A Private Haunting Read Online Free PDF Page A

him. Getting words wrong deliberately, just to annoy Eggers.
    â€˜I’m not listening to you anymore.’
    Jonas reached into his rucksack and, with a flourish, produced the bottle of akevitt . ‘But it’s Jonsok !’
    â€˜The hell is Jonsok ?’
    â€˜Don’t you listen to anything I say?’
    â€˜Give it here then.’
    Eggers took the bottle. And soon as he did sip his face drained. For a while he sat very still and very quiet. Jonas awaited the barf but Eggers kept it down. He took another sip, another.
    By ten thirty Eggers was drunk again. Jonas watched him clamber onto one of the stones, shouting I’m sitting on a standing stone, I’m sitting on a standing stone! He gave Boss Hogg a wide berth when he appeared in the pick-up around midday and told them to get the fuckin site cleared this side of Christmas, ok? They nodded, watched him go and ignored him.
    Â 
    Jonas walked the hedgerows. He filled another bag with elderflowers and dozed in the circle, waking to the sure sense of being watched. Just echoes, no one there but the gnarly old stones and a reinvigorated Eggers, dancing alone on the far side of the circle, the truck radio blaring.
    The dream drifted back. The rabbit and the child, the blood, all that was expected. But Axel Johansson? Jonas hadn’t thought of him in a long time. His first true friend. Inseparable at primary school, they drifted apart at secondary. By their final year they contemplated each other across a distance they would never again bridge. The poignancy was apparent even to a seventeen-year-old Jonas, whose default setting was ruthless condescension.
    â€˜Meatloaf!’ shouted Eggers.
    â€˜No. Too theatrical. Sounds like a West End show.’
    â€˜Not the music, you twat! The food. Tonight. You making meatloaf?’
    â€˜Wait and see.’
    Jonas stacked the traffic cones. Neat piles of five. How satisfying it would be if every aspect of his life slotted away like that. It must be possible to achieve a generalised neatness. He had the ability. Take Jonsok , the care he took with the smorgasbord , the smoked salmon and pickled herring, Jarlsberg and knekkebrod . Each element was set out just so.
    He learned this from his mother, who spent hours, days even, preparing the food then fled before the gannets descended. She’d head down to the beach to sit and watch the sea, the bonfires. His father would come staggering along drunk, or maybe just the loose pebbles giving way under his feet. He remembered watching them, hand in hand in silhouette, disappearing into blue falling night, a secret so open he had no way of grasping it. Their affection was embarrassing, a first glimpse of an unsettling universe he knew nothing about.
    Axel once noticed them kissing. ‘Look, Jonas, look , do you think they’re going to have sex?’
    Ah, Axel. A happy-go-lucky boy, stilled by adolescence like the night extinguished birdsong. Yet an unexpected teenage hit with the ladies. Jonas remembered him with girl after girl, arm in arm on the lunch hour promenade. Not the top level chicks but the Cs and Ds, the lesser-noticed, the plainer and the gauche, who Jonas found out would bloom late and well, streaking past those whose beauty peaked at sixteen and downhill ever faster from there.
    A reunion was in order!
    Follow the songline, revisit the tales. Get back home and onto Facebook, search down Axel Johansson and pick up the phone. Imagine the delight on the end of the line as memory’s flashbulbs began to pop: the farmer’s gate falling, falling, down , dumping them in the mud and cow shit; the button they tied to a string and taped to old Zetterlund’s window, tip-tapping from the dark; his father telling him this isn’t a second bloody home for Axel.
    Jonas felt a surprising heat in his cheeks. Still that anger towards his father, thousands of days gone by. He hated telling Axel to go home because home was a frightening