Travelling Light Read Online Free PDF

going outside to look at the boats.”
    Admittedly the Fredriksons were a bit spoiled. They didn’t like food unless it was absolutely fresh, whether fish or meat or Hanna’s home-baked bread, so a great deal did wind up down the drain with Friberg’s pickles, as the saying goes. Elis discovered this fact at once. He would go to the fridge and take out the leftovers that usually lay there until they were stale enough to be thrown away with a clear conscience. He would carefully rescue these remnants and eat them. He might say, for instance, “No meatballs, thank you. The old fish soup is fine for me.”
    “Ha ha,” said Oswald, who followed most of what was happening and thought about it, and who never had his brother to himself any more because of the summer child. “Ha ha. You’re our new slop pail, aren’t you?”
    “We eat what we eat,” Axel said. “But it’s not good manners to comment on what our guests eat. Food is not something we discuss. It’s just a fact of life.”
    “It most certainly is not,” Elis objected. “Think of all the poor people who don’t…” But that was as far as he got, because Axel banged his hand on the table and said, “Now you be quiet! And the rest of you, too. There’s no peace in this house any more.”
    Out of doors, though, all was completely at peace. It was a time of light breezes and soft summer rain; down in the meadow the apple trees were in bloom, and all of nature was at its loveliest. In previous summers, Tom had wandered the woods and along the shore through the bright summer nights, but it was no fun this year. He could never count on being alone.
    “Mum,” he said. “How long is he staying?”
    “People come and people go,” Hanna answered. “Relax. There’s a time for everything. This, too, will pass.”
    The worst part was that Elis was able to support all his arguments with incontrovertible statistics. Whenever the news came on, he glued his ear to the radio to collect new miseries or get the old ones confirmed. The news was the only programme he cared about. But he would sometimes mix actual catastrophes with his own fantasies, which then wormed their way so deeply into his dreadful prophecies that Tom didn’t know which way was up.
    With Elis around, you had to be constantly ready for the worst. For example, Granny was a long-term patient in the local hospital, but when Elis came in and said, “She just died!” it turned out it wasn’t Granny he meant, but a crow with one leg, for heaven’s sake, that he’d been caring for all week.
    One day when Hanna was taking the bus to go and see her mother, Elis asked if he could come along, and she thought why not. Of course he was a morbid child, but he did have great compassion for any creature in distress.
    The experiment was not repeated. Granny didn’t care for all the sighing and groaning at her bedside. He shook his head mournfully and pressed her hand as if saying a final farewell, and when he went out for a few minutes, she asked Hanna angrily, “Who’s this insufferable child you’ve dragged along?”
    There was no getting around the fact that the summer child was affecting everyone in the house. They were all a little afraid of him. Axel no longer smoked his pipe after meals but he stomped straight off to the boathouse. He’d grown sullen, and one day when Elis started interrogating him about his income and political views, he stood up and walked out in the middle of the fish soup. Little Mia was too small and innocent to understand, but she sensed the change and grew whiny and difficult. As for Oswald, he was openly jealous. Tom had no time for him any more, and when they did go out fishing together it wasn’t in the nice old friendly, peaceful way. Oswald developed a biting irony: “Are you really going to murder that poor little cod?” or “Look how many corpses in the net today!” And so forth. The whole family had fallen on evil days.
    Axel and Hanna knew they’d put a