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  Darkness was everywhere. The darkness smelled. It smelled of fright and something sickly. Darkness it was that rushed from the tap and filled up the bath. I washed my hair in darkness, my body, my entire being. I ate of the darkness, and was stained by it inside. The darkness encroached. Only mum still contained the light. Darkness yielded to her. Unburdened, she went about as if it were nothing. Even if her brow was now furrowed. We’re a family of light, were the words that came out, with the same conviction as ever. I wondered if she even saw the darkness. If it frightened her. If she was refusing to see it, or if it really wasn’t there for her.

  I kept a knife in the drawer of my desk. I sometimes took it out and looked at it. Felt the sharpness of the blade against my fingertips. It was the filleting knife that we used to bone fish, and how it ever came to be in the hall one day, so conspicuous there on the window sill, I’ve no idea. But I took it with me into my room and put it in the drawer, and its being there gave me a feeling of calm. I had a knife. Now and then I took it out of the drawer and placed it on top of the notebook, where it was plain to see how sharp it was. I wondered if I would ever use it.

  The bass thumped in my brother’s room, throbbing at the wall. Maybe he was laying a bass track down on the computer. It was the only instrument I could hear. My brother’s musical talents had held my mum’s attention from the start. She bought him whatever he pointed at in the music store, which was quite a lot. He played the guitar and the piano. I’d never heard him practise. All of a sudden he could just play.

  Before, I would sing to his music, into the microphone, and he would mix the song and we would listen to it all together, mum, my brother, and me. Mum always said the same thing: that my brother was brilliant and I sang so well. That we were musical was something she took to be a good sign. It fit in with us being a family of light. It had been a long time now since my brother had wanted to share anything with us. He kept mum firmly from his room by nailing it shut, and I wouldn’t ever have dreamed of knocking on his door. The three of us kept to ourselves. Mum was at the theatre, I didn’t even know what she was playing. By the time she got home late in the evenings I was usually asleep, or else I would hear her and not get up. All this must have been a hindrance to her in her efforts to look on the bright side. The silence around me grew and became their silence too. Mum still spoke to me, but she stopped expecting me to answer. I think I’d have given her a fright if I’d suddenly said something. It feels as if every situation strives to find balance, each encounter at the fridge, that every moment is something that has to be poised against something else. Living together was perhaps just that, shifting the centre of balance until everyone could stick it out. There were lots of ways. One was no better than the rest.

  They’re growing up, mum would say to a girlfriend over the phone. Soon they won’t be children anymore. But it was only something she said. That wasn’t what was happening at all. Not yet.

  What was happening? Were we coming apart now that dad had gone? Had he been keeping us together? Why did I no longer belong in my family?

  Dear God. Look after mum and make her happy. Amen. Her happiness was the most important of all. I could have done a lot more. I could have talked to her. I could have been like I was in school. I could have filled the apartment with voices and life. Did it ever occur to me what life would be like without her? What we would do then on our own? It was a thought that didn’t bear thinking. She was everything to me. Without her I couldn’t exist. I knew that.

  I used to have a life. Did I still? My refusal to speak was bigger than I had ever been. The silence came out of me and laid itself over everything that was here. It went into mum’s mouth and reshaped her words. Absorbed her syllables. Are you hungry? Have you showered today? Have you done your homework?

  Before, the words would tumble out in her eagerness to describe the world. To express her joy at being alive.

  How did she end up in the theatre? Mum and dad lived together up north, she was a secretary at the iron works, he was an engineer. He had his fishing and his football, a job he enjoyed, and then she came and messed it up. How small a life, she would say. Is this all there is? She took the train down south, to the capital, applied to the country’s finest drama school and was admitted. It was sheer grit. Her new class were on the TV news, and dad and grandma and everyone else up there saw her sitting on the stone steps of the Royal Dramatic Theatre, waving at the camera with all the others. They relocated and she began her new life. Dad had to end his and tag along. It was the start of his decline. He couldn’t hack it in the city, even though he soon got a new job and supported mum during the years she attended the school.

  I used to tell her everything. She could get me to talk about the slightest fluctuation. It was such a blessing, the way she always knew how I felt, and together we could thrash things out, bring them into the open, until the badness was little and all on its own, and vanished in the light, her light. She took all the badness and made it go away. She was a magician, playing with the light on the walls, stealing into the nooks and crannies of my mind, slipping into my tummy, where the badness first set in. She soothed me from the inside and made me free. When had it stopped? How could I have chosen to be without it? To be without her?

  Was that the difference between the child and the grown-up? To be able to let light in, and then not? What was I now? I wasn’t a grown-up. But I wasn’t a child either. I wasn’t yet a teenager, so I was a child. A child clinging to darkness. It was scary.

  The walls moved in the night. Bulging in and out. As if they were breathing. I put my hands against them, pressed to keep them still, but they kept on breathing and took no notice. Sometimes I sat on the balcony in the night and looked at the stars. Looked for the constellations I knew. There weren’t many: the Plough, the Little Bear, the Great Bear. When I was little we used to drag the mattresses and covers out to the balcony in summer and sleep there. One night, dad came shinning up the drainpipe. He was tired of his flat, but mum had taken his key to ours. His eyes flashed in the darkness as he climbed onto the balcony and we looked at each other. He could turn up anytime. He always turned up. His dark eyes that night. The look that silenced me straight away. The look that said he was going to kill us.

  One time we came home from visiting grandma up north, the whole apartment was filled with gas. Dad had turned it on and the air was thick and hard to breathe. Mum ran down into the street with me and my brother and told us to wait on the pavement. Then she dashed back up into the apartment, turned off the gas, and opened the windows. My brother there in the street with my hand in his: You know mummy can die, don’t you? But then she came back down and we went to a café where we stuffed ourselves to celebrate that we were still alive. Later, when evening came, I heard her talking to dad on the phone. Were you trying to kill us?

  The nights were crisp and clear on the balcony. We had two big wicker chairs out there with cushions, and a small table with a lantern on it. Mum often smoked a cigarette on the balcony after dinner and I would watch her from the kitchen while I did the dishes. All I could see was the smoke curling into the air, the back of her head, her blond hair. Perhaps she sat with her feet up on the rail. Perhaps she was trying to relax and remove herself from it all. My mum’s solitude was something I couldn’t think about.

  The terror I felt if she didn’t come straight home after the show. My crying if it got too late. Where was she? What had happened? Most likely she was only having a drink with the others. She was seldom late, but when she was that was what I told myself she was doing.

  The clock, sweeping away the time, and her not being back. I used to lie down on the sofa in the living room and wait. I waited and waited. Now I did the same, but in my bed, and the tears would never come. The relief of hearing her key in the door was still the same though. She had survived. She was alive.

  Before, the thought never occurred to me that she probably need
ed to see other people besides my brother and me. The thought was new to me and it came out of the silence along with every other understanding. She wanted to be with other grown-ups. Nothing odd about that.

  Sometimes I would think I was punishing her. That I was attacking all the light with my darkness.

  I ate my dinners in my room. Fetched my plate from the kitchen, with meat and rice, chicken or fish. Always something well prepared, from fresh ingredients. I couldn’t refuse food. My hunger was too great and I imagined myself to be growing with every bite I took. That I was nourishing my growth and that it was no use stopping. I was nearly the tallest in my class by then. From having been one of the smallest I’d now shot up. There was something uncomfortable about growing like that, it felt so out of control. I even pestered God about it, pleading with him to stop me growing so fast. I knew I could make it stop by speaking. As things were, there was nothing to curb it, nothing in its way.

  My mum would leave a tray at my brother’s door. When no one was there, he opened the door and took it in. Then he would nail the door shut again and eat. There was no need for the nails. Neither mum nor I would ever go in there.

  But sometimes mum came into my room. She could stand for a long time in the middle of the floor, looking around. As if barely awake, unable to take things in. Her gaze passed over me and warmed me in the armchair. If I was sitting on the bed she would sometimes sit down beside me and smooth my hair. Everything all right? she might say, and look at me, only in the next instant to vanish inside herself. Getting enough fresh air? Why don’t you go over to the park for a bit? I wouldn’t move, but did my utmost not to shake or nod my head. Please yourself, she would say and then leave. The room had to catch up with itself again after her visits. It needed to settle down and get its breath back. I put my hand against the wall and pressed against it to see if it would give, but it stayed the way it was, motionless. She left her smell behind her when she went. The sweet bodily aroma that was hers. I opened the window to the chestnut tree and the evening sky. I sat on the windowsill and looked out over the rear courtyard, the little lawn there under the tree, the gravel pathways that led around the courtyard and from the iron gate to the door. The concierge’s old Volvo under its tarps, driven only on the occasional evening in summer.

  Now and again they spoke to each other. My mum and my brother. They could laugh together, and I would try not to listen. They seemed to have a kind of shared understanding then. But it was on my brother’s terms. Sometimes he needed to come out from his room. Sometimes he needed to talk to mum. About music, school, girls. He’d met someone and wanted to bring her home so mum could meet her too. He was proud of her; it showed. Would she change anything? I asked myself. Would she change my brother? Curb his anger, extinguish it? I looked forward to her coming. I wanted to see her and my mum together.

  My brother stopped nailing his door shut. The day before she was meant to come, he left it open. I heard him vacuuming and getting rid of all the bottles. He’d decided to step out into the world. He was done with something, whatever it was.

  Mum wanted her to stay for dinner. It was her night off and she asked my brother what they would like to eat. Nothing out of the ordinary, was all he said, but I could hear the way he smiled when he said it. The apartment had life again. Not just mum’s pupils, but a proper guest. The kitchen was a hive of expectation, mum busied herself making a seafood pie. Seafood pie, would that be all right?

  It was as if my brother had given her a present. At last, a break in our daily lives. I thought it best to keep a distance, so my brother wouldn’t need to introduce his sister. No need to bring anything weird into it from the start. Nevertheless, I’d be disconcertingly close to them if they sat in the kitchen, and I thought maybe mum would realise this and set the table in the living room.

  All of a sudden, she was there. Her presence could be felt throughout the apartment. The air was different, and I could sense that she too was a person of light. That my brother had found a girlfriend who in many ways was like mum. Her voice, rising and falling with mum’s and my brother’s. But still it was odd, I thought. That he’d brought her here.

  They ate in the living room. Mum had already set the table. I couldn’t hear anything of what they said to each other. I listened, but heard only a faint murmur from behind the door. Did I want to be with them? No, not at all. Maybe she would come back. Sooner or later, we would have to be introduced. Perhaps I would hold her hand.

  I was sitting in the kitchen when mum came in to put the coffee on. I could tell she was still pleased. Do you want to join us for dessert? Her voice caught me off guard, though I’d seen her come in. I went to my room. To my surprise, she came after me. Her name’s Vendela, she said. Perhaps you know her? But I didn’t. It had been a long time since I’d looked in the school yearbook and studied the faces of those in the older classes. Maybe you should come out and say hello? Mum put her arm in mine and nudged me gently in the direction of the serving passage. I offered no resistance, allowing myself to be led across the floor to the living room. I saw them sitting at the table, my brother and this Vendela. They looked up at me, and I stepped towards her on my own. She stood up and seemed to collect herself, her features came together. She put her hand out and I shook it. Neither of us said anything. Unexpectedly, my brother got to his feet and said: Vendela, this is my sister who doesn’t speak. Vendela smiled at me. I couldn’t smile back.

  I finished my ice cream and stared down at my plate. Mum chatted with Vendela and my brother. About school mostly, and Vendela’s voice rose and fell as various subjects cropped up. Mum was beaming. Energetic and warm. My brother was surprisingly buoyant. Our eyes met over the ice cream and he was wide open. I’d never see him like that before, and sucked in my breath, sensing that something I knew had now come to an end. That something new had begun and that I didn’t know what it was. Fiercely, I longed for the way things had been before Vendela. Each of us in our own silence. Now everything was a turmoil. It was opening up and I didn’t want that. I would need to get even better at shutting myself in if this was how it was going to be. I got up from the table and crossed the floor. Behind me they went on with their conversation. It was as if I didn’t exist. They’d made up their minds, my mum and my brother. I wasn’t going to spoil anything.

  The walls bulged in my room. I didn’t bother pressing my hand against them, but threw myself on the bed and buried my head under the pillow. Nevertheless, I could still hear my brother and Vendela when they went into my brother’s room. I heard their voices, my brother putting music on. Vendela’s voice sang out into the room. Had they been recording while I’d been at school? It sounded gorgeous, the music and her voice, which seemed almost to float on its own. They laughed in unison about something, and I wondered if my brother was glad she was there or if he’d rather everything were the same as before. Maybe both, I thought to myself, and pulled the cover up.

  When I woke up it was night. I sat up with the feeling I’d missed something important. Under what circumstances had she left? Assuming she’d actually gone? Or was she asleep beside my brother in his bed? I went out into the kitchen and through the serving passage, past the living room into the hall. Her shoes weren’t there. She must have gone.

  I went back to my room. Night was the time I liked best. The silence, and the feeling of everything having wound down to collect itself again before morning. The darkness in which to rest. Nothing that had to be done, or not be done. Stillness. Mum and my brother asleep. I could sit in the armchair and do nothing. What had their parting been like? Had he kissed her while we were here, so close in the apartment? Or had he simply hugged her and breathed in the smell of her hair?

  Night was a friend. Silence wasn’t odd at night, and loneliness unfeigned. Not like in the daytime, where my silence was more a reaction against mum or my brother. I was one with the night and we spoke the same language. Breathed the same stillness. It was like when I
was little and would sit on mum’s knee after a performance. The way I could sleep there in her lap and not have to be afraid of anything. Just give up and sail away. The way mum would lay me down on the sofa in the dressing room while she got changed. Removed her makeup, moisturised, pulled off the wig cap with all the hair pins she kept in a glass jar. All of this I sensed in sleep, the way you sense something happen above the surface while swimming deep underwater. You see a movement, but are far away, the water pressing against your ear drums. The last cigarette before she would wake me up and we’d go down into the foyer and ask them to call a taxi. I sleep-walked into the lift, descended six floors, before lying down again with my head in mum’s lap in the back of the cab. Absorbing her fragrance and the leathery smell of the upholstery. The lights in the night as we drove. The street lamps suspended like small, shining planets. The cab door after we got out and it was shut behind us. The cold air as we crossed the pavement to the entranceway. The stairs up to the apartment, and mum putting me to bed with my clothes still on. I was awake and not awake. Like now.

  Daddy. Are you there? Yes, I’m here. What do you think of Vendela? Don’t worry yourself about her. Mind your own. Do you think I should start talking again? Mum wants me to see a specialist. You’ll be fine, petal. You’re stronger than them. Am I? Yes, much.

  The night wrapped me up inside it, drew me back to bed with its darkness. I listened to the sound of my breathing as it slowed, then drifted into sleep, wading into the water, my dress held up above my knees, crossing over to the island where we bathed when we were away at the cabin. The island where mum had discovered you were allowed to be naked. Only women and children bathed there. The water, salt and sweet, cold and warm against my bare skin. How I swam, back and forth between the island and the jetty. Back and forth. My body finding purchase in every stroke to forge ahead. The sun shone always. The frozen meatballs thawed on the rocks and the sandwiches with liver paste and cucumber in their little packages of silver foil at the bottom of the cooler box would be squashed flat, but always they tasted so good. The bottle of squash, the liquid inside tasting of strawberries and warm plastic. The nudity was confusing. Mum’s body, and the cabin neighbours’. Their bare skin. And my own nakedness. I covered myself with the towel when I came up from the water. Mum laughed. What a shy girl. Everyone thought it was funny. Everyone laughed, whatever my mum said. They admired her. It was hard not to.