Her stomach had felt empty, but as she stood there and looked at all the food there was nothing she wanted. From habit, she had still taken out the bread, butter, cheese and milk and set them on the kitchen table.
She made herself a cheese sandwich and poured milk into a glass. Then she sat at the table and looked at the white liquid in the glass, the brown piece of bread with its yellow slice of cheese. It looked revolting. She didn’t want it. She threw it out, pouring the milk into the sink. There was a half-full bottle of white wine in the fridge. She poured out a glass, brought it to her lips. But when she smelled the wine she lost interest.
With a feeling of failure she poured herself a glass of water from the tap. She hesitated. Surely you could always drink water…? Yes.
She could drink the water. But it tasted…stale. As if everything good in the water had been removed and only left the flat dregs.
She went back to bed, shifting restlessly for a few more hours then finally falling asleep.
When she woke up it was half past ten. She threw herself out of bed, pulled on some clothes in the dim bedroom. Good heavens. She should have been at the store at eight. Why hadn’t they called?
Oh, but wait. She had heard the phone ring. It had rung in her last dream before she woke up, then stopped. If they hadn’t called she would still be sleeping. She buttoned her blouse and walked over to the window, pulled up the blinds.
The light struck her face like a physical blow. She staggered back, away from the window and dropped the cords to the blinds. They slipped down again with a clattering sound, stopping at a crooked angle. She sat down on the bed. A single beam of sunlight came in through the window, shining on her naked foot.
A thousand pinpricks.
As if her skin were being twisted in two directions at once.
What is this?
She moved her foot away, pulled on her socks. Moved her foot back into the sunlight. Better. Only a hundred pinpricks. She stood up to go to work then sat down again.
Some kind of…shock.
The sensation when she pulled up the blinds had been ghastly. As if the light were heavy matter flung at her body, pushing her away. It had been the worst in the eyes. Two strong thumbs pressing on them, threatening to gouge them out of her head. They were still stinging.
She rubbed her eyes with the palms of her hands, took her sunglasses out of the bathroom cabinet and put them on.
Hunger raged in her body but all she had to do was think of the refrigerator and pantry contents to make all thoughts of eating breakfast disappear. And anyway she had no time. She was almost three hours late.
She went out, locked the door and walked down the stairs as fast as she could. Her body was weak. Maybe it was a mistake to go to work today. Well, the store would only be open four more hours and it was now the Saturday customers started to come in.
She was so preoccupied with these thoughts that she did not hesitate before opening the front door of the building.
The light was there again.
Her eyes hurt despite the sunglasses, boiling water was poured over her hands and face. She gave a little scream. Pulled her hands into her coat, bent her face to the ground and ran. She could not protect her neck and scalp and they stung like they were on fire. Luckily it was not far to the store.
When she was safely inside, the stinging and pain eased. Most of the store windows were covered in advertising and protective plastic film so that the sunlight wouldn’t affect the goods. She took off her glasses. It hurt a little, but that could be because some sunlight came in the spaces between the advertising posters. She put her sunglasses in her pocket and walked to the office.
Lennart, the store manager and her boss, was there filling out forms but he looked up when she came in. She had expected some kind of reprimand but he simply said, ‘Hi, how’s it going?’
‘Oh…fine.’
‘Shouldn’t you be at home getting some rest?’
‘No, I thought…’
‘You didn’t need to, you know. Lotten will fill in for you today. I tried to call you earlier, but when you didn’t pick up…’
‘Isn’t there anything for me to do, then?’
‘Check with Berit in the meat department. And Virginia…’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m sorry about what happened. I don’t know exactly how to say it, but…I feel badly about it. And I completely understand if you need to take it easy for a while.’
Virginia couldn’t get her head around it. Lennart was not the type of person who looked kindly on sick leave or, for that matter, any problem that other people might have. And to hear him extend his personal sympathies was something completely new. She must look pretty terrible with her swollen cheek and her bandages.
‘Thanks,’ Virginia said, ‘I’ll think it over,’ and went to the meat department.
She looped over past the checkout registers to say hi to Lotten. Five people were lined up at her register and Virginia thought she should open another one after all. But the question was if Lennart even wanted her to sit at a checkout register looking as she did.
When she walked into the light from the horrible window behind the registers it got like that again. Her face tightened, her eyes ached. It wasn’t as bad as the direct sunlight out on the street, but it was bad enough. She would not be able to sit there.
Lotten caught sight of her, waved in between two customers.
‘Hi, I read…How are you doing?’
Virginia held up her hand, wiggled it from side to side: so-so.
Read?
She nabbed the Svenska Dagbladet and Dagens Nyheter, took them with her over to the meat department, quickly eyed the front pages. Nothing there. That would have been a stretch.
The meat department was at the very back of the store, beside the milk products; strategically planned so that you had to walk through the whole store to get there. Virginia stopped next to the shelves with canned food. She was trembling with hunger. She looked carefully at all the cans: crushed tomatoes, mushrooms, mussels, tuna, ravioli, Bullen’s beer sausage, pea soup…no. She felt nothing but revulsion.
Berit saw her from the meat counter, waved. As soon as Virginia had come around the back of the counter Berit hugged her, and carefully touched the bandage on her cheek.
‘Ugh. Poor you.’
‘Oh, it’s…’
Fine?
She retreated to the little storage room behind the meat counter. If she let Berit get started she would be subject to a long harangue about people’s suffering in general and the evils of today’s society in particular.
Virginia sat down on a chair between the scales and the door to the freezer room. It was an area of only a few square metres but it was the most comfortable place in the store. No sunlight. She flipped through the papers and found a small article in the Dagens Nyheter domestic news section. She read:
WOMAN ATTACKED IN BLACKEBERG
A fifty-year-old woman was attacked and assaulted Thursday night in the Stockholm suburb of Blackeberg. A passer-by intervened and the perpetrator, a young woman, immediately fled the scene. The motive of the assault is unknown. The police are now investigating a possible connection to other violent incidents in the western suburbs during the past few weeks. The fifty-year-old woman’s injuries were described as minor.
Virginia lowered the paper. So strange to read about yourself in that way. ‘Fifty-year-old woman’, ‘passer-by’, ‘minor injuries’. Everything that was concealed by those words.
‘Possible connection’. Yes, Lacke was convinced that she had been attacked by the same child who killed Jocke. He had had to bite his tongue not to say this at the hospital to the female police officer and the doctor who examined her early on Friday morning.
He was planning to talk to the police, but wanted to inform Gösta first, thought Gösta would see the whole thing from a new perspective now that even Virginia had been involved.
She heard a rustling sound and looked around. It
took a few seconds before she realised that it was the newspaper shaking in her own hands that was making the noise. She set the papers on the shelf above the white coats, and went out to join Berit.
‘Anything I can do?’
‘Do you really think it’s a good idea, hon?’
‘Yes, it’s better for me to be doing something.’
‘I see. You can portion out the shrimp, in that case. Five hundred gram bags. But shouldn’t you…?’
Virginia shook her head and walked back to the storage room. She put on a white coat and hat, took a case of shrimp out of the freezer, pulled a plastic bag over her hand and started to weigh them out. Dug around in the carton with the hand that had the plastic bag over it, portioned them out into bags, weighed them on the scales. A boring, mechanical job, and her right hand felt frozen already on her fourth bag. But she was doing something, and it gave her an opportunity to think.
At the hospital Lacke had said something really strange: that the child who attacked her had not been a human being. That it had fangs and claws.
Virginia had dismissed this as a drunken hallucination.
She didn’t remember much from the attack. But she could accept this: the thing that had jumped on top of her had been much too light to be an adult, almost too light to be a child, even. A very small child in that case. Five or six maybe. She recalled that she had stood up with the weight on her back. After that everything was black until she woke up in her apartment with all the guys except Gösta gathered around her.
She put a tie around a finished bag, took out the next one, dropped in a few handfuls. Four hundred and thirty grams. Seven more shrimp. Five hundred and ten.
Our treat.
She looked down at her hands that were working independently of her brain. Hands. With long nails. Sharp teeth. What was that called? Lacke had said it out loud. A vampire. Virginia had laughed, carefully, so that the stitches in her cheek wouldn’t come out. Lacke had not even smiled.
‘You didn’t see it.’
‘But Lacke…they don’t really exist.’
‘No. But what was it then?’
‘A child. Living out a strange twisted fantasy.’
‘Who grew out her nails? Filed her teeth down? I’d like to see the dentist who…’
‘Lacke, it was dark. You were drunk, it—’
‘It was, and I was. But I saw what I saw.’
It burned and felt tight under the bandage on her cheek. She removed the plastic bag from her right hand, put her hand over the bandage. It was ice cold and that felt good. But she was weak, it felt as if her legs weren’t going to carry her much longer.
She would finish this carton and then go home. This wasn’t going to work. If she could rest over the weekend she would probably feel better on Monday. She put the plastic bag back on and started in on the work again with a spark of anger. Hated being sick.
A sharp pain in her index finger. Damn it. That’s what happens if you don’t concentrate. The shrimp were sharp when they were frozen and she had pricked her finger. She pulled off the plastic bag and looked at the finger. A smallish cut with a little blood welling out of it.
She automatically popped it into her mouth to suck the blood away.
A warm, healing, delicious spot radiating out from the place where her fingertip met her tongue, started to spread. She sucked harder on the finger. All good tastes concentrated into one filled her mouth. A shiver of well-being went through her body. She sucked and sucked, giving in to the pleasure until she realised what she was doing.
She pulled the finger out of her mouth, stared at it. It was shiny with saliva and the tiny amount of blood that now welled out was immediately thinned out by the wetness, like an overly diluted watercolour. She looked at the shrimp in the carton. Hundreds of pink bodies, covered with frost. And eyes. Black pinheads dispersed in the white and pink, an upside-down starry sky. Patterns, constellations started to dance in front of her eyes.
The world spun on its axis and something hit her in the back of the head. In front of her eyes there was a white surface with cobwebs in the corners. She understood that she was lying on the floor but had no strength to do anything about it.
In the distance she heard Berit’s voice: ‘Oh my God… Virginia…’
Jonny liked to hang out with his older brother. At least when none of his sketchy buddies were around. Jimmy knew some guys from Råcksta that Jonny was pretty scared of. One evening a few years ago they had come by to talk to Jimmy, hanging around outside but without ringing the buzzer. When Jonny told them Jimmy wasn’t home they asked him to deliver a message.
‘Tell your brother that if he doesn’t get us the dough by Monday we’ll put his head in a vice. You know what that is? OK…and turn it like this until the dough runs out of his ears, like this. Can you tell him that? OK, great. Jonny’s your name? Goodbye then, Jonny.’
Jonny had delivered the message and Jimmy had simply nodded, said he knew. Then some money had disappeared from Mum’s wallet and then there had been an angry scene.
Jimmy was not home as often nowadays. There was no real room for him any more since their youngest little sister was born. Jonny already had two younger siblings and there weren’t supposed to be any more. But then Mum had met some guy and…well…that’s how it went.
At least Jonny and Jimmy had the same dad. He worked on an oil rig off the coast of Norway and not only had he started sending regular child support, he was also sending a little extra just to make up for before. Mum blessed him, and when she was drunk she had even cried over him a few times and said she would never again meet a man like that. So for the first time in as long as Jonny could remember, a lack of money was not the constant topic of conversation.
Now they were sitting in the pizzeria on the main square in Blackeberg. Jimmy had been home in the morning, argued a bit with Mum, and then he and Jonny had gone out. Jimmy heaped condiments on his pizza, folded it up picked up the large roll with both hands and started to eat. Jonny ate his pizza in the usual way, thinking that next time he ate pizza without Jimmy he would eat it like that.
Jimmy chewed, nodded his head at the bandage over Jonny’s ear. ‘Looks like hell.’
‘Yes.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘It’s OK.’
‘Mum said it’s damaged for life. That you won’t be able to hear anything.’
‘They don’t know yet. Maybe it’ll be all right.’
‘Hmm. Let me get this straight. The guy just picked up some big branch and bashed it into your head.’
‘Mmm.’
‘Damn. What are you going to do about it?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Need any help?’
‘No.’
‘What? Me and a few of my pals can take him out.’
Jonny pulled off a big piece with shrimp, his favourite, put it in his mouth and chewed. No. Not drag Jimmy’s friends into this, then it would get out of hand. Nonetheless Jonny smiled at the thought of how scared shitless Oskar would be if he appeared at his house with Jimmy and, say, those guys from Råcksta. He shook his head.
Jimmy put his pizza roll down and looked seriously at Jonny.
‘OK, but I’m just saying. One more thing, and then…’
He snapped his fingers hard and made a fist.
‘You’re my brother and no little shit is going to come and…One more thing, then you can say whatever you like. Then I’m going after him. OK?’
Jimmy held out his fist across the table. Jonny also made a fist and bumped Jimmy’s with it. It felt good. That there was someone who cared. Jimmy nodded.
‘Good. I have something for you.’
He bent down under the table, took out a plastic bag that he had been carrying all morning. He drew a thin photo album out of the bag. ‘Dad came by last week. He’s grown a beard, almost didn’t recognise him. He had this with him.’
Jimmy held the album out to Jonny, who wiped his fingers on a napkin and opened it.
>
Pictures of children. Of Mum. Maybe ten years ago. And a man he recognised as his father. The man was pushing the kids on swings. In one picture he was wearing a much-too-small cowboy hat. Jimmy, maybe nine years old, was standing next to him with a plastic rifle in his hands and a grim expression. A little boy who had to be Jonny sat on the ground nearby and looked wide-eyed at them.
‘He loaned me this till next time. He wants it back, said it was… yeah, what the fuck was it…“my most valuable possession” I think he said. Thought it might interest you too.’
Jonny nodded without looking up from the album. He had only met his dad two times since he left when Jonny was four. At home there was one picture of him, a pretty bad one where he was sitting around with some other people. This was something completely different. Here you could construct a real image of him.
‘One more thing. Don’t show it to Mum. I think Dad kind of swiped it when he left and if she sees it…well, he wants it back, as I told you. Promise. Don’t show Mum.’
Still with his nose buried in the album Jonny made a fist and held it out over the table. Jimmy laughed and then Jonny felt Jimmy’s knuckles against his. Promise.
‘Hey, you check it out later. Take the bag too.’
Jimmy held out the bag and Jonny reluctantly folded up the album, put it in the bag. Jimmy was done with his pizza, leaned back in his chair and patted his stomach.
‘So. How are things on the chick front?’
The village flew by. Snow that was kicked up by the wheels of the moped trailer was sprayed back and peppered Oskar’s cheeks. He gripped the towrope with both hands, shifted his weight to the side, swinging out of the snow cloud. There was a sharp scraping sound as the skis sliced through the loose snow. The outer ski nudged an orange reflector where the road split in two. He wobbled, then regained his balance.
The road down to Lågarö and the summerhouses wasn’t ploughed. The moped left three deep tracks in the untouched snow-cover, and five metres behind it came Oskar on skis, making two additional tracks. He drove zigzag over the moped tracks, stood on one ski like a trick skier, crouched down into a little ball of speed.