Prologue
The stone ship
2014
It is difficult to piece together fragments of memories and do justice to people you have cared for in just a few written words. Sometimes I am unsure whether a memory is real, something I was told, or something seen in a photograph. Now and then I am overcome by a strong, aching sense of longing. When spring comes, I can’t help thinking that another year has gone by, and the memories of my friends have faded even more.
I pack my backpack and start the hike to the place where we said goodbye. To the place Rickard chose. This time, I go there just as the last snow has melted and the paths are still muddy. It’s a long walk, and I reach the ridge by the old castle ruins by noon.
I carefully climb over the small rocks, navigating the slippery ridge towards the point where I have the clearest view of the lake. It’s a cold day, and the icy water below blends with the white sky on the horizon. I take it all in and follow the line of bare, slender birch trees down to my left.
The forest opens up to a small clearing. I feel calm, but I still look for shoeprints in the mud and listen for voices.
There are thirty-three Viking graves here, but only seven are visible under the dried winter grass. In the middle of the clearing stands a stone ship made of twenty-eight stones, with a round stone in the centre. I take a few steps forward and touch the largest stone. I drop my backpack and press both palms against the wet, lichen-covered stone, pausing as my breath turns into small, white clouds.
This stone has stood here, resolute, for fifteen hundred years. Its surface is plain, and there are no runes or markings, because this burial ground honours all fallen men and women. By coming here, I hope the stone will remember them even when I can’t. Slowly, I drag my finger across the surface, writing each of their names.
Patrik.
Rickard.
Ash.
March 1995
Spring term, year 9
The first time I saw him was after our second lesson. As the girls and I walked towards our lockers, I noticed, out of the corner of my eye, that someone was at our table. The unpopular kids’ table.
A chill ran down my neck. A teacher stood in the corridor, chatting with a group of boys. Students moved back and forth. Nobody stopped. All the while, this boy sat not at but on top of our table, curled up, his hands covering his face, crying.
I swallowed the lump in my throat, and walked up to him.
“Are you okay?”
I placed my hand gently on his upper arm. He flinched and turned towards me; I pulled away. He looked up at me from under his black hair, wiped his tears with the sleeve of his hoodie, and nodded twice.
“Come with me.”
He followed me to my sanctuary: the school library. Edith, the librarian, was tiny and soft-spoken. Not even the most persistent bullies dared to argue with her. She opened the door, stepped aside when she saw his face, and locked it behind us.
The library was small, with a quiet reading room at the back, closed off by glass walls looking out onto the courtyard. The rows of worn books, together with Edith’s calm presence, always made me feel more at ease. I knew she wouldn’t ask why we were there.
We sat down in the reading room. She brought us each a glass of water, then handed him a damp towel to wipe his face.
When he picked up his glass, I noticed something different about his hands. When he moved his right hand, the fingers of his left twitched as if they were also grabbing something in the air, mirroring each movement.
When he caught me staring, he nearly dropped the glass and hid both hands under the table. He looked at me with tense blue eyes, waiting for me to say something.
“Hey, you don’t need to do that. I think it looks kind of cool,” I blurted, louder than I’d meant to.
My head spun. Had I really said that? Had I just outed myself as a freak to the new boy?
I was still trying to work out how to survive in this world. Maybe, just maybe, he could show me.
I thought he would look away. Laugh at me, maybe. My face was burning, but to my relief, he dropped his guard a little.
He finished his water, and when I asked his name and class, all he said was,
“I’d like to go back to class now.”
After he left, Edith took a bookmark from her desk, wrote something on the back, and handed it to me. It read: Patrik Isaac, 9C.
I walked back to our corner table, the bookmark still in my hand. I barely registered that my friends were asking who he was or whether he’d been crying.
Anna slid my books across the table and stood up. Simon mumbled that he must be new. I told them I didn’t know. I’d just taken him to Edith.
When the bell rang, we headed towards our next lesson. Farther down the corridor, Patrik walked into his classroom.
I was still thinking about the stupid thing I’d said. And of the fear in his eyes when I touched his arm.
We didn’t share any classes, but it didn’t matter. I saw him move through the school, trying to make himself invisible, just like me. Our eyes would meet, and when I nodded or raised my hand, he stood taller; his feet stopped shifting. I did the same. But if he saw me talking to someone else, he’d soon look away.
He was tall, but he tried to hide it. Skinny, with a chiselled face and high cheekbones. With those blue eyes, he could have pulled it off easily. I kept noticing small things: his barely visible limp, the way his hair fell over his eyes because he always kept his head down, the tiniest birthmark above his left eyebrow.
I realised that when he was waiting for me in the corridor after my classes, he was sometimes skipping his own.
A few times I walked past him while he was sitting alone in the school cafeteria, always close to the exit, and I thought he might say something. If Anna or Simon were with me, he never looked up, and I never had the courage to go over and sit with him. Another time, he saw me sitting in the reading room, but turned back at the door.
After the Easter holiday, I noticed he was disappearing for days at a time. I made up an excuse to ask about him at the school office, and they told me his dad had rung in to say he was ill. Whenever he returned, there were dark rings under his eyes. He seemed even more distant, but he wasn’t going to tell me why; we weren’t speaking.
One morning, after he had been gone for nearly a week, I turned from my locker and saw two of the boys who used to bully me coming down the corridor. They were being loud and shoving each other as usual.
When they got close, one of them suddenly slammed his fist into the locker next to me, and I flinched. Patrik stepped forward. I hadn’t even realised he was there. They glanced at him, and I slipped past them.
Back at our table, Jessica lowered her voice to a whisper.
“You shouldn’t let him do that.”
“Do what?” I asked.
“Get involved,” she said.
“I just want to know why he hasn’t been to school,” I tried.
“You should stay away from him. Everyone’s saying his brother is a drug dealer,” Anna said.
“He’s probably using too.”
She said it as if it was obvious.
“He isn’t high. He’s just anxious,” I said.
Maybe even scared.
But what did I know about drugs? I hadn’t even tried alcohol yet, and I didn’t want to. I didn’t see the point of losing control. I was already barely managing.
But the rumour I couldn’t shake was that he locked himself in the bathroom after PE, and that someone had seen bruises on his arm.
The girls quickly changed the subject back to an upcoming party, and I leaned back against the wall and stopped listening.
All they seemed to talk about was fashion, make-up, parties, and boys. All I wanted was to get through the school day without being questioned.
I didn’t want the attention of men. I wanted them as far away from me as possible. I should make myself less pretty, less desirable. I still had flashbacks to that man’s hands on my body when a boy stood too close in the lunch line or brushed against me.
When the girls partied, I stayed home, hiding from my stepbrother in my room, reading fantasy, painting, and listening to music.
One Friday afternoon, I picked up my brother Jesper after school, and we took the shortcut across the meadow. Halfway across the field, three boys came up behind us.
One of them grabbed my arms and twisted them behind my back. The others ripped through our pockets and backpacks, laughing and throwing insults. I recognised one of them from school.
When Jesper kicked and stomped on his foot, the boy slapped him hard across the back of the head, and my brother dropped to his knees. Mud splattered across his face and into his blond hair.
I was furious. I didn’t think. I turned and drove my knee into the boy’s groin as hard as I could. He doubled over, cursing, and they let us go. They threw our bags into the grass and ran.
I helped Jesper up, and we stood there panting, eyes wide, staring at each other for a minute. I grabbed our bags, gave him a quick pat on the back, and we ran the rest of the way. We didn’t slow down until we reached the house.
Mum panicked when we got home. She asked me over and over if I was sure I didn’t know who they were. Then she rang the school and a few other parents. I knew I’d pay for it, but I said,
“Ask Marcus. It was his friend.”
I hid in my room when my stepdad knocked on my stepbrother’s door.
“Marcus! Do you know anything about this?”
I was too scared of his retaliation to go upstairs for dinner. Mum thought I was just moody and brought a plate to my room. Soon after, Jesper knocked on my door with his plate in his hands. He crawled up on my bed, and we had dinner together, watching an episode of The X-files.
At breakfast the next morning, Marcus sat down on the kitchen sofa opposite me, laid my Mr. Big CD across a pencil, and snapped it in two.
Mum called it an accident.
I was boiling.
On Monday, I got my first glimpse of the real Patrik. He was waiting for me outside school. The girls looked at each other, then nudged me towards him anyway before disappearing towards their buses.
I stopped a few steps away, waiting for him to speak. He shifted his weight.
“Hi Hanna … can I walk you home?”
I was surprised he knew my nickname and I couldn’t help smiling.
“I’d like that. Are you sure?”
“Yeah. You probably shouldn’t walk home alone,” he mumbled.
“It’s a twenty-minute walk,” I said, watching his face.
“Okay,” he said, and we started walking.
“What about you? Do you live close by?” I asked.
He twitched, barely noticeably, as if the question had surprised him.
“I … live at Dad’s. With Mum,” he said.
I stayed quiet and waited.
“And I have a brother. But he’s older than your brother. I mean … he’s older than me. His name is Rickard. But he’s not my real brother.”
He stopped mid-step and looked at me, almost pleading.
“Like a stepbrother?” I said.
“Not exactly …” he said, staring down at his shoes. “Half-brother. Most people at school know who he is.”
As we walked, he kept his left hand buried in his pocket. I wanted to ask why he’d been missing school. I wanted to thank him for waiting, for walking with me. Instead, I repeated my question:
“Where do you live?”
“Edsberg,” he said.
“Edsberg? But that’s miles away. You’re really walking me home? You’d have to take the bus to the train station and then…”
“I don’t like being at home,” he interrupted, scratching at his face.
“Me neither,” I agreed.
He had fallen in behind me, so I slowed until we were walking side by side again.
“Sometimes I stay at my brother’s place in the city,” he said. “I have more friends there than at school.”
I knew I might not get another chance, so I asked.
“Why do your fingers do that?”
“It’s not just my fingers,” he said. “My wrists and toes too. It’s genetic.”
He pulled his left hand from his pocket. The fingers moved slower, mirroring the ones on his right.
He held out his right hand in front of me, palm up.
“Here, put your finger on my thumb.”
I could hardly believe he was asking me to touch him. This was the same boy who could barely speak to me. My heart skipped, and that familiar tingling rose in my chest.
I pressed my thumb into his hand, doing as he asked. He flexed his fingers.
“Soft, yeah? Now try the other hand.”
His skin was rougher; the palm was rock hard. I let my thumb slide up his stiff fingers before letting go and turning to him.
“Why is it—?”
“Arthritis,” he said. “Apparently it’s not just old people who get it.”
“I didn’t know,” I said. “Do you need to get shots, like, into your joints?”
“I’ve tried them. They don’t help for long.”
When we reached the bus stop near my house, I wanted to ask more, but he’d already looked away. We sat in silence until his bus arrived. At the last second, as he turned to climb aboard, we both spoke at once:
“I’ll—”
“See you tomorrow,” we said together.
I watched the bus pull away.
I could count the number of people who had ever wanted to be my friend on one hand, including Ellie, who had been my friend for two weeks in year two before she found someone else. I never knew the right thing to say, and I didn’t usually get a second chance.
And now there was Patrik, who knew my nickname and what had happened on Friday. Who cared enough to walk me home, to stand in the way of the bullies.
I was surprised he’d shared anything with me. I didn’t know his favourite TV show, which teacher he liked best, what music he listened to, or, more importantly, whether he liked fantasy. But I wanted to find out. That night, I lay in bed going over all the questions I wanted to ask him.
On the bus the next morning, Jessica asked me,
“What did you guys do yesterday?”
“He just walked me home, then he left.”
“Wait, you didn’t hang out? You just walked?” Anna asked over the seat.
“What did you talk about?” Jessica asked. “He never talks to anyone.”
“Nothing much. School. Where he lives.”
I wasn’t sure why I didn’t want to tell them about his hands. Or that I would see him again after school.
In the afternoon, he was waiting for me outside the main entrance.
“Hi, did you just finish?” I asked.
“At three.”
He had already been waiting almost an hour.
“I need to be home in an hour. Mum doesn’t like when I’m late,” he said.
“Your mum seems pretty strict.”
I saw his shoulders tighten. When he didn’t say anything more, I asked,
“Do you also have maths with Mrs Aida? She got so angry today I thought she was going to kick us out.”
“Yeah.”
“And I think you have English with Simon?”
I described what Simon looked like even though he probably already knew who I meant.
“I’ve seen you in the library. Do you like to read fantasy?”
“I like computers more.”
He looked up at me.
“I like birds, too,” he said.
“I have two zebra finches. They are really noisy,” I said. “Or, they are not mine, they are the whole family’s.”
“I don’t have any pets. I used to have a cocker spaniel.”
“Oh. I love dogs,” I said.
He went quiet, but came up beside me.
“So why did you change schools? There must be schools closer to where you live?”
He didn’t reply, and we walked the rest of the way in silence.
At the bus stop near my house, he said,
“I didn’t want to switch schools, but Mum made me.”
“She says I ruin it for her.”
He raised his hand and flicked it over a couple of times.
“She doesn’t like it. She thinks I can just make it stop, but I can’t.”
He said it as if it were simply a fact. That almost made it worse.
He scratched his face, then quickly put his hand back in his pocket.
“My mum is Nev Hansen. Isaac is my dad’s surname. Thomas Isaac? Mum registered me at school under his name, but most teachers know who I am.”
I stared at him.
“So your mum is a supermodel?”
“Or was,” he said, glancing at me and tugging his sleeves down over his hands. “I wasn’t sure if you already knew.”
I shook my head.
I wasn’t sure how he wanted me to react. I wanted to ask more, but the bus arrived.
The next week, he walked me home twice. Sometimes we walked in silence, sometimes deep in conversation, always at his pace. If I got distracted halfway through a thought, he waited until I had finished, then picked up the thread where we’d left off.
On the first warm day, he stopped so suddenly that I almost walked into him.
“Sorry,” he said, and pointed at a magpie sitting on a fence by the side of the road. He stood there, watching it in silence until it flew away, as if everything else could wait.
Two loud motorcycles went past us as we waited to cross the road.
“My brother likes to go to motocross events at the weekends,” he said. “But if I’m not with him, it’s usually just me and Mum.”
“My mum works at a bank and my stepdad manages a taxi company. Your life sounds more exciting than mine.”
“I don’t know if exciting is the right word,” he said, then fell quiet for several minutes.
A few days later, I was sitting at our table, doodling absentmindedly on my notepad, when Simon sat down, Patrik following behind him.
“Come sit with us,” Simon said.
Patrik hesitated then sat down opposite me, and I smiled carefully.
At first, he barely spoke to anyone but me. He sat with us during recess, but mostly listened. Even when he looked down, I could tell he was paying attention. Sometimes I saw him shift and glance past us towards a loud group of students or a door slamming, not as if he was waiting for someone, but as if he was bracing for whatever might happen next.
One afternoon, I saw Jessica and Anna leaning over our table, studying three golden envelopes with the Swedish Film Institute logo on them. Patrik had brought tickets to a screening of While You Were Sleeping. That was exciting, at least to us. He didn’t make a big deal about it. If anything, he looked uncomfortable when we thanked him. When he said he wasn’t going with us, I asked Jessica to give my ticket to someone else.
When we were alone, I told him, “If you’re not going, I don’t want to sit in a cinema full of strangers. Not even for Sandra Bullock.” His lip twitched.
Some days, we sat at the bus stop, letting several buses pass before he got on. Sometimes we ran out of things to talk about, and I wasn’t sure whether to break the unspoken rule and tell him it was okay. That I could sit with him a little longer, or leave if he preferred to be alone.
“I like walking with you,” I told him one afternoon. “Even when it’s raining.”
It had started as a light drizzle, but the closer we got to the bus stop, the harder it poured, and our hair got wet and tangled. The rain had seeped in around my neck.
Patrik sat beside me, shoulders hunched, arms wrapped around himself. Even so, he didn’t get on the first bus.
Like mine, his black hair curled when it got wet, and I had to stop myself from reaching out and touching it.
“Why don’t you want to go home?” I asked.
He looked down and dragged his shoe back and forth over the asphalt.
“You first,” he said. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. That was … Nobody’s ever asked me that.”
“It’s okay. I can go first.”
I took a big breath.
“I’m not close to my mum. I don’t always feel safe … I have to avoid my stepbrother.”
He didn’t blink. He didn’t look away.
“They won’t be home for a couple of hours.”
I glanced up the road. For a second, I wasn’t sure I should invite him in.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll show you.”
I took his arm, and we ran up the wet slope to the house, past the rows of gardens and the old playground.
I unlocked the door and called, “Hey, is anyone home?”
Silence.
We stepped inside.
“There’s the kitchen,” I said, pointing upstairs, “And the birds. Tea or coffee?”
“I don’t like tea or coffee,” he said.
“Me neither,” I said, smiling.
He kicked off his shoes. Our jackets were dripping onto the floor. I helped him out of his jacket and took both to the laundry room.
I showed him the zebra finches, and he stood quietly by the cage for a moment before we headed downstairs.
“My room’s the last one on the left.”
He waited for me to go first.
“Parents’ bedroom. Bathroom. My little brother’s room, but it’s empty most of the time. He lives with Dad.”
There was a small pile of clean laundry on my bed. He sat in the chair by my desk while I shuffled the pile aside. I handed him a towel. He held it for a moment, water still dripping from his hair, and I resisted the urge to take it and dry his hair myself.
“For your hair,” I explained, drying the ends of my own curls.
He stared at the door, at the poster of Michael Jackson without a nose. Where the nose had been, someone had cut out a triangle.
“A reminder from my stepbrother. About why I don’t like being home.”
I held out my left hand, showing him the two-centimetre white scar across my palm.
“When we were younger, I was scared of him all the time.”
“One day, I forgot to check if he’d been in my room, and I sat down on my bed without seeing the shards of glass.”
Patrik shook his head.
“What an arsehole.”
He spun the chair and ran a finger along the CDs stacked on the desk. Among the boy bands and 2Pac, he picked Throwing Copper by Live and popped open the CD player, only to realise the CD was already inside. He skipped the first four songs and pressed play, and we hummed through half of “Lightning Crashes” before he turned it off.
“I always wanted to play guitar, but.” He played air guitar with his crooked fingers.
“What’s your mother’s name?”
“Marianne.”
“Won’t they be angry that you let me in without asking first?”
“No. They won’t notice. If they do, they won’t care.”
“Nev just flips. Pretends everything is fine, like she hasn’t even noticed. And then she explodes, out of nowhere. And it’s not shouting. It’s … worse.”
He ran his hand over my desk and watercolour set. Then he looked at his hand, as if wondering why he wasn’t getting paint on his fingers.
“Who do you paint for?” he asked.
“Myself. The bin, mostly.”
He bent down, picked a sheet of aquarelle paper from the bin, placed it on the desk and tried to flatten it out.
“You have a lot of things.”
He stepped up, walked to the door, rested his hand on the handle, then changed his mind and sat beside me on the bed.
“She used to lock my door. Then I figured out how to unlock it with a pair of scissors, so she removed the whole lock.”
He rubbed the back of his neck.
“Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
I stared at him.
“She locked you … in your room?”
He didn’t nod, but he didn’t deny it either.
“Dad didn’t even try to stop her. At least not in front of me and my brother.”
He wasn’t just talking about the room anymore. He was talking about everything. But I didn’t know what everything was. Not yet.
“That’s messed up,” I said.
He leaned back against the wall and tugged one sleeve down over his hand.
“I think I’m kind of messed up,” he said.
We sat in silence for a while.
“Yeah. We’re definitely both messed up,” I said.
I glanced at him and picked at the towel in my lap.
Patrik moved closer until my shoulder touched his arm. Then he leaned his head against mine. I could feel the weight of him, as if he knew this was as much touch as I could handle. After a moment, I leaned back into him.
“You don’t look at me like I’m weird when I have a bad day,” I said.
“But I couldn’t let you sit there, crying,” I went on.
I gave a small laugh.
“I mean, we needed the table back.”
He gave a short laugh and wiped his eyes with his sleeve. His fingers twitched.
“I’ll walk you back to the bus later. Do you want to listen to some more music first?”
On our way out, I tore down the poster.
That evening, I curled into a ball in my bed as my stomach ache grew. I thought about the way he had looked at my paintings, and how quiet he had been. His mother had been on magazine covers, and she had locked him in his room. I almost repeated his words out loud. She says I ruin it for her. None of it fitted together.
A couple of days later, as we walked up to our bus stop, a group of younger kids were already there. Patrik stopped and looked at them.
“I don’t want to wait with them,” he said.
“I know a place,” I said, pointing towards the forest.
“But we’ll have to climb a gate first. And it might be wet,” I added.
The meadow split the forest in two. We followed the path, crossed a small ditch, and reached the gated fence. The gate was locked, but there was a wooden two-way ladder next to it. I took his backpack and he climbed over first.
He let out a soft “Ooh.”
The pasture was a wide open field with a small creek and a huge, old mossy apple tree in the middle. Beneath the tree was a single big boulder. The sheep were grazing on the far side of the creek, far enough away that we wouldn’t disturb them. On the left, the fence was hidden by wild roses.
Excited, he climbed ahead of me onto the boulder.
“There it is again!” he said, pointing to the dark shape of a large bird in the sky above us.
“Can you tell what kind of bird they are?” I asked.
“It’s a hawk. A goshawk. Are you saying there are two? They bond for life.”
We couldn’t stay long. The air was getting cold fast, and it looked like it was about to start raining again. But I hoped I could bring him back when it was warmer.
When I got home, I picked up my notebook and turned to the last blank page. But instead of writing, I started sketching the scene. Patrik sitting on the boulder by the tree, watching the birds.
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