THE CHANGING OF THE SEASONS: EXCERPT

The breakfast room at Hotel Krabbklon had only just started to fill with the smell of fresh rolls when Fru Gyllenhammar walked in and stopped all conversation. Granted, not much conversation had been going on between the four young seasonal workers that, at seven thirty in the morning, made up the room’s full populace– they had all stayed up enjoying their staff discounts the night before, and only two of them had had time to brush their teeth – but what little dialogue there had been was brought to a halt at the appearance of their manager’s wife and two small daughters. It was the first time anybody had seen Fru Gyllenhammar before noon, discounting the time when, three years earlier, she had silently observed her father-in-law’s burial from behind large, black sunglasses.

‘Good morning, ma’am,’ said Fredrik, the only returner among the staff, as he reported at Fru Gyllenhammar’s habitual beach-facing table. ‘All set for tonight, are we?’

‘Well, I am,’ Fru Gyllenhammar said and refused a menu held out by the stocky young man, ‘but these two have all of ten hours to catch more cuts, bites and bone-breaking blows than they ever dreamed of.’ She looked at the older of the two girls, distinguishable as such not so much by her size as by her hair, into which she had accepted the application of two strawberry-shaped hairclips. Her sister, whose hair was more like that of a troll doll, had agreed to no such inanity. ‘In fact this one,’ Fru Gyllenhammar said and stroked the shiny blonde hair of her firstborn, ‘has already caught herself a nasty cold. Haven’t you, dear?’

‘Hmph,’ Line said and snivelled, ‘why else would I be here?’

‘That’s true,’ Fru Gyllenhammar said and withdrew her hand. For a moment her face wavered, but she quickly regained composure and looked back at Fredrik. ‘She was supposed to go with her father to fetch the oysters,’ she said and rolled her eyes. Done with this, she tried to catch her daughter’s gaze, but was beaten to it by a salt shaker. Still, she put on a nursery teacher’s exaggerated inflection as she continued. ‘But sun and wind and salty sprays,’ she said to the girl’s downturned eyes, ‘is no recipe for recuperation, now is it?’

‘That’ll be two bowls of porridge, then,’ Fredrik said and tried not to look at the two buttons left unbuttoned on Fru Gyllenhammar’s dress. He looked instead at the redundant menus in his hands. ‘Am I correct?’

‘That’s right,’ Fru Gyllenhammar said and smiled, the sweet, reserved smile she used towards all her husband’s staff.

‘Very good, ma’am,’ Fredrik said and looked at the redhead’s pretty face, until he realised she’d only put mascara on the lashes of her left eye. He gave a quick bow and left the table.

‘Those ferries better be as crowded as your father thinks they’ll be,’ Fru Gyllenhammar said as Fredrik disappeared into the kitchen. She looked out across the empty dining room. ‘Or there will be an awful lot of oysters for us to finish.’

‘Of course they will,’ the older girl said and sighed. ‘You said the same thing last year, and just about a billion people turned up. In fact you say the same thing every year.’

The woman smiled, but did not take her eyes off the empty chairs around them. She did not speak as Fredrik came with the children’s porridge bowls, and Fredrik – unlike the children – knew better than to ask again a Fru Gyllenhammar before midday if indeed she did not want another look at the menu. And so they sat, Line in her hairclips eating the porridge and Grete with her troll hair moving it around in the bowl, until the first guest showed up at the breakfast buffet and Fru Gyllenhammar finally sat back in her chair. She looked at her daughters.

‘Why are you not eating, Grete,’ she asked and frowned at the smaller girl. Her tone made it clear this was a reprimand, not a question.

‘She doesn’t like porridge,’ Line replied.

Fru Gyllenhammar looked at Grete, her face a blend of disappointment and surprise. Grete looked at the porridge. ‘Well it’s good for you,’ Fru Gyllenhammar said after a couple of seconds. ‘There is no alternative on the card. You’ll learn to like it in time.’

‘Daddy lets me eat cereal,’ Grete said without looking up from the sticky spoon in her hand, going round and round. ‘Ouch,’ she said then, feeling her sister’s sandal hit her shin.

‘Oh does he,’ replied her mother and raised a theatrical eyebrow. Keeping her eyes on the face of her youngest daughter, she seemed to be considering this new piece of intelligence. ‘Well,’ she said then, ‘you won’t be eating from that buffet so long as I’m in the room. People grab those bread rolls with their fingers.’

‘Can I go then,’ prompted Grete.

‘Not until you’ve finished. As you would have,’ Fru Gyllenhammar said and reached a long, slim arm across the table to loosen a linen napkin, once eggshell and now covered in blue and green crayon, from underneath Grete’s elbow , ‘if you hadn’t spent your time converting your father’s investment into, now what is this, a… cow?’

‘It’s uncle Klas’s motor-bike.’

‘Where’s the sketchbook I gave you?’ Fru Gyllenhammar asked, a wrinkle appearing between her two shapely eyebrows.

‘In our room.’

‘Well you better hurry back and put this in with the others,’ she said and nodded to the napkin between her thumb and forefinger. ‘You know you’ll never make it through first grade unless you become more organized.’

Without a word, Grete snatched the napkin back from her mother. She put it on top of the clear plastic crayon suitcase next to her bowl, and carefully folded it to the same shape and size. Then she pulled her legs out from beneath her scrawny body, grabbed her artist’s materials, and left the table.

Down in the harbor a few more people had woken up, but Grete paid no mind to the bath-robed couples having coffee on the decks of their sailing boats who, at the sudden sound of footsteps, turned their sleepy heads to look at the barefooted girl as she thundered down the jetty. Grete really did make an awful lot of sound for a girl of such slight build, never having learned to run as graciously as her sister or the other girls at gymnastics, but she couldn’t care about grace when the fishing boats would be tying up any minute. In fact, she noticed as she turned the corner behind the last of the rust-red fishermen’s huts, they had already come in. Her mother had kept her past seven-fifteen. She stopped in her tracks, wild-eyedly scanning the tall figures unloading cages and untangling nets around her. He wasn’t there. She took a deep breath, and was just about to ask Jörgen, who had a glass eye, when something big and cold nudged her from behind. She spun around to find an empty red wheelbarrow, wheeled by a pale-faced boy of slim build, a good six feet, twenty-and-some years and spectacularly bad posture. Grete broke out into a wide grin, unashamedly displaying the gap left by her recently fallen-out left canine tooth.

‘So what did you think?’ she asked enthusiastically.

The boy glanced over at Jörgen, who was combing through a piece of sun-bleached-green net. ‘You shouldn’t have come to my house,’ he said lowly. ‘I’ve told you that already.’

Grete turned her head to the fishing-boat on her right and lowered her eyes. ‘Nobody saw me,’ she said flatly.

‘That’s not the point,’ said the boy and stepped from the jetty into the turquoise-bottomed boat. He grabbed the sides of a tank no bigger than an average suitcase, and began edging it out from a row of four identical containers. Some water splashed over the edges, and he bit his lower, already chafed lip. Then, in a feat that seemed to require the boyish frame’s maximum strength, he hoisted the tank onto his knee and wobbled it onto the jetty.

Grete stared down into the dark clouds of claws and antennae that scraped about the bottom of the tank. Her eyes widened. ‘There’s a crab in there with just one claw,’ she said and squinted at Nikolai’s flushed face. ‘You have to take it out, or it won’t get any mussel when you feed them.’

‘I’ll make sure to tell Jörgen,’ Nikolai said and wiped his brow with the back of a surprisingly large hand. He let it drop to his side and looked at the child in front of him. Grete was watching him intently, albeit with one eye only, the other shut to prevent sneezing from morning sun. When no command came, she dug her hand into the belly pocket of the red-and-white cotton dress her mother had sewn for her first day of school, and which she was intent on wearing every day until then. Tenderly she took out a small packet wrapped in the crayoned napkin. She looked at it for a second, a bit like one would look at a hamster before passing it to the vet, then held it out towards Nikolai.

The boy looked at the packet, not taking his hands off his sides. ‘What’s this?’

‘Open it,’ prompted Grete.

‘It better not be pancakes again.’

Grete said nothing. The boy sighed loudly, and it was with considerable grudge – facial, if not vocal – that he took the packet off the girl’s hands. But he took it nonetheless, and his face softened a fair bit as he unfolded the moist pieces of cloth. He looked at the limp yellowy slabs, and then he looked at the blue and green lines surrounding it.

Grete, noticing immediately the shift of focus, quickly snatched the napkin back. The pancakes flopped onto the wooden planks below. ‘It’s not finished yet.’

‘Easy,’ Nikolai hissed, realizing too late the sharpness of his tone. Grete looked down at her feet. For a moment the boy said nothing, looking at the sun-burnt line that zigzagged through Grete’s white-blonde hair and thinking of a way to repair the damage. He crouched down to attain a matching height. ‘Hey,’ he said softly, putting a finger underneath Grete’s chin. He began pushing it upwards, seeking the eyes of the child. ‘Oh don’t cry now,’ he said as he saw Grete’s tearing eyes. ‘I’m not angry. See?’ He stretched the corners of his mouth as wide as he could. ‘See that? I’m happy.’

Grete closed her eyes and sniveled loudly. ‘I’m not crying.’

‘Oh no?’

‘I don’t mean to be so ag-‘ – she gasped, not very successfully, for air – ‘a-gu-gu…’ The girl paused, swallowed loudly, and used her final bit of air to get the end of the word out: ‘guh-ressive.’

A little uncertainly, Nikolai looked around the jetty. The other fishermen were still going about their business, taking no interest in the little girl who had come down to greet the boats every morning for more than two months. He turned back to the girl. She was looking pointedly away, breath held and lower lip out. The lip, however, was not moving. Gingerly, Nikolai reached out and tugged at the hem of the red-and-white dress. Having regained the child’s attention, he dug his hand into the freezing water of the tank and snatched out the one-clawed crab. He held it in front of Grete just long enough so she could recognise the cripple, and then, with a Frisbee-thrower’s flick of the wrist, tossed it across the jetty and into the glittering water.

‘Well come on, then,’ he said to the breathless and, by now, certainly snivel-less child as he got to his feet. ‘This won’t wheel itself to the fish-shop. You gonna be any help this morning or what?’