Blood Cruise by Mats Strandberg

  And then, suddenly, the weight on top of him is gone. It happens so quickly he is disoriented. Two security officers, Henke and that old milksop Pär, who should have retired long ago, have picked the man up from behind, but he refuses to let go of Dan’s hand; it feels like his arm is about to be wrenched out of its socket.

  The guards finally manage to wrest the lunatic off him. Dan struggles onto his elbows, sits up at the edge of the stage, staring at his hand. New blood is seeping out of the little wounds, turning pink and transparent where it mixes with the man’s saliva. Dan looks up.

  The nut job is writhing in the security officers’ firm grip, kicking, his teeth snapping in mid-air. Pia and Jarno have arrived now as well. The man tries to take a bite out of Pia’s cheek; she only just manages to turn her head away.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Pär calls to Dan.

  He becomes aware of everyone’s eyes on him: all the fucking cowards who just stood there gawking.

  ‘You better lock that guy up,’ he says. ‘He must be off his tits on some kind of super-smack. Bloody hell.’

  He glances down at the saliva-soaked lacerations. He has no desire to catch AIDS from some doped-up head case.

  When he looks up again, the guards have managed to cuff the man’s hands behind his back. Dan can hear their laboured breathing, the sound of the man’s teeth snapping shut so hard you would think they would shatter.

  ‘Do you want us to take you to the infirmary so Raili can have a look at that?’ Jarno says.

  ‘I’ll head there on my own,’ Dan says. ‘You just get that one behind bars. Or throw him overboard. Nut jobs like that don’t deserve to fucking live.’

  Albin

  Linda and Lo have gone to the till to buy drinks. Albin and his mum have sat down at one of the tables at the back of the Charisma Café. They are practically the only ones there. The staff seem bored; you can tell they are eager to close.

  ‘What happened?’ his mum says.

  ‘Dad came by the cabin. I think he’s gone to bed now.’

  ‘Yes, he was feeling a bit tired,’ his mum says. ‘He wanted to go to bed now so he would have more energy tomorrow instead.’

  Albin looks down at the table, pushes scattered biscuit crumbs into a pile. ‘He was tired last night too,’ he says.

  He can’t look at her. He doesn’t know what to say next.

  ‘Abbe,’ his mum says. ‘Did something happen?’

  He shrugs.

  It is so difficult to find the words. When he tries, it is as though a circuit-breaker switches off in his head and everything goes dark.

  ‘I’m sorry, Cilla, but I can’t remember if you take milk in your coffee,’ Linda says, and puts a tray of clattering glasses and mugs down on the table.

  ‘Either way is fine,’ Mum says.

  ‘Are you sure? Because I can go get you milk if you …’

  ‘Black is great.’

  Linda stays standing, hesitating for a second before sitting down next to Lo. People are often like that around his mother, even her carers: always wondering if they are doing things right. And since they have to do so many things for his mum, a lot of time is spent answering their questions. Obviously, it is ultimately because people are well-meaning, but Albin wonders how she puts up with it. His dad is the only one who doesn’t do that. Maybe that is why she won’t leave him.

  He knows children are not supposed to want their parents to get divorced, but Albin wants nothing more. He could help his mum. She doesn’t need his dad. And maybe what Lo told him is the excuse he needs to finally be able to talk about his dad for real, about what he’s really like.

  In the middle of the sea, far from home, with a big, dark nothingness outside the windows, it suddenly seems possible.

  ‘Is Dad sick?’ Albin says, and pinches the pile of crumbs into a soft mass.

  ‘What do you mean, honey?’ his mum replies.

  ‘Is he sick?’ Albin looks up. ‘Lo says Linda thinks so.’

  His mum blinks. At least he has said it now. No going back. Lo sinks deeper into her chair, as if she has been holding her breath for a long time and is now letting all the air out in one go.

  ‘Lo,’ Linda says, turning to her, ‘what did you say to Abbe?’

  ‘He just told you.’

  ‘That was something we discussed in confidence.’

  ‘It’s his dad,’ Lo says, ‘and maybe he needed to know.’

  ‘That’s not up to you to decide.’

  ‘But it’s up to you, is it? Always up to you. Real big shock you don’t want to talk about it. We never say it like it is in this stupid family. But maybe Albin and I don’t want to be like you.’ Lo has crossed her arms and is looking straight at Albin, sending him her strength.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Cilla,’ Linda says. ‘Lo overheard me talking to a friend and … I tried to explain … I thought I could trust her.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ his mum says dully.

  ‘I love how you think I should lie to my cousin to prove I’m trustworthy,’ Lo says slowly, turning back to Linda. ‘You really don’t see any problems with that logic?’

  For a moment, it seems like Linda might slap her. ‘Look who suddenly cares about her cousin,’ she says instead.

  Lo’s eyes narrow into slits.

  ‘Abbe,’ Linda says quietly, leaning forward, ‘it’s hard for you to understand this; it’s hard for us too … But your mum and I are trying to help—’

  ‘Linda,’ his mum says, and Linda breaks off abruptly.

  Then his mum takes a deep breath. She has folded her hands in her lap. Her coffee sits untouched on the table in front of her. ‘We will talk about this when we get home,’ she says.

  ‘No,’ Albin says, ‘we will talk about it now.’

  ‘Abbe, please,’ his mum says. He can tell from her voice that there are tears lurking just beneath the surface.

  He almost changes his mind. But he knows if they don’t talk about it now, they never will. He will never be able to bring this up again once they are back home. And she will never do it of her own accord.

  ‘We have to,’ he says. ‘Lo’s right. We never talk about anything. You always tell me Dad is tired, for example, but he’s drunk. Why can’t you just say that?’

  His mum’s head has tilted forward. Silent tears fall into her lap. She wipes her eyes with her whole hand. ‘It’s hard for Dad,’ she says. ‘You can tell from looking at me that I’m sick, but it’s not always so obvious from the outside …’ Her voice fades away.

  ‘So he is sick?’ Albin says. ‘You think so too?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ his mum replies. ‘But when he feels bad, he drinks.’

  ‘It never makes him feel better,’ Albin counters.

  ‘No,’ his mum admits, wiping her eyes again. ‘It’s hard for him. It becomes a vicious circle.’

  Albin looks at Lo, draws more strength. ‘But why do you pretend with me?’ he says. ‘Don’t you think I get it?’

  His mum opens her mouth and closes it again. ‘Sometimes I forget how big you’ve become,’ she says.

  ‘The important thing to remember is that it’s not Mårten’s fault that he’s sick,’ Linda says. ‘It’s just like having a broken leg, or like Cilla with her illness.’

  ‘I know,’ Albin says impatiently, wishing she would just stop talking, that she would let his mum speak.

  Finally speak.

  But his mum says nothing.

  ‘Though in fairness, it’s not like anyone’s lying to Albin about Cilla, pretending she’s not really in a wheelchair at all,’ Lo says. ‘So it clearly is different somehow.’ She looks at Linda triumphantly, and Albin is happy she is here. He would never have thought to say that. At least not until he got into bed and replayed everything again and again, like a scene from a film, when it is already far too late.

  His mum chortles and Albin looks at her, stunned, because she isn’t crying but laughing. ‘Oh my, Abbe, what a couple of lemons you’ve been given for parents.?
??

  He doesn’t quite know what ‘lemon’ is supposed to mean, but he understands her point. And it sounds much too similar to the things his dad likes to tell him.

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’ His mum wipes her eyes. ‘I just feel so …’ She shakes her head and tries to stifle a sob.

  ‘Cilla hasn’t wanted to worry you,’ Linda says.

  Albin stares at them. Do they honestly believe he hasn’t been worried? Don’t they get that this is much easier? If his dad is sick, if there is a name for what his dad is, then maybe there are people who know what to do about it.

  ‘Can’t we make him go see a doctor?’ he says.

  ‘First Mårten needs to realise he needs help,’ Linda says, ‘or it won’t work.’

  ‘But we’re going to make him realise it,’ his mum adds quickly, shooting her a look.

  She clearly doesn’t want Albin to think there is the slightest doubt that they are going to sort everything out. She is still lying and sweeping things under the rug.

  Silence falls. Linda hasn’t touched her coffee either. She has milk in hers. Grease patches have formed on the surface.

  ‘Can’t you get divorced first?’ Albin says quietly. ‘Then at least we don’t have to live with him until he’s better.’

  His mum shakes her head. ‘We’re not getting divorced. We love each other. You know that. And you can’t tell him about this. Then he’ll be upset that we talked to you, and that will make it even harder to get through to him. Lo is right; it’s not good to lie and pretend like nothing’s wrong. But you have to for a little while longer. For his sake.’

  The more she talks, the more Albin feels like he is about to explode. It is so unfair. Everyone has to tiptoe around his dad. But Albin doesn’t get a say in anything, even though it is his life too.

  ‘But I don’t want to live with Dad,’ Albin says, and now he is close to tears himself. ‘I don’t love him. I hate him.’

  ‘No, you don’t,’ his mum says. ‘And we’re going to help him, and everything will be better.’

  Albin won’t be able to hold back the tears for much longer. ‘I hate you too,’ he says, and then he gets up from the table and runs away before they have a chance to stop him.

  He doesn’t know if anyone is coming after him. He runs without turning around.

  The Baltic Charisma

  The man at the heart of the discussions in the café is asleep in his bed. Sweat makes his shirt cling to his body. In his dream, he is running up a flight of stairs.

  ‘Mårten! Mårten! Mårten!’ The voice sounds abandoned and scared and angry all at once and it cuts right through him. He looks at the paintings hanging side by side on the walls of the staircase. The woman crying out for him painted them. Thick layers of oil paint have hardened in uneven clumps on the canvasses. A door stands ajar at the top of the stairs. Darkness and the smell of cigarette smoke are seeping out through the crack.

  ‘Mårten!’

  He enters. His mother is propped up against a mountain of pillows in her bed. She puffs on her cigarette, emerging more clearly from the gloom as the glow intensifies. Her naked breasts sag over the edge of the duvet into her armpits.

  ‘Hey, sweetie,’ she says. Her cigarette crunches when she stubs it out in the ashtray. ‘Do you like staying home from school?’

  He nods automatically. His mum has called him in sick. She didn’t want to be home alone today. His sister Linda is jealous. Linda doesn’t know that Mårten is jealous of her too. He wants to go to school. He wants to get out of here.

  ‘Why don’t you come here and lie down for a bit so I can cuddle you?’ his mum says, and pushes the duvet aside.

  Mårten obeys and she pulls the duvet over both of them. It is warm.

  ‘What would I do without you?’ she says.

  He pokes at the bubbles on the textured wallpaper next to the bed. There is a bare patch there.

  ‘You love me, don’t you?’ she says, and he promises. ‘Because you know we have to do everything right this time. Otherwise it all just starts again in the next life, until we’re done with each other.’

  Mårten nods and his mother tells him again about all their previous lives. Sometimes they are married, sometimes Mårten is the parent. Sometimes they are friends, sometimes soldiers in the same army.

  ‘It’s always been us against the world,’ his mum says. ‘If not for you, I wouldn’t have wanted to live this life. I would have jumped straight into the next one.’

  Grown-up Mårten, who is in bed in his cabin, is struggling to breathe. The dream always ends the same way. He wants to break out of it, but he can’t.

  ‘We should move on to the next life together,’ his mum says. ‘Like in The Brothers Lionheart.’

  The bed is soaked. The mattress is dripping.

  ‘Mårten, I’m waiting for you, you know.’

  He turns over. Droplets of water glitter in his mum’s hair. Her skin is faintly green. Bits of her face are missing where the eels and crayfish have fed on her. Her eyes are covered by a milky film, but he knows she is looking straight at him. He tries to get out of bed, but he is stuck to the sodden mattress. Murky water pours out of her mouth when she smiles at him.

  ‘It’s you and me, Mårten.’

  Her breasts are resting on her belly, which is protruding as though she is pregnant. He knows there are eels in there. It has been years since she walked into Lake Mälaren.

  It’s only a dream, he thinks. I got away. A shadow drifts past behind the milky eyes, something wet and slippery moving about. He can feel her fury. In his dreams, he never gets away.

  ‘You promised,’ she says. ‘You said it would always be the two of us.’

  *

  There is a hard knock on the door of a cabin on the ninth floor. Fourteen-year-old Lyra turns off the film on her laptop and removes her headphones, straightens the black Alice band keeping the fringe she is growing out from falling in her eyes. There is another loud rap on the door. Impatient. She figures her mum or dad must have forgotten their key card and wonders if they have been knocking for long, because she had the volume turned up high in her headphones. The legs of her white silk pyjamas are so long she can’t see her feet when she gets out of bed. She hopes Mum and Dad won’t say anything about how she should be asleep. It is going to be an early start, driving all the way to Grandma in Kaarina. Lyra pushes the handle down, but suddenly hesitates. What if it’s not Mum and Dad? What if it’s someone dangerous? She lets go of the handle.

  ‘Hello?’ she calls.

  ‘Hello,’ a small child’s voice replies.

  Lyra pulls the door open. In the hallway outside is a boy in a T-shirt and red hoodie. His blue eyes look up at her from under an ash-blond mop of hair. He looks happy, almost excited.

  ‘Hi,’ he says. ‘What’s your name?’

  She warily replies that her name is Lyra. She peers up and down the corridor, but there is no one to be seen. Distant voices from the lower decks are drifting up the stairs further down the hall.

  ‘What a strange name,’ the boy says, his voice tinkling with laughter.

  She sighs inwardly. Sometimes she hates her name, even though she likes the Lyra she was named after. ‘It’s from a book my dad read when Mum was pregnant with me,’ she says.

  ‘What’s it about?’ the boy asks.

  And she replies the way she always does, ‘Magic and different kinds of creatures and things like that. It’s hard to explain.’

  The boy’s brow furrows. ‘Are there vampires that sparkle in the sun?’ he says, and Lyra laughs.

  ‘No.’

  He nods resolutely. ‘Good. I think vampires should be dangerous.’

  She laughs again, because the boy is cute but so precocious. Even more than that, she thinks to herself. He’s kind of old-fashioned, like a little old man. She asks where his parents are, and he shrugs. Asks if he can come inside to use the loo.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says.
>
  The boy presses his thighs together, as if he is suddenly worried. ‘Please. I don’t want to have an accident.’

  So she lets him in. When the cabin door closes, the boy positions himself with his back to it. And when he smiles at her she notices his teeth are yellow.

  *

  The deep jarring ring of the internal telephone on the desk wakes Mårten from his nightmare. He sits up, feeling the vibrations of the engines through the bed, and peers around, bewildered, before remembering where he is. The sheets are soggy; he reflexively reaches down between his legs. He has not wet himself. When the phone rings again, he jumps out of bed and picks up the receiver. The anxiety from his dream lingers. He hears voices and laughter in the background when his wife tells him about the children, that they are missing. She has called Lo and Linda’s cabin several times but had no reply.

  ‘I’ll call you again in a bit,’ she says. ‘Stay there in case they come back.’

  Mårten can tell she is panicking. She hangs up before he can get a word in. Mårten pulls off his sopping shirt, shivers. His eyes fall on the wall the room shares with the cabin next door. He pulls out a bottle of cognac from the tax-free bag sitting by the door.

  *

  At the information desk, Mika has grabbed the microphone. Speakers all over the ship come to life with a gentle sound effect. ‘Personal message for Albin and Lo Sandén,’ he intones, his voice echoing down the hallways. ‘Would Albin and Lo Sandén report to the information desk, please? Would Albin and Lo Sandén report to the information desk, please?’

  *

  The blond boy glares at the speakers on deck nine. The scars by his collarbones are almost gone now, but he feels sick. It is hard to stop feeding in time. There is too much blood in his tiny body and he needs to find someplace to hide, wait for what is coming. For what is going to change everything. He smiles, hardly able to contain himself.

  Dan

  ‘All done,’ Raili says, pulling off her white, powdery latex gloves with a snap. ‘Now you have to make sure to keep the wound clean. And once there’s a scab, let it breathe at night.’