She had no plans. The only thing she had thought about, or rather heard in her mind, was this very silence. The fact that every sound in the house would come from her. She tried not to make any noise at all as she padded into the kitchen.
Humming and buzzing. The fridge, humming quietly; the flies buzzing hysterically as they banged against the kitchen window. Teresa stopped and stared at them. There must have been ten flies dancing across the window pane, hurling their bodies against the hard glass in their quest for a gap, a way out. All Teresa had to do was lift the catch and open the window.
But the flies belonged to her now, just as everything in the house belonged to her. She folded her arms and looked at her flies. Then she sat down on a chair and looked at her flies. Waited. Sometimes a fly left the window and took a turn around the kitchen, but it was soon back, banging against the glass.
The fridge gave a rattle and stopped humming. The flies carried on buzzing. The faint thuds as they gathered themselves and made another onslaught on the glass, a fleeting higher note from one individual fly, like a disappointed question before it once again fell back into the collective note that filled Teresa’s head.
She sat there as if she were nailed to the chair, her auditory perception hypnotised by the humming and buzzing, just as the TV screen’s white hiss can draw the eye if you’re not careful. She was erased and recreated.
With a sudden movement she got up from the chair and went to the bathroom to fetch her mother’s hairspray. She found a box of matches in a kitchen drawer. She carefully folded the curtains back from the window until she had two clear rectangles of glass with the helpless little bodies flying around.
She struck a match and held it in front of hairspray’s nozzle, pressed the button. A cone of fire spurted towards the window, sweeping across the flies. She took her finger off the button. Four flies dropped onto the windowsill, their wings seared off. She pulled up her chair and sat down to study them.
One of the flies had lost only one wing and was spinning around on the spot like a propeller; it managed to get to the edge and fell on the floor. Teresa stamped on it. Of the remaining three, two were walking around like clumsy beetles, and one was lying on its back waving its legs in the air. Teresa pressed her thumb down on that one until it stopped waving its legs. When she had finished looking at the other two, she squashed them with the matchbox.
Two more sprays, and she had cleared the window. She rearranged the curtains and swept the corpses into her hand, threw them in the bin. Then she made herself a peanut butter sandwich. As she was eating, another fly appeared and started banging against the window. She left it alone.
She felt quite still inside, apart from a slight feeling of shame in her stomach which was not dissimilar to vertigo. She quite liked it. It was something to hold onto.
As she was putting the hairspray back she caught sight of her mother’s make-up. She made an attempt. Mascara and kohl around her eyes, concealer on the pimples on her cheeks, pink lipstick. She had no idea what to do with blusher, so she finished off by teasing up her hair with spray.
It looked bloody awful. The concealer, which should have brought about a straightforward improvement, was the wrong shade and showed up as dark patches on her pale skin. Apart from that, she looked like an ugly girl with colour on her face. She quickly got undressed and took a shower, scrubbing her face with soap several times.
She pressed the shower head against her pubes. It felt quite nice. She tried rubbing herself with her index finger, but felt nothing. She had watched Sex and the City a few times and realised it was possible to do things to yourself. But it didn’t work for her. Maybe she was doing it wrong.
She squatted down and rested her head in her hands as the warm water flowed over her back. She tried to cry. Only dry sobs emerged. She visualised how sorry for herself she was, and had almost succeeded when she decided she’d had enough, and turned the thermostat until the water was ice-cold. She let the cold water pour over her until her face was stiff and her skin covered in goose-pimples. Then she turned off the shower, dried herself and got dressed.
When she came out of the bathroom the house was just as silent, but her chilled body now felt like a crystal in the silence, an element of clarity in the still fuzziness. She went and sat at the computer, launched Google and typed in ‘poems’.
The result surprised her. It had just been an idea, because her head felt so clean and pure. She would read poems. But the top results were pages where people who weren’t poets had posted stuff they had written. She opened a page called poetry.now.
She read one poem, then another. She found a girl called Andrea, fifteen years old, whose poems she liked; she did a search using her name and found several more examples of her work. They were called ‘Loneliness’, ‘Is it just me?’ and ‘Black angel’.
Teresa read on, open-mouthed. She could have written those poems. They were about her. Andrea was a couple of years older than her and lived in Västerås, and yet they were almost exactly the same. She clicked on another page and discovered Malin from Stockholm, sixteen years old, who had written a poem called ‘The Bubble’, in which she described how she lived inside a bubble whose walls were impossible to break down.
That was exactly how it was. Teresa felt the same, but hadn’t found those particular words. Nobody else could see the bubble, but she was shut inside it all the time. Malin had put it into words.
Teresa scrolled down and saw that some people had left comments about the poem, saying it was really good and well written and that they felt the same. A shiver ran through Teresa’s body and she felt as if she had a fever. She clicked on the box that said ‘leave a comment’ and was asked to log in.
She got up and walked around the living room, then went into Göran and Maria’s bedroom, where she lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. Then she rolled herself in the duvet and curled up, whimpering like a puppy.
I’m too small.
Almost everyone writing on poetry.now was a girl. The youngest she had found was Matilda, fourteen years old. Teresa thought her poem, ‘Tears’, was childish. And she was twelve, almost thirteen. She tossed and turned in the bed until she started sweating and relaxed. All these other girls who were older than her but felt the same, where were they? What did they look like?
She got out of bed and a feeling of restlessness she couldn’t pin down drove her all over the house. When she got to the bathroom she picked up the hairspray. The box of matches was still on the kitchen table. Five flies had appeared since she was last here. She brought them all down with one circular spraying movement. She looked at them as they crawled around on the windowsill.
In her mother’s sewing box she found a pack of pins. She nailed the flies to the windowsill, one by one. They remained alive, waving their little legs. The feeling of shame in her stomach grew until she could almost see it, touch it. A sticky, orange jellyfish floating just beneath her ribcage.
She took a deep breath and tried to get rid of the jellyfish. It didn’t go away, but it shrank. She took another deep breath. The jellyfish disappeared. She looked at the skewered flies.
That’s how simple it is, she thought. It isn’t you who makes the decisions. It’s me.
She fetched a small wooden chopping board and transferred the flies. One of them who had tiny bits of wing still attached to its body buzzed feebly when she picked it up, impaled on the pin, but fell silent when it was secured to its new base. She took the board into the living room and placed it next to the computer.
She spent a while sorting out an email address, which was a requirement for creating an account at poetry.now. When the registration page for Hotmail asked for her date of birth, she made herself three years older than she was, just to be on the safe side. She gave the same date when she registered with poetry.now.
From time to time she looked at the flies. They were all still alive. She would have liked to know what kind of food she could give them so they would stay alive. But
who knows what flies eat?
Using her grandfather’s surname and her own middle name, she became Josefin Lindström from Rimsta, fifteen years old. She was in.
She couldn’t get to sleep that night. After tossing and turning for a couple of hours, she got up and put on her dressing gown. The house felt even more silent and mysterious with the darkness outside the window. She crept cautiously down the stairs.
As she approached the living room, she started to feel afraid. She had the feeling there was a creature in there. A huge, insect-like creature with slime dripping from its jaws, just waiting to grab her. She took a deep breath, and another. Then she switched on the light.
Nothing. The chopping board was where she had left it, next to the computer. She padded over and looked. All the flies had stopped moving. She pulled out a pin and removed the fly. It was dead. It had suffered during its final hours of life, but now it was dead.
Teresa stuck the pin in her arm. A drop of blood welled up. She licked it off. Then she went and fetched a small cushion and lay down on the floor with the cushion under her head. She closed her eyes and pretended she was dead.
After a few minutes she had fallen asleep.
Österyd usually had two classes in each year group at high school level, and the policy was to move children on from juniors to high school. Many children came in at that stage from village schools, and the aim was to break up the structure so that the new arrivals would find it easier to fit in.
Teresa’s class was joined by a strikingly pretty girl from Synninge called Agnes; Mikael, who from day one looked and behaved like a fight just waiting to happen, plus a number of others with less outstanding characteristics. Johannes ended up in the parallel class.
Everyone checked each other out, testing the waters, and Teresa did her best not to draw attention to herself in any way. After a few weeks she had established herself in the role of the quiet girl who minded her own business, but without appearing to be some kind of idiot who needed to be taught a lesson.
She carried on using Arvid and Olof’s computer when it was available, and on her thirteenth birthday she was allowed to take it over when her brothers bought a new one with a more powerful processor. The first thing she did with the computer that now belonged to her was to set a password. When she was asked to type in her password twice, she chose gravel pit for no real reason.
When she logged on to poetry.now, she found a new poem written by a thirteen-year-old girl called Bim. Nothing good could come of a name like that, but to Teresa’s surprise she really liked the poem, which was called ‘Evil’:
where I am no one can be
inside the brain lies thinking
porridge is not good
talk misleads
the name does not mean me
the moon is my father
It was incomprehensible in a way that appealed to Teresa. Concrete and vaguely unpleasant. Entirely to her taste. Besides which it was nice to find someone of her own age who wrote like that.
Under the guise of her alter ego Josefin she wrote a comment praising the poem, and said she hoped Bim would write more. When she had sent the comment it occurred to her that Bim could have done exactly the same as her, but the opposite way round. She might be a much older girl, or even a boy.
She scrolled through several new poems without finding anything else she liked. Then she did what she hadn’t dared to do while the computer didn’t belong to her. She opened a blank Word document so that she could write a contribution of her own for poetry.now. Not one of the old poems in her exercise book, but something completely new. Something current.
The cursor flashed, exhorting her to key in the first word. She sat with her fingers resting on the keys. Nothing came to her. She wrote ‘I am sitting here’ and deleted it immediately. She wrote ‘talk misleads’ and stared at the two words for a long time. Then she deleted them.
She went and lay on her bed, buried her face in the pillow, folded the sides of the pillow over her ears and pressed hard. Everything was suddenly dark and silent, and patterns made of golden threads danced on the inside of her eyelids. The threads turned and twisted to form the word ‘everyone’. Suddenly a whole sentence was flashing at her.
Everyone is actually called something else.
She lay there breathing heavily, waiting for more. Nothing came, so with her hair plastered to her forehead with sweat she sat down at the computer and wrote, ‘Everyone is actually called something else.’
She didn’t understand what it meant, but it was true. Not only on the poetry forum, but everywhere. Inside every person there is another person. She wrote that down too. With a sudden burst of daring she put down the two words from Bim and added to them. Then she rounded it off with a final line.
She pushed back her chair and looked at the words she had written.
Everyone is actually called something else
Inside every person there is another person
Talk misleads and behind the words are other words
We can be seen only when it is dark
We can be heard only when there is silence
Before she had time to change her mind, she copied the poem into ‘make a contribution’ on poetry.now. She didn’t know whether the poem was any good, but it looked like a real poem, and what she had written was true.
She sat with her fingers on the keys and there was absolute silence inside her head. Nothing more came.
How do you actually do this?
The following day she went straight to the library after school. There were three shelves of poetry, comprising perhaps two hundred books. She had no idea where to start. Under ‘new arrivals’ was a book called Pitbull Terrier. It had a red cover showing a black monster dog, and was written by somebody called Kristian Lundberg. Teresa took it off the shelf and read the first lines of the first poem:
Poems about
the month of April are all banal
We spit on poems like that
Poems like that are as predictable as death
Teresa sat down in an armchair and carried on reading. She hadn’t thought poems in books could look like this. There was a lot she didn’t understand, of course, but there were almost no difficult words and a lot of the pictures were very easy to get her head around. She particularly liked ‘the tide of death is rising’.
After an hour she had read the whole book, and had a slight headache. She looked along the shelf and found two more collections by Kristian Lundberg. After glancing around she pushed them into her school bag along with Pitbull Terrier and cycled home.
When she logged onto poetry.now she saw that someone had left a comment about her poem. Bim.
‘good poem i am also other though i hear when there is sound write about porridge’
Teresa read these few words over and over again. ‘i am also other’ could mean that Bim, like Teresa, was a different person from the one she was pretending to be on the forum. Or perhaps the whole thing meant something else, just like her own poem.
There was, however, no doubt about one thing: those first two words. It was the first positive comment anyone had made about something she had written.
When she had finished staring at Bim’s words, she noticed that it actually said ‘Comments (2)’ below the poem. She scrolled down and found another reaction, this time from Caroline, aged seventeen. It said, ‘A completely incomprehensible poem about nothing. Get a life.’
Teresa stopped breathing. Her eyes prickled and the tears began to well. She clamped her hands together. Then she got up, fetched a hand towel and rubbed her eyes so hard that her eyelids swelled up. She scrunched up the towel and breathed into it, slowly and deeply.
She sat down at the computer again, went into Hotmail and got herself a new address, then created a new account at poetry.now. This time she was Sara from Stockholm, eighteen years old. She searched for Caroline, and found that she had written a number of poems. Most were about unhappiness in love. Boys who had betrayed her.
The comments were very positive. Sara from Stockholm was of a different opinion. She said, ‘I have read several of your poems about unhappiness in love and it seems to me that you don’t really deserve anything else. You are a vile, self-obsessed person no one could ever love.’
She could hardly breathe as she pressed send. Then she lay down on her bed and took out one of the poetry collections she had stolen from the library. It was called He Who Does Not Speak Is Dead.
It seemed to be completely unopened. Nobody had read it before her.
The following day Teresa became acquainted with the term ‘troll’. She had thought no one would react to Sara’s comments. She was wrong. Caroline seemed to have a lot of fans on poetry.now, and eight people had commented on her comment, a couple of them at some length.
Every single comment, whether long or short, made it clear that Sara was a very bad person who had no feelings—you come up with something better, then. And so on. In two of the replies she was called a ‘troll’, and realised it was some kind of term. She looked it up and found that ‘troll’ came from trolling: dragging a baited hook through a shoal of fish and waiting for them to bite. Translated to internet forums: posting unpleasant or stupid comments just to get a reaction. A person who does this is a troll.
Teresa crossed her arms tightly over her chest and looked out of the window. She felt happy and peaceful. Lots of girls had read what she’d written and felt compelled to express their point of view. Because she was a troll.
I am a troll.
It suited her perfectly. She lived in the world of humans even though she had been swapped in her cradle, and really belonged to the dark, wild forest. A troll.
During the winter and the spring she was a regular visitor to the library, reading her way methodically through the poetry section. When she got home, trolling took up a considerable amount of her time. She created several different aliases on various forums. She was Jeanette, aged fourteen and Linda, twenty-two. On a forum dealing with anorexia and bulimia she was My, aged seventeen, and received over thirty-five replies to her contribution in which she stated that all anorexics should be force fed and then have their mouths taped shut so they couldn’t run off and throw up.