‘The thing in the shower room allows me to pretend. That I can be free. That there’s a possibility. That…love still exists. I believe in it for a little while, because I can see it. Because it is shown to me.’
He dragged his attention away from the window and started picking at a patch of candle wax on the table. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times, as if it were unsure whether to let out what followed.
‘I have a moment,’ Lars went on. ‘Or rather a brief period of time. It’s Thomas’s ninth birthday. Marianne and I are standing outside his bedroom door with his cake, candles lit, and his presents. We can’t wait to see what Thomas will think of his great big Lego castle. We kiss. The candles on the cake make my wife’s eyes sparkle. We open the door. We sing. Thomas leaps out of bed, his whole being shining with anticipation. He forces himself to open the biggest present slowly, although it’s obvious that he just wants to rip off the paper. He is ecstatic about the castle. He pulls me and Marianne close, and the three of us hug. He smells of sleeping child, and he is so happy. We decide we’ll build the castle together, all of us.’
As Lars talked, his eyes fixed on the patch of wax, silent tears had begun to flow down his cheeks. He wiped them away and said, ‘That was my special time. The time I’ve chosen. The thing in the bathtub lets me go back to it. I’m there. Completely. I can relive it, over and over again. I get a little closer each time. I’m almost there.’
Suddenly Lars sat up straight and looked at me. Something like madness burned in his eyes as he gazed right into me and said it again, with even greater emphasis: ‘I’m almost there.’
We sat staring at one another and I didn’t know what to say. Then he slumped down again, grabbed his glass and had a drink. He turned his attention back to me, his eyes hazy now as he asked, ‘And you? What’s missing from your life?’
I was pleasantly tipsy as I made my way back to my house after another beer, which Lars had paid for. The rosebush had lost a lot of leaves. What’s missing from my life? I gathered up the leaves and threw them in the bin, thinking that both Lars and I were tormented by the same thing. A lack, something fundamental missing from our lives. It was just that in his case, it was a lot more concrete.
I switched on the TV; the same show was still playing relentlessly, and I sat there for a while with my mouth hanging open, as if I were watching the absurd customs of some alien race, until the colourful images began to flicker before my eyes. I turned off the TV, laid out my mattress and allowed the stream of lava inside my head to carry me towards Christmas Eve, which I would be spending with my mother.
*
I see no reason to describe the apartment on Ibsengatan in Blackeberg where I grew up. For one thing I have already done so in detail in Let the Right One In, and for another it has no relevance to this narrative. My account of my life might make me seem heartless, a bad son, but I have left out three or four visits to my mother, because they don’t bring anything to the story, and I can’t include everything.
We did the best we could in our loneliness, watching Donald Duck and his Friends, even though it felt a bit desolate. As usual tears sprang to my eyes when the mice helped Cinderella with her dress. We ate our Christmas dinner and my mother asked how things were going and I said fine. Everything was fine. Then we sat next to her little Christmas tree and exchanged presents. Mum was suitably pleased with the expensive slippers I had stolen, and I received a chunky blue jumper that was really lovely, plus a pair of thick socks that she’d knitted herself. At about seven o’clock we hugged each other and said goodbye, and I caught the subway back to the city centre.
By quarter to eight I was sitting on my chair once more. It was the evening of 24 December, and I felt dreadful. I tried crying, but that didn’t help. I put on my new socks and jumper, which improved things a little. At least I felt warm and cared for.
Christmas Eve has a tendency to bring things to a head. A summary of who we are and where we have got to in our lives. What we have. It’s no coincidence that Christmas Eve is the number one occasion for suicide, if it turns out that the final total is zero or minus.
I looked out and saw that the light was on in the laundry block. Someone was celebrating Christmas with the slime. Good for them. Or not. Whichever might be the case, I longed to go back there with a physical pull that reminded me of abstinence. The thing in the bathtub was what I had, for the moment.
Shit!
I gave a start, sitting there on my chair. I had forgotten to return Elsa’s key, which I had promised I would do as soon as I’d had a copy made. Elsa took the issue of access to the shower room very seriously, and I was so shaken that I immediately put on my boots and ran up the fire escape, my heart in my mouth, clutching the red ribbon.
A second after I’d rung the doorbell I regretted it, because I could hear the hum of voices from inside. I was about to slink away when the door was opened by a middle-aged man with ruddy cheeks. I held the key behind my back and a wave of warmth flooded over me from the apartment. The man frowned. ‘Yes?’ he said. ‘Hello?’
I waved my hand vaguely. ‘I was just going to…I’m a neighbour, but obviously you’re…’
The man stepped aside. The scene that met my eyes verged on the ridiculous. Elsa’s words a couple of days earlier had been an exact prediction. She was holding court in one of the armchairs, with children sitting at her feet playing with their presents. The boy I recognised as Dennis tugged at her skirt and held up something made of Lego. Judging by the noise there were more people I couldn’t see. A real family Christmas.
‘Did you want something?’ the red-faced man asked. Elsa looked up and saw me. I can’t say that her expression was tortured, but it certainly didn’t convey the grandmotherly contentment that the situation called for. She seemed more or less indifferent. Something was going on around her and she was there, but that was it. I nodded to her and she nodded back. It’s okay. I apologised for having disturbed them, and turned away. The door closed behind me and the voices were reduced to a murmur.
To what extent can a person make demands? The scene I had just witnessed ought to be the dream for many people, and is reproduced in endless variations in ads, songs and stories. That scene was what those who put the noose around their neck to the sound of ‘Jingle Bells’ didn’t have. To what extent can a person make demands?
I suppose the answer is that only the individual knows. If there is no God to set the boundaries and exhort us to embrace humility, then we are free to demand whatever we want. In which case there is only one question: does God exist?
I shook my head at myself as I clattered down the fire escape with Elsa’s key dangling from my hand. Theological speculation was not my thing, but I suppose I could call myself an agnostic. Ever since I had been able to think in those terms I had had a sense that something else exists, something that lies outside and beyond our everyday existence…
I stopped at the bottom of the steps and looked at the laundry block door. The thing in the bathtub fitted that description to perfection. Did that mean the slime should be regarded as some kind of God? It was a long way from the kindly old man with the beard I remembered learning about in junior school, but I had never believed in that image either. Maybe God was actually a black, formless mass, a vague and ambiguous possibility.
The pull as I stood there was almost irresistible. I knew the booking schedule for the shower room was set in stone, and that it was unacceptable to go crashing in during someone else’s time. Something was tugging and dragging at my arteries, and I might have broken the rules if I hadn’t seen another way out. It was only a substitute, but it was enough to stop me from doing something I would regret.
*
While the rest of the city was festooned with Christmas decorations and coloured lanterns, the Brunkeberg Tunnel stretched before me as dark and silent as ever. The floor was wet with melting snow that had been brought in on people’s shoes; it was relatively warm inside, and condensation dripped from the w
alls as I squelched along to the point where the busker had stood and played, and where I had sat with a skinhead on my knee. The rock face was just as rough and solid there as in the rest of the tunnel.
My palms grew wet when I placed them against the rock and lowered my head. I closed my eyes and erased all thoughts, allowed my mind to embrace the darkness.
This time the first thing that came towards me out of the emptiness wasn’t an image, but a sound. My mental eardrums, located somewhere inside the physical, began to vibrate with the sound of a scream. No, more than a scream. A roar. A person roaring in pain. I reached further in, trying to sharpen my receptors so that I could see what was going on.
I don’t know if it was because of a weakness in the thoughts of the sender, fluctuations in the rock itself or something else, but the image that emerged was diffuse, the outlines blurred like a photograph developed in fluid that is too diluted.
It was a person, a person running—that much I could make out. The body was in the process of disintegrating, the skin bubbling and pitted like that of someone who has been badly burned, and my internal nostrils picked up a sulphurous odour. As the burned figure ran, it roared with pain. Apart from that: nothing. It seemed to be moving through emptiness.
I concentrated as hard as I could, but my only reward was the perception of grass beneath the feet of the running figure. Grass cut very short, with no distinguishing features. The person was in the field; I couldn’t say any more than that. I tried to make out facial features, but the severity of the burns made it impossible.
The image was sucked away and the rock closed around me. The next moment I was back in the Brunkeberg Tunnel, standing in slush with a wall in front of me. If someone was in the shower room right now, deep inside his or her desires, then how could these desires take the form of a badly burned person roaring with pain? Was it a revenge fantasy, something they wanted to inflict on someone else? No—the dreamer and the burned figure were the same person.
I heard the sound of footsteps splashing through the slush and looked up. A woman was coming towards me. She was in her fifties, and life hadn’t been kind to her. Dark shadows beneath weary eyes; coarse, dry hair peppered with grey. She was wearing a short skirt and tights with holes in them, and she was clutching a thin fake fur jacket around her upper body. She didn’t look at me, but kept her eyes fixed on the other end of the tunnel, as if there was a vision of hope shimmering there that she didn’t really believe in. As she passed me I said, ‘Excuse me?’
She stopped, slowly turned and stared at me as if I were an hour’s sleep she was about to lose. She shook her head and said, ‘Not working now. I can do you a quick blow job if you’re desperate.’
‘No, it’s not that. I just wondered…could you do me a favour?’
The look on her face said I’ve heard that before. ‘I don’t do favours. Everything has a price.’
Since I was more or less bankrupt and it didn’t really matter, I fished out my wallet and offered her a fifty-kronor note. She snorted and was about to say something cutting, but I got in first. ‘I just want you to come and stand here, put your hand on the rock and close your eyes.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘What kind of sick crap is that?’
I held both hands up in the air with the note firmly clasped between the index and middle fingers of my right hand as I backed away from her. I pointed with my left hand. ‘There. Stand there and close your eyes. Tell me if you feel anything.’
The woman took a couple of steps towards the spot, suspicion written all over her face. I moved further back until I was a good five metres away from her. She shrugged with such indifference that my heart turned over.
‘Okay.’
Her eyes were cloudy. I thought maybe she was under the influence of something or other and had already forgotten what I said, so I repeated my request: ‘Put your hand on the wall. And close your eyes.’
‘Why?’
‘I just want to know if you feel anything.’
She grinned, exposing a set of yellowish-brown teeth. ‘It’s been a long time since I felt anything, son.’ She leaned heavily against the wall and closed her eyes. I held my breath as the seconds ticked by. My lungs tensed as her body language changed; she became alert, wary of an approaching danger.
Suddenly she pushed herself away from the wall with unexpected strength, almost as if the wall had hurled her away from itself. Her mouth opened and closed and she stared at me. I lowered my hands, held out the fifty-kronor note and asked, ‘What did you…?’
Before I could finish the question she turned and ran towards Birger Jarlsgatan. She tottered on her high heels, and after a few steps she slipped and fell in the slush. I went to help her up, but she pulled a Mora knife out of her pocket and pointed it at me.
‘Fuck off!’ she yelled. ‘I’m not afraid to use this—get away from me!’
I stopped and raised my hands once more. As the woman scrambled to her feet, I said as calmly as possible, ‘Can’t you just tell me what you saw?’
She backed away, waving the knife around in front of her. Was she fighting the ghosts? ‘I know people, so you’d better fucking watch out!’
When she was about ten metres away from me she turned and broke into a run again. She glanced over her shoulder a couple of times. I stayed where I was. It didn’t really matter; I had got the answer I’d been looking for. She had seen, she had felt. But I would have liked to have known what.
*
I went home and flopped down on the chair. Christmas Eve. It’s Christmas Eve. Inside the shower room there was someone who had chosen to spend this special night running across a field, badly burned and in terrible pain.
I relaxed, forgot my conventional ideas about what was right and wrong, good and bad, and I understood. When in trouble, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. I was no different. Under slightly different circumstances my own field-longing might have been exactly the same. Being able to run with my body on fire, run and run and scream to feel numb and escape something else. Instead of fear, I felt a spontaneous tenderness towards the person who was so like me, deep down inside. On some level we all want to fall or burn. I picked up the piece of paper with Thomas’s phone number on it and stared at it. The deadline for accepting his offer was fast approaching.
Perhaps I can explain my actions by saying that the experience in the tunnel had softened my moral code and created a longing to drop out of what I thought I was. Thomas answered on the fifth ring, obviously drunk. I could hear music in the background, but no voices.
‘Yes?’
I was about to hang up, mostly as a reaction to Thomas’s pathetic Christmas celebration, but I hesitated for a few seconds, which gave him time to ask, ‘Is that John?’
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, cool. So you’re in?’
I saw the picture Lars had painted: Thomas in his bed, hugging his mummy and daddy when they gave him his much longed-for Lego set.
‘I’m in. On condition that…’
Thomas interrupted me. ‘No one gets hurt, et cetera, et cetera. You don’t need to worry—it’s not that kind of job.’
‘So what kind of job is it?’
‘A house on Lidingö. Owners away over Christmas.’
‘How do you know they’re away?’
A long, drunken sigh, then: ‘Friends of my dad’s. I know them. Know where they keep stuff.’
‘Is this some kind of…revenge?’
‘What are you talking about? Where’s that come from?’
‘Forget it. Just something that came into my head.’
‘For fuck’s sake…I’ll pick you up tomorrow at six.’
By the time I put down the phone I was regretting my decision, cursing my impulse-driven behaviour. I pulled the jumper my mother had given me down over my knees and tucked my feet underneath me. I sat in my chair curled up into a ball. It wouldn’t have come to this if the shopkeepers had been a little more generous. It was their fault.
/> I wanted to run, roar, burn. Instead I sat there apathetically, glaring at the dying rosebush and imagining a Cruise missile taking down Santa’s sleigh. All those children’s presents turned to ash, and the reindeers’ entrails raining down over the snow-covered earth, while Santa himself was impaled on the spire of the City Hall.
The following day I had booked a slot in the shower room at twelve. Without that knowledge I would have fallen apart. Again. I listened to ‘Somebody’ eight or nine times, sitting right next to the turntable, mechanically lifting and moving the needle. I tried ‘Blasphemous Rumours’, but as soon as I heard the introductory sound of the respirator I felt so uncomfortable that I went back to ‘Somebody’ and listened to it several more times.
*
At twelve o’clock precisely I opened the door of the laundry block and discovered that both machines were hard at work. There were two separate booking systems for the laundry and the inner room. The new key was a little bit stiff, but it worked. I went in, switched on the light and closed the door behind me.
There was something hypnotic about the smooth surface in the bathtub. I moved the knife and the towel and sat down on the stool with my elbows resting on my knees, keeping my eyes fixed on the black mass.
After a while I was convinced that something was moving beneath that mirror-glazed surface. I was also aware, in a way that couldn’t be defined by normal perception, that it was much bigger than the bathtub. A blue whale swimming in a kitchen sink. It is possible to write the words but impossible to imagine, and I felt dizzy as the three dimensions of the room collapsed. The bath no longer seemed like a physical object within the room, but simply an opening.