He was perfectly capable of talking crap about Magnus, for instance.
“Forget him,” he might say before dragging you off somewhere, even though you’d made other arrangements. As if what you were doing really didn’t matter, and whatever new thing he had going on was bound to be way more interesting.
* * *
—
I told Jallo that Magnus wasn’t home but there was something strange going on, seeing as I had heard noises inside the flat. And his phone was engaged the whole time. Jallo listened and nodded. I told him how I’d seen the lights go on and off. In the end we both went back upstairs and knocked on the door. No answer.
“So he’s not home,” Jallo said.
“What d’you mean?” I said.
“If he was home he’d open the door.”
I looked at him and he looked back at me. As if it was as simple as that.
I told him that Magnus and I had been to the circus and I hadn’t seen him since.
“OK,” Jallo said, nodding. “So?”
I looked at him.
“So I thought I’d try to get hold of him,” I said.
Jallo tilted his head a few times with an expression that could be taken to mean that he’d been hoping we could do something more entertaining.
“Why don’t you write a letter?” Jallo asked.
“To Magnus?”
“Yes,” Jallo said.
I sighed.
“You know what I think you should do?” he said after a pause, brightening up as if he’d just had an idea. “I think you should check out this place.”
Jallo found an old till receipt in one pocket and a pen in the other. He scribbled something on the scrap of paper and handed it to me. I took it. He stuck his tongue out and caught a raindrop that was trickling from his wet hair. Then he stiffened and raised his eyebrows. He pulled something from the pocket of his hoodie and held it up triumphantly.
“Toffee,” he said.
I glanced at my watch while Jallo unwrapped the toffee with his long, thin fingers and put it in his mouth. He smacked his lips as he sucked it, still looking at me. As if it was down to the pair of us now. As if I had to decide what we should do.
“Bought any records lately?” he asked as he chewed the toffee.
“Yep,” I said.
“ ‘Sail Away’ by Enya is pretty good,” he said.
I didn’t respond to that.
We stood like that for a while, and the only thing that happened was that the toffee in his mouth got smaller, and the obscene slurping sounds came faster and faster. Every so often he held up his hand and looked at it. It looked chapped and red.
“I’ve started getting dry skin again,” he said. “Need to remember to wear gloves.”
Eventually I realized I had no choice but to leave. Jallo stood where he was, still looking at me in that forlorn way, and I thought it was just as well to get going before he asked if he could come with me. I pushed the front door open and felt the relentless rain on my face. I held up the receipt Jallo had given me. It came from the Gryningen health food shop on Folkungagatan. Jallo’s handwriting was as bad as a doctor’s, and the rain was already washing some of it away. But I could just about make out the address: Bondegatan 3A.
I stood there awhile, shuffling from one foot to the other. Then I went home.
Bondegatan 3A? What was that supposed to mean? I didn’t like the way Jallo went about things. He always saw so many different ways of approaching a subject, the possibilities seemed endless. If you lost your wallet, for instance, and the police couldn’t help you, why not try hypnosis? Or a Facebook group? Everything seemed equally valid to him.
He would muddle brand-new research findings from the Karolinska Hospital with long-forgotten medieval remedies. Grumble that a lot of conventional psychology was too rigid.
For a while he tried to cultivate oyster mushrooms in a garage on Kungsholmen. He had a load of cardboard boxes that looked like little red cottages lined up along the wall behind the cars.
“Low rent,” he said. “Decent margins.”
I don’t know what happened, if it just wasn’t profitable after all, or if there was some sort of problem with the garage or people driving over the boxes. But he seemed to have put the project on hold, anyway. It had been a long time since he had mentioned anything about the “mushroom industry.”
More recently he had embarked upon a proper psychology course.
“Having a bit of paper that says you can do stuff seems to be so important,” he said.
I agreed that it might not be a bad idea to acquire a bit more evidence-based knowledge if you were serious about setting yourself up in that line of business. So he had applied, been accepted, and decided to study enough course units at the university to get himself a certificate, but it was highly doubtful that he’d stick at it for long enough.
“Takes a hell of a long time,” he said.
Predictably, his studies ended up taking a back seat in favor of his other activities. Being “certified” no longer seemed so important, as Jallo put it, with air quotes. People would still come to his clinic.
The last time I was there he showed me a karaoke machine. He said he’d got it to help his clients “lower their guard.”
“The atmosphere can get a bit too tense,” he said, looking through the songs on offer. “And of course it’s pretty cool, too!”
Maybe he used rocks or crystals, or did some sort of CBT treatment? I don’t really know what he offered his clients. Apart from karaoke, of course.
It was impossible to get any real grip on all his plans and activities. Maybe even he didn’t know. He seemed to collect slightly dodgy people and together they would come up with unconventional ways to earn money. His ideas often seemed to involve telesales.
* * *
—
Bondegatan 3A. There could be anything there. But perhaps it would be silly not to make use of his contacts, I reasoned. Whoever they might be.
That evening Magnus’s phone was still busy. I called five times and never got through. I watched some TV, had a cup of tea, then went around the flat turning the lights out before I went to bed. I knew I should get to sleep just after eleven in order to be vaguely awake for work early the next morning. There was nothing good on after the late news anyway. The programs would only get worse and worse until eventually I was left watching repeats of The Fall Guy from the early 1980s or staring at the rolling news on TV Vision. Even so, I still found myself sitting on the sofa with the phone in my hand. Why was the line still busy? Did he have that many friends to talk to? Or had he pulled his phone out of the socket? Why hadn’t he called me? I put the phone down next to me on the sofa and listened to the busy signal for a while before I pressed the red button.
Sure enough, SVT was showing a documentary about a school orchestra tour, Channel 5 had an American poker program, TV3 a reality program in which the participants pretended to be friends before voting each other out in the hope of becoming the World’s Biggest Loser. By the time The Fall Guy finished it was two o’clock. I picked up the phone. Looked at it. It rang. I answered at once.
* * *
—
No one said anything, there was just a faint hum, but I could hear someone breathing on the other end. I switched the television off, and the flat plunged into darkness. And complete silence. I stood up and walked over to the window.
“Hello?” I said.
Still no response, but I sensed someone there. I tried to breathe as quietly as possible even though I could hear my heart beating faster and faster.
“Hello?” I said once more. “Who am I talking to?”
Not that there’s anyone talking back, I thought, listening to the silence on the line. Down in the street a billboard advertising men’s underwear was lit up, casting a faint s
treak of light across the building opposite, where all the lights were out. I pressed the phone closer to my ear and tried to imagine the person at the other end. The silent caller. It felt decidedly unsettling.
“Is that Magnus?” I said after a while.
There was a noise—it sounded like fabric or possibly a hand. Unless it was just static on the line. It was impossible to tell. I stood perfectly still in my pitch-black living room, feeling the warmth of the phone against my cheek.
“What…Is that you, Magnus?” I repeated. “Is everything OK?”
When there was no answer to that either, I decided to stay quiet as well. I walked slowly back and forth in the darkened room, waiting. It felt like the two of us, the caller and I, were each waiting for the other. I stood for a long time leaning against the frame of the kitchen door. I rested my head gently against the wood and heard a slight tap as the phone knocked the frame. I angled it away from my mouth.
I ended up in the hall, in front of the mirror. Because the flat was in total darkness I couldn’t see anything in the mirror. There was nothing for it to reflect. I wondered for a moment if you could say I was in the mirror even though I couldn’t see myself. I pressed the phone to my ear and because neither of us was speaking it was almost as if I was listening to myself. I got the sense that the silence was somehow betraying how anxious I was and did my best not to breathe into the receiver too much. It wasn’t nice, listening to your own anxiety.
“Where’s Magnus?” I said.
I imagined I could hear that the breathing at the other end was just as nervous. As if there was something stressful, discomforting about the whole situation. As if he or she had been about to say something but had thought better of it. Perhaps they were frightened and didn’t dare speak?
In the end there was a click and I realized that the other person had hung up. I paced the flat for a while. I switched the bedside light on and sat on the bed staring at the phone. If it was him, why hadn’t Magnus said anything? And if it wasn’t him, who was it? Could there have been something wrong with the microphone on his phone? That sort of thing sometimes happened. No, because I could clearly hear someone breathing. So why hadn’t he said anything? Was he afraid to?
I lay back and opened the IKEA catalogue on my chest, but the usual undemanding joy of idle browsing wasn’t there. After ten minutes I got up and dialed the same number again. No answer.
Being awake at night can have its advantages. As long as you can manage to suppress all thoughts of sleep and the tiredness you’re bound to feel the next day. The night offers a stillness, a concentration that can make you think you’ve found a gap in time.
I put my headphones on and listened to Prefab Sprout’s Jordan: The Comeback. I clicked to get to “Moon Dog” and sat in the armchair next to the stereo listening to the intro, which always calmed me down and made me feel I was going somewhere. Even if that just meant onward through the night. Somehow I managed to fall asleep like that.
I hate it when people disappear inside mirrors and don’t come back. It’s a real pain. You just don’t do that sort of thing. But if people still insist on doing it they usually come back sooner or later, and you find out what happened. Then you both sit and laugh about how gullible you were, and at the entertaining but slightly humiliating fact that you fell for such a simple trick. But if they disappear and don’t come back, then in my opinion the joke stops being funny. It makes you question the way you see the world, and I really don’t like doing that. I’d be perfectly happy to keep hold of the way I see the world right now, with a tolerably good understanding of how things work. I’d prefer to keep hold of my friends and be able to trust my senses.
I worked behind the bakery counter of the NK department store. I would stand there wrapping bread and pastries, literally imprisoned in a glass cage under the gaze of the customers, all of whom had just one and the same wish: that as soon as I was done serving another customer, I would press the button so that their number would finally come up on the ticketed queuing system. If I took too long someone would call out, “Young man, what do you think you’re here for?”
The boss had told us we should just smile if that happened.
All things considered it was a good, reliable job. I mean, people are always going to want bread, and they’re always going to want to buy it from NK. I was fairly happy there and did the job well enough. But I was due to start at nine o’clock on Monday morning, and when I woke up in my armchair it was already quarter to. I got up and pulled my headphones off, and it was only when the noise disappeared that I realized I had slept all night with last night’s music in my ears. It echoed in my head as I brushed my teeth and pulled on my shoes and coat.
I arrived at work at half past nine and got some pointed stares from the girls who had had to cover for me. Fortunately the boss was nowhere in sight, so I clicked to the button for the next customer and tried to compensate for my late arrival by smiling even more than usual. By lunchtime it felt as if that smile had eaten its way into my features and become a grimace that was more frightening than welcoming.
I tried calling Magnus twice from work, but there was no answer. No answering-machine message. Nothing.
As the day went on, the trays from the bakery emptied, and they had to be cleaned before they were returned. I usually tried to get that job, which meant twenty minutes or half an hour at the sink in the back. Without an audience. After lunch I hauled all the trays into the kitchen and turned the tap on. I pulled off the fake bow tie that was part of the bakery-counter uniform. The girls had to wear frilly aprons and have their hair up. I had the male equivalent: a shirt with a bow tie on an elastic band that pinched your throat. It was fixed to the top button, and would snap off when you unfastened it. I stood there staring into space for a while. What on earth was going on? Magnus had gone missing, and now someone I didn’t know was calling me in the middle of the night and not saying a word.
* * *
—
The more I thought about it, the more I felt sure that the silence on the line was in some nebulous but undeniable sense—a bit like the way Lou Reed is connected to David Bowie, or Jonas Bonetta to Josh Garrels—connected to Propaganda’s third single, “p:Machinery.”
There was no good reason for “p:Machinery” by Propaganda to pop into my head. Even so, I listened to the whole of their A Secret Wish album when I got home, trying to figure out what it was about the silence on the phone line that had made me think of Propaganda. Sure, that was the sort of music we listened to most, me and Magnus. But what was it about that particular track? The computerized bleeps at the start, or just the dark, foreboding atmosphere? Listening to it again didn’t help. When I was putting the record back I wasn’t sure if it ought to move along a few places, closer to China Crisis and Heaven 17, who admittedly had more of an acoustic sound but still belonged to that same part of the synth music scene.
* * *
—
That evening I swapped the Pixies and the Ramones, which meant that there was no room for the Sex Pistols and Andy Hull’s solo album, so they had to be squeezed in on the shelf below, which didn’t feel great, seeing as that was the shelf I had been happiest with up until then. I stood there for a while wondering if that meant I couldn’t buy any more albums in that subgenre, or if I would just have to expand it instead. There wasn’t room on the wall for any more shelves. Maybe I’d have to sell some records or use those plastic sleeves. I didn’t want to put my records in plastic sleeves. It felt tacky. Disrespectful. As if all records could be reduced to a flat disc with no spine. Besides, it ruined the whole idea of a record collection if you couldn’t see which records were lined up next to each other. In that case I might as well give up and switch to Spotify, I reasoned, and end up left with everything and nothing. An undefined mass of tracks on a computer where you could sneak a listen to individual tracks without any sense of the integrity of the a
lbum and the culture of album sleeves. No structure.
That was pretty much how people used to listen to the Chart Show at school. Listening idly and never learning names and album titles. Never knowing where the different tracks belonged. As if music was just one big river, something you couldn’t influence, like fog, or pollution.
* * *
—
There were two schools in the area where Magnus and I grew up. One good, one not so good. Berg School and Vira Elementary.
Berg School was notorious for its thugs, bullies, and genuinely criminal students. It was widely regarded as a “bad school.” A big, old-fashioned slum school where kids ended up if their families lived in the wrong place or didn’t have the right sort of influence, the right contacts in the council, didn’t have the energy to keep nagging and writing letters to the education office. A place for kids with no ambitions.
The more fortunate of us went to Vira Elementary School. A modern school in nice buildings that had a “salad bar” and flower beds on the grounds and guaranteed good grades. Those of us who went to Vira didn’t socialize with the kids who went to Berg. We were told—by teachers, other pupils, and not least of all our parents—that they were all either illiterate, hooligans, or drug addicts. The papers had written about the “situation” at Berg School, where violence and threatening behavior were part of daily life. Our headmaster appeared on local television, tilting his head thoughtfully and lamenting the way things had developed at Berg while simultaneously declaring that there was no bullying at Vira Elementary.
Vira only had well-behaved pupils who were motivated to study. Our headmaster said that at our school we helped each other and put all our efforts into our studies. And if there was ever any bullying, he crowed on that television program, the bullies would have him to answer to.
The Circus Page 3