One afternoon at the beginning of September, the boy went along to his tree house as usual. He had with him a Dime bar and a Mars bar which he had stolen from the corner shop. He was planning on eating them as he dreamed of future triumphs.
As he stood at the bottom of the tree looking up, he could already tell that something was different. Through the gaps in the floor he saw something red that hadn’t been there the day before. He also glimpsed a fleeting movement, but when he called out, there was no response.
He wasn’t a courageous boy, except in his imagination, and he almost turned and ran off home in the hope that the problem would sort itself out, that whoever was in the tree house would be gone by the following day. But there was something about the movement he had seen, something furtive, that made him clamber up after all.
Inside the tree house, pressed into the furthest corner, sat a child aged five or six. He was wearing a thin, faded, ragged padded jacket and stained tracksuit bottoms. His face was dirty and covered in sores, his eyes filled with terror. He looked like a refugee, maybe from the Iran–Iraq war. But he also looked Swedish.
‘Hi,’ the boy said to the child. ‘What are you doing here?’
The child simply stared. When the boy heaved himself up into the tree house, the child pressed himself still further into the corner, as if he thought he might be able to push his way through the wall and disappear. The boy sat down in the opposite corner and scratched his head. He glanced out through the opening. Such a small child shouldn’t be alone in the forest.
‘Where are your parents?’
Something changed in the child’s face, as if the shadow of a cloud passed across it. The boy leaned forward and asked, ‘Shall we go and look for your parents?’
The child’s eyes widened even more and he shook his head—such a tiny movement that it was little more than a tremble.
‘Okay,’ the boy said. ‘So what shall we do then?’
The child had no answer, and the boy took out his stash of chocolate. The child’s expression brightened a fraction, and the boy held out the Mars bar. ‘Would you like it?’
Cautiously, as if the chocolate were a cobra that might strike at any second, the child reached out and took it. There was something strange about his fingers: they stuck out in different directions. As soon as the child had the chocolate at a safe distance, he ripped open the wrapper and bit into the bar with such ferocity that fragments of the paper ended up in his mouth too. The child chomped away, breathing hard through his nose.
‘Wow,’ the boy said. ‘I guess you were hungry?’ He looked down at the Dime bar, weighing up the pros and cons. He wasn’t exactly starving, but he did want something sweet. However, when the child had gobbled up the Mars bar, the boy held out the second bar of chocolate.
‘Here. You can have this one too.’
This time the child grabbed the gift more readily. The boy sat in his corner, watching as the child’s jaws loudly demolished the crunchy centre. It was quite good fun. Like having a pet.
*
Dawn had come creeping along while I was writing, and a faint glow was seeping in through the slats of the venetian blind. My eyelids had begun to feel heavy as I wrote the last few sentences, and I put down my pen. I wasn’t sure if this was a good project, but at least I’d made a start.
I laid out the mattress, made up my bed and got in, but then I lay awake for a long time, wondering how to continue the narrative. That was the first time I encountered the torment and joy of writing, and I decided that it was mostly a positive experience. The story lost its menacing, formless quality in the telling and became something I could twist and turn, looking at it from different angles as if it were something manageable.
*
The following day was something of a shock for me, as I spoke to no less than two of my neighbours.
Though I spent quite a lot of time in the laundry block, I still hadn’t used it for its designated purpose. However, the IKEA bags I shoved my dirty washing in were getting as full as my wardrobe was empty, so I had booked a slot to do my laundry.
It took me a while to figure out how the machines worked, and I used up almost all of my allocated time. Only five minutes remained as I piled the clean, dry clothes into the bags, and at that moment a smartly dressed man walked in.
‘Nearly done,’ I said.
He waved a dismissive hand and asked, ‘Are you the person who lives in the house across the courtyard?’
I wasn’t sure about the legality of my situation, so I mumbled and jerked my head in a way that could mean just about anything. He must have taken it as a yes, because he went on.
‘Good. It feels more homely when there’s a light on in there in the evenings.’
Reassured by his positive response, I took the opportunity to ask a question: ‘Do you happen to know who lived there before me?’
‘No. People came and went. It didn’t feel quite…right, if you understand what I mean.’
I gathered up the rest of my laundry from the tumble dryer and cleaned the filter. On my way out I passed the basket containing the man’s dirty clothes—shirts, trousers, underwear. The odd thing was that every item was meticulously folded. Before it was washed. I said goodbye and went back to my place.
After putting away my clean laundry I decided to go and have lunch at Kungstornet. I took my notepad and pen in case I wanted to carry on writing. On the way out I bumped into an elderly woman I had noticed earlier. She was somewhere between sixty and seventy. Her apartment was on the floor above my house, and I had learned to recognise her footsteps on the staircase outside my window.
She was often accompanied by small children of different ages, and I had drawn the conclusion that she was a very involved grandmother. When I met her at the main door it turned out I was right. A boy of about seven was holding her left hand.
‘Aha,’ the woman said, looking at me with interest. ‘I believe you’re our new watchdog?’
She used the word gårdvar. At the time I didn’t know what it meant, but I realised it had something to do with my house—or gårdshus. Encouraged by the friendliness of the meticulous man I had met in the laundry room, I bravely said, ‘Yes, that’s right.’
The woman held out her hand. ‘Elsa Karlgren,’ she said, bending down towards the boy. ‘And this is Dennis, my grandson.’
The boy glanced up at me shyly, then reverted to studying his shoelaces as he tugged at Elsa’s hand. I took out a five-kronor coin and showed it to Dennis, then I made it disappear before producing it from his ear. I wasn’t sure whether it was appropriate, but in a moment of inspiration I offered him the coin and said, ‘It’s yours. If you want it.’
Dennis shook his head, his eyes firmly fixed on his feet. Elsa smiled at me and said, ‘Wasn’t that clever?’ She and Dennis carried on towards the staircase. I stayed where I was for a moment before leaving the courtyard, feeling like a child who doesn’t understand how things work.
After I’d worked my way through a tuna salad and collected the coffee that was included in the price, I opened my notepad and read through what I had written during the night. It was astonishing how the unpleasant course of events lost its sting when it was written as a story. Was that why authors wrote?
Everything had happened exactly as I had described it, but it was impossible to convey all the details and perceptions linked in my memory to what had gone on, making it come alive. The smell of rust from the child’s jacket, the streaks of dirt on his neck, and his distorted fingers, like a broken machine. I couldn’t describe it then and I can’t describe it now. Then, as now, all I can do is write: first this happened and then that happened, while the real sense of the event eludes me.
I didn’t care whether I looked interesting or not as I bent over the pad and carried on with my narrative.
*
‘What’s your name?’
No answer. The dirt on the child’s face was now mixed with melted chocolate. He opened his mouth as if he were ab
out to say something, but instead his tongue emerged and licked his lips.
The boy sighed. ‘Do you understand what I’m saying?’
A nod, as minimal as the previous shake of the head. All of the child’s movements were so slow and tiny that it was difficult to work out how he had climbed up to the tree house.
‘My name’s John,’ the boy said. ‘I’m twelve. How old are you?’
The child held up one hand, its fingers pointing in different directions as if they had been broken and then healed badly. Five. The gesture was accompanied by a vague head movement, as if he wasn’t sure. Encouraged, the boy asked, ‘Do you live here? In Blackeberg?’
The child simply stared at him, and the boy was at a loss. What did you do in a situation like this? Ring the police, probably. The boy had had some dealings with the police due to his petty thieving, but no doubt that was what he ought to do. Ring the police.
‘Listen,’ the boy said, ‘whatever your name is. I think I need to call someone, someone who…’
There was no indication that the child understood, so the boy nodded to himself as if to confirm the wisdom of what he had just said. As he was clambering down through the opening to run home and call the police, the child spoke.
‘What? What did you say?’ the boy asked.
‘Fuckin,’ the child said. ‘Fuckinlittlebastard.’
The child uttered the words without a trace of emotion, his eyes fixed on the floor.
‘What are you talking about?’ the boy said. ‘I haven’t done anything to you!’
‘Gonnakillyou youfuckinlittleshit.’
The boy wasn’t stupid. Ugly and repulsive perhaps, but not stupid. He realised that the child’s garbled threat wasn’t aimed at him, but was simply a repetition of something he had heard. If the boy called the police, if he…
dropped the child in it
what would happen then? They would track down the child’s parents, or he would end up in the clutches of social services. The boy himself might get into trouble, because the police had already described him as a ‘cowardly little thief’. As a general rule, his experiences of turning to adults for help weren’t great.
‘Wait,’ the boy said. ‘I’m just going to collect a few things.’ He climbed down from the tree house and ran home.
Having a pet was good fun. Working out what the pet needed. His knowledge of small children was limited, as he had grown up without siblings, but he had kept a rabbit for a couple of years, and now he tried to use the knowledge he had gained.
Something to eat, something to drink, somewhere to sleep. The trickiest part was the toilet issue. It would be best if the child could do what was necessary in the forest, but the boy had the impression he was reluctant to leave the tree house.
Down in the cellar he found an old sleeping-bag that smelled a bit mouldy, plus a bucket with a lid. He stuffed the sleeping-bag into the bucket, then went back upstairs and put some crispbread, fish paste and several apples in a carrier bag, along with a roll of toilet paper and a bottle of water.
*
The lunchtime rush had subsided while I was writing. I tapped my pen on the pad as if I was seeking entry to my own story.
Why do we become what we become? The simple answer is that we are the sum of the choices we have made, the actions we have carried out. But why did we make those particular choices, carry out those particular actions? We have to go further and further back—like a child who keeps repeating ‘But why?’—until we reach the maternity ward and what took place there.
But even if we were given a minute-by-minute account of our first days of life, we still wouldn’t be able to explain all our decisions. There are incidences of uncertainty, there are leaps, and perhaps it is those very leaps that shape us, when we step outside ourselves and act without any regard for our previous experience.
The incident with the child in the forest was just such a leap for me.
I tapped my pen on the paper and realised what I was doing only when the sound began to echo around the room.
I stopped tapping and looked up. There was a man sitting at the corner table right at the back; he was wearing shabby, greyish-brown clothes that made him blend in with the wood-panelled wall. His hair was thin and greasy, and he was staring at me with his bulging eyes as he tapped his finger on the table next to his coffee cup. When our eyes met he gave me a conspiratorial grin.
I smiled back and shuddered inside as it occurred to me that I was looking at a possible version of myself in thirty years’ time. Perhaps I would still be sitting alone in the Kungstornet cafe, but by then I would have withdrawn from the light. If I made the wrong decisions, took the wrong roads. I picked up my notepad and pen and walked out.
I needed to succeed as a magician so that I wouldn’t end up sitting in that corner. I should have gone home to practise, right then, but anxiety had me in its grip, so instead I wandered along to Stureplan, where I sat down on a bench in the square and read through what I’d written.
In my highly strung state it seemed to me that everything depended on my success in writing the story, in continuing to write down what had happened. I stood up and hurried along Birger Jarlsgatan so that I could cut through the Brunkeberg Tunnel and get home more quickly.
The tunnel looked different back then. What is now a futuristic corridor that wouldn’t be out of place in an Alien film had a rawness about it in those days, and the ceiling was nothing more than bare rock. As I walked in through the doors I could hear music. A busker with a guitar was playing Towa Carson’s Eurovision song ‘Everyone Has Forgotten’. Drawing closer I dug out the five-kronor coin that Dennis had rejected. We street artists have to stick together.
During the summer in the Old Town and Kungsträdgården I had grown heartily sick of ‘House of the Rising Sun’, ‘Hotel California’ and ‘Stairway to Heaven’, so the busker’s unconventional choice of song made him worth the five kronor, which I dropped into his hat as I passed by.
‘Thanks, brother. By the way…’ he said, and stopped playing. I turned around. The man didn’t look like a typical busker. He was wearing khaki trousers with a sharp crease, a short-sleeved white shirt and a pair of deck shoes. He could have been an accountant who had suddenly decided to give music a go.
‘Yes?’ I said, looking into a pair of blue eyes surrounded by crow’s feet. The man gazed up at the ceiling and said, ‘It’s getting stronger, isn’t it?’
I took a step closer, unsure if I’d heard him correctly. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘It’s getting stronger. Don’t you think so? The pressure. It’s getting stronger.’
So that was the explanation. The man was a little bit crazy, he had strayed outside the norms of society, and maybe his clothes were an attempt to compensate.
‘Sure,’ I said, not committing myself to anything in particular. ‘Good luck.’
I waved to him as if he were a child, then turned and went on my way. Behind me the man began to sing yet another Eurovision entry, ‘It’s Beginning to Seem Like Love’, and the sound followed me out into Tunnelgatan.
*
As he approached the tree house, it had changed. It was no longer merely a rickety construction made of old planks and branches; no, it was also a container, and its contents emitted a pull that made the boy quicken his pace as he drew closer.
‘Are you still here?’
The question was unnecessary. He knew that the child was still there, just as we know when we are not alone in a pitch-dark room. He wanted to warn the child of his arrival, though, to avoid frightening him. He left the bucket at the bottom of the tree so that he could climb up.
The child was sitting in exactly the same spot, pressed up against the wall in the corner. He stared as the boy heaved himself over the edge and put down the carrier bag in the middle of the floor.
‘There you go,’ said the boy, taking out a piece of crispbread. Before he could do anything else, the child had grabbed the food and stuffed it in his mouth. In ten s
econds it was gone, and when the child reached out for the bag, the boy moved it away and said, ‘Just hang on a minute.’
The child, who had leaned forward to eat, hurled himself backwards into the corner with such force that the tree swayed. The boy dug out the tube of fish paste and showed it to him. ‘Look. I was just going to—’
He fell silent. A lump of something was working its way out of the child’s nose. It didn’t look like blood, because it was black. At the same time, it was too dense to be snot. However revolting the thought might be, it resembled some kind of diseased faecal matter. The boy gestured towards his own nose and said, ‘You need to wipe your nose.’
One of the child’s crooked fingers shot up in a spastic imitation of the boy’s gesture, and the black thing disappeared, back where it had come from. The boy unscrewed the lid of the tube and squeezed a string of red paste, which suddenly disgusted him, onto a piece of crispbread and handed it to the child. ‘Here. It tastes better this way.’
As the child ate, slightly less greedily this time, the boy looked at those bent fingers. They were barely human, more like claws in fact, and some of the nails were missing.
‘So what happened to your fingers?’ he asked.
‘Fuckoff,’ the child said. ‘Fuckoffyoulittlebastard.’
The boy understood. Someone had done this to the child, and that was probably why he had run away. He also understood that this was way too heavy for a kid in sixth grade to handle.
‘Listen, don’t you think I ought to call the police?’ he said.
‘Police,’ the child repeated. ‘Dadda police.’
‘What are you saying? Are you telling me your dad’s a cop?’