And that’s exactly what happened. A heavy hand fell on my shoulder, and I heard a deep voice behind me: ‘Stop right there. Can I have a look in your bag?’
The bubbles in my blood burst in a nanosecond, and my guts fell through the floor. There was a brief moment when I could have dropped everything and run. Drottninggatan was busy, and I might have been able to disappear into the crowd. But then I’d have had to leave my notepad behind.
I’m not going to make myself out to be any tougher or smarter than I was. The truth is that the hand on my shoulder completely paralysed me. When I slowly turned around, a substantial part of me—about the size of a twelve-year-old—expected to see that policeman looming over me. Which he wasn’t, of course. The man in front of me was only fractionally taller than I was, and he was wearing perfectly ordinary clothes. A store detective. He produced his ID.
‘The bag.’
I showed him the contents of the bag, the cellophane-wrapped T-shirts, the jumper.
‘Have you paid for these items?’
I nodded.
‘Do you have the receipts?’
‘I…I didn’t keep them.’
It was no more than a formality. It was clear from the man’s attitude that he knew exactly what the situation was. He placed a large hand between my shoulder blades and guided me back into the store. We went down the escalator to the food hall, then into a room where I was asked to tip out the contents of my bag onto a table.
‘And you say you’ve paid for all this?’
I nodded. I couldn’t do anything else.
‘Okay, let me explain. I can request printouts from the tills in the relevant departments to check if these items have been paid for. Are you with me?’
I was.
‘But that takes time. A hell of a long time. And both you and I know that time will be wasted, because you haven’t paid for them. Are you with me?’
Nod. Nod.
‘Okay, good. So you admit you’ve taken these items without paying for them?’
I didn’t know how the system worked. Printouts from the tills? Was that even possible? And of course there was always the chance that someone else had bought items for the same price at the same time. So I shook my head. The man’s shoulders slumped and his expression hardened.
‘You’re not admitting it?’
‘No. I’ve paid.’
The man let out a long sigh and shook his head. He looked at me as if he were about to say something a lot less pleasant, then he picked up the bag, stuffed everything back inside it, turned on his heel and left the room, slamming the door behind him. When I got up and tried it after a couple of minutes, it was locked.
I don’t remember what I thought about during the long period while he was away. I followed the movement of the minute hand on the clock on the wall. My own movement, which had been focused on 16.21 for the past few weeks, had come to a standstill.
Fuck, I probably thought. Fucking hell.
It was ten to four by the time the man came back. He was carrying several strips of paper, which he placed on the table in front of me. With deliberate slowness he examined the items in my bag one by one, comparing them with the strips of paper and then jotting down notes. I cleared my throat.
‘Excuse me, but…I’ve got a train to catch.’
The man looked up and stared at me. He didn’t even deign to reply before returning to his task. I should have owned up, I realised. If I’d done that, everything might have been sorted out by now.
There were fifteen minutes to go before my train left by the time the man pushed aside the strips of paper and summarised the situation: ‘So—we have goods to the value of 1872 kronor which have not been paid for at any till. Do you know what that means?’
Yes. I wasn’t that stupid. I had been caught out, and there was no point in pretending any longer. I was about to say something along those lines when it turned out that the man had a surprise up his sleeve, one he was only too happy to share with me. ‘Since the value of the goods in question exceeds 1500 kronor, this is no longer a question of shoplifting—we’re looking at theft. Are you with me?’
Not any more, no—but the very sound of the word, theft, didn’t bode well. I made a quick calculation in my head and worked out that the Japanese pressings were to blame, because they cost 200 kronor each.
‘Which means,’ the man went on, leaning back in his chair with undisguised pleasure, ‘that this is now a police matter.’ He looked at me and nodded slowly, as if to emphasise that what he had said was in accordance with the truth. Then he got up and left the room.
Once again I was left alone for a long while, but this time I remember what I was thinking. Those fucking Japanese pressings. Why did I have to have them? The sound was a fraction clearer, the bass a fraction deeper, but the main reason was that the Japanese writing on the sleeve looked cool. A status symbol. Who the fuck did I have to show off to? And for that I had crossed a line I didn’t even know existed and had become a police matter, whatever that meant.
It was gone five o’clock by now. The competition in Copenhagen was due to start at three o’clock on Saturday. There was an overnight train and an early-morning train that could get me there in time. Without new underwear.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised this wasn’t just about the competition itself. I had severed the few social ties I had with the rest of humanity, with one exception: the world of magicians. I still had a few friends there, and I had been looking forward to seeing them.
Mika from Finland with his amusing accent and his skilful side steals; Charly from Gothenburg, who might be every bit as crazy as he seemed. Magnus, Peter. And a few others. They would still have been up and about when I arrived in Copenhagen in the middle of the night, sitting in some hotel room drinking beer and showing each other card tricks until their eyelids began to droop. I should have been on my way there. Fuck. But it still wasn’t too late.
Just before six o’clock the door opened and the man came in, accompanied by two uniformed police officers.
‘Is that him?’ one of the policemen asked, and I stupidly glanced behind me as if I thought they might be referring to someone else. When I turned back, both officers were looking expectantly at me.
‘Let’s go,’ one of them said.
‘Go where?’ I asked.
‘You’ll find out.’
*
We emerged onto the street via a back door. I was hustled into a police van. A scruffy, skinny man with a bushy beard was already sitting inside, and the smell of his breath filled the space with alcohol fumes. The two officers got in the front and we set off along Klarabergsgatan. When we passed the central train terminal and I saw that the clock outside was showing ten past six, I began to cry. It was so upsetting; I should have been on the train now, practising my magic, on the way to people and light.
I pressed my fingertips to my forehead, digging my nails into the skin, and gave myself up to the misery that poured out of me in great hulking sobs. After a while I felt the opposite of a heartless hand on my shoulder. The bearded man patted me gently and said, ‘You’ll be okay. It’ll be all right.’
At that moment it felt like the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me. The man’s life was no doubt considerably more fucked-up than mine, and yet he had reached out to comfort me. I collapsed with my head on his chest, and remained there, enveloped in a miasma of booze and urine, until we reached the police station. He spent the whole time stroking my hair.
At the station the plastic bag containing my notepad and pen was taken off me, and I was told to empty my pockets. The duty officer was particularly interested in the thumb tip; I always pick it up before I leave home, out of sheer habit.
‘What’s this?’
‘A thumb tip.’
‘What’s it for?’
‘Magic.’
‘Magic?’
‘Yes. I’m a magician.’
For a second I hoped this information would make
him realise that I didn’t belong here, or at least make him a little more sympathetic towards me, but it didn’t. He tossed the thumb tip in a box along with my wallet, my keys and my belt, and I was led deeper into the station.
I don’t know if the way the police treated me on that occasion was routine, or if they were making a special effort to scare me and thus put me off a life of crime. Or maybe that was routine when it came to first-time offenders.
I was taken to a small room where I was ordered to drop my pants. A man slowly pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and I knew what was coming. I stood there with the palms of my hands on the wall as the man parted my buttocks, and I thought: I’m a long way down right now. He didn’t go any further, though. If the police were aiming to intimidate and humiliate me, they had succeeded. I was at rock bottom as I was led along the blue-grey corridors.
My memory fails me at this point. I might have been interviewed; I might have signed something. But what follows is the part I remember best, and is the real reason I am including this scene.
There were corridors and a lift. New corridors. Eventually I was shown into a cell. When I turned around to ask how long I would have to stay there, the door slammed behind me.
The cell measured five or six square metres, and held nothing but a table fixed to the wall—no chair—and a bunk with a plastic-covered mattress. The silence was even more palpable than at home, and the door was so effectively sound-proofed that I couldn’t even hear footsteps in the corridor.
I sat down on the bunk, rested my elbows on my knees and stared at a spot on the cement wall where someone had managed to scratch: Palme is dead. Elvis is alive. After a couple of hours I needed a piss, so I banged on the door. To my surprise a guard came and opened it and allowed me to go to the toilet.
Before he locked me in again I asked how long I would be there. He said he didn’t know, but probably until early the following morning. I didn’t even bother mentioning trains or Copenhagen, and the door closed behind me once more.
I lay down on the bunk with my right arm covering my eyes and gave up. I tossed my hope and my will aside and abandoned myself. That’s the only way I can describe it. I accepted the fact that the small room with its fluorescent tubes was all I had, that the figure lying on the bunk was me, and that this was what had become of me. Does it make sense if I say it was a relief? If I was nothing and had nothing, then I had nothing to lose. I became as still and silent deep inside as the room surrounding me.
Time passed. The night came and went. I didn’t sleep. At some point I began to write the final part of the story of the child in the forest. I wrote it in my head. Later on I wrote it down on paper too, but it was during that night in the cell that I really wrote it, because it was only then that I found the courage, when all hope had gone.
*
As he had thought, the slender trees were just capable of bearing the policeman’s weight. The tree house tilted and rocked as if it were in a fierce, shifting gale, while the sound of movement could be heard from inside. The boy stopped a few metres away, unsure of what to do. Once again his mind had led him astray. Why had he come back? There was nothing he could do, nothing he dared do. The best thing would have been to run home and call…
The police?
Before the boy had time to reflect on the impossibility of the situation, the policeman appeared at the opening to the tree house. He was holding the child in both hands, and the boy just had time to see that the child was clutching the toy dog before the policeman hurled him into the air.
The tree house was about four metres from the ground, and the child fell towards the boy in a wide arc. As he came down he began to blur and dim, his contours became unclear and the boy could see that his eyes were closed. The boy instinctively stepped back, and the child crashed to the ground in front of him.
Two things happened at virtually the same time. One of the child’s feet was bent sideways at an unnatural angle, and the boy heard a dry sound like a cap gun. The child screamed with pain, and black smoke exploded from his body in a cloud, enveloping the boy and rushing down into his lungs when he took a deep breath so that he could scream too.
Before he could push up the air past his taut vocal chords, they relaxed and the scream turned into a gasp. He was back in the field. The grass was green, the sky blue. At his feet lay a five-year-old boy, barely recognisable as the child from the tree house. This boy had clear brown eyes and rounded cheeks. His skin was smooth and clean, and his fingers looked like the fingers of any other child, with neatly clipped nails.
The child shook his head and got to his feet. The toy dog fell from his chest and landed on the grass. His eyes met the boy’s, and the only question the boy could come up with was: ‘Where…where are we?’
The child shrugged. ‘In the other place. It’s better here.’
‘But what place is it?’
This seemed to bother the child. He looked around with a slight frown, as if he were wondering too. Then his face cleared and he rubbed his nose.
‘Don’t know. Maybe I invented it. Don’t know. It’s not finished. There’s not much here.’
Too right. The grass extended towards the horizon in all directions, with not a hint of unevenness to be seen beneath the cloudless blue sky. And yet the boy didn’t find this place frightening—quite the reverse. Accustomed as he was to keeping an eye open, fearing attack from every possible hiding place, it was liberating to be able to see in all directions, to breathe in an open space with no risk of a punch in the stomach or a gob of spit landing on his face. When the boy inhaled the clean air of this place, it was as if over the past few years he had forgotten what it was like not to feel tense or to be afraid, but simply to exist. To breathe.
He was about to ask the child another question when something invisible seized hold of his cheeks and prevented him from opening his mouth. It hurt, and he screwed his eyes shut. When he opened them he was back in the forest. The policeman was looming over him, and the boy’s face was clamped in the iron grip of one enormous hand. The child was lying at his feet, legs bent. The boy noticed that the toy dog was gone before the policeman forced his head back and said, ‘Do you hear me?’
The boy tried to shake his head, but it was no more than a faint movement. His body felt unreal, split between two worlds. It was only when he saw the Mora knife in the policeman’s other hand that he had to accept he was in this world, in the forest, and that he was in deep trouble.
However scared he was of the kicks and blows, the pinches and punches in school, he knew the other boys in his class would never think of killing him, whatever they might say about the piggy going to the slaughter. This was different. His limbs went cold and limp when he saw the blade coming closer in his peripheral vision.
‘I said this hasn’t happened,’ the policeman said. ‘Do you understand?’
The man could have asked absolutely anything that required a positive response, and the boy would have squeezed out the same ‘Yes’ as he did now.
‘You haven’t seen anything, you’ve never met anyone, you’re going to forget this whole thing. And above all…above all you are never going to say anything to anyone.’
The boy’s mind was paralysed with fear, and he couldn’t work out what the right answer was supposed to be. Yes or no?
‘Are you?’ the policeman said, squeezing the boy’s face even harder. The boy made a noise that could have meant just about anything, but the policeman nodded and showed him the knife.
‘I will find you. Remember that. And just so you don’t forget, here’s a little reminder.’
He let go of the boy’s face and grabbed his right wrist. Two rapid slashes with the knife and the boy felt a burning sensation in his arm. He didn’t dare move a muscle. He saw the policeman pick up the child and carry him off over his shoulder, paying no attention to his broken leg, which was dangling and bouncing as if there were no bones beneath the skin. The child’s eyes were still closed, so at least the boy didn’t ha
ve to meet his gaze.
The policeman marched away with the lifeless child. The boy remained where he was for several minutes with one meaningless thought running through his mind.
The dog was left behind. The dog was left behind. The dog…
‘Rebus,’ the boy said eventually, and the sound of his own voice broke the paralysis. ‘Rebus, that was his name.’ Slowly he raised his right arm and examined the burning, stinging flesh.
Two lines scored the skin between his wrist and elbow, two cuts at right angles to one another forming an ‘X’. He was marked. He walked home, one step at a time. He never went back to the tree house; he never saw the child again. He never said a word about what had happened. Not to anyone.
*
I raised the arm covering my eyes, pulled up my shirtsleeve and studied the white scar, the cross that still disfigured my skin. I ran my index finger over the smooth scar tissue, and that was when it happened. Something juddered and shifted, as if a cold draught had passed through the earth’s crust, as if the planet itself had shuddered. Later on I came to the conclusion that the movement must have happened at that precise moment.
The morning light had been seeping in through the barred window for a couple of hours when I was finally let out. It was past eight o’clock, too late to go to Copenhagen. It didn’t matter any more. I was informed that I would receive a summons by post, and that I would be required to attend court at some point in the future. I signed a piece of paper.
A different officer was on duty at the desk where I’d handed in my possessions the previous evening, and he too was interested in the thumb tip.
‘What’s this?’
‘A thumb tip.’
‘What’s it for?’
‘Drug smuggling.’
The joke was not appreciated, but I was allowed to reclaim my belongings, sign another piece of paper and leave Kronoberg. Because of the early hour the car park was virtually empty, and seemed enormous. Though I had spent only half a day in custody, it felt fantastic to walk down the streets in whatever direction I wanted. I have no hesitation in calling the state in which I found myself happiness—it was the first time I had experienced it for what seemed like an eternity.