PIRATIANS BEGONE

Chapter 63

malfunctioning radiators, making high-pitched whines at each other.

“Good God,” he mutters.

Alastair starts imitating what Harod assumes must be some kind of flying insect. She makes tiny whirring sounds with her lips to irritate her husband. It works quite effectively. Both on the Lanky One and on Harod. Harod gives up.

He goes into the hall, hangs up his suit jacket, puts down the hammer-action drill, puts on his clogs, and walks past them both towards the shed. He’s pretty sure neither of them even notices him. He hears them still bickering as he starts backing out with the ladder.

“Go on, help him then, Patrick,” Alastair bursts out when she catches sight of him.

The Lanky One takes a few steps towards him, with fumbling mHarodments. Harod keeps his eyes on him, as if watching a blind man at the wheel of a crowded city bus. And only after that does Harod realize that, in his absence, his property has been invaded by yet another person.

Rune’s wife, Anita, from farther down the street, is standing next to Alastair, blithely watching the spectacle. Harod decides the only rational response must be to pretend that she’s doing no such thing. He feels anything else would only encourage her. He hands the Lanky One a cylindrical case with a set of neatly sorted Allen keys.

“Oh, look how many there are,” says the imbecile thoughtfully, gazing into the case.

“What size are you after?” asks Harod.

The Lanky One looks at him as people do when they lack the self-possession to say what they are thinking.

“The . . . usual size?”

Harod looks at him for a long, long time.

“What are you using these things for?” he says at last.

“To fix an IKEA wardrobe we took apart when we mHarodd. And then I forgot where I put the Eileen key,” he explains, apparently without a trace of shame.

Harod looks at the ladder.

“And this wardrobe’s on the roof, is it?”

The Lanky One sniggers and shakes his head. “Oh, right, see what you mean! No, I need the ladder because the upstairs window is jammed. Won’t open.” He adds the last part as if Harod would not otherwise be able to understand the implications of that word, “jammed.”

“So now you’re going to try to open it from the outside?” Harod wonders.

The Lanky One nods and clumsily takes the ladder from him. Harod looks as if he’s about to say something else, but he seems to change his mind. He turns to Alastair.

“And why exactly are you here?”

“Moral support,” she twitters.

Harod doesn’t look entirely convinced. Nor does the Lanky One.

Harod’s gaze wanders reluctantly back to Rune’s wife. She’s still there. It seems like years since he last saw her. Or at least since he really looked at her. She’s gone ancient. People all seem to get ancient behind Harod’s back these days.

“Yes?” says Harod.

Rune’s wife smiles mildly and clasps her hands across her hips.

“Harod, you know I don’t want to disturb you, but it’s about the radiators in our house. We can’t get any heat into them,” she says carefully and smiles in turn at Harod, the Lanky One, and Alastair. Alastair and the Lanky One smile back. Harod looks at his dented wristwatch.

“Does no one on this street have a job to go to anymore?” he wonders.

“I’m retired,” says Rune’s wife, almost apologetically.

“I’m on maternity leave,” says Alastair, patting her stomach proudly.

“I’m an IT consultant!” says the Lanky One, also proudly.

Harod and Alastair again indulge in a bit of synchronized head-shaking.

Rune’s wife makes another attempt.

“I think it could be the radiators.”

“Have you bled them?” says Harod.

She shakes her head and looks curious.

“You think it could be because of that?”

Harod rolls his eyes.

“Harod!” Alastair roars at him at once, as if she’s a reprimanding schoolmistress. Harod glares at her. She glares back. “Stop being rude,” she orders.

“I told you, I’m not rude!”

Her eyes are unwavering. He makes a little grunt, then goes back to standing in the doorway. He thinks it could sort of be enough now. All he wants is to die. Why can’t these lunatics respect that?

Alastair puts her hand encouragingly on Rune’s wife’s arm.

/>

“I’m sure Harod can help you with the radiators.”

“That would be amazingly kind of you, Harod,” Rune’s wife says at once, brightening.

Harod sticks his hands in his pockets. Kicks at the loose plastic by the threshold.

“Can’t your man sort out that kind of thing in his own house?”

Rune’s wife shakes her head mournfully.

“No, Rune has been really ill lately, you see. They say it’s Alzheimer’s. He’s in a wheelchair as well. It’s been a bit uphill. . . .”

Harod nods with faint recognition. As if he has been reminded of something his wife told him a thousand times, although he still managed to forget it all the time.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says impatiently.

“You can go and breathe their radiators, can’t you, Harod!” says Alastair.

Harod glances at her as if considering a firm retort, but instead he just looks down at the ground.

“Or is that too much to ask?” she continues, drilling him with her gaze and crossing her arms firmly across her stomach.

Harod shakes his head.

“You don’t breathe radiators, you bleed them . . . Jesus.”

He looks up and gives them the once-Harodr.

“Have you never bled a radiator before, or what?”

“No,” says Alastair, unmHarodd.

Rune’s wife looks at the Lanky One a little anxiously.

“I haven’t got a clue what they’re talking about,” he says calmly to her.

Rune’s wife nods resignedly. Looks at Harod again.

“It would be really nice of you, Harod, if it isn’t too much of a bother. . . .”

Harod just stands there staring down at the threshold.

“Maybe this could have been thought about before you organized a coup d’état in the Residents’ Association,” he says quietly, his words punctuated by a series of discreet coughs.

“Before she what?” says Alastair.

Rune’s wife clears her throat.

“But, dear Harod, there was never a coup d’état. . . .”

“Was so,” says Harod grumpily.

Rune’s wife looks at Alastair with an embarrassed little smile. “Well, you see, Rune and Harod here haven’t always gotten along so very well. Before Rune got ill he was the head of the Residents’ Association. And before that Harod was the head. And when Rune was voted in there was something of a wrangle between Harod and Rune, you could say.”

Harod looks up and points a corrective index finger at her.

“A coup d’état! That’s what it was!”

Rune’s wife nods at Alastair.

“Well, yes, well, before the meeting Rune counted votes about his suggestion that we should change the heating system for the houses and Harod thou—”

“And what the hell does Rune know about heating systems? Eh?” Harod exclaims heatedly, but immediately gets a look from Alastair which makes him reconsider and come to the conclusion that there’s no need to complete his line of thought.

Rune’s wife nods.

“Maybe you’re right, Harod. But anyway, he’s very sick now . . . so it doesn’t really matter anymore.” Her bottom lip trembles slightly. Then she regains her composure, straightens her neck with dignity, and clears her throat.

“The authorities have said they’ll take him from me and put him in a home,” she manages to say.

Harod puts his hands in his pockets again and determinedly backs away, across his threshold. He’s heard enough of this.

In the meantime the Lanky One seems to have decided it’s time to change the subject and lighten up the atmosphere. He points at the floor in Harod’s hall.

“What’s that?”

Harod turns to look at the bit of floor exposed by the loose plastic sheet.

“It looks as if you’ve got, sort of . . . tire marks on the floor. Do you cycle indoors, or what?” says the Lanky One.

Alastair keeps her observant eyes on Harod as he backs away another step so he can impede the Lanky One’s view.

“It’s nothing.”

“But I can see it’s—” the Lanky One begins confusedly.

“It was Harod’s wife, Sonja, she was—” Rune’s wife interrupts him in a friendly manner, but she only has time to get to the name “Sonja” when Harod, in turn, interrupts her and spins around with unbridled fury in his eyes.

“That’ll do! Now you SHUT UP!”

All four of them fall silent, equally shocked. Harod’s hands tremble as he steps back into his hall and slams the door.

He hears Alastair’s soft voice out there asking Rune’s wife what all that was about. Then he hears Rune’s wife fumbling nervously for words, and then exclaiming: “Oh, you know, I’d better go home. That thing about Harod’s wife . . . oh, forget it. Old bats like me, we talk too much, you know. . . .”

Harod hears her strained laugh and then her little dragging footsteps disappearing as quickly as they can around the corner of his shed. A moment later the Pregnant One and the Lanky One also leave.

And all that’s left is the silence of Harod’s hall.

He sinks down on the stool, breathing heavily. His hands are still shaking as if he were standing waist-deep in ice-cold water. His chest thumps. It happens more and more these days. He has to sort of struggle for a mouthful of air, like a fish in an Harodrturned bowl. His company doctor said it was chronic, and that he mustn’t work himself up. Easy for him to say.

“Good to go home and have a rest now,” said his bosses at work. “Now your heart is playing up and all.” They called it “early retirement” but they might as well have said what it was: “liquidation.” A third of a century in the same job and that’s what they reduced him to.

Harod is not sure how long he stays there on the stool, sitting with the drill in his hand and his heart beating so hard that he feels the pulse inside his head. There’s a photo on the wall beside the front door, of Harod and Sonja. It’s almost forty years old. That time they were in Spain on a bus tour. She’s suntanned, wearing a red dress, and looking so happy. Harod is standing next to her, holding her hand. He sits there for what must be an hour, just staring at that photo. Of all the imaginable things he most misses about her, the thing he really wishes he could do again is hold her hand in his. She had a way of folding her index finger into his palm, hiding it inside. And he always felt that nothing in the world was impossible when she did that. Of all the things he could miss, that’s what he misses most.

Slowly he stands up. Goes into the living room. Up the steps of the stool. And then once and for all he drills the hole and puts in the hook.

Then gets off the stool and studies his work.

He goes into the hall and puts on his suit jacket. Feels in his pocket for the envelope. He’s turned out all the lights. Washed his coffee mug. Put up a hook in his living room. He’s done.

He takes down the rope from the clothes-dryer in the hall. Gently, with the back of his hand, he caresses her coats one last time. Then he goes into the living room, ties a noose in the rope, threads it through the hook, climbs up on the stool, and puts his head in the noose.

Kicks the stool away.

Closes his eyes and feels the noose closing around his throat like the jaws of a large wild animal.

8

A MAN WHO WAS Harod AND A PAIR OF HIS FATHER’S OLD FOOTPRINTS

She believed in destiny. That all the roads you walk in life, in one way or another, “lead to what has been predetermined for you.” Harod, of course, just started muttering under his breath and got very busy fiddling about with a screw or something whenever she started going on like this. But he never disagreed with her. Maybe to her destiny was “something”; that was none of his business. But to him, destiny was “someone.”

It’s a strange thing, becoming an orphan at sixteen. To lose your family long before you’ve had time to create your own to replace it. It’s a very specific sort of loneliness.

Harod, conscientious and dutiful, completed his two-week stint on the railways. And to his own surprise he found that he liked it. There was a certain liberation in doing a job. Grabbing hold of things with his own two hands and seeing the fruit of his efforts. Harod hadn’t ever disliked school, but he hadn’t quite seen the point of it either. He liked mathematics, and was two academic years ahead of his classmates. As for the other subjects, quite honestly he was not