, but I couldn’t imagine him wanting to die and, to this day, I still don’t think it was a suicide. He drowned in calm water, just as Mats had done, and that was strange, but it doesn’t mean he did it on purpose. Afterwards, Kyrre Opdahl would say – to me, and probably to anyone else who would listen – that it was because of her, because of the huldra; but that was ridiculous. There was no huldra. Something out of the ordinary had happened, but it was something that could be explained. Something psychological. There’s no proof that Harald even saw Maia during that week or so before he sneaked out of his house in the middle of the night and walked out to the shore in the gloaming, and there’s no reason to believe that she had anything to do with his going.

  Still, it has to be said that something strange happened. The meadows were quiet, the sky was clear – and the water was still, just as it had been when his brother was lost, so there was no reason for Harald to die. There was no reason for any of them to die, in fact. Not Mats, not Harald; certainly not Martin Crosbie, who shouldn’t even have been here in the first place. Everybody knows this and, even though most people have explained away everything they could explain and dismissed everything they couldn’t, I know we still think about it, all of us when we are alone, going over the sequence of events in our minds and trying to explain the impossible – and I know it haunts us still; it haunts, not just me, but all of us, because none of those drownings made any sense. Nobody should have died out there, in those conditions, at that time of year. Like Mats before him, Harald vanished on a still, moonlit night when the water was utterly calm and the boat – they found the boat at Kvitberg, sitting upright not far from the shore, as if waiting for him to return – the same boat Mats had used, stolen from the same neighbour, was in perfect condition. Besides which, there was no more reason for him to have been there than there was for Mats, no reason for him to row out till he was alone on the open water and no explanation for why he ended up dead. There was no reason for any of it, in fact. Not Mats, not Harald, not Martin Crosbie. Most of all, there was no reason for Kyrre Opdahl to disappear, along with the girl he hated so much, the two of them vanishing into thin air on the path from our house to the shore, leaving nothing more than a trail of spots in the grass that might have been ash or dust. A trail that was washed away by the rain before anyone could see it – though I saw it, and I see it now in my mind’s eye, a thin trail at the edge of the meadows, melting into the quick, dark rain before I could really make out what it was. So, yes, we are all of us haunted by what happened that year, even if we don’t talk about it any more – but I am haunted more than most, because of what I saw and couldn’t tell.

  That was ten summers ago. The summer of my eighteenth year; the summer my dead father appeared and then disappeared into the silence from which he’d come; the summer of spirits and secrets; the last summer when I thought of myself as one of God’s spies. A long, white summer of stories that no one could possibly believe, and stories that we all accepted, though we knew they were lies from beginning to end. The summer when the huldra came out from wherever she had been hiding and drowned three men, one by one, in the still, cold waters of Malangen. Now that everybody else has stopped talking about what happened that summer, only one story remains, and I can’t say it out loud, because it belongs to another world. I didn’t catch more than a glimpse of that world, but if I tried to talk about what I did see, the people in the town would think I was crazy, just like Kyrre Opdahl – and maybe I am because, even if I don’t believe what Kyrre said about the drownings, I know that something terrible happened, and I know that I saw what I saw, on that last day, when Kyrre and Maia vanished. People in the town would say that it was all just a series of unfortunate coincidences, because they want more than anything to explain this story away – but then, Kyrre always said that people in the town were stupid. All his life, he was surprised, and disappointed, that everyone around him took things so literally: they thought trolls were squat, crab-faced monsters that lived under bridges and ate stray goats; they thought the huldra was a pretty woman in a red dress dancing around in the meadows, waiting for a young man to beguile and destroy. People from the town didn’t believe in such things, of course they didn’t, so they made fun of the old stories, not realising that, for a true believer like Kyrre, nothing was ever that crude. But I realise; I know. In Kyrre’s house, there were shadows in the folds of every blanket, imperceptible tremors in every glass of water or bowl of cream set out on a table, infinitesimal loopholes of havoc in the fabric of reality that could spill loose and find you, as the first hint of a storm finds a rower out on the open sea. In Kyrre’s house, there were memories of real events, of long-dead farm lads and schoolgirls who went out at first light fifty years ago and came home touched – touched, for the rest of their lives – by something unnameable, a wing-beat or a gust of wind in their heads, where thought should have been. Kyrre believed in all that stuff, but it had nothing to do with monsters or fairies – and now, because of what I have seen and can’t explain, I find that I believe in it too. If I don’t want to speak about that in the town, or when I sit down to dinner with Mother and she looks at me, knowing that something has changed – something she is surprised to find she cannot put her finger on – if I don’t want to repeat Kyrre’s stories, ever, to anyone, it’s not because I am ashamed of them. It’s not even that I’m afraid that the people in town will say I am just as crazy as that old man who lost his mind and wandered off, all those years ago. As it happens, I don’t think the people in the town are stupid – at least, I don’t imagine they are any more stupid than people elsewhere. I just know that they belong to one world, and the stories belong to another. Somewhere in between, four souls were lost, and the huldra disappeared, but I couldn’t say for sure that any of them are really gone, and I keep going back to the places where I last saw them, looking for clues that must have been there, once upon a time, but which are now long gone.

  SEEING THINGS

  THE MOMENT I woke, I could tell something was wrong. I had the feeling that sometimes comes with waking, the feeling of dread that begins in a dream and then, as that night logic fails, solidifies for a moment into some dark, looming shape before it collapses into nothing but daylight and fairy-tale cliché. A phantom state, a will-o’-the-wisp, one of those tricks the mind plays on itself when i
t has heard too many stories. A stray thread of superstition, more real than anything else, more real and more persuasive, until you are finally awake and it becomes absurd. For a moment, I think, I really was scared and I didn’t quite know where I was. Then I heard voices downstairs and I realised that it was a Saturday morning in our grey, sunlit house above the meadows, a house that has become a metaphor over the years – a metaphor, or perhaps a talisman – for a certain way of living, a grey-painted timber house seen far and wide on gallery walls in Oslo and London and New York, in scarce and highly prized landscapes by the famously reclusive painter, Angelika Rossdal – a woman who happens to be, yet bears no actual resemblance to, my mother.

  Because the voices were there, in the dining room directly below my bed, it had to be some time after eleven o’clock, when Mother’s friends – Mother’s suitors – came to the house, as they did every week, no matter what the weather, driving over from Mjelde or Kvaløysletta on fair days, or skiing cross-country when it snowed, always punctual and always bearing gifts. Packets of seeds or new plants from Harstad, who had an alpine nursery further up the shore; books and newspaper cuttings from Ryvold, our tame scholar who, like Kyrre Opdahl, spent his time collecting stories – though for what seemed, at the time, quite different reasons. Rott, who was, in some ways, Mother’s favourite among that happy band of unrequited lovers, brought confectionery and sweetmeats, or fine teas from his shop in Tromsø. They never arrived empty-handed, and they never came without a story to tell, some titbit of gossip or local news gathered during the week just passed, the details carefully memorised so they would have something to talk about over the tea and pastries. They were all good men, and I didn’t actively dislike any of them, but I avoided their company whenever I could. Individually, they were decent, or even admirable; collectively, however, they made me sad, not because their lives were worse than anyone else’s, but because they were all so in love with Mother, each in his own way, and they all so clearly expected nothing in return.