a birthday present from Tilda. It was a huge, blue thing with two big arms, which had hands at the end of them. Eric loved the clock and made a ceremony of setting it every night himself. Gunhild went to his room and opened the blinds.
“Come on sleepyhead, time to get up. You´ll be late for school.”
He didn´t move.
“Eric, breakfast is ready.”
Eric still didn´t move.
“Rise and shine, another day full of adventures is waiting.” Slightly alarmed now she moved over to his bed.
He still didn´t move.
She reached out and touched him.
He was ice cold.
She screamed, she shook him, screamed his name, again and again, she held him to her, sobbing uncontrollably.
But Eric did not move.
The rational part of her brain that was still working knew that he was dead, but her heart refused to accept this.
He would wake up again, if she only screamed loud enough.
Chapter 18
Tilda was busy doing her laundry, when the phone rang.
It was someone from Eric´s school. Eric had not turned up for school that morning and they could not reach anyone at her mother´s house. Did Tilda know if anything had happened?
But Tilda knew of no reason why Eric shouldn´t be in school and her mother was very conscientious where Eric´s schooling was concerned. If he was sick she would have most certainly have called it in. I have to go and do some shopping in Färjestaden anyway, she thought. I´ll drop by her flat on my way.
She took the scenic route to Färjestaden, with the Alvaret on the right side of her and the pretty old windmills on the other. Tilda loved Öland and couldn´t bear to live anywhere else. She supposed it would have made sense to move, to get away from her father and bad memories, but she would miss the island and she wanted Oscar to grow up here. She couldn´t imagine a better place for a child to grow up than the island. In her opinion it had everything. The sea, the beautiful barren landscape, seclusion and quietness if that´s what one wanted. And yet its nearness to Kalmar ensured access to a bustling town and all its distractions.
She stopped in front of her mother´s building and rang the bell. There was no answer. She tried to reach Gunhild on her mobile, but again no one answered. She rang a neighbour´s bell and explained who she was and why she was there. The neighbor knew her of course and let her in. Tilda rang the bell of her mother´s apartment door.
Nothing. She knocked, and then knocked again.
She was just about to leave, when she thought she heard something from inside, but no one came to the door.
Tilda was suddenly caught by a strange sense of foreboding. She opened her handbag and rooted around for her own key to her mother´s apartment but could not find it. How strange. She never took that key out, it was always in her handbag. She must have dropped it somewhere.
Now what to do?
Then she remembered that the owner of the house lived only a few houses away. He had keys to all the apartments. She would go there and ask him for the key.
The owner of the apartment block, a rather thick set man in his seventies, insisted on going with her to open the door to Gunhild´s apartment. She didn´t know whether he was afraid she would lose his key, too or whether he thought she wanted to steal something from her mother´s apartment. In any case he didn´t seem to trust her with his key.
Tilda opened the door. For a moment they both stood still and listened. There were little whimpering sounds coming from her brother´s room. Tilda quickly went, flung the bedroom door open and froze.
Her mother was on the floor with a lifeless Eric in her arms. She had her head buried in his chest and Tilda didn´t need to touch Eric to know he was dead.
He was like a ragdoll in her mother´s arms. Her mother was quietly whimpering into Eric´s chest and didn´t notice Tilda in the room.
Tilda knelt down and touched her mother and tried to get her to look at her. But her mother didn´t respond, didn´t even look up. She was completely listless and didn´t seem to want to let go of Eric. Tilda spoke to her urgently, tried to get her to let go of Eric, even tried to pull her away, at which her mother lashed out at her and held on to her brother even tighter. The landlord stood frozen in the doorway. Whatever he had been expecting, he hadn´t been expecting this. Tears running down her own face now, Tilda did the only thing she could think of and phoned the police.
Chapter 19
Clarice was just about to grab her car keys and head for the door when the phone rang.
Who the hell could that be? Basically she only got calls from work or from people trying to sell her something. She picked up. It was Tilda, that was unusual. And there was something wrong with her voice. She sounded like someone who had a bad cold. And then Clarice realized she was crying. “Tilda, what happened? What´s wrong, is it Oscar?”
Oh, please don´t let it be Oscar, Clarice prayed silently.
“No, Clarice, it´s my brother”, Tilda sobbed, “He´s dead, he died in his sleep. I visited my mother this morning and found her by the side of his bed holding him and she wouldn´t let him go. I called the police, I didn´t know what else to do.”
Clarice was sincerely shocked. “Oh God, Tilda, how awful. I´m so sorry.”
“Clarice, can you pick Oscar up from the dagis today? It’s just that I can´t leave my mother alone here, but I don´t want to bring Oscar here either, because everything is such chaos right now. I´m sorry, but I have no one else to ask.”
”Tilda, don´t worry about a thing. I´ll cancel my afternoon lectures and look after him all day if you like, until you come home. You just take care of your mother.”
“Thank you Clarice, that´s very good of you.”
Clarice immediately phoned the university and cancelled her lectures for the day. When the time came she picked Oscar up from his dagis and tried to answer his curious questions about the whereabouts of his mother as truthfully as she could. She never had a problem keeping him entertained. In fact she enjoyed playing with him almost as much as he did. “Wow, Clarice, you´re really good at memory, Mama isn´t so good, I always beat her,” Oscar said admiringly.
Memory was actually one of the games Clarice least like to play, because it was so hard for her not to win all the time. She had a photographic memory and could of course memorize the position of all the cards instantly. But that would be really boring and frustrating for Oscar, so half the time she had to act like she couldn´t remember where the cards were and pretend to turn over the wrong cards. And she had to be convincing, because children noticed when you were trying to lose on purpose. But apparently she was doing a great job of it.
They had played three rounds already, apart from painting pictures together, building a flashlight and talking a walk to the ostrich enclosure.
Even Clarice was slowly running out of ideas. “Oscar, how about we go and see Nanna in the big house? Maybe she´s baked something nice today, like a chocolate cake or something?”, she suggested.
“Oh, yes, lovely. I love chocolate cake.”
“Well, I don´t know if she baked chocolate cake but she usually bakes something.”
So they had made their way over to the big house and Nanna had been very pleased to see them. She and Oscar had immediately set about baking a tray of muffins.
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