‘After our wedding.’
That, at least, told me something about them. Who the hell refers to their marriage as ‘our wedding’? As if it were nothing more than a fixed point in time that had been labelled in that way.
I wish I had more fine-tuned stylistic instruments with which to paint the picture, but in the absence of such tools I will simply say that I perceived the man and woman as dead. Their apartment was dead; their conversation lacked any sign of life; their gestures and expressions were stiff.
The erotic fantasy involving the woman had been nothing more than a projection. She radiated as much sexuality as the sound produced by an air guitarist. There was nothing there, and I finished off my beer with impolite speed.
The Dead Couple got their cash and I got my TV. Picking it up in a double grip meant I could avoid shaking hands. As I made my way down the stairs clutching my purchase, I had the feeling that they were standing watching me through the peephole. Both of them. At the same time. I sped up, anxious to get out of sight.
*
When I got home it became clear that there was another explanation for my highly strung behaviour. I was sweating as I connected up the TV, and by the time I had balanced it on top of three telephone books and run an extension lead from the socket, I was completely exhausted. My temperature soared, and I had to sit down and rest for five minutes before I could summon the energy to lay out my mattress. Then I crashed.
I have only vague memories of the next two days. I just about managed to crawl to the toilet, and I couldn’t even think about food.
Curled up on my side and shaking, I watched TV, letting the images flicker past my eyes. The only thing I remember is that The Brothers Lionheart was on, and that the fluffy feeling in Körsbärsdalen was a great comfort. Falcon Crest was probably on too, but I might be getting mixed up there, because I remember seeing Angela Channing on a horse, pulling a papier-mâché kite along behind her. The theme tune from Hill Street Blues also penetrates the fever-fog. Black-and-white Swedish films. Time passed.
At some point I must have gathered enough strength to pick up my pen and carry on with the story of the child in the forest. The narrative is disjointed and hard to read, and it has taken a significant amount of editing to make it comprehensible.
*
The following day the boy had to stay home from school. His eyes were bloodshot, his cheeks bright red. When his mother had gone to work, he got up and wandered aimlessly around the apartment. The fever was throbbing and swaying inside his head, and he felt curiously excited.
He spent a while leafing through the Hobbex catalogue, then fetched the cellar key and went downstairs. After searching through a couple of boxes looking for something to give the child, he finally found the one that held his old cuddly toys.
He chose a shaggy dog; it was the only one he couldn’t remember the name of, and therefore the easiest to part with. He stroked the other animals’ soft fur and whispered their names, which gave him a little pain in his chest. He closed the box carefully and went back upstairs with the dog—Raffe? Ruff? Riffe?—under his arm, then checked out the contents of the fridge.
He would be expected to eat during the day anyway, so it wouldn’t arouse any suspicion if he made a few cheese sandwiches. He put them in a plastic bag, along with two apples. Something told him he ought to take milk too, that small children were supposed to have milk, for their bones or their brain or something, so he rinsed out a soft drink bottle and filled it up with milk. He placed the dog on top of the food, then weighed the bag in his hand. There was something missing.
He opened the bottom kitchen drawer and rummaged around until he found an almost new Mora knife in its sheath. He slid it out and ran his thumb over the blade. Super sharp. He put it back in its sheath and added it to the bag. Good. Now it was…complete.
Once again he approached the tree house cautiously, keeping an eye out in all directions. If he saw the policeman from far enough away, he would run, and if the policeman turned up at close quarters, he would play dead. Shut himself down inside, just as he did when the boys in his class started on him. He wouldn’t let the policeman get to him.
The boy stopped, swinging the bag back and forth. Was that what the child had done? If the boy’s suspicions were correct, and he had been systematically abused by the policeman or someone else, had the child employed the same strategy and shut down, but in a more fundamental way than the boy had ever done?
Jimmy, Conny and Andreas had once tied the boy to a tree and whipped his arms and legs with hazel branches. On that occasion the boy had managed to shut down and removed himself so effectively that he had found it difficult to come back when it was all over. He had felt no pain, and had hardly known where he was when they untied him and left him lying at the foot of the tree. There had been nothing but darkness, and it had taken him some time to escape from it. Had the child gone so far into the darkness that…
The boy swung the bag, whirled it around in circles. He felt desperately sorry for the child, and yet the child possessed something that the boy really wanted. Something that was beyond.
When he reached the tree he whispered ‘psst’ even though he didn’t expect a response. But this time he got one. A faint ‘ss’ came from inside the tree house. The boy glanced around once more, then clambered up.
The child ate the cheese sandwiches while the boy munched on an apple, then he drank the milk. He had to clutch the bottle in both hands because his fingers were so crooked. A trickle of milk ran down his neck and under his jacket.
‘What actually happened to you?’ the boy asked. ‘Did someone beat you?’
The child lowered the bottle, which was empty now, and nodded.
‘Often?’
The child nodded again and said, ‘Bam, bam. Bam, bam. Bam, bam.’
The boy picked up the carrier bag and took out the toy dog. ‘Here,’ he said, holding it out to the child. ‘You can have it if you want.’
The child tilted his head to one side and stared at the dog—Roffe? Raff-Raff?—as if he had never seen anything like it. Maybe he hadn’t. He reached out a finger that ended in a congealed lump of pus instead of a nail, and touched the dog’s nose as if it might burn him. When that didn’t happen, the child ran the palm of his hand over the dog’s head.
‘That business with the darkness,’ the boy said. ‘How did you do that?’
By now the child had plucked up enough courage to stroke the dog’s fur properly, and was making a sound not unlike a cat’s purr. The boy tapped on the wall of the tree house, and the child looked up.
‘I mean, seriously? How do you do that?’
The child pulled up one sleeve of his jacket. His skin was covered in a network of lines. Older, white scars, brown scabs, and sores that still showed red.
‘Blood,’ the child said. ‘Whoosh, whoosh. Blood. Evil.’ He pulled down his sleeve and turned his attention back to the dog.
The boy finished off the apple and tossed the core outside. The child’s purring turned into a soft crooning; it was a tune the boy recognised, because his mother had it on a record.
‘Somebody Up There Must Like Me.’
*
During Thursday night the fog in my head began to disperse, and when I woke up on Friday morning I was fine—stronger now, as if I’d passed through a furnace and come out the other side—and absolutely ravenous. My breakfast consisted of a big plate of spaghetti with ketchup. I say plate, but I actually ate it straight out of the pan, sitting on my mattress.
While I was sick I had been painfully aware that the train to Copenhagen and the Nordic Championships left on Friday afternoon. Now it was looking as if I might be able to go after all. I finished off my breakfast, put away the mattress and had a quick swill in the tub, then I sat down at the desk with my magic paraphernalia. I soon realised it was pointless. A few hours’ practice would only serve to increase my anxiety, and I really didn’t want to stay in the house. Now the illness had loosened its grip, I was once again
free to feel the pressure. It had grown stronger, and my skull felt as if it were slowly being encased in a helmet made of lead.
It can’t go on like this.
If the worst came to the worst, I would have to use all my savings and let the landlord keep his nine thousand—the current month’s rent plus two months’ notice—without staying on in the house. Move back to Blackeberg. It was a gloomy prospect, and I put it aside for the moment. First Copenhagen. I had booked a ticket on the train departing at 16.21, so I had plenty of time to get ready.
I started by carefully packing the items I needed for my act. The close-up mat, the deck of cards that had been used just enough, the four half-dollar coins with the shells that fitted over them, the purses, the oversized coin, plus the toy laser pistol I used instead of a magic wand. Then my stage clothes. Shirt, waistcoat, black trousers, bow tie.
The problem was underwear. I had nothing clean—no pants, socks, T-shirts. Right at the back of the wardrobe I found a pair of flimsy, washed-out pants and pushed them into my bag. Then I took them out again and threw them in the bin. There was still time for a little shoplifting trip to Åhlén’s. I could pick up what I needed, nip home to finish packing, then head off to the Nordic Championships wreathed in the smell of new clothes.
Before I went out I flicked through my notepad and discovered that while I was ill I had written about giving the child the toy dog. As I said earlier, the narrative was unclear and unstructured, but it was crying out for me to carry on. I was getting close to the really terrible part, the part I wasn’t even sure I could write down.
I put my notepad and pen in a plastic bag that could also be used for gathering up my ‘shopping’, then I set off to find a second, more conventional breakfast. I sat in Kungstornet for a long time with my coffee going cold; I didn’t stop writing until I reached the point where it really began to hurt.
*
The child carried on humming ‘Somebody Up There Must Like Me’ as he stroked and hugged the dog. The boy sat opposite, feeling more and more listless. He had felt feverishly enthusiastic on the way to the tree house, but now he was here it was no fun at all.
It was no fun having a pet that knew nothing, no fun having a tree house. Life was horrendous at school and boring at home. He was twelve years old and had never thought about his existence as a whole concept. He was doing that now, and he could see that it was total crap. All of it. His head drooped, drawn towards the floor as he saw himself wading through days as heavy as black, sticky mud.
Suddenly he straightened up. Everything might be crap, but he never thought that way. Was it the child making him do it? If so, it didn’t appear to be something he was doing consciously. The child was still humming and stroking the dog. Maybe it happened automatically, just as a magnet is always a magnet.
It didn’t matter. The boy couldn’t fight against the images passing through his mind, and his head began to droop once more, weighed down by things that had happened at school, the fear he carried with him every minute he was there, the misery when he got back to his room at home, the emptiness on the streets of Blackeberg, where he didn’t have a single friend to visit. He was a failure, an insignificant victim of bullying whom nobody liked. Fact.
He took the knife out of the carrier bag, slid it out of its sheath and studied the clean, shiny steel. The child stopped humming and moved as far back as possible, staring with huge eyes as the boy gently ran his index finger along the blade.
To cut. It was strange, really. The fact that you could hone a piece of steel until it was so thin that it could penetrate another substance.
The boy pointed the knife at the child. ‘Are you scared of this? Are you? Do they cut you?’
The boy could feel the darkness growing inside him, or perhaps he was simply reflecting the child’s darkness—it was irrelevant. It was there, and it was growing. He remembered his dream, the dream he had thought was a memory, but might have been a warning. He edged closer to the child as the images of his worthless life whirled by faster and faster, merging together into pure, unbearable pain.
A murderer. I am…a murderer.
No. It was impossible. Before the boy could stop himself he had slashed his right palm with the knife. Something of the throbbing darkness-pain in his chest eased, rushing towards the wound where blood was seeping out. The boy exhaled, gasped.
A drop of blood landed on the floor of the tree house. The boy frowned, and when the next drop fell, he watched more closely. The idea of a magnet hadn’t been far off the mark: the drops changed course in midair and landed a few centimetres closer to the child than they should have done. They were drawn towards him. The boy grabbed the roll of toilet paper, tore off a sheet and pressed it to the cut.
Why did I do that?
On several occasions he had stolen things he didn’t want, and thrown them in a bin outside the shop. Why? Because it had felt like a compulsion. Same with the knife—it was something he had to do.
He pressed the soft paper against the wound as the darkness began to well up inside him again. Slowly the child leaned forward, reached out and placed one deformed hand on the bloodstain. The boy’s chest contracted and he found it hard to breathe. He shuffled back towards the opening as the child lifted his hand. The blood was gone.
The boy’s limbs felt heavy by the time he made his way back down to the ground, dizzy with the lack of oxygen. After a few steps the pain in his chest began to ebb away and he was able to take a few breaths, which made the dizziness subside. He had escaped.
He was halfway home when he caught sight of the policeman, facing away from him and staring towards Råcksta Lake. The boy looked around, utterly panic-stricken, and crept behind a large rock before the policeman had time to turn around.
He kept perfectly still, listening hard. It didn’t sound as if the policeman was coming closer. After a couple of minutes he dared to peep out, and saw the policeman walking towards the tree house. The boy clasped his hands together and pressed them against his stomach, feeling like a rabbit in the headlights. Everything around him was much too big, incomprehensible and terrifying.
He would run straight home. Lock the door behind him, defrost a portion of meatballs, sit on the balcony and read Spiderman, have a glass of juice with his meatballs and forget that any of this had happened. Unlike the rabbit, he had that possibility.
The boy had left the safety of the rock and scuttled several metres closer to home and safety when he heard a scream from the forest. From the tree house. If he hadn’t known better he would have thought it was the scream of an animal, an animal caught in some terrible trap. But he did know better. Unfortunately. The boy stood there with his back bowed, digging his nails into his palms. His right hand started bleeding again.
Perhaps the most important decisions in our lives are made without the aid of our intelligence. There is good reason to suspect that this is the case. So is it possible to talk about something that resembles the concept of fate? Maybe it is.
The boy turned and headed back to the tree house.
*
I came to a stop there, and I didn’t know when I would have the courage to write the rest. I took a deep breath and wrote: As he had thought, the slender trees were just capable of bearing the policeman’s weight. Then I noticed the time. It was almost two; I had completely lost track. Quickly I put the pad and pen back in the carrier bag, finished my cold coffee and hurried along Kungsgatan. I turned into Drottninggatan and made a beeline for Åhlén’s.
I was hot and flustered as I approached the revolving doors leading into the perfume department, so I stopped for a while, allowing my heart to slow down. I assumed it wasn’t good to look stressed if I was going to steal stuff.
I say assumed because I had no experience of what was right and wrong. I hadn’t been caught since I was eleven, and all I’d taken then was a bar of chocolate from the corner shop in Blackeberg. Since then I had never been stopped, in spite of the fact that I’d helped myself to records, c
lothes, books and magazines worth many thousands of kronor.
As I mentioned earlier, my method was very simple. I picked up whatever I wanted and marched out of the department. If anyone stopped me I could claim absent-mindedness and pay for the goods in question. But that had happened only once. The shop assistant had definitely been suspicious, but she had no proof. I should add that only the more expensive items had security tags back then.
I hid my bag behind a suitcase in the luggage department, which wasn’t exactly heaving with customers, and set off on my mission. After three trips up to the men’s department I had gathered what I needed in terms of underwear, plus a new jumper. The bag was so full that it just fitted behind the suitcase. It was only quarter to three, so I treated myself to a visit to the record department.
I could see from some distance away that the Depeche Mode section was fuller than usual, and when I looked through I discovered they’d acquired Japanese pressings of both Some Great Reward and Construction Time Again, which cost three times as much as the normal pressings. As if that mattered. I tucked the two albums under my arm and walked out.
When I got back down to the luggage department, the LPs wouldn’t fit into the carrier bag. That didn’t matter either, because I was three floors away from the record department. I gathered up my loot and headed just purposefully enough towards the exit.
I went through the revolving doors and out into the street, and that’s when I got the real kick. Every time I stole something from a department within a store I experienced a slight euphoria, but the real endorphin rush didn’t come until I was outside and safely back in the harbour, so to speak. I let out a long breath and felt the carbon dioxide fizzing in my blood.
And that was when…
There is a line by Morrissey that I’ve carried with me through life, just waiting for the right opportunity to use it. That came in a story I called ‘Majken’, which is about shoplifting. The feeling stems from that moment outside Åhlén’s. It’s from ‘Shoplifters of the World Unite’, and it refers to a heartless hand on the shoulder, a push and it’s over.