Johannes gave a stiff little smile. ‘Not really. I just did what I had to do to fit in, kind of. Sometimes I think…shit, if only I’d been able to stay there. We had fun sometimes, didn’t we?’
‘Do you really think about this?’
‘Yes. Sometimes.’
Teresa swallowed a lump of soggy cheese puffs. Then she swallowed again and said, ‘Me too.’
They were sitting close together. By this stage Teresa was so familiar with every form of sorrow that she could pick the different kinds with the precision of a car spotter. As soon as they got close, she could identify the model. This was melancholy. Grieving for something that has been and can never be again.
But it was a pleasant sorrow, a Moomintroll sorrow so unlike the one she carried around in her everyday life that she welcomed it like a warm, woolly blanket. There was an ache in her breast, and when Johannes put his arm around her, she leaned her head on his shoulder.
Johannes.
She closed her eyes and gave herself up to her dizziness and her lightly borne melancholy. She was almost happy. There was a flash and she opened her eyes. Karl-Axel had crept up close and taken a picture of them with his mobile. Johannes didn’t seem to care, and Teresa closed her eyes again.
Johannes. If only everything had been different.
That time on the rocks. If she had let him put his tongue in her mouth, if she hadn’t pushed him away. If he hadn’t moved house, if she hadn’t…perhaps she wouldn’t have got so fat, perhaps she wouldn’t be taking the pills now, perhaps…
‘Hi.’
Teresa opened her eyes again. Agnes was sitting next to her on the sofa. Even though Johannes didn’t take his arm away, Teresa sat up straight as if she had been caught in the middle of some forbidden act. Or thought.
Agnes was looking shyly at Johannes. Teresa couldn’t understand how anyone could resist such a look; she would gladly have sacrificed a finger to look like Agnes for just one day.
No. Not one day. One week. One month. Her little finger for one month. Not her index finger. Her index finger for one year. Her whole hand for her whole life? Her left hand, in that case.
Johannes touched her shoulder. ‘What’s the matter?’
Teresa didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there caught up in thoughts about looks and body parts, but when she came out of them she could feel that something had changed in the atmosphere between Agnes and Johannes, and she was sitting between them like a third wheel. She got up and went into the kitchen.
On the worktop she found half a glass of red wine and knocked it back. She thought it tasted peculiar, as if it had been mixed with spirits.
Her right hand for Johannes. Special offer—one kidney, her right hand and twenty kilos of flesh. Shylock. The Merchant of Venice. A pound of flesh. What does that mean?
She went for a wander around the house. People were sitting in groups, and she felt slightly sick when she realised they were just talking lumps of flesh. Jenny was posed unnaturally against a door frame, twisting a strand of hair around her finger as she talked to Albin, whose hand was resting on her hip.
They’re going to fuck. Everybody’s going to go off and fuck.
Teresa’s gaze locked onto Jenny’s hip, and she thought about the set of exclusive chef’s knives she had seen on a magnetic holder in the kitchen. Shylock. If she sliced away Jenny’s hips, Albin wouldn’t have anything to hold onto.
‘What are you looking at, headcase?’ Jenny hissed at her and Albin adopted a stance that suggested he would defend his fuck if necessary. Teresa pulled a face at them and wobbled into the living room. Agnes and Johannes were snogging the face off each other on the sofa. Teresa hadn’t really thought they were capable of such a thing. Particularly Agnes, who was always so cool when it came to expressions of affection, but now she was half lying on top of Johannes, her tongue slurping away in his mouth as her hand squeezed his inner thigh.
Teresa stood staring at them. Johannes seemed to be having some difficulty keeping control of his hands; a couple of fingers slipped inside the waistband of Agnes’ jeans at the back, but didn’t dare go any further. They were among other people, after all. Instead they rubbed themselves against one another, licking and sucking and enjoying themselves inside their bubble of arousal.
Teresa stared. Alternate streams of hot and cold liquid flooded her body. The stereo was playing that song about dying.
We’re gonna die at the same time, you and I
We’re gonna die-ie-ie-ie-ie-ie-ie-ie-ie…
She tore herself away. She moved through the house as if she were underwater, towards the front door. There was only one thing she wanted. She managed to get down the steps and over to the garage, where she fell to her knees next to the box, took out a bottle of Bacardi Breezer and drank. Relief, for a few seconds. She emptied the bottle in thirty seconds then remained on her knees for a long time, swaying back and forth with her head in her hands.
‘For fuck’s sake, are you pinching my supplies?’
Micke was standing in front of her, a drunken smile playing around his lips. When Teresa opened her mouth to apologise, he waved dismissively and said, ‘It’s cool. What’s mine is yours and all that shit.’ He leaned against the door frame and lit a cigarette. When he offered Teresa the packet, her eyes filled with tears.
‘Micke. You’re so bloody nice. So kind.’
‘Sure I am. You want one or not?’
‘Can’t you fuck me? Now?’
Micke gave a snort. ‘Pull yourself together. You’re pissed.’
‘I’m not pissed. Everybody else is pissed. They’re all pissed and they’re going to fuck.’
Micke was standing directly in front of her. Teresa placed one hand over his crotch, squeezed his cock. Micke waved her hand away half-heartedly, but when she began to rub she could feel him growing hard.
‘For fuck’s sake, Teresa. Pack it in.’
But she didn’t want to pack it in. She wanted to be fucked and snogged like everybody else and she wanted to be close and part of it all. Through the water billowing all around her and making everything blurred, she shuffled forward on her knees. She watched her hands like two alien fish as they undid Micke’s belt and pulled down his zip.
When she took his semi-erect cock in her mouth, Micke groaned out loud. A couple of thrusts in and out and he was completely hard, and there were no more protests. He placed his hand on her head, buried his fingers in her hair and pressed her towards him.
For a little while she enjoyed the unfamiliar feeling. The warm piece of flesh in her mouth, the sounds Micke was making. Then the veil of water was drawn aside, and she saw what she was doing. This wasn’t her. Not here, not like this. She couldn’t breathe. She wanted to stop now, she wanted to go home.
She tried to pull away, but Micke whispered, ‘Don’t stop, don’t stop’, pressing her head closer so that his cock touched the back of her throat. A violent wave of nausea crashed through her body, surging up until she vomited. Alcopops, red wine and cheese puffs spurted out of her in a red slop that went all over Micke’s cock, hands and jeans, and the garage floor. He backed away towards the wall, shaking the revolting mess off his hands as he yelled, ‘What the fuck are you doing? That’s so fucking disgusting!’
Teresa collapsed and threw up again, a pool forming beneath her on the cement floor. On the edge of her vision she could see Micke ripping off a long length of kitchen towel from a holder on the wall. When had wiped the worst of the mess off himself, he handed her a bundle.
‘Here. This wasn’t such a good idea, was it?’
Teresa wiped her mouth as she mechanically shook her head. An acrid stench hit her nostrils and she blew her nose and took a couple of deep breaths. She heard a snigger and turned towards Micke, who was looking out into the garden.
It took a couple of seconds for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Then she saw that there was a little group standing behind a low shrub five metres away from the garage. Jenny, Albin and Karl-Axel.
&n
bsp; Micke said, ‘What the hell are you doing, you fucking idiots?’
Karl-Axel held up his mobile. ‘Nothing. Just made a little film. Real hardcore stuff. It’s just that the ending’s a bit disgusting.’
Teresa hid her face in her hands. She heard the sound of running footsteps, screams and laughter. When she raised her head a long time later, she was alone. She got to her feet and looked around. Her red vomit splashed up the walls, the pool at her feet made the garage look like a slaughterhouse. A slaughterhouse.
She rang Göran on her mobile and asked him to come and pick her up. Then she went and sat on the pavement and waited for him, staring down through the grating over a drain. Behind her the party went on.
Somewhere there has to be rock bottom, a limit to how far a person can fall. It is possible that Teresa had reached this point when she woke up at half past eight on Saturday morning. She started the day by going to the toilet and spewing up everything that hadn’t already come up. Then she lay in her bed with her arms around her belly and just wanted to die. Really die. Be obliterated, not exist any more, not take one more step in this world.
She had thought it was unnecessary to remove all sharp objects from her room; her problems had never had anything to do with taking her own life. Now her thoughts were focused on nothing else. She lay there wondering whether she had the strength or the courage to sharpen a pencil and hold it upright on the desk in her clenched fist, then slam her head down onto the point so that it penetrated her eye and went into her brain.
No. It was too gruesome, and there wasn’t even any guarantee that she would die. But she wanted to die. Her memories of the previous evening were blurred and disjointed, but she remembered the most important bits, which made her want to fill her mouth with earth, cover her body with earth.
The bottle of Fontex tablets was on her bedside table. She knew they weren’t an option, that they wouldn’t work. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been allowed to have them there. Out of habit she reached for the bottle to take her morning tablet, but let her hand drop.
If she stopped taking her tablets, perhaps she really would become mentally ill. Perhaps they would come and take her away. Lock her up. It was an alternative to dying, and almost the same thing. Only the earth in the mouth was missing, but you could always eat that anyway.
That was the way her thoughts went on Saturday morning.
When she got up to go to the toilet again, Maria was sitting in the armchair on the landing, knitting. She never usually sat there. She was keeping watch.
‘Hi,’ said Teresa.
‘Hi. Have you taken your tablet?’
‘Mm.’
Sitting on the toilet, she made her decision. She really would stop taking her tablets, she would see if she went crazy. Give it a month. If that didn’t work she would come up with a way of killing herself that didn’t feel too horrible. Her hope was that she would go mad without actually noticing.
Just after twelve she went downstairs to keep up appearances. She ate a bread roll with cheese; it tasted like ash. The radio was on in Olof’s room because he was listening to Tracks. As the song that was bubbling under this week was introduced, Teresa stopped in mid-bite to listen to Kaj Kindvall: ‘A studio version of a track that’s already had considerable success on MySpace and YouTube has now been released. The artist calls herself Tesla, and apart from a couple of appearances and an early exit from the latest series of Idol, we don’t know too much about her. Perhaps that will all change now. This is “Fly”.’
The song began, and Teresa resumed her chewing. They had added strings and made the song more showy. It no longer had anything to do with her. She finished her sandwich and had a glass of milk. Then she felt sick and had to go and throw up again.
At three o’clock her mobile beeped to tell her that she had a message. It said, ‘Film of the year! Check this out!’ A film clip was attached.
Since she already had her face pressed firmly to the ground, she had a look. The picture quality was surprisingly good. Karl-Axel’s father had an excellent job. He gave his son excellent presents. For example an excellent mobile with excellent definition and excellent video and sound recording. The film might even have been even more excellent and more detailed than Teresa’s crappy mobile was capable of showing.
They had been standing there right from the start, and they had filmed the whole thing, right from Teresa’s, ‘Micke. You’re so bloody nice. So kind.’ Teresa saw and understood. No shadow would fall over Micke. He was a boy, and she had practically attacked him. Forced herself on him, then thrown up all over him.
She knew how it worked. The film would spread. Right across the world. In a couple of days people in Buenos Aires would be sitting laughing at the most disgusting thing they had ever seen, then they would send it on to their friends. She couldn’t quite take it in.
Teresa sat down at her desk; her hands were ice-cold. Her mobile rang. She automatically pressed the reply button and put it to her ear.
‘Yes?’
‘Teresa? Hi, it’s Johannes.’
‘Hi, Johannes.’
There was silence at the other end. Then Johannes sighed, making a crackling sound in her ear. ‘How are you feeling?’
Teresa didn’t reply. There was no simple answer to that question.
‘I saw the film,’ said Johannes. ‘Well, not all of it, but…I just wanted to…I feel really sorry for you.’
‘Don’t.’
‘But I do. It’s not right. You’ve had such a…I just wanted to say that…I’m here. Just so you know.’
‘How are things with Agnes?’
‘What? Oh, fine. And she says the same.’
‘Are you back together?’
‘Yes. But Teresa, try to…try…Oh, I don’t know. But I’m here, OK? And Agnes. And we’re very fond of you.’
‘I know you’re not. But thanks anyway. It was kind of you.’
Teresa rang off. When the phone rang again she rejected the call. She lay down on her bed and stared up at the ceiling.
Something gets dirty. A towel. Then it gets dirtier. And even dirtier, so dirty that it begins to fall apart. It is trampled in the mud, picked up, rolled into a ball. There is a breaking point in the state of dirtiness where the object that is dirty ceases to be itself. It becomes something else. The towel no longer looks like a towel, it cannot be used as a towel, it is not a towel. The same thing applies to a human being. Oh, the capacity for reflection might get in the way, the capacity to miss what that person once was. Human, detergent-scented, usable.
But it disappears, very gradually. It disappears.
During the afternoon and evening she received a number of suggestive or downright unpleasant text messages which she saved after reading them. The telephone rang twice; the first time it was somebody making slurping noises, the second time somebody whispering, ‘Don’t stop, don’t stop.’
When Teresa went to bed, she was incapable of sleeping. She tried reading some Ekelöf, but couldn’t concentrate for more than two lines at a time.
She re-read the disgusting texts: have a nice weekend slag; suck and swallow; World Championship in cock sucking and spewing, along with those who had made a little more effort.
She couldn’t get enough. It was two o’clock in the morning when she sat down at the computer to see if she had received any emails. She had. More of the same from unfamiliar addresses; the little film had already spread far and wide, and had fired certain people’s imagination and limited ability to articulate their thoughts.
There were several messages from Theres as well, spread over the past few weeks. When she opened one of them she almost expected it to contain some variation on the cock/suck/spew theme.
‘you must come here you have to be here’ one of them said. In another, older message, ‘why did you run away tell me why you didn’t stay’. The oldest, apart from the one she had deleted, said, ‘jerry says you misunderstood i don’t understand how you misunderstood you have to tell me’.
The most recent message had arrived on Friday evening while Teresa was at the party, ‘you have to write i don’t like it when you’re gone’.
Teresa copied the phrases from fourteen messages in total and pasted them in chronological order into one single document, which she read over and over again. If she had still had the ability to cry, she would have done so. Instead of tears a couple of phrases by Ekelöf welled up and forced their way out.
She clicked on reply, and at the top of the message she wrote, ‘I live in another world, but you live in the same one.’
She looked at the sentence. That was really all she had to say. But still her fingers began to move over the keys. She imitated Theres’ elided style, which made it easier to write. She didn’t make any effort to be anything other than honest.
Theres. I haven’t gone. I exist. But I don’t exist. Everyone wants to hurt me. Everyone hates me. I ran because I love you. I want you to be with me. Not with other people. You don’t know how unhappy I am. All the time. I’m empty. There is nowhere I can be. Forgive me. I live in another world now.
She sent the message. Then she went back to bed. Her own darkness melted into the darkness of the room, and she fell asleep.
When she woke up at nine o’clock, there was a reply from Theres in her inbox.
you must live in this world you must come to me now would be good but next weekend jerry is going to america so you will come then i will show you what to do
For a message from Theres, it was practically a novel. As usual there was a fair amount that needed interpreting, but that didn’t bother Teresa. She had written, and she had received a reply. She would go to Stockholm, and she would go without any particular hopes. It wasn’t an act of will that made her think that way. It was simply a fact.
On Sunday afternoon, when Teresa was taken ill, nothing could have been more welcome. Her temperature shot up above thirty-nine degrees and it felt cool and refreshing. Her body was exhausted, her thoughts pleasantly fuzzy. All of her real pain was absorbed in the inconsequential aching of her muscles, and as her temperature approached forty degrees and the fever made her body levitate from the sheets there was even a hint of pleasure.