‘Dadda,’ the child said again. The word was followed by an unpleasant grin. Several of his teeth were missing. Then he turned his face to the wall and made himself as small as possible.
The boy clambered down to fetch the bucket. Back in the tree house, he shook out the sleeping-bag on the floor, and explained how the child should use the bucket and the toilet paper. He had no idea if the child knew what he was talking about.
‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ he said.
Then he went home.
*
When I had finished writing and run through my magic act a few times, I made dinner. My culinary skills were limited to pasta and a couple of combinations using Uncle Ben’s stir-fry sauces. On this particular day I diced a Falun sausage and mixed it with the sweet-and-sour variety. Plus rice. I ate sitting at the desk, staring at the wall where smoke and age had stained the plaster the colour of a hard-bitten nicotine addict’s fingers.
The pressure. It’s getting stronger.
The busker’s words left me no peace, because I could feel the pressure too. A rushing sound in my ears, a faint whistling deep inside my skull that I had dismissed as a consequence of thick walls and isolation. The sound of loneliness, if you like.
The pressure is getting stronger.
I washed my plate, knife and fork and left them to dry on a tea towel. Then I stood with my arms dangling by my side and glared at the wall with its sick pigmentation. The evening lay before me, plump and empty. I considered going out and buying a pack of cigarettes to see if smoking had anything going for it. A pause, an escape. I decided not to bother. I stood completely still, feeling the pressure. Feeling it grow stronger. As if I were in a tank filled with water, sinking slowly, so slowly. The whistling inside my head, the pressure on my eardrums. I couldn’t move, daren’t even breathe for fear of actually feeling the water pouring into my lungs.
The sound of the telephone ringing caused a rupture. A sledgehammer struck, relieving the pressure. My hand was free to lift the receiver to my ear so that I could hear the familiar voice.
‘Can I speak to Sigge?’
‘We’ve already been through this. Sigge isn’t here.’
‘Hasn’t he arrived yet?’
‘He’s never been here.’
I was about to add that he wasn’t going to be here either, when the voice on the other end interrupted me. ‘How do you know?’
‘Sorry?’
‘How do you know he’s never been there?’
‘Because I’m the only one who lives here.’
‘Mmm. But we’re not talking about you at the moment. We’re talking about Sigge.’
Had the pressure really eased, or had the phone merely distracted me so that I no longer felt it? I cautiously took a breath, just to check if anything would prevent my lungs from expanding.
‘Aren’t we?’
I must have tuned out; I couldn’t work out what he meant, so I said, ‘What?’
‘It’s Sigge we’re talking about now.’
‘Yes. We are. But he isn’t here.’
‘Are you absolutely sure about that?’
I lowered the receiver and looked over at the toilet door. As I stood there listening, I got the idea that there was someone in there. The man on the other end of the line said something, and I put the receiver to my ear once more. ‘What?’
‘I said you don’t seem absolutely sure. Maybe Sigge’s there after all?’
I was about to hang up so that I could go and investigate the toilet, but then I pulled myself together and came out with the question I should have asked in the first place: ‘This Sigge you keep talking about—who is he?’
The man guffawed, and I could picture him shaking his head as he replied, ‘Oh my goodness—that’s something you’d really like to know, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘I’m afraid that’s not possible. If you don’t know, you’ll find out. But I think you do know. Just don’t get too caught up in that Sigge business. I mean, what’s a name? Anyway, I’ve got to go.’
Before I had time to say another word he ended the call, leaving me listening to the atmospheric hissing of the phone lines. I could hear distant voices without being able to make out what they were saying. When I had sat there for a while, I hung up and opened the toilet door. It was empty, and the only sound was the movement of the water in the pipes. Rising, falling.
I survived that night too, as one does. Minute follows minute, and time passes. The election was the following day, and I intended to go and vote. Which I did. I probably listened to ‘Shake the Disease’ by Depeche Mode several times that night; I had stolen it a few years earlier. Martin Gore’s lonely voice as he sang the desolate intro was like a companion, somehow familiar, as if he was describing something I knew.
*
The boy found it difficult to sleep that night. He lay there with his head buried in the pillow, thinking that he had forgotten to take a pillow for the child. From there his mind wandered to the image of the child curled up on the floor of the tree house. In the forest, in the darkness.
He might have been able to sleep if his thoughts had stopped there, but they continued to circle mercilessly around the child’s appearance, and what he must have suffered. The missing teeth, the broken fingers.
As soon as the boy closed his eyes he saw himself shut away in a cramped, dark space. A door flung open, hands grabbing hold of him and dragging him out, kicks, blows, and even worse. Tools.
He couldn’t shake off the images, but in the end he found a way to deal with them. Instead of being the one subjected to the abuse, he made himself the perpetrator. This was unpleasant too, but at least there was a glimmer of satisfaction in it. He had the power. This reassuring knowledge allowed him to fall asleep at last.
*
My polling card instructed me to cast my vote at Blackeberg School. It would be fifteen years before I set some of the narrative of Let the Right One In inside that very building, but when I woke up feeling groggy from a lack of sleep on the morning of election day, I felt a nagging sense of horror.
I was far from done with my childhood, and not just the events surrounding the child in the forest. More ‘normal’ things still lay like muddy silt in my mind, and I avoided stirring it up if I possibly could.
Isolation leads to egocentricity. In the absence of outside influence, it is easy to imagine that the world is a machine, created to focus on oneself. As I walked out of Blackeberg’s subway station towards the brick colossus on Björnsonsgatan, I thought everything was about me and the school, how we would handle our reunion.
I don’t know if it was a disappointment or a relief when it turned out that this particular day wasn’t in fact about ‘Young man returns to his past’, but about the election of the Swedish parliament, councils and local authorities. The schoolyard was full of people with party banners, handing me leaflets that meant nothing to me.
Someone explained the procedure to me, and I placed my votes in three envelopes. When I handed them over to the returning officer and he ticked me off on his list, for a brief moment I experienced a sense of belonging, of being a part of something bigger, and I realised that I really wanted the Social Democrats to win. Not because of any deep conviction, but because they were my team. I had voted for them, after all. There and then I made up my mind to stay up and watch the results come in on TV.
The sense of belonging faded away when I left the polling room and went upstairs to my old corridor. It hadn’t changed, and the smell was exactly the same—a mixture of perspiration, paper, misery and hormones. I sat down on the bench outside the classroom and tried to feel something. There was nothing apart from a misdirected nostalgia, so instead I took out my notepad and thought about the not-too-distant past.
*
The next day was a bad day. Jimmy became obsessed with the idea that ‘the air is free’, and during every break his hands fluttered and flapped in front of the boy’s eyes. As soon as the boy b
linked or tried to turn his head away, he got a smack on the cheek. Conny and Andreas helped out with pinches and name-calling just to increase the level of difficulty.
It wasn’t the bullying itself that was the worst thing. The boy had learned to let his thoughts drift away while it was going on, let time pass until it was over. The constant feeling of persecution was much harder to handle, though—the knowledge that the schoolyard, the corridors and classrooms were unsafe places where the next attack could come at any moment, from any direction and in any way. The boy could never relax, and the constant tension, combined with poor sleep at night, meant that he was utterly exhausted.
During maths, the last lesson of the day, the boy was sitting there solving a simple equation when blood began to drip onto the squared paper in front of him. His immediate thought was that Jimmy had come up with something new, but the drops came faster and faster, and when he raised his head they trickled down into his mouth.
He was given permission to leave the room and ran to the toilets, where he stuffed plugs of toilet paper into his nostrils. By this time it was only twenty minutes to the end of the school day, and he had the golden opportunity to gather up his things and put on his outdoor clothes in peace. He made the most of it.
It was nice to walk home without having to look over his shoulder, and most of the tension in his body eased. The boy touched the lumpy plugs in his nose and thought about the black substance that had oozed out of the child’s nostrils. What was it? He had never seen anything like it. It had looked like a black snake, poking its head out and trying to escape. Something special, something different.
*
I spent the evening working with my coins and manipulating my cards in the glow of the desk lamp as something behind my back strove to take shape.
The pressure. It’s getting stronger.
The busker’s words had confirmed what I had suspected, and once I started thinking about it, it was more or less impossible to stop. I took my bearings, trying to locate the growing pressure. At nine o’clock I gave up and got ready to go to Monte Carlo. I slipped a pack of cards and a thumb tip in my pocket in case I had the opportunity to do some magic.
The Monte Carlo club at the junction of Sveavägen and Kungsgatan was a den of iniquity. I could feel it, just as I could feel the seedy atmosphere in my house. The appearance, attire and attitude of the clients were part of it, but it was also the way people looked at one another, how they conducted their conversations. Money, wariness and power play were circulating away from the roulette and blackjack tables too.
The large-screen TV, which normally showed music videos or sport, was tuned to the election results with the sound turned off. I bought a beer and sat down at the only free table as pie charts flickered on the screen. The forecasts indicated victory for the left. I raised my glass and toasted the image of Olof Palme that had just appeared.
Behind me I heard someone declaim with the exaggerated emphasis of the drunk: ‘This whole fucking country will soon be part of the Soviet Union, just you wait and see. Spetsnaz units on the streets, U-boats in the Baltic, while Palme sits there grinning and rubbing his hands as the money pours into the funds controlled by the unions and disappears to Moscow. Fucking hell.’ I turned around and saw a man who looked like a yuppie shaking his fist at the screen, where a smiling Olof Palme was now making his way through a crowd of people, a bouquet of red roses in his arms.
The angry man’s friend, who had an identical haircut and was dressed exactly the same, was trying to get him to sit back down, but to no avail. When the friend said something, the angry man replied, ‘I’ll say what I want. If someone took out that arsehole I’d dance on his grave.’
A barrage of flashing lights from the TV as Palme stepped up onto a stage, raised the bouquet in the air and leaned towards a microphone. I could read the first word on his lips: ‘Comrades!’
A whistling sound started up between my temples. I was caught in the crossfire between the joy on the screen in front of me and the anger behind my back.
The pressure. It’s getting stronger
and it felt contradictory and dirty in a way that made me feel slightly sick. I stood up and left the club. When I got out into the street I took a few deep breaths and the nausea subsided a little.
I have to practise.
I had to practise my magic. I had to pass the coins more skilfully, make every movement smoother. It had to be cleaner, cleverer. I had to get there. I had to get away.
*
Transcendence. All my life I have striven to achieve it, in different ways. I am not sufficiently educated in philosophy to understand how Kant, Kierkegaard or de Beauvoir define it, but I know what it means to me. I believe that most people are striving for transcendence, whether they use that term or not.
The world and our existence are on the one hand wonderful, a miracle. On the other hand they are an insult, like being promised a buffet and receiving nothing more than a few cold potatoes. Of course no one promises us anything; it is we ourselves who are responsible for making the most of what we are given. Life is insufficient because we make it insufficient and regard it as a disappointment. And so it spins around and in the worst-case scenario gradually becomes a spiral. A downward spiral.
The only way to escape from this velodrome of the soul is through transcendence. To continue the analogy: it doesn’t help if the cyclist begins to wobble as he or she travels around, pedals faster or repeatedly rings the bell. He or she is still following the circuit. It’s all about getting the parts to blend together or to dissolve so that the movement continues without the help of either the circuit or the bicycle. This can be achieved. You just have to believe it.
With the help of Han Ping Chien, for example. When I returned from Monte Carlo I sat down at the desk in front of the mirror and switched on the light. I’d been practising a routine in which four coins are magically transported from the left hand to the right hand using the manoeuvre known as Han Ping Chien, but now I put the routine aside and concentrated on the manoeuvre itself.
One coin is on the upturned palm of the right hand, another in the closed fist of the left. Turn the right hand downward so that the coin ought to fall, but instead you palm the coin. At the same time the left hand slides over to the left and imperceptibly drops its coin in the spot where the coin from the right hand should have landed.
The manoeuvre takes two seconds to execute, and in its simplicity demands that a range of different muscles work together in a complex way in order to become totally harmonious and to make the illusion complete.
The left hand can move too fast and draw the attention of the observer, the right hand can acquire an unnatural appearance; the coin can land a centimetre away from the spot where it ought to have landed. Even if the observer can’t say exactly what is wrong, there is a sense that aha, something dodgy happened there, and the whole thing is ruined.
I practised getting the right-hand coin in the perfect spot where it could be palmed most easily; I tried using different speeds for the movement of the left hand. I varied the height of my hands above the table, and the distance between them when the movement began and when it ended. I worked on exactly where the borderline lay when it came to applied pressure from the flaps of skin on my right palm so that the coin was held in place while my hand remained as relaxed as possible, and on how tightly I could weave the fingers of my left hand over the coin that was to be dropped. And so on.
I had been practising for over an hour when I began to enter the state I was trying so hard to achieve. Until then the turbulent emotions I’d felt at Monte Carlo had stayed with me like a background hum, but it had faded away without my noticing, leaving only my hands, the coins, the movement.
As I threw the coin from my right hand, my body and mind told me that I was actually throwing it, and that my left hand was naturally pulling away, nothing more. It was as if even I couldn’t believe that the coin remained in my right hand while the left was empty. It was like
magic, and for a brief period of grace I was on the other side of the borderline.
My fingers were stiff when I eventually put aside my equipment and picked up my pen to carry on writing the story of the child in the forest, the story of the time when I really had transcended and finished up somewhere else.
*
When the boy got home he felt a strong urge to collapse on his bed and drift off for a couple of hours, but curiosity won out over tiredness. He wondered whether the child was still in the tree house, and if so, what he was doing. And there was something more, a pull he couldn’t put into words.
He took a spare pillow out of the wardrobe and looked in the fridge to see what he could take without arousing suspicion. He settled on a tomato, two carrots and half a jar of jam that was lurking at the back of the shelf. He put these paltry offerings in a plastic bag and weighed it in his hand. In the freezer he found a foil tray containing a portion of lasagne, left over from a couple of weeks ago. It should be edible when it defrosted. He set off for the forest to see what had happened to his pet overnight.
It was a lovely afternoon. The deciduous trees shimmered in different shades of green, tucked in among the dark conifers. It was just warm enough, and soft sunlight found its way down between the treetops, scattering patches of brightness across the ground. The boy moved from one patch to the next, telling himself that he had to find the right one, the one that would beam him up to the mothership. He was so preoccupied with his quest that he didn’t notice the uniformed man until he almost bumped into him.
‘Steady on now,’ the police officer said, placing a heavy hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Let’s just take it easy, shall we?’
Ever since the boy had been picked up for shoplifting, the police had joined the list of things he was afraid of. It wasn’t just their appearance and attitude, but also the thought that from that moment on, every single cop knew precisely who and what he was.
The man standing in front of him didn’t exactly help matters. For a start he was very tall, almost two metres, and his muscular build made him seem like a giant in the boy’s eyes. His hands were so big that he could easily place one of them on top of the boy’s head, squeeze hard and lift him straight up in the air like a basketball. Or crush his skull.