I picked up the smallest of the three pieces of biscuit, popped it in my mouth and chewed. It tasted of nothing.
‘You’re the only one who can decide,’ Elsa said. ‘If you’re going to carry on or not. And to go back to your question…’ She blew on her coffee and took a tiny sip. ‘…as I said, I’m not the right person to ask.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because my experience is such that it’s hard to make out a child.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘No, how could you? You don’t know what I look like when I’m there, what I do.’
‘And you don’t want to tell me.’
‘The fact is, I was thinking of contacting you today anyway. Most of us are meeting up tomorrow night.’
‘On New Year’s Eve?’
‘Yes, it felt right, somehow.’
‘And what are you…or rather we…going to do?’
Elsa didn’t give me a direct answer; instead she took another sip of coffee while staring blankly into space, as if she were recalling an image in her mind. She put down the cup and said, ‘Have you noticed that there’s a frustration? A…dissatisfaction?’
‘Yes.’
Elsa nodded. ‘That feeling has become increasingly painful for those of us who’ve been involved for longer than you, and something has to be done. So we thought we’d show ourselves to one another.’
‘In the field?’
‘Yes. I’m sure you’ve seen the shadows. We thought we’d try turning them into flesh, so to speak, by travelling together.’
I remembered the What? that I had yelled out in the field, that sense of dissatisfaction that had given rise to the destructive urges I felt in this world, and I asked, ‘What time?’
*
The meeting in the laundry block was due to start at ten o’clock on New Year’s Eve, so when I arrived at the Boilermaker’s Association HQ on Sankt Eriksgatan half an hour before I was due to appear at eight, I assumed I had plenty of time.
The party was in full swing, with drinking songs and speeches. As I waited in a storeroom with piles of stacking chairs, I left the door ajar so that I could listen. I still wasn’t sure what these people actually did.
At eight-thirty the person who had booked me and who had also met me when I arrived came in to say things were running a little late, there were more speeches than expected, but people were pretty merry, which was bound to be an advantage as far as I was concerned, wasn’t it? Without waiting for a response the man tottered back to the party, leaving me grinding my teeth.
As I mentioned before, there is no advantage whatsoever if my audience is pretty merry, quite the reverse in fact, and at a party like this it’s even worse. The merriment could easily lead to a desire to show off, to shout comments or actually clamber up on stage to tell a joke or demonstrate some magic trick of their own during my performance. It had happened before.
I decided to walk. The man hadn’t even apologised for leaving me stuck in this fucking storeroom—he probably thought there was no need because I was there to serve and would wait politely until I was told to perform my services. I got to my feet, picked up my bag and was on my way out of the door when I came up with a better solution. Revenge. I sat down again, crossed my legs and smiled.
The man reappeared just before nine, his eyes watery and unfocused. He informed me that the atmosphere was absolutely brilliant—yes yes yes, showtime! I stood up with dignity, gave him a little bow, grabbed my bag and my stool and followed him into the room.
There is no need for me to describe the party or the room in any detail; they’re all the same. The long tables, the red faces, jackets off, blouses unbuttoned maybe just a little too far. There were around sixty people in the smoky room, where the temperature was approaching thirty degrees and most of the partygoers had reached the stage of intoxication where they had started stubbing out their cigarettes in the potato gratin.
The man who had booked me stepped onto the stage and executed a few clumsy dance steps before waving his arms in an attempt to silence the crowd. He was aged about fifty, and I assumed he was the company’s Minister of Fun. A garish tie adorned with fireworks and shot glasses dangled over an impressive belly, which bumped into the microphone stand and meant he had to lean forward to get his mouth anywhere near the mic.
‘Comrades!’ he bellowed. ‘Fellow delegates!’
Loud whistling and cheering. I didn’t think the Boilermakers’ Association had anything to do with the Socialists—the man was just being ironic, and it worked. He went on: ‘I now have the honour of introducing a young man from Blackeberg. I lived there for a few years in the sixties and I knew his mother, so you never know who I’m actually introducing! Thank you very much!’
Laughter and applause. If there had been a sharp object within reach, a fork or a steak knife, I might well have picked it up and stabbed him. What right did he have to talk about my mother? Every right, in his opinion. Hatred flared up inside me, and only the thought of revenge enabled me to climb up onto the stage and say, ‘Good evening! So you’re the Boilermakers’ Association? Is that why it’s so warm in here?’
Strangely enough, the performance went well. The venom I felt towards every single person in the room emanated from me in the form of an intensity that was able to cut through to their booze-addled minds. The Cigarette in the Jacket was a success, and the poisonous jokes I aimed at an under-manager provoked bursts of laughter, even though the manager himself was clearly upset. Fine by me. The applause at the end of my act was loud and heartfelt. I smiled, bowed and waved. Bye bye, everyone—I’m just a clown without the slightest trace of resentment.
The man with the festive tie accompanied me to the cloakroom and then down to the foyer, where he gave me an envelope containing my fee and said, ‘Er…I hope you didn’t mind…that comment about your mother…it might have been a bit…’
‘No problem,’ I said, patting him on the shoulder. ‘I thought it was funny.’
He looked at me with a certain amount of scepticism, then seemed to decide that I meant it. He shook my hand and said, ‘Great show. I might call you again.’
‘Do that,’ I said. I opened the door, walked out into the street and set off slowly, listening hard. My revenge depended on what the man did next. When I arrived the door had been locked. I had rung the bell, and he had come down with a key, but when we went up to the party room, he had forgotten to lock it behind us. He was even more drunk now, and I hoped he would make the same mistake again.
I went about twenty steps without hearing a key turn, then headed straight back. I was right: the door wasn’t locked. I slipped inside and up the stairs.
A set of closed double doors separated the cloakroom from the party. Originally I had only intended to take money from the wallets and purses that would probably be in various coat pockets, but there was no reason to be so circumspect. The outside door was open, which meant anyone could walk in off the street. Besides which it was quarter to ten, and I didn’t have time to mess around. And possibly the most important reason of all: most people can cope with losing the odd hundred-kronor note, but to lose the whole wallet and everything in it? That hurts.
Methodically I moved along the rows, dropping whatever I found into my doctor’s bag. I ended up with around twenty wallets, several pairs of very nice gloves, a couple of empty hip flasks and a few other things, including a Bricanyl inhaler. With a bit of luck someone would have an asthma attack and find they couldn’t get it under control. That should put a bit of a dampener on the party atmosphere.
No one came out of the party as I went about my business, and I ran down the stairs and out into the street with my bag stuffed full of stolen property. I hadn’t done any serious shoplifting since the incident in Åhlén’s, and I had almost forgotten the fizzing sensation in the blood when I stepped across the line and into freedom—I hadn’t felt the same at the two houses on Lidingö—and my footsteps were light as I hurried up to Fleminggatan and hailed
a cab. Home to the meeting.
*
Before I go on I want to deal with the aftermath of the raid at the Boilermakers’ Association party so that it doesn’t drag through the rest of the narrative like a tail—so what happened next?
The man who had booked me called the next day, wondering if I’d seen anything; quite a lot of wallets had gone missing. In his voice I could hear both nervousness and suspicion, or maybe it was just a hangover.
Of course I said Oh dear, that’s terrible, I was really sorry to hear that, but no, I hadn’t seen a thing. Had he locked the door behind me when I left? Silence as he tried to disentangle what were no doubt confused memories of the previous evening. Eventually he said, ‘I’m sure I did—didn’t I?’
‘I don’t know, but I don’t think you locked it behind us when you let me in. Presumably the same thing could have happened again.’
I suspected that a clear memory had suddenly come into his mind, because he whimpered, ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘Well, I don’t know what your routines are, do I?’
He must have realised the battle was lost. If he still suspected me he had nothing to go on, and best of all, he was responsible, and he would have to face the consequences.
We said goodbye and I had to bite my tongue to stop myself from adding, ‘Mum sends her best.’
My haul came to 6200 kronor, more than four times what I earned for the actual performance. Plus a really good pair of gloves.
*
It was five past ten when the cab driver dropped me off on Luntmakargatan. I hurried in through the main door with my bag, which was now quite heavy. The light was on in the laundry block, the door was ajar and I could hear voices from inside. The last time I had witnessed that same scene, I had taken to my heels. Now I was looking forward to going in. I ran up to my house, dropped off the stool and the bag, then slowly walked back to the laundry block, savouring the evening. The smell of snow, the plume of light from the door, the approaching new year. I could hear the odd rocket going off in the distance.
Six people had gathered together: Elsa, Lars and the man who had burned his hands. His name was Gunnar. I also recognised the overweight woman—Petronella. The Dead Couple weren’t there, and I had never seen the other two before.
One introduced himself as Åke; he was a man in his fifties with such a staggeringly boring appearance that he would have fitted perfectly in a farce. Light brown trousers and an equally light brown pullover with a dark and light brown checked shirt underneath. A long narrow face and thin brown hair. An accountant with a medium-sized company who only poked his nose out when the annual audit came around, the guy whose name nobody could remember. That gives a better picture than saying he was a pharmacist, which is what he actually was.
The last person was a woman in her early thirties, spiky hair stiff with hairspray, zebra-striped tights and suit jacket with enormous shoulder pads. Both the hairstyle and the clothes would have been better suited to someone ten years younger. She was wearing so much make-up it was impossible to tell what she really looked like. Her name was Susanne, she worked for Swedish Television, and there was something about her that made me feel uncomfortable.
On the table provided for folding clean laundry there were cups, a thermos of coffee and the basket of biscuits from Elsa’s apartment. Plus two bottles of champagne and plastic glasses. The requisites for a normal if slightly substandard gathering, if it hadn’t been for the seven knives of different shapes and sizes laid out beside them. The table was directly beneath the Palmebusters T-shirt, dangling there like an altarpiece over some perverted sacrament.
‘I think you’re the last, John,’ Elsa said. ‘Could you close the door—it’s cold.’
I did as she asked, and when I turned back to the group it struck me that it would have been impossible to guess what these people, myself included, might have in common. To be fair, we didn’t have anything in common, at least on the surface. Only the longing for that chaotic opportunity.
Which immediately raises the question: why only us? There were other people who lived in the apartments surrounding the courtyard, other people who used the laundry block. The booking system for the shower room had been adjusted so that no one came or went at the same time as those who were only using the laundry, but that’s not enough of an explanation. It should have aroused our suspicions.
I can only speculate. Maybe they didn’t feel the pull, but rather the opposite. If they didn’t have an inclination towards the other, then it seemed repellent. Some are drawn to dark rooms and want to investigate what’s in there; others refuse and don’t even want to think about going inside. Are there strange noises coming from the darkness? Hurry away and forget about it. Do your laundry, stay in the light.
That’s one possible explanation. Another is that this is Sweden. If someone puts up an official-looking piece of paper that says this facility is closed for maintenance until further notice, then that’s the way it is. No point in asking questions, particularly if it feels a little… dark. Look after yourself and ignore everybody else.
‘Okay,’ Elsa said. ‘We all know why we’re here. Some have declined to take part in the experiment, and if anyone wants to drop out, then now is the time. After all, we have no idea what we’re going to see. And more importantly, perhaps, what we’re going to reveal.’
We looked at one another. No one left. The woman from Swedish Television was biting her nails, Lars stared expressionlessly at the floor and Petronella fanned herself with her blouse as Elsa unlocked the door of the shower room. We each picked up a knife and went in, shuffling so that everyone could fit.
Working together we managed to pull the bathtub and its contents half a metre away from the wall, then we knelt down around it. Because of her age Elsa was allowed to sit on the stool, and Petronella’s bulk meant she had to go at the short end. We raised our knives and Elsa counted to three. Then we cut our hands or arms, looked at one another, gave our blood to the blackness and were transported.
*
It is not yet time to describe what happened and what we saw in the field. For the moment I will simply say that the journey was considerably longer than usual thanks to the large quantity of blood, and that it was almost midnight when we returned to the shower room.
As the clock struck twelve we were standing out in the courtyard with our arms around one another, as close as we could get, all seven of us with tears of joy pouring down our faces. We were struck dumb by the deepest happiness, stroking each other’s hair and cheeks as the sky above us shimmered with flares and explosions in all the colours of the rainbow. A new year. A new life.
The six weeks that followed what I came to refer to as the gathering are unclear in my memory, as if someone had taken an Hieronymus Bosch painting—Hell or The Garden of Earthly Delights, whichever you like—and poured acetone over the myriad figures. Those tortured individuals would dissolve and flow together, so that you couldn’t see where one ended and the next began. That’s how January and the first half of February 1986 seem to me.
My notepad with its account of The Other Place is a great help when it comes to working out the chronology, but not everything is in there, and events in the real world are touched on only occasionally. I will describe them as far as I am able to make them out in the acetone soup, but I can’t swear that everything will be in the right order.
Certain events are among the most wonderful things that have happened to me in my whole life, while I am deeply ashamed of others. The first category belongs to the field, the second to the ordinary world, but both changed me and, in the end, an entire nation, because of what took place at the intersection of Tunnelgatan and Sveavägen on the evening of 28 February, two days after my—and my neighbours’—final journey.
So were we to blame for the assassination of Olof Palme? No more than a child playing with a grenade who blows up himself and his friends. However, we were responsible. Without our actions it wouldn’t have happ
ened. There is a difference, and I am holding on to that difference.
*
The gathering is a good description of that New Year’s night, because that’s what it was: we gathered, we came together. I will shortly include the section from The Other Place in which everything is described in more detail, but for it to make sense, I must first say a few words about this business of coming together.
It’s hard, not to say impossible, to really know another person. No matter how open-hearted we are when talking about our views and preferences, our history and our fears, however long we spend with the other person, we can’t help suspecting that the most important element is not being shared: who that person is, beyond the sum of his or her qualities. People much wiser than me have wrestled with that question, and it is equally complex and banal.
I have already talked about the field’s ability to reveal my real being, my innermost character. I had no idea what a gripping experience it would be to see others in the same way. When I look back at this narrative so far, I see that the theme of community runs through the whole thing. The isolation of human beings behind the barriers of skin and skull, the inability to achieve a genuine sense of belonging on both a personal level and within society.
For anyone who hasn’t had the experience, it’s difficult to understand what it can mean when these barriers fall, and you get closer to a group of people than you would ever have thought possible. It can’t happen in the real world, where we put on our masks and adapt our behaviour, subconsciously or otherwise. Even if we manage to drop all pretence and honestly stand naked before each other, those naked bodies would still not be our true bodies, merely the collection of bones, cartilage and tissue that has been randomly allocated to us. Our field bodies tell the truth about us, and a closeness that is impossible in the real world can arise.
Maybe it’s not a coincidence that this happened in the mid-1980s. Ten years earlier the experience wouldn’t have been nearly as overwhelming, but now individualism was becoming the norm. It was all about going to the gym and the tanning salon, Susanne Lanefelt bouncing around in pastel colours, time to stop restricting yourself and realise your possibilities. Invest in yourself!