As Teresa stood listening in the garage, she wondered if it had gone wrong from the start. Hadn’t Ronja even managed to get hold of Max Hansen? Teresa had brought some newspaper articles so that Ronja could see what he looked like, and he had mentioned that he usually frequented Café Opera. But that didn’t mean he had been there tonight, of course.
Teresa had begun to consider other options when she heard the sound of running footsteps, and Sofie pulled open the garage door. Behind her came Ronja, Caroline, Anna S and Melinda carrying a limp body wrapped in black plastic, which they dumped on the workbenches. Teresa switched on the fluorescent light and set to work.
She had expected more resistance from Max Hansen, but the man was just feebly moving his legs, and all Ronja had to do was press down on his shoulders to keep him in place. Teresa freed his arms from the plastic and fastened his hands in the clamps on the workbench. Only when she made the final adjustments to tighten the clamp around his right hand did she hear a muted scream from inside the sack. Meanwhile Cecilia had grabbed hold of his legs; she and Linn bent them over the edge of the benches and tied his feet to the base with thin rope.
They all took a step back, arranged themselves in a circle around the benches, and contemplated their treasure. Max Hansen was gradually coming round. His body jolted back and forth as best it could, fettered at every corner. The sack rustled as he jerked his head, billowing in and out as he screamed, inhaled, then screamed again.
‘Let me go, what’s going on, who are you, what are you doing?’
Teresa picked up a Stanley knife and sliced through the bag over his face. His skin was bright red with exertion and fear. His eyes opened even wider when he caught sight of Teresa.
‘Hi,’ she said. Theres passed her a wide strip of gaffer tape and Teresa placed it over his mouth. She thought it was a shame she wouldn’t be able to hear him scream, but it wasn’t worth the risk. Three of the others cut off his clothes, then stepped back.
Everything had gone according to plan—slightly better than expected, actually. The fact that Max Hansen had banged his head might well have saved those charged with bringing him in a split lip or a black eye. Now he was lying in the correct position. Ready for use.
Teresa found his naked body just as repulsive as when she had seen it on film. A flabby, calloused lump of pale flesh. Seeing him lying there now, it was difficult to imagine that he had been a real threat to them for a while. She couldn’t help smiling. Then giggling.
She was still giggling when she fetched the pieces of paper with names on, and a staple gun. Max Hansen jerked and squealed like…yes, like a stuck pig when she stapled ‘Melinda’ to his shoulder. Teresa said, ‘Lie still.’
Human beings are strange. They always struggle, to the bitter end—no matter how hopeless the situation is. With the tiny, tiny amount of movement Max Hansen had with his fettered arms and legs, he kept on trying to twist out of the way as Teresa rapidly stapled ‘Linn’ and ‘Cecilia’ to his thighs. There was the sound of splashing on the plastic covering the floor as he wet himself, and Teresa had to walk around the puddle as she moved across to fix ‘Anna S’ to his other shoulder.
She continued until all the names were stapled to his body, like a blanket made of pieces of paper. Ronja had to help hold his head so that she could finally fix her own name to his temple. Theres fetched the tools laid out on the bench at the side, and handed them out to the girls.
With their weapons in their hands they closed the circle around Max Hansen more tightly. His eyes darted from their faces to the tools, back and forth, back and forth until something happened. His body, which had been tensed in an arc, as far as he could manage it, suddenly relaxed. The expression in his eyes altered, and his head sank back.
Teresa couldn’t believe what she was seeing, but obviously the others could see it too, because they stopped dead and just stared, like her. Slowly, slowly Max Hansen’s cock began to rise. His eyes were looking up at the ceiling. The expression in them was hard to read because the tape over his mouth distorted his features, but Teresa thought she could see…yes, peace.
She looked from his stiff cock to his face. She shook her head and said, ‘Do you understand what’s going to happen?’
Max Hansen nodded faintly, his eyes still fixed on the ceiling, without losing that expression of tortured bliss.
Teresa thought it was best to start with a safe bet, so she nodded to Ronja, who had a small, sharpened screwdriver and whose name was fastened just above Max Hansen’s right hip bone. Ronja stepped forward, pulled a face at the defiant erection, and without further ado drove the screwdriver straight through her piece of paper, all the way to the handle.
Max Hansen screamed through his nose, snot spurted out, sweat poured down his forehead and his body quivered for a few seconds before becoming still once more. The erection didn’t subside, but remained sticking up about three centimetres below the handle of the screwdriver; it was about the same thickness.
It was Linn’s turn next. She had to stand on tiptoe to stab through the label below the right collarbone with her slender chisel. Max Hansen’s back squelched sweatily against the bench as he reared up and fell back down. Blood was trickling out of his wounds and dripping slowly onto the plastic.
Teresa had worked out that if they left the tools in place, it would take longer for him to bleed to death. She had also made sure she chose thin, short spikes and blades. He wasn’t going to die until everyone had done what they had to do and played their part.
Caroline was the sixth in line, and when she drove her knife through the label in the inside of his right thigh, Max Hansen let out a completely different kind of groan as he ejaculated with such force that the semen spurted into his face and over his head. Miranda, who had been standing behind the bench, squeaked in disgust and wiped her top with a cloth.
By this stage a fairly large pool of blood had begun to gather on the floor, and Teresa waved the girls forward more quickly so that they would all have their turn before it was over. Max Hansen’s penis finally collapsed and he was hardly even twitching as he was stabbed now.
In the end only Anna L, Cecilia and Teresa remained. Theres had said that she would prefer to watch, and was following the procedure curled up on the workbench at the side, humming ‘Thank You for the Music’.
Anna L stepped forward. She had been given a fine awl, because her label was dangerously close to the heart. She frowned, raised the awl and looked at Max Hansen’s eyes; only the whites were visible now. Then she shook her head and lowered her hand. With tears in her voice she said, ‘I can’t. This is crazy. It’s wrong. You can’t.’
Theres jumped down and went over to her. ‘Do you want to sit in your car?’ she asked. Anna L shook her head as tears welled up in her eyes, and she said, ‘I just can’t.’
‘You can,’ said Theres. ‘You have to.’
‘But this is crazy.’
‘It isn’t crazy,’ said Theres as she gripped her wrist, moved the hand holding the awl to the correct position, ‘it isn’t crazy at all’, then she thrust Anna’s hand down so that the awl went in halfway. Theres banged it with the palm of her hand, hammering it all the way in, then climbed back onto the workbench. Anna L crouched down by the wall with her hands over her head as Cecilia drove in a long nail.
Max Hansen’s body was limp, perforated in thirteen places and white from loss of blood. Shafts and handles stuck up through sticky pieces of paper, moving in time with his shallow breathing. A film covered his eyes as the pupils rolled back into place, and his gaze fixed on Teresa. He moved his head as if he wanted to say something, and since Teresa didn’t think he could possibly have any strength left to scream, she pulled off the tape. He looked at her and whispered, ‘Teresa…’ She leaned closer to his marble-grey face. ‘Yes?’
Max Hansen’s lips didn’t move and the consonants were no more than faint puffs of air. ‘That was fantastic. That was fantastic…that was fantastic…that was fantastic…’
‘Just one thing,’ said Teresa. ‘That stuff you’ve got on Theres. Is it going to get out?’
Max Hansen made a movement with his head, the hint of a shake, a no, then he carried on whispering, ‘That was fantastic…that was fantastic…’
Teresa shrugged her shoulders. ‘Glad you thought so. Bit of a shame, though. You might change your mind now.’
She picked up the drill that had been charging all day, pressed the button. The bit, which was the thickness of a little finger, was spinning around at twenty revolutions per second. She showed it to Max Hansen, revved the motor a couple of times then pushed it into the label attached to his temple.
And at long last came the scream she had longed for.
The girls gathered around the body, which was twitching like a landed fish as the blood spurted, with dwindling force, from the hole in the temple. Theres stood at the top and stroked the sticky hair from Max Hansen’s forehead. She said, ‘Come closer.’
They moved right in, fourteen girls. A rattling came from Max Hansen’s throat, then the body lay still. The blood stopped flowing from the temple, and as if that little black hole were a point of higher gravity, they were all drawn closer, as close as possible, as thin wisps of smoke extended like cobwebs.
They breathed in collectively, inhaling the essence that had been Max Hansen and incorporating it with the circulation of their own blood. But it was so little, much too little. Several of them moved their lips closer to the hole to force out something that was no longer there, almost kissing Max Hansen’s lacerated skull in order to lap up the very last bit.
They straightened up and the light in the garage was so bright, the iron-rich smell of blood so strong, and the sound as their feet stuck to the plastic and pulled free sliced through their ears. Their breathing was uneven as they returned to their wide-open bodies.
‘We are here,’ said Theres. ‘Now we are here.’
Many spent the night crying. Their senses were open wounds, their perceptions too powerful. They consoled and held one another, shared sleeping bags or lay caressing each other’s faces without speaking.
But in spite of the tears and the need for comfort, the underlying feeling was one of happiness. A different kind of happiness. A happiness so great, so piercing, that it had something of grief in it. Because it couldn’t last forever, it was far too intense for that. They could keep it alive together through the closeness of their bodies and their shared experience, but at some point it must fade and die. So: the grief.
It was yet another sleepless night, and before dawn they went out under cover of darkness to clean up. A group of them carried Max Hansen’s plastic-wrapped body down to the grave and threw it in along with his clothes, then filled the hole with earth and stones before carefully replacing the turf and stamping it down. Within a couple of weeks the turf would have grown into the surrounding grass. The others tidied up the garage, washed all the tools and scrubbed the work benches.
When dawn came and they had restored everything to its original state, they gathered on the jetty to watch the sun rise. Linn still had tears in her eyes, but not for the reason the others thought. When they had allowed the first rays of the sun to warm their faces for a while, Linn folded her arms, turned to Teresa and said, ‘Next time I want to use the drill.’
It was perhaps not quite the last thing Teresa had expected, but almost. Linn’s little face looked so sulky that Teresa burst out laughing, and soon several of the girls were laughing. Linn looked around, her expression furious.
‘What are you laughing at? I got practically nothing!’
The laughter quickly died down and there was silence as they looked at each other. They no longer needed to talk as much in order to communicate, and it appeared that several of them had been thinking along the same lines as Linn.
Next time. There was going to be a next time.
At about twelve o’clock the shuttle service to the bus stop began. Theres had had a long conversation with Anna L, and Anna said she did want to be involved in the future, but that she would need the others’ help. She would get it; that was the whole point of being a pack rather than fourteen girls. They gathered around her, they held her and shared their strength with her. Ronja offered to drive her car to Mörby so that she could travel on the bus with the others.
This turned out to be a valuable experience, because it was only on the bus that the experience finally seemed to settle within her, as they took up the whole of the back of the bus together and Anna found herself in a familiar environment, but no longer defenceless and afraid. No, she was sitting here now with her family—who had been buried and risen again, the hungry sharp-toothed ones, her sisters in the pack who would defend her. Then at last happiness came to her.
‘You all kind of belong to me, don’t you? And I belong to you. We’re together in this. Seriously together. We can do anything at all, and we’ll never let each other down, will we.’
It wasn’t a question, it was a statement, and Anna took a deep breath and flung her arms wide, as if she had only just fully risen from the grave.
They parted company at different places along the way, having decided to meet again the following Sunday in the usual place. Teresa went on to Svedmyra with Theres. In spite of the fact that they were alone for the first time in over twenty-four hours, they didn’t say much, didn’t discuss what had happened or the others’ reactions. It wasn’t possible, because the others no longer were the others. It was not possible to talk about them as if they weren’t there.
They went their separate ways at the front door of Theres’ apartment block. As Teresa turned to head back towards the subway station, Theres said, ‘It was good.’
‘Yes,’ said Teresa. ‘It was very good.’
On the subway and then on the train home, there was just one word going round and round in Teresa’s head, jerking and bumping about like a fish in a bowl that was far too small.
Urd. Urd. Urd.
Voices under the ground. On one level she knew that it was an image created by her oxygen-starved brain as she lay buried. On another it was real and true. Urd had come to her, lain down behind her and then put on her thin skin like a close-fitting suit. Urd was no longer merely her name. Urd was her.
Teresa woke up in her own bed at six o’clock on Monday morning feeling like a calf about to be turned out to pasture. The barn door had been opened after the long winter, and before her lay green meadows, flowers and the bright summer. There was a word for it: joyfulness. As she stood at her window wide awake, gazing out over the garden, she felt full of joy, and her whole body, not just her legs, was full of energy.
When the household began to wake up an hour later she lay down on her bed and pretended to be half-dead. She rubbed her eyes hard for a long time to make them look terrible, and when Maria came in Teresa explained that she felt awful and just couldn’t get up, couldn’t do anything. This was accepted with a sigh and a shrug, and Teresa was left in peace.
It was like that poem by Bob Hansson she had read a year or so earlier. The man who phones work and explains that he can’t come in. Why not? Is he ill? No, he’s far too healthy, but he might be in the following day if he feels worse.
She lay in bed impatiently waiting for the others to go off to work or to see friends so that she could be alone. When the house was finally empty, she got up. The first thing she did was to go down to the kitchen and pour herself a glass of water.
She sat for a long time looking at the clear liquid in the glass, enjoying the play of the surface and the spectrum of colours on the tablecloth when she tilted the glass and allowed the light to break up. Then she raised the glass to her lips.
A shudder ran through her body as the water slipped into her mouth. It was smooth and cool and crept over her tongue and palate like a caress. And they say water doesn’t taste of anything! It tasted of earth and iron and grass. Saltiness and sweetness in thin layers, the taste of depth and eternity. When she swallowed it was like receiving a g
ift, being able to taste something so delicious. And she still had plenty left in her glass.
It took her five minutes to finish the water, and when she went out into the garden afterwards she was so overwhelmed with the happiness bubbling up from the impressions flooding into her body that she had to sit down on the steps for a while. She closed her eyes, put her hands over her ears and concentrated only on the scents, the scents of early summer.
To think that people can walk around on this earth and not be aware of what is around them. What a waste. They might just as well be robots, soulless automata moving between work, the bank, the shop and the TV until their batteries run down.
Teresa had been just the same, but that person now lay crumpled in a grave. She was a goddess, and perceived things with the senses of a goddess. She was Urd, the primitive one.
And so her day passed. She wandered through the trees, gently running her hands over leaves and stones; she walked like Eve through Paradise, knowing that everything was hers, and everything was good.
She woke up feeling happy on Tuesday as well, and another day passed in a state of joyful awareness that might have burst her chest open if she hadn’t divided it into manageable parts, one or two senses at a time. Towards evening it slowly began to slip away from her.
She could hear the voices of her parents and her brothers again. Of course they were no longer her parents or her brothers: her family was thirteen people who were not present. But she knew what they were called, these people sitting around the dinner table with her.