beautiful monsters

later

Gradually I make my way north, and when I get to Malmö Tomas is waiting at the station. He comes bounding towards me and almost knocks me over with a huge hug. Malmö is filled with bicycles, and a couple of times I accidentally walk on the cycle lane and almost get knocked over. We visit the library, which is a beautiful building, filled with light. There is a sculpture made of books and pages tumbling from the ceiling. In the evening we meet up with one of Tomas’s friends, Loela. She’s lovely, I feel as though I can speak to her about anything. Later her partner joins us, but he has trouble getting into the restaurant: apparently you have to look cool and affluent enough to get past the bouncers. They ask him what’s in his bag, and he says books.
“Well, just don’t study,” they grumble.

I meet Ann Britt, Tomas’s mother, who gave me a complete set of Astrid Lindgren books one birthday at a time.
“At last,” she says as she hugs me. We’ve heard so much about each other for the past decade. Then Daniel comes over, he was in Aotearoa the same year as Tomas, and the three of us go out for a crayfish party that is part of the Malmö festival. I feel a bit weird, a vegetarian surrounded by hundreds of people eating crayfish, but the folk music is fun, and a drunk woman dances down the line of people and swings me around as she passes.

*

Tomas drives me across Skåne to see a castle that is 500 years old. It’s a bit unfriendly, cold dark stone with gaps in the construction for firing arrows and pouring boiling oil on enemies. Afterwards we go to visit Ales Stenar, a Iron Age monument of 59 boulders set in the shape of a ship. I’ve seen photos of my parents wandering between these massive stones that emerge from the mist; somehow it seems less impressive today, smaller somehow in the bright sunlight. The landscape is completely flat, except for the cliffs that fall to the sea. We lie at the edge of the drop, listening to the cries of birds and children, wind rushing over us, and the water crashing over the rocks below.

We decide to check out the queer nightlife in Malmö, but Tomas doesn’t really know where to go. We find out about one bar, but when we turn up there are no other women. I am enjoying the atmosphere, but Tomas is looking around for an escape route.

The next day we travel by boat to the island of Ven. The leaflet I read on the way over had me expecting a wild nature reserve, but in fact the flat land on the top of the island is completely cultivated, and the endangered species of plants clinging to the cliffs around the edge look a bit like weeds to me. The wind threatens to tear us apart as we eat lunch sitting on an army bunker, our arms covered in goosebumps. Then we scramble down the slope to the stony beach, and nibble on wild rose hips. The sea is filled with small jellyfish, but we run in anyway for an invigorating swim.

Tomas’s father lives in the countryside, amongst fields of golden wheat, rape seed and red poppies. Everything is so flat, and so tamed. “There’s not a tree in Skåne that hasn’t been put there by someone,” Tomas tells me. Sven seems slightly shy around me, but perhaps it is just the language. Tomas climbs up to a loft in the garage, and produces the drawings I did for him before he arrived in Rotorua.

We catch the train across the bridge to Kobenhagen, buy Danish pastries and Danish waffle cones, and then return to Malmö by boat. There’s a row of massive white wind turbines in the sea.

In the evening Tomas has organised a dinner party with a dozen of his friends, and the two of us cook frantically for a couple of hours. There are a couple of people I met in Rotorua ten years before. Tomas plays his cheesy music, he hasn’t moved on far from Lady in Red, and he stops the CD to play his favourite passages over and over. We light candles and open some wine. Everyone seems to know a lot about me, and Tomas seemed to be really proud of me. “Hey kid sis,” he grins at me when we have a moment alone in the kitchen, and ruffles my hair.

Ann-Britt walks into town with us and buys me some fruit – the vendor is very excited to hear that I’m from New Zealand, and tells everyone nearby. He has some apples from New Zealand, see? Tomas deposits me on a train, and I have a seat to myself. We pass through pretty forests of birch and pine trees, moss covered rocks and a haze of blue and purple flowers. There is a lake, and wooden houses dotted among the trees.

*

Christian meets me at the train station in Oslo. He seems shorter than he was in 1992, but just as lovely. We go out for coffee, but it’s strange. We have only Tomas in common, and a few months living in the same town. Oslo is very picturesque. The guards parading in front of the castle have ridiculous black outfits: they must be melting in the sun.

On the train north I wish I could get out and explore the lakes and mountains. The forests here are thinner, translucent. The leaves seem to glow with a light of their own. The waterways are broken around the edges by massive rocks. There are patches of snow in the valleys, and as we travel higher the vegetation becomes stunted and tougher.

When I get to the train station in Trondheim, Anita isn’t there. I phone her parents, who don’t speak English, but finally I realise that she’s gone to the airport by mistake. Eventually we meet up. She doesn’t seem to have changed a bit, it’s like I saw her yesterday. She gives me a rose, peach coloured. Then we go to her apartment, which is tiny, and meet her flatmate. We talk mostly about boyfriends and Costa Rica, eat pizza and chips and drink cider. Anita can still out drink me by a long shot.

In the morning I make strawberries and pikelets for Anita’s birthday. She’s thrilled with the John Lennon CD I have picked out, but doesn’t seem interested in the flax kete I have made for her. Then we drive further north to the small town where her family live. Some of her aunts, uncles and cousins come around and there are so many cream cakes. When Anita’s cousin, Nina, who was twelve, found out that I was from New Zealand she wrote a few things down on a piece of paper and then shyly passed it to me. It said had a list of words: “kuia, pipi, hōha…” She’d learned them from a story book. Some neighbours were visiting with their two year old son, and we took him outside. I learned to say “tractor” in Norwegian.

In the forest by her house we picked wild raspberries, and I got stung by nettles. We drank from a waterfall, and I slipped over in the mud.

*

Stockholm is beautiful in the mornings, the golden light glinting off the buildings. We go swimming, clambering over the rocks to find a good spot. The water is freezing, but afterwards we lie on the warm rocks.

Tomas takes me to a National Park, about an hour away from the city. It’s as close as you can get to virgin forest in Sweden. The landscape is so strange, scraped over by glaciers that were 5km thick. As the ice retreated the landscape started to rise, forming until there were a few scattered islands, and then more islands closer together, and then solid land with lakes scattered around. The higher points in the national park were very rocky, covered in lichen and stunted pine trees. Lower there were more plants, oaks, birch, wildflowers and mosses. Part of the forest had been destroyed in a fire, but it was just starting to regenerate. On the each of the burnt area I saw a movement.
“Is that a… um… what does a moose look like?” There were two of them, a mother and her youngster. Tomas’s excited shouting startled them and they loped away.

We came across a Viking fortress, probably 1500 years old, and we picked wild blueberries among the ruins. After lunch we swam to a tiny island in the middle of a lake, and hundreds of slender silver fish teemed around us.

Back in Stockholm we rent a canoe and paddle among the islands. The weather is gorgeous, and we are constantly bobbing around in the wakes of larger boats.

*

On my last night there’s a street party on in the Old Town. The mediaeval buildings are lit up in blue and crimson, with fairy lights sparkling over pathways. We watch people breathing fire and dancing with poi, clowns and jugglers, stalls selling jewellery and hats and hot candied almonds.

Afterwards we head back to the city centre and check out a gay bar I’ve found in my guidebook. It’s tiny, and we stand around awkwardly with our beers. Then suddenly at midnight they open some frosted glass doors at the back of the bar and reveal a smoke filled dance floor. We walk through, and stepping out of the smoke at the other side is like passing through a curtain. We find ourselves in yet another room, and another bar, and mirrors everywhere so it seems to go on forever. We talk to a woman, Peggy, whose parents are French and Armenian. She has short hair and piercings and when I ask her what she does she says, “I drive trucks.” At one point she turns to Tomas and says, “you’re not gay.” I can’t help giggling. He’s been feeling paranoid that he’ll be found out, and now he has been.

That night we stay up late talking.
“I remember…” Tomas says, and starts another round of reminiscing. I’m mortified at what an inquisitive little brat I was at ten years old. I’m hoping he won’t remember a friend and I trying to spy on him and his girlfriend… I’m remembering him posing by a sign in a shop selling Svensk made machinery; "Swedish Staying Power." The arguments he used to have with Merlin (our father a connoisseur of chamber music, Tomas sticking resolutely to pop). Converting him into a gourmet chef. Decorating a kanuka bush for Christmas, and Tomas waking up to find that a kea had pierced his airbed in the night. Him picking me up easily and tipping me, kicking and screaming, upside down. His tall figure disappearing at the end of the year, wearing a swandri and gumboots, a taiaha in one hand.

Sometimes I still hate myself for “failing” my own AFS exchange. I think my biggest regret is that I never really became part of a family in Costa Rica. But talking to Tomas, I realise how incredibly lucky I am. He’s the best brother I could ever hope for.

*

It is night. Kilometres below a city sparkles like an intricate necklace at the throat of a continent. I love the sense of being somewhere else that is nowhere and could be anywhere as we speed through the night. I feel as though I’m paused on the edge of something. A landscape of possibility waits to take shape from the darkness.

Posted by Fionnaigh at April 2, 2004 08:51 AM