‘You can take off your blouse,’ I said. ‘If you want to.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course.’
She wriggled out of her blouse, which had a bold floral pattern, and I folded it and laid it on the edge of the bath. I caressed her face, let my hands move down over her shapely shoulders.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘It’s been such a long time.’
‘I know. I know.’
There was nothing aesthetically pleasing, no sensual beauty in the way the pale, billowing rolls of belly fat spilled over, not in this world and not for me. I don’t think I would have been able to manage to make love to her, but after all this was Petronella, one of my nearest and dearest. I could give her comfort with my hands, so I stroked her distended skin, allowed my fingers to slip into moist folds, to flutter as gently as a butterfly’s wings over the voluptuous curve of her hips, until eventually I kissed her on the cheek, and we remained sitting there for a long time, our foreheads touching.
*
You say you’re a monster. In which case you don’t need to understand. Anything.
As I said at the beginning of this section, things flow together, and maybe the absence of thoughts is part of the reason. By brooding about things we anchor them in time and in ourselves. Consider a painting. If you don’t think about what you’re seeing, you will neither remember the painting nor when and where you saw it. To continue the metaphor: my life after the gathering became like rollerskating through the Louvre. Everything flickers past and flows into one. I know that I had sex with Petronella’s fat lady, turned on by the Dead Couple’s symbiotic figure, but it might have been on a different day and under different circumstances.
I will do my best to reconstruct that period, but what I can’t provide are thoughts, because hardly any existed. For the same reason, I am unable to give any explanation for my behaviour. Everything I and the others did seemed perfectly self-evident at the time, so there was no point in pondering over it. It just happened. It felt right.
*
A few days into the new year I got a call from the police. The night in the cells at Kronoberg and what preceded that night belonged to a different life, but the justice system was unlikely to take that into account. In the eyes of the law I was still the same person, and a week later I found myself outside the enormous doors of the city courthouse.
Something I’d read by Kafka flashed through my mind as I opened a smaller door inset into the larger ones. I made my way to room E5, which was a disappointment. I wasn’t doing much thinking, but I had imagined something similar to a scene from an American movie. A courtroom, a judge sitting behind a bench, banging his gavel. Room E5 was an ordinary office in which a little man with narrow lips whose skin seemed too tight for his face was sitting at a desk.
He rocked back and forth on a large upholstered chair as he went through my case and established that all the details were in order. I had admitted the offence and signed my statement. Because my declared income for the previous year was so minimal, he had issued the lowest level of fine, twenty payments of forty kronor each, and he hoped that my current income…
I had stopped listening. On his wall hung a picture of—believe it or not—a weeping child, which took me back to a journey I had made with Elsa and Susanne a couple of days earlier.
The significance of Elsa’s field body wasn’t hard to understand. Proximity to her children and grandchildren wasn’t enough: she wanted to enclose them within herself, carry them and own them, and consequently the best times of her life had been during her pregnancies. As soon as they left her body, her children had begun to move away from her.
During the journey Elsa had allowed the children to emerge from her skin, and Susanne’s little girl had played with them, turning somersaults on the field while I tried out a different aspect of my monster-body. I made my jaws enormous so that I could seize the screaming, sobbing children with my tentacles and swallow them, feel them kicking and fighting all the way down into my belly before regurgitating them and starting all over again. It had been fun.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ The man leaned forward and tapped on the desk. I tore my eyes away from the picture and said no, I hadn’t heard what he said.
‘I said: What do you actually live on?’
I met his gaze and smiled. ‘Love and dreams.’
A look I couldn’t interpret passed across his taut face, and he lowered his voice: ‘Are you…for sale?’
I shrugged. That was one way of looking at my magic; I hadn’t even given it a thought since the Boilermakers’ Association party. The man got up and went over to the door. He locked it and took a couple of hundred-kronor notes out of his wallet. He placed them on a shelf filled with legal tomes, and said, ‘Maybe I can give you a nice time.’
‘Couldn’t you just knock it off the fine?’
He gave a nervous laugh. ‘I’m afraid that’s not how it works.’
He wanted me to sit in his big, comfortable chair while he knelt down in front of me and sucked me off. He made little noises as if he was in pain, and he wanted me to pull his hair and force him. His hair was quite thin, but I wound my fingers through the strands as best I could. I tore out a tuft along with a piece of his scalp and he let out a yell, but he didn’t stop even though blood was trickling down his cheek. So I picked up a hole punch from the desk and hit him over the head a couple of times, but even that didn’t put him off. I spotted a letter-opener and considered driving it into his ear, but decided to let him carry on. We all have our fantasies, our journeys. And besides, it was very pleasant.
When it was over and he had wiped his lips, which had swollen and now looked much better, I picked up the hundred-kronor notes and left the same way as I came in.
*
Despite what I said earlier about prudishness, I have noticed that sexuality is given a certain amount of space in this narrative. I think it’s to do with the physicality created by my association with the field. When thoughts disappeared, the physical gained greater significance, and it also expressed itself in different ways.
For example, maybe a week or so after the incident at the courthouse, Åke and I went on a journey. As I’ve already said, his field body was a barbaric warrior, Conan or something along those lines, a murderous machine with bulging muscles and cheekbones like bolt cutters.
If there is an archetype that’s all about Beauty and the Beast, then there’s another called the Warrior and the Monster, and that was the one we were going to experience. As we weren’t sure how injuries or death transferred between worlds, Åke put aside his sword and I promised to exercise a certain level of caution.
Even so, it was a battle worthy of the sagas when we clashed. Åke rained down blows as heavy as lead on my thick skin before I locked his arms with my tentacles, threw him to the ground, thought ‘teeth’ and inflicted a deep bite on his shoulder. No blood appeared, and we intensified our conflict until we lay exhausted side by side, gazing up at the blue sky. Then we left the field.
After agreeing that the black substance in the bathtub had now faded so much that it could no longer be called black, we went out into the laundry room and carried on fighting. We didn’t feel the least vestige of hatred or ill-will towards each other, quite the reverse, but we were completing the movement we had brought with us from the field. We punched each other’s bodies and hurled ourselves against walls and washing machines with love flowing between us and we didn’t stop until both our mouths were bleeding, at which point we embraced and went our separate ways.
It is still not time to talk about the Dead Couple, but they had gone further than any of us in transposing the physical aspects from the field into our world. Maybe it was because they had travelled together right from the start, and had had more time to reach the stage they were now at. More of that later.
*
These journeys to the field-world, which I increasingly came to regard as the real, true world, were turning into th
e central element of my life, but even on this side of the field a great deal was changed by being part of a group that was genuinely close.
I started going to the shops with Elsa, helping her to carry her bags, then we would have coffee in her kitchen while she talked about what life in Stockholm used to be like, filling out the memories of which I picked up only fragments when we travelled. Dancing at Nalen, the smugglers’ boats that sometimes sold their wares direct from Strömkajen, the problems during the war years. I liked listening to her.
Just as I had suspected the first time I saw Gunnar’s burned body running across the field there was a spiritual connection between us, though we had lived very different lives. He was a caretaker and general handyman for several properties in the area, and while ambling around carrying out his daily tasks he had developed an attitude to life that had led him to embrace Beckett wholeheartedly. The stubborn chipping away, searching for an emptiness and lack of lustre so great that it acquires a different kind of lustre. The silent panic.
Everything I know about Beckett I learned from Gunnar. I borrowed books from him and together we went to see a performance of Endgame in a basement theatre. We agreed that it was very poor, because it was deadly serious. We also went bowling a couple of times.
The wariness I had felt when I first met Susanne had more or less gone when I got to know her, and it disappeared completely when she called me one night and asked me to come and sleep over. As a result of certain experiences in her childhood she was asexual, and had kitted out her apartment with cuddly toys, cushions and brightly coloured posters. She fell asleep with my arms around her as I lay behind her, looking at a picture of Pegasus soaring up into the sky. A week or so later I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of emptiness. I called her and she came down and lay behind me on the mattress.
Petronella, Åke and I were all prone to sentimentality, and we would meet up in Åke’s apartment every Saturday night to eat Princess cake and watch This Is Your Life. We had tears in our eyes when Björn and Benny made their entrance on Stikkan Anderson’s program to the sounds of ‘Waterloo’.
Regardless of who I was spending time with and what we were doing, the hours we spent together were characterised by a simple sincerity. We knew each other so well that we instinctively steered away from topics of conversation that might be difficult for someone, and we never hurt one another. Being with them was like putting on a favourite old jumper, and the monster who leaked out into the world through me never showed its teeth to the neighbours. It was a good time.
*
As the attentive reader will have noticed, there was one person who took part in the gathering, but didn’t hang out with the rest of the group or accompany anyone on a journey afterwards. Lars. Days and weeks went by; he wouldn’t go to the laundry block if someone else was there. I tried phoning him a couple of times but he didn’t answer, so one day at the beginning of February I went up to see him.
By this stage my arms were covered in so many cuts that I had started to use my calves instead now and again, and occasionally the loss of blood took its toll and everything would start to spin around. Walking up the stairs to Lars’s apartment made me so dizzy that I had to lean on the wall after I’d rung the doorbell. I decided to take a few days off from travelling to the field to regain my strength.
The door opened slowly and Lars peered out at me as I stood there with my head down, trying to steady my breathing.
‘Yes?’
‘Hi Lars.’
‘Hi?’
His expression was blank, and there was nothing to indicate that he recognised me. ‘It’s John. From downstairs.’ His eyes narrowed as if he were trying to work out whether I was telling the truth. ‘We had a late night at the Monte Carlo restaurant, you and I. The day before Christmas Eve.’ I searched my memory for something that might make that particular evening stand out. ‘There was an elf dancing. On TV.’
It seemed as if that detail made the penny drop. Lars’s eyes widened and he said, ‘John’.
‘That’s right. How are you?’
‘Fine, thanks.’
‘Can I come in for a little while?’
He glanced over his shoulder as if checking with someone inside the apartment before he opened the door. ‘Just for a little while. I’ve got things to do.’
The hall looked exactly the same as when I had been there the last time. Exactly. Coats and jackets were hung up in the same places and as far as I could remember the shoes were in the same order. The odd thing might have been added, but I’m no memory man.
We went and sat down in the kitchen, and it didn’t take an expert to see that there was something new on the table: four boxes, a pair of scissors, Sellotape, ribbon, and a roll of wrapping paper covered in stars.
‘Boxes,’ I said.
‘Mmm. There’s just one missing—Marianne’s gone out to get it.’
‘Your wife Marianne?’
Lars nodded and gave a big smile. If I’d had the capacity to feel sorrow, I would probably have done so then. As it was I just got a bit of a lump in my throat that made it harder to swallow.
‘Lars,’ I said. ‘You never join us. Down in the shower room.’
‘I do go down there.’
‘Yes. But never with us.’
Lars leaned closer and whispered, as if he were revealing a secret. ‘There’s a way to make the journey…on a permanent basis.’
‘To the field, you mean?’
‘The field?’
I didn’t know what Lars saw when he was transported. His body had been more or less unchanged in the field. Perhaps it was the surroundings that looked different in his eyes, so I said, ‘The other place.’
‘Yes. That’s right.’
‘Okay. So how does that work?’
Lars had clearly lost his mind and almost managed to convince himself that he was thirteen years back in time, on Thomas’s ninth birthday. Which didn’t necessarily exclude the prospect that he’d come across something worth knowing. Children and fools tell the truth, as the saying goes, so I followed him when he stood up and went into the hallway.
If Lars had found a way of staying in the field, was that a step I was ready to take? I wasn’t sure, but it was certainly possible. He went over to a small chest of drawers and beckoned to me. He glanced at the closed door of Thomas’s room and opened one of the drawers. Inside lay a revolver, a Smith & Wesson. The sight of the large gun in the little drawer was so striking that all I could say was: ‘Where… Where did you get that?’
‘Monte Carlo.’ Lars lowered his voice to a whisper as he added, ‘It was expensive,’ and closed the drawer.
‘So you mean…’ I pointed at my temple with my index and middle fingers, and Lars nodded enthusiastically. This wasn’t the solution I’d been hoping for, nor was it a step I was willing to take, in spite of everything.
‘What makes you think you’re right?’
‘I just am. If you do it…’ Lars jerked his head towards the laundry block. ‘…there.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Depends what you mean by sure…’
I grabbed him by the shoulders, looked him in the eye and said, ‘Lars, you mustn’t do this. I’m going to take the gun and—’
I moved my hand towards the drawer, but Lars knocked it aside and said in a voice that suddenly sounded wide awake and fully compos mentis, ‘No fucking way. This has nothing to do with you. Get out.’
The blissful look in his eyes was gone, replaced by a seething rage. If we started fighting he wouldn’t hold back as Åke had done, and things could go badly wrong. Plus he was right: what did any of this have to do with me? Just like the rest of us he would do what he had to do; it was only the thought of Thomas that had led me to try to intervene. I left him and went home.
*
It might come as a surprise to learn that I cared about Thomas, but there’s something I haven’t told you about. Apart from the neighbours, there was another group I could tolerat
e in the ordinary world—Thomas and his gang.
I had kept my promise to Lars and not got involved in any more housebreaking with his son, but as we wound up our business affairs we had gone for a beer at Thomas’s regular haunt in the Old Town. A couple of his fellow skinheads came and joined us, then we went on to an apartment where there was a party going on, and that’s how it happened.
It is clear from this narrative that I harboured a kind of latent violence during this period, a projection of my monster-creature into this world. At the beginning of February I stopped using the subway, because the urge to push people onto the track was so strong that I no longer trusted my ability to resist it. Like everything else it was simply a fact of my world, but I still didn’t want to end up in jail for murder.
I enjoyed hanging out with Thomas and his friends. They had the same tendency as I did, and our association had a thread of brutality that suited me. There were plenty of hard shoves and crude jokes that sometimes turned into fights, especially if booze was involved—and it often was. I both took and gave plenty of punches, then it was Cheers, for fuck’s sake, and that was the end of the matter.
The music they listened to was harsh and bombastic with lyrics full of rage, and their conversations often contained hatefuelled diatribes against all those bastards who were destroying our wonderful country. I didn’t agree with much of what they said, but the tone made me feel at home. There was also a vein of sentimentality when they talked about things that were gone, from the death penalty to the little cottage where someone’s family used to spend every summer holiday.
As a skinhead gang they had one particular quirk that must have come from Thomas. Those who called themselves boneheads listened to White Power bands such as Skrewdriver and Ultima Thule, while the less extreme among them preferred classic ska bands like Madness and the Specials. Plus Povel Ramel.
A sparsely furnished apartment with mattresses on the floor among beer cans and bottles of Explorer vodka, and in the haze of cigarette smoke sits a gang of young men with shaven heads, stamping their booted feet and singing along with ‘Look, It’s Snowing’, booming out from the record-player. Their real favourite was ‘Daddy, I Can’t Crack My Coconut’, and no party was complete unless it had been played at least once, and preferably several times.