At this year’s Winter Solstice, Ilbereth, Aslak and Nicholas John gathered in Muonio for the release of The Return of the Ancient Mariner. William Shepherd had entrusted the manuscript to them 210 turns of the moon previously.
The prologue is written by Nicholas John and starts like this. ‘It's quite a while since anyone heard from my father. Helena says she isn't worried. He'll show up. He always does. I'm not so sure. People who disappear in Colombia normally disappear forever.
But he only said he was going to South America…was Helena's response…to put everybody off the scent. He was just covering his tracks. You know how he keeps telling us that we have to think for ourselves and decide what's true and what's fantasy...and how men and women have a different way of understanding fact and fiction...men being poets and film-makers and women being novelists and members of parliament’.
Yes I know. But Helena wasn't there that last time. I can still remember every detail. The sun had gone down but they were still serving at Paviljongkonditori on the shores of Ridderfjärden. ‘How come you sit on the inside and everyone else sits on the outside?’ he had asked me. Then he started on about how when two people came into a café the second person never wanted to sit at the same place as the first person. I was feeling really good at the time.
We had just come from St. Erik's Squash Hall. I was playing off a handicap of five but I won…two sets to one. ‘Six games all,’ he said. But we were playing the best of three sets, so I knew he just said that to irritate me. In the first set it was 3-0; then I took the second set 3-2 and the third set 3-1. He was pretty pleased at how well I played…although he wouldn't admit it. ‘That's the last time you play off a five point start,’ he said at the end. ‘From now on your handicap is reduced to four’. ‘OK,’ I'd replied, ‘that’s just fine by me.’
As we sat there at his favourite Kungsholmen café...the one he wrote about in Report From A Swedish Village...I was remembering the game…how in the third set I had dropped my racquet in the middle of the rally. Back came the ball off the front wall and there I was…perfectly positioned…but without a racquet. So I hit the ball with my fist. I lost the point but I was remembering him turning to me afterwards…laughing. ‘Amazing’, he said ‘I've never seen that before. Mind you I don’t think there’s anything in the rules against it’. And he laughed again.
I won the game in the end. I hit it just right…low and just over the bar. He tried to cut across in front of me but I'd hit it just right. ‘Great shot!’ he said. That put me at 2-1 with just four points between me and my first win.
Anyway I was remembering and smiling to myself when this motor boat went by. ‘I'll tell you,’ he said, ‘because you understand what I mean when I talk about things this way. I don't think I'm going to buy a house. I think I'll buy a boat. Use it as a houseboat. Moor it at Alan's place on Ljusterö for a few weeks. Then pull up anchor and head for Gotland. Winter in Cork. It's got to be able to do the canals and lakes of Northern Europe and also get across the North Sea when the weather's good...wooden boat…one that I can work on converting to solar power. Not the North Atlantic...something that can do the North Sea and The Baltic’.
I was only half-listening as I was still going over the squash game in my mind. But then my father put this handwritten booklet in front of me and said ‘Nicholas. I’m putting this in your safe-keeping. I am leaving Stockholm next week and this is the only copy of a book I’ve been working on here in Stockholm’. I turned it over.
There was a map on the back. I asked him why Oulu was on the map and not Tarku and he talked about there being two Baltic maps that overlapped...one with the big cities and this one with the small country towns where Academic Inn Books would be sold. But he didn't dwell on that...he can really go on sometimes... that's what I mean about Helena not having been there like I was. He turned to inside the front page and pointed to something he had written.
‘You can look on this rather like my literary last will and testament,’ he said. ‘I know I can trust you.’ It was then I began to understood that he was serious. ‘In the event of my death or disappearance,’ he had written, ‘this should be published exactly as it is.’ It felt like he was telling me he was going to die…so I changed the subject and told him about the Olaus Magnus Map and the new Iceland stamps. But I took the manuscript and hid it away in a drawer.
