‘So where are you off to?’
His voice was deep and lacked any trace of friendliness. When the boy glanced up and met the policeman’s gaze, it was like looking into two camera lenses, and for a moment he got the idea that the policeman was a robot. He lowered his eyes and muttered, ‘Nowhere special.’
‘What have you got there?’
‘Just some stuff.’
‘Can I see.’
It wasn’t a question, and as the boy held out the bag with one hand, he clutched the pillow to his stomach with the other.
The policeman peered into the bag and asked, ‘What are you going to do with all this?’
The boy shrugged. ‘Eat it.’
‘Look at me when I’m talking to you.’
A magnetic force was drawing the boy’s eyes to the ground, and it took enormous effort to lift his head high enough to do as he was told.
‘Let me ask you again. What are you going to do with all this?’
The magnetic force shifted and took up residence between the boy’s jaws. His teeth chattered as he managed to part them just enough to say, ‘Eat it.’
The camera lenses scrutinised him, and the boy scanned the ground. If he could just find the right patch of sunlight the mothership would be able to beam him up and rescue him from the evil robot. The plastic bag swung into view as the policeman held it out to him. The boy took it with a trembling hand. He turned to walk away, but a colossal hand stopped him.
‘The thing is,’ the policeman said, ‘we’re searching for a boy. A little boy, no more than a child, and we think he might have got lost in the forest. Do you know anything about that?’
The boy shook his head, his neck crunching as bones and muscles were unlocked.
‘What did you say?’
The boy managed a whisper: ‘No.’
‘No, what?’
‘No, I don’t know anything.’
The policeman gripped the boy’s chin, and it felt like being caught in the fork of a branch as his face was forced upwards. ‘I hope you realise this is a serious crime. Withholding information. Do you understand?’
The boy nodded as best he could with his chin clamped in the policeman’s hand. He had never been so scared in his whole life, and something was about to spill out—piss, shit, a confession. He didn’t know why it hadn’t already happened, particularly the confession. His tree house was three hundred metres away—he didn’t even need to say anything, all he had to do was point. But as soon as he saw the policeman
Dadda police
it was as if all knowledge of the child had slipped down into the darkness. He knew and did not know at the same time, and it was doubtful if he could have told the policeman anything even if he’d wanted to.
The policeman contemplated him with those glassy eyes, then let go of his chin. The boy stood there with the pillow pressed against his stomach and thought about Mr Spock, about the Vulcan nerve pinch, about anything other than the man in front of him.
‘Run along and play,’ the policeman said.
The boy’s legs wouldn’t obey him well enough to allow him to follow the instruction, but he did manage to move away, one step at a time. He didn’t head for the tree house, but took a detour down towards Råcksta Lake in a wide arc, and when he got there he sat on a bench and waited.
He sat on that bench for two hours. It was an hour before he had recovered sufficiently to think of sitting on the pillow to make himself more comfortable.
He was intimately acquainted with nastiness, spite and sheer cruelty. But evil was an abstract concept he had never encountered; he hadn’t even believed that it existed, except in films and on TV. Now he thought differently.
The policeman who had come when he was caught stealing had been hard on him, and stupid, but the guy in the forest was something else. He was evil.
Evil?
The policeman had done nothing but ask a few questions and hold him by the chin. That was all. So how could the boy be so sure he had been faced with pure evil?
For a start, all he had to do was think of the child. He was pretty sure that it was the policeman who had hurt him, the policeman he had run away from. And yet that wasn’t conclusive. The boy wracked his brains, trying to formulate something that would enable him to make sense of it all.
Yes. Got it. The boy and his mother had once gone on a skiing trip to Norway. There had been a sturdy rail alongside one of the runs. The boy had gone over to see what was on the other side. When he leaned forward, his stomach contracted. Half a metre in front of him there was a steep drop of at least a hundred metres, ending in a lake so deep in shadow that the ice looked black. If the boy simply lay down on his back and wriggled under the rail, he would fall straight down into the lake.
The feeling when he faced the policeman in the forest had been very similar: as if he were standing on the edge of an abyss and could fall at any moment. And just as on a particularly bad day when he was waiting in the subway and felt the urge to throw himself in front of the train, there was a pull…
The boy straightened up. Come to think of it, that same pull had emanated from the child. And yet he didn’t feel that the child was evil.
Or did he?
*
It was gone two in the morning by the time I put down my pen and closed my notepad without having reached the part about transcendence. No doubt there were celebrations going on all over the city—three more years for the Social Democrats. Sweaty faces, red flags and bunches of roses. I tried to feel happy—my team had won—but the only thing I felt was the pressure in my skull and a loneliness as deep as the ocean.
I took out Some Great Reward by Depeche Mode and placed the needle on track one, side two: ‘Somebody’. I had nothing against Dave Gahan, but at a moment like this it was Martin Gore’s voice I needed. I sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the speakers and closed my eyes.
Gore had only just started singing when the needle jumped and made a hissing noise as it scraped along the outer edge of the record. I carefully lifted the arm with my index finger, but when I tried to drop it on the first track it skidded away and landed outside the grooves once more, as if the vinyl was charged with static electricity that was repelling the needle.
The night had to be endured without consolation. I laid out the mattress and made up my bed, then lay awake for a long time thinking about Olof Palme. All that joy around him, but at the same time the loathing of the yuppie in the bar—irreconcilable opposites. My thoughts drifted on to fire and water, life and death, and at some point I fell asleep.
I was woken early in the morning by the sound of something falling on the floor. In the grey light filtering through the blinds I saw it was the little cup I had won at the National Championships the previous year; I kept it on the window ledge. Then I went back to sleep.
With hindsight I might think it strange that I didn’t see the signs, didn’t put two and two together. And yet it was perfectly understandable. What’s the point of putting this and that together when the final result is something hitherto overlooked, something abnormal?
*
I had toyed with the idea that the pressure I was experiencing, the sense of an approaching change or disaster, was in fact a social pressure linked to the election. Something that had been in the making had reached its conclusion.
On the morning after the election there was a notice on the main door, asking the residents to attend a meeting to discuss switching from rental rights to residential rights. I had only a vague idea of what this meant and wasn’t really interested; instead I went into the city searching for signs of change.
I was young. I was looking for big, emotional movements—I didn’t care about trivial matters written on bits of paper. I was both perceptive and easily fooled. I walked the streets and sat in cafes, studying people’s faces and posture. Was there anything to indicate that we had started to care about one another a little more?
No. Maybe I was projecting my own loneliness onto
my fellow human beings, but the only thing I saw was isolation, everyone enclosed in their own little world. Perhaps the sense of community the Social Democrats talked about was nothing more than a dream inside Olof Palme’s head, a bunch of wilting roses.
Preoccupied with gloomy thoughts, I returned home. In the courtyard I caught up with Elsa. This time she was accompanied by a girl about the same age as Dennis, clutching a helium balloon in the shape of a rabbit. Elsa explained that they’d been to the Skansen amusement park, and were now on their way home for cakes and juice. Bearing in mind how things had gone with Dennis, I made no attempt to converse with the girl; I simply said something appreciative about the balloon, and headed for my house.
When I was halfway up the steps I heard a scream, and turned around. Through the railing I could see that the girl had let go of the balloon, and it was slowly floating upwards with the string dangling beneath it.
I leapt down the steps in a couple of strides thinking that as I was a few centimetres taller and many years younger than Elsa, I might be able to jump up and grab the balloon before it was too late. I had hardly covered any distance when I came to a halt and stared.
The balloon had stopped. It hung there motionless in the air in the middle of the courtyard, three metres above the ground. Elsa and the girl stretched their arms up high, but couldn’t reach it. I went over to them, stood on tiptoe and grabbed the string, then returned it to the girl.
Elsa and I gazed at the spot where the balloon had just been, as if we might see an invisible glass roof, a spider’s web—something. But there was no sign of anything.
‘It must be the air pressure,’ Elsa said, rubbing her temple. ‘I can feel it in my head.’
‘Yes,’ I said. Only then did I become aware of an oppressive humming inside my skull. I rubbed my forehead and said, ‘You kind of get used to it.’
Elsa and the girl went up to the next floor, the balloon dangling by the girl’s side. When they reached the landing above my roof, the balloon tugged at the string again, pulling it straight as it strove to reach the sky.
*
It was still daylight when the boy left the bench by the lake and cautiously returned to the forest. Patches of sunlight still dappled the ground, but the boy had lost interest in games. The forest was no longer a playground; instead, like almost everywhere else, it had become a place where danger lurked.
A faint gust of wind carried the rancid smell of a muddy stream through the air, and the boy got it into his head that it was the stench of a corpse. The policeman had found the tree house, found the child, and what had he done? The stench provided the answer.
The boy moved slowly, taking care not to snap any twigs. He wrapped the plastic bag around his hand to stop it from making any unnecessary noise. He was looking around all the time, terrified of spotting that dark blue uniform among the trees. When he got close to the tree house, he crouched down and shuffled along.
‘Psst,’ he whispered. ‘Psst.’
Not a sound, not a movement. Bearing in mind the size of the policeman, it was unlikely that he was inside the cabin. The tree would have been bending sideways, if it was even capable of carrying his weight. The boy scanned the trunk, looking for signs that an adult had climbed up. It was impossible to tell. Maybe the policeman was up there after all, and would grab hold of him with those hands as soon as he showed his face.
There was an alternative, a good alternative. He could run home as fast as possible and never come back. And he might have done it if it hadn’t been for that…pull. The tree house was drawing him in. It was possible to resist the pull, but he chose not to. He heaved himself up onto the lowest branch.
The whole cabin was filled with dark, odourless smoke that didn’t disperse when the boy tried to wave it away. It wasn’t too dense for him to see that the policeman wasn’t there. The only things inside were the bucket, the water bottle and the sleeping-bag, rolled into a bundle.
‘Psst,’ the boy said again, but the bundle didn’t move. The boy shuddered. What if the child was lying there hurt, dead, his body dismembered? And the smoke? Was it dangerous to inhale? The boy leaned forward and took a shallow breath. A warmth entered his chest, but it wasn’t unpleasant—more as if he had been lying on a rock warmed by the sun on a summer’s day.
It was pointless hanging there in the tree weighing up the pros and cons, when he knew he was going to clamber up into the cabin eventually. He glanced over his shoulder one last time, scanned the forest without seeing anything untoward. Then he climbed in.
‘He’s gone,’ the boy informed the bundle. ‘The policeman. Dadda. He’s gone.’
It was a relief when the bundle finally moved. The boy took a deep breath, and for a moment he wasn’t on his knees inside the tree house—he was on a TV-series green lawn, an empty field stretching in all directions as far as the eye could see. Above him was a clear blue sky without a single cloud. He exhaled in a long sigh, and was back in the tree house, where the child’s head was poking out of the sleeping-bag. The smoke began to disperse.
‘I’ve brought…food,’ the boy said, dropping the carrier bag on the floor in front of the child. Then he sat there open-mouthed, watching as the child gobbled up the tomato and munched on a carrot. The inside of his head felt grey and dirty. He couldn’t cope with any more right now. It was too much—he was too tired. He made his way down the tree as if in a dream, and staggered home through the forest. When he reached his room he collapsed headfirst on the bed and fell asleep right away.
*
That was a wonderful sentence to write: ‘When he reached his room he collapsed headfirst on the bed and fell asleep right away’. To think I had once been capable of doing something like that. I sat at my desk. I passed my coins, I laid out my cards, I practised hard to make the impossible appear probable and I felt a faint madness approaching, a bowling ball moving in slow motion towards my head.
I crouched down by the record-player. I wanted to play ‘People Are People’ just so I could hear Martin Gore telling me that he couldn’t understand what makes a man hate another man, but the needle behaved as it had done the night before, and skidded off the album.
I wept for a while; I hit my head with my hands; I realised that life is very, very long. There were three days left before I was due to travel to Copenhagen, but just then I didn’t know how I was going to endure even that amount of time. I rolled around on the floor, I hugged myself, and the hours passed. Eventually I lay there exhausted, staring into the corner, where there was a connection point for a TV aerial.
I gave up. I couldn’t do this any more. I had decided to live without a television in order to focus on what was important, but I just couldn’t carry on. I needed to see faces and hear voices, even if it was only from a box. I had seen on the noticeboard by the main door that someone was selling a small TV. I was just about to get up so that I could check out the number and call right away when I realised it was after midnight. It would have to wait until tomorrow.
Like someone who has a party to look forward to and can therefore survive a few miserable days, the thought of the TV had calmed me sufficiently that I was able to practise my magic for an hour or so, then go to bed.
*
Collapsing headfirst on the bed, falling asleep right away. All that rolling around on the floor had made me so tired that sleeping seemed like an entirely reasonable proposition, but it was made impossible by a crackling noise in my ears, like when you exhale and allow yourself to sink in a swimming pool.
I sat up on the mattress and wrapped my arms around my legs. The crackling came and went with a stubborn, pulsating rhythm, and I tried to distract myself by going through my magic act in my head, movement by movement, each carried out with a precision of which I was incapable in real life.
I had almost reached the end, the finale where I produced a giant coin from a purse that was far too small, when the phone rang. I sat and stared at it, let it ring ten times before I crawled onto my desk chair, p
icked up the receiver and said, ‘Hello?’
‘You took your time.’
‘Yes, I…Sigge isn’t here.’
‘No. I know.’
‘You know?’
‘Well, I can’t be sure. But if you say so.’
I tried to imagine the room the man was calling from. The only thing I could say for sure was that it wasn’t a public place. There were no other voices or sounds. Eventually I asked, ‘So why are you calling me?’
He sighed. ‘Why do we do this or that? Can you always answer that question? Anyway, what are you up to?’
‘I was trying to sleep.’
‘I’m guessing that didn’t go too well.’
I might have been clutching at straws, but I couldn’t help asking, ‘Do you know what’s wrong with this house?’
‘What house?’
‘The house where I live.’
‘You live in a house?’
I shook my head at myself and said, ‘It doesn’t matter. Did you want anything in particular?’
‘You were trying to sleep?’
‘Yes.’
There was such a long silence that I thought he’d lost interest. I said, ‘Goodnight,’ and was about to hang up when he said, ‘Wait a minute. Couldn’t you just…lay the receiver down beside you?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When you lie down to sleep. I won’t talk or anything, I promise.’
‘I’m not sure if…’
‘Oh, come on—what does it matter?’
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Sleep, of course.’
On any other evening I would probably have reacted differently, but the combination of my search for a sense of community during the day and the thumbscrews of loneliness during the evening had weakened my defences.
‘Do you snore?’ I asked.
‘No, I fucking don’t. No way.’