Why don’t I run?
Because he didn’t have a chance. They would have him on the ground before he had taken five steps.
‘Let me go.’
Jonny turned his head, pretended like he hadn’t heard.
‘What did you say, Piggy?’
‘Let me go.’
Jonny turned towards Micke.
‘He thinks we should let him go.’
Micke shook his head.
‘But we’ve made such nice-looking…’ He waved his whip in the air.
‘What do you think, Tomas?’
Tomas looked at Oskar as if he were a rat, still alive, writhing in his trap.
‘I think Piggy needs a whipping.’
There were three of them. They had whips. It was a maximally unfair situation. He could throw the rock in Tomas’ face. Or hit him with it if he came close. There would be a talk with the principal and so on. But they would understand. There had been three of them, armed.
I was…desperate.
He wasn’t desperate at all. In fact he felt a streak of calm through the fear, now that he had made up his mind. They could whip him as long as it gave him the opportunity to smash the rock in Tomas’ disgusting face.
Jonny and Micke stepped up. Jonny whipped Oskar across one thigh so he doubled over in pain. Micke went up behind him and locked his arms by his side.
No.
Now he couldn’t throw it. Jonny whipped his legs, spun around once like Robin Hood in that movie, hit again.
Oskar’s legs burned from the lashes. He writhed in Micke’s grasp but couldn’t get free. Tears sprang to his eyes. He screamed. Jonny gave Oskar one last hard lash that grazed Micke’s legs so that he yelled, ‘Watch it, will you?’, but without releasing his hold.
A tear ran down Oskar’s cheek. It wasn’t fair. He had picked up all the rocks, he had bent over backwards, so why did they have to hurt him?
The rock that he had been holding onto so hard fell out of his hand and he started to cry for real.
Jonny said with a pitying voice, ‘Piggy’s crying.’
Jonny seemed satisfied. His work was done. He gestured to Micke to let go. Oskar’s whole body was shaking, wracked with sobs, and from the pain in his legs. His eyes were filled with tears when he lifted his face to them and heard Tomas’ voice.
‘What about me?’
Micke grabbed Oskar’s arms again and through the fog of tears over his eyes Oskar saw Tomas walk closer. He snivelled, ‘Please don’t.’
Tomas raised his whip and struck. One single blow. Oskar’s face exploded and he jerked so violently to the side that Micke either lost or let go of his grip and said, ‘What the hell, Tomas. That was…’
Jonny sounded angry. ‘Now you can talk to his mum.’
Oskar didn’t hear what Tomas answered, if he said anything.
Their voices disappeared into the distance, they left him with his face in the sand. His left cheek burned. The sand was cold, soothed the heat in his legs. He wanted to put his cheek in the sand as well, but realised it wasn’t a good idea.
He lay there so long he started to get cold. Then he sat up and carefully felt his cheek. His fingers were bloody.
He walked over to the outside toilets and looked in the mirror. The cheek was swollen and covered in half-congealed blood. Tomas must have struck him as hard as he could. Oskar washed his cheek and looked in the mirror again. The wound had stopped bleeding and it wasn’t deep. But it ran right across almost his entire cheek.
Mum. What do I tell her?
The truth. He needed comforting. In an hour Mum would be home and then he would tell her what they had done to him and she would be completely distraught and hug him and hug him and he would sink into her arms, into her tears and they would cry together.
Then she would call Tomas’ mum.
Then she would call Tomas’ mum and they would argue and then Mum would cry about how mean Tomas’ mum was and then… Woodshop.
He had had an accident in woodshop. No, then maybe she would call the teacher.
Oskar studied his wound in the mirror. How did you get something like this? He had fallen off the play structure. It didn’t really work but Mum would want to believe it. She would still feel sorry for him and comfort him but without all that other stuff. The play structure.
His pants felt cold. Oskar unbuttoned them and checked. His underpants were soaked. He took out the pissball and rinsed it out. He was about to put it back but stopped and looked in the mirror.
Oskar. That’s…Oskar.
He took the rinsed pissball and put it on his nose. Like a clown nose. The yellow ball and the red wound on his cheek. Oskar. He opened his eyes wide and tried to look crazy. Yes. Creepy. He talked to the clown in the mirror.
‘It’s over now, it’s enough. Understand? This is it.’
The clown didn’t answer.
‘I’m not standing for this. Not even one more time, understand?’ Oskar’s voice echoed in the empty bathroom.
‘What should I do? What should I do, do you think?’
He twisted his face into a grimace until it hurt, distorted his voice by making it as raspy and low as he could. The clown spoke.
‘Kill them. Kill them. Kill them.’
Oskar shivered. This was a little creepy for real. It really sounded like someone else’s voice, and the face in mirror wasn’t his own. He took the pissball from his nose, put it back in his pants.
The tree.
Not because he really believed in this and all, but he would go stab the tree. Maybe, just maybe. If he really concentrated then…
Maybe.
Oskar picked up his bag and hurried home, filling his head with lovely images.
Tomas is sitting at his computer when he feels the first stab. Doesn’t understand where it is coming from. Staggers out into the kitchen with the blood gushing from his stomach. ‘Mum, Mum, someone is stabbing me.’
Tomas’ mum would just stand there. Tomas’ mum who always took his side no matter what he had done. She would just stand there. Terror-stricken. While the stabs continued to puncture Tomas’ body.
He falls to the kitchen floor in a pool of blood, ‘Mum…Mum…’ while the invisible knife cuts open his stomach so his intestines spill out onto the linoleum.
Not that it really worked that way.
But still.
The apartment reeked of cat piss.
Giselle lay on his lap, purring. Bibi and Beatrice were wrestling on the floor. Manfred sat in the window as usual, his nose pushed up against the glass, and Gustaf was trying to get Manfred’s attention by buffeting his side with his head.
Måns and Tufs and Cleopatra were relaxing in the armchair. Tufs was pawing at a few loose threads. Karl-Oskar tried to jump up onto the windowsill but missed and fell backwards onto the floor. He was blind in one eye.
Lurvis was out in the hall keeping an eye on the letter slot, ready to jump if any advertising was pushed through. Vendela was resting on the hat shelf keeping an eye on Lurvis. Her deformed front paw hung down between the wooden slats and flinched from time to time.
More cats were out in the kitchen, eating or lazing around on tables and chairs. Five were sleeping on the bed in the bedroom. A few more had their favourite hideaways in closets or cupboards they had learnt how to get into on their own.
After Gösta had stopped letting them out—relenting to pressure from his neighbours—no more fresh genetic material had come in. Most of the kittens born were either dead or so deformed they died a few days after birth. About half of the twenty-eight cats that lived in Gösta’s apartment had some kind of congenital defect. They were blind or deaf or were missing teeth or had motor damage.
He loved them all.
Gösta scratched Giselle behind the ear.
‘Yes…my little darling…what are we going to do? You don’t know? No, either do I. But we have to do something, don’t we? You can’t get away with something like this. It was Jocke. I knew him. And now he??
?s dead. But no one else knows. Because they didn’t see what I saw. Did you see it too?’
Gösta lowered his head, whispered, ‘It was a child. I saw it coming down the path. It waited for Jocke. In the underpass. He went in, and never came out. Then in the morning he was gone. But he’s dead. I know he is.
‘What’s that? No, I can’t go to the police. They’re going to ask questions. There will be a lot of people and then they will ask why I didn’t say anything. Shine one of those lights in my face.
‘It was three days ago. Or four. I don’t know. What day is it today? They’re going to ask. I can’t do it.
‘But we have to do something. I just don’t know what.’
Giselle looked up at him. Started to lick his hand.
When Oskar came home from the forest, the knife was smeared with splinters of rotten wood. He washed it under the kitchen tap, drying it off with a dishcloth that he then rinsed clean and held against his cheek.
His mum would soon be home. He had to go out again, needed a little more time—tears were still clumped in his throat, his legs ached. He took the key from the kitchen cupboard, wrote a note: Back soon, Oskar. Then he put the knife back and walked down to the basement. Unlocked the heavy door, slipped in.
The underground smell. He liked it. A reassuring blend of wood, old things, and locked-in-ness. A little light filtered in through a ground-level window and in the dim light the basement promised secrets, hidden treasure.
To his left there was an oblong section divided into four storage compartments. The walls and doors were made of wood, the doors secured with various locks. One of the doors had a reinforced lock; a person who had been robbed.
On the wooden wall at the very end of the area someone had written KISS with a marker. The ‘S’s were formed like elongated, backward ‘Z’s.
But the most interesting area was to be found at the end opposite all this. The room for recycling and oversized rubbish. Oskar had once found a world globe that now stood in his room, as well as several issues of the series ‘The Hulk’, and some other stuff.
But today there was almost nothing. It must have been emptied recently. A few newspapers, some folders with the labels English and Swedish. But Oskar had enough folders. He had scavenged a whole bunch from the container outside the printing shop a while ago.
He walked through the basement room and out to the next stairwell in the building, Tommy’s stairwell. Continued on to that basement door, unlocked it and walked in. This basement had a different smell; a trace of paint, or thinning solution. This basement also contained the safety shelter for the whole complex. He had only been in once before, three years ago, when some of the older guys had a boxing club there. He had been allowed to go with Tommy and watch, one afternoon. The guys had gone after each other with boxing gloves on their hands and Oskar had been a little scared. The groaning and sweating, the tense, concentrated bodies, the sound of the blows muffled by the thick concrete walls. Then someone had gotten hurt, or something like that, and the wheels that you turned to pull away the fastening mechanism on the door had been blocked with chains and lock. That was the end of the boxing.
Oskar turned on the light and walked over to the shelter room. If the Russians were coming it would have to be unlocked.
If they hadn’t lost the key.
Oskar stood in front of the massive iron door and a thought appeared. That someone…someone was locked in here. That’s what the chains and lock were for. To restrain a monster.
He listened. There were distant sounds from the street, from people’s movements in the apartments above. He really liked the basement. It was like being in another world, while knowing that the other world was still there outside, above you, if you needed it. But down here it was quiet, and no one came and said anything, did anything to you. Nothing you had to do.
Across from the safety room was the clubhouse. Forbidden territory.
Of course, they didn’t have a lock, but that didn’t mean just anyone was allowed in. He took a deep breath and opened the door.
There wasn’t much in this storage unit. Just a badly sagging couch, and an equally sagging armchair. A rug on the floor. A chest of drawers with peeling paint. A clandestine lighting arrangement had been rigged up consisting of a cord feeding from the light in the corridor connected to a single naked bulb suspended from the ceiling. It was turned off.
He had been down here a few times before and knew that all he had to do to turn it on was twist the bulb. But he didn’t dare. Enough light filtered in through the gaps between the planks to see. His heart beat faster. If they found him here they would…
What? I don’t know. That’s what’s so horrible. Not beat me up, but…
He kneeled on the rug, and lifted a sofa cushion. A few tubes of glue and a roll of plastic bags, a container of lighter fluid. In the other corner of the sofa, under the seat cushion, there were porno magazines. A few well-thumbed issues of Lektyr and Fib Aktuellt.
He took a Lektyr and shifted closer to the door where there was more light. Still kneeling, he spread the magazine out on the floor in front of him, flipped the pages. His mouth was dry. The woman in the picture lay in a deckchair wearing only a pair of high-heeled shoes. She was pushing her breasts together and pouting. Her legs were spread and in the middle of the bushy hair between her thighs there was a strip of pink flesh with a groove down the middle.
How do you get in there?
He knew the words from talk he had heard, graffiti he had read. Cunt. Hole. Labia. But it wasn’t a hole. Only that groove. They had had sexual education at school and he knew there was supposed to be a…tunnel leading in from the vulva. But in what direction? Straight up or in or…you couldn’t tell.
He kept turning the pages. The readers’ own stories. At the swimming pool. A stall in the girls’ changing rooms. Her nipples stiffened under her bathing suit. My dick was thumping like a hammer in my swimming trunks. She gripped the clothes pegs, turned her little ass towards me and moaned, ‘Take me, take me now.’
Did this kind of thing go on all the time; behind closed doors, in places where you couldn’t see?
He had started a new story, about a family reunion that took an unexpected turn when he heard the basement door being opened. He shut the magazine, put it back under the sofa cushion and didn’t know what to do with himself. His throat contracted, he didn’t dare to breathe. Footsteps in the corridor.
Please God let it not be them. Let it not be them.
He squeezed his kneecaps with his hands, clenched his teeth so hard he hurt his jaw. The door opened. Tommy was standing there, blinking.
‘What the hell?’
Oskar wanted to say something, but his jaws were locked shut. He simply stayed where he was, kneeling on the rug of light that rolled out from the door, breathing through his nose.
‘What the hell are you doing here? And what have you been up to?’
Almost without moving his jaws Oskar managed to press out a ‘…Nothing.’
Tommy took a step into the storage area, towering over him.
‘With your cheek, I mean? How did you get that?’
‘I…it’s nothing.’
Tommy shook his head, screwed the light bulb so it turned on and closed the door. Oskar got to his feet, standing in the middle of the room with his hands by his side, unsure of what he should do. He took a step towards the door. Tommy sank down in the armchair and pointed to the couch.
‘Sit down.’
Oskar sat down on the middle cushion, the one that didn’t have anything stashed underneath it. Tommy sat quietly for a few moments, looking at him. Then he said: ‘All right, let’s hear it.’
‘What?’
‘What happened to your cheek.’
‘I just…’
‘Someone beat you up. Right?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How come?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What? They beat you up with no reason?’
‘Ye
s.’
Tommy nodded, picked at a few loose threads that hung from the armchair. Took out a wad of chewing tobacco and tucked it into his lip, held out the jar to Oskar.
‘Want some?’
Oskar shook his head. Tommy put it back, adjusted the wad of tobacco with his tongue and then leaned back in the armchair, with his hands folded on his stomach.
‘I see. And what were you doing down here?’
‘Um, I was just going to…’
‘Check out some of the babes, right? Because you aren’t into sniffing yet, are you? Come over here.’
Oskar got up, walked over to Tommy.
‘Come closer. Breathe on me.’
Oskar did as he was told and Tommy nodded, pointed at the couch and told Oskar to sit down again.
‘You stay away from that shit, you understand?’
‘I haven’t…’
‘No, you haven’t. But you stay the hell away, you understand? It’s no good. Tobacco is good. You can try that.’ He paused. ‘OK, are you planning to sit there gawking at me all night?’ He gestured to the cushion next to Oskar. ‘Want to read more?’
Oskar shook his head.
‘OK, then get lost. The others are coming soon and they won’t be too pleased to see you here. Go home, go on now.’
Oskar got up.
‘And Oskar…’ Tommy looked at him, shook his head, sighed. ‘No, forget it. Go on home. And one more thing. Don’t come down here any more.’
Oskar nodded, opened the door. He stopped in the doorway.
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s OK. Just don’t come here any more. Oh—you got the money yet?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Great. I made a tape for you with Destroyer and Unmasked. Come by and pick it up later.’
Oskar nodded. He felt a lump growing in his throat. If he stayed here he would start to cry. He whispered, ‘Thanks’, and left.
Tommy stayed in his armchair, sucked on the wad of tobacco and stared at the dust bunnies that had collected under the couch.
Hopeless.
They would keep beating up Oskar until he finished ninth grade. He was the type. Tommy would have liked to do something but once it got started there was nothing you could do. No stopping it.