I always imagined life at Berg School like a prison film, where different gangs were in charge, doling out punishments and demanding bribes and protection money.
Panic broke out when there was talk of transferring some of us from Vira to Berg School. The intake had been too big and the classes were too large. Unless this was just an attempt by the council to mix up the socioeconomic groups a little in order to reduce segregation and create a more equal society. Vira was considerably smaller, and in order to make space some of us might have to be moved to Berg School.
The parents, led by Dennis’s dad and Mia Lindström’s mum, attended a crisis meeting with the headmasters and representatives of the council. Rumor had it that Dennis’s dad had torn a strip off the people from the council and told them they were incompetent and how he’d see to it that they lost their jobs and never got another position with any authority. Anna Hamberg’s mum said that if her daughter was going to be transferred to Berg School, they may as well put her in a young offenders’ institution there and then. Several of them, parents and teachers alike, wept openly. In the end nothing came of the whole thing. Our parents were able to draw a collective sigh of relief, content in the knowledge that we could carry on going to the very best of schools.
I didn’t know anything about Berg School apart from what Magnus and Jallo told me and the rumors that used to do the rounds. I was just immensely grateful that I didn’t have to go there, because I was a “special” child, as my teacher put it. The sort who can find the social side of things a bit difficult, as he told my parents.
“And obviously that’s a bit of a challenge for the rest of the class,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. I rarely did in those days. I did what I usually did. Waited until it was over so I could put my headphones on again. I learned at an early age that most things only got worse the more you talked. After a lot of nagging and sulking I had finally got myself a Walkman, partly paid for by my parents, and spent almost all my free time making mix tapes that I wandered about listening to. The best part of the day was in between lessons when I could put my headphones on and disappear into my own soundtrack, drifting along listening to one song after the other and seeing the world more as a sequence of moving images set to music.
* * *
—
At Vira Elementary there were two musical genres you could choose between. You either liked synth music or hard rock. There was nothing in between. We’d heard of people who listened to reggae, and older people who listened to all sorts of things, jazz, for instance, but the choice at school was simple: synthesizers or hard rock. If you didn’t make the choice for yourself, someone else would do it for you. If you weren’t into rock, you were automatically a synth fan.
* * *
—
The hard-rock kids were the overwhelming majority, but that was just as much to do with the whole image as the music. Torn jeans and studded belts, long blond curly hair or dead straight black hair. Armbands with skulls on them, that sort of thing. Some of them wore battered leather boots and shark-tooth necklaces, but they were still pretty tame compared to the rockers from Berg School you used to run into down at the shopping center. They had tattoos, carried ghetto blasters on their shoulders, and knew people who were real punks. At Vira all you needed to be a rocker was an Iron Maiden T-shirt. Dennis had permed hair and usually wore a clean, unblemished tennis shirt, but every so often he would wear a leather bracelet to discreetly indicate which group he belonged to. He talked a lot about W.A.S.P., chainsaws, Twisted Sister, and women being crucified onstage. Synth-pop was a term of abuse.
* * *
—
In our class we muddled along well enough, but there was a definite hierarchy, with Dennis at the top and the rest of us in descending order, with me close to, if not right at, the bottom. It didn’t bother me. It wasn’t something that was ever spoken about. That was just how it was. And it somehow made a lot of sense, everyone having clearly defined roles. There was never any need for fighting or threatening behavior. Things sorted themselves out of their own accord, with glances and whispers and the number of chairs between me and the others in the cafeteria. I was always aware of the situation and stuck to the rules as well as I could.
Most of the time I wasn’t bothered by it. I had my music. As soon as I put my headphones on they could push me about however they wanted without it mattering at all. Sometimes they stood on my heels so my shoes would come off, but it wasn’t exactly hard to put them back on again. Sometimes I was just unlucky. Like the time a note with a vulgar—extremely vulgar—sentence on it ended up on my desk, and Eva, our English teacher, spotted it. I wasn’t sure I understood all the words, and certainly not what they meant, but because the note contained Eva’s name I was summoned to see the headmaster.
The same thing happened in Year 9 when they composed a fake “love letter” in my name to Maddy, which she showed to her teacher, who brought it to the attention of the headmaster because of the coarse language and threatening, chauvinistic tone. The headmaster said it was deeply insulting to women, and I would have to apologize to Maddy in person. He also said that if I wanted to have any contact with the opposite sex in the future, I would have to learn that that sort of language simply wasn’t acceptable. It was far too much bother to try to explain what had happened, so I did as they said and apologized. That seemed the simplest solution, and it was all over fairly quickly. A few short platitudes by Maddy’s locker, then I could put my headphones back on and retreat into the world of music again.
The times I ended up battered and bruised, or my schoolbooks got ruined, were almost always the result of a prank or an accident. Like the time I came out of the shower after PE and all my clothes were gone, and I had to cover myself with paper towels all the way to the headmaster’s office, where they let me borrow some clothes from the lost and found. That was probably my fault. Maybe I hadn’t heard something because I had my headphones on? That happened quite a lot. Things usually got sorted out after I got told off or had to go and see the headmaster. It was just how things had always been for me.
* * *
—
Once I’d slotted Lotte Lenya and Ute Lemper back in next to Kurt Weill again I was left standing there with an old Madness album in one hand and a Starsailor single from 2003 in the other. Still no solution to the Sex Pistols and Andy Hull dilemma. I pondered the possibility of getting rid of some records and wondered where to draw the line. That Starsailor single, for instance: it was pretty good in its own way, even if I never played it. I was reading the back of the sleeve to see if it featured any names I recognized when the phone rang. I picked it up.
“Hello?” I said.
There was obviously someone there.
“Hello?” I tried again, a bit louder this time.
Still silence.
I turned the stereo down and walked over to the window, making up my mind to wait. Several minutes of silence followed. I pressed the phone closer to my ear to see if I could hear any sounds in the background that might give me an idea of where the person was, but there was nothing. After a while I went on leafing through my records and almost managed to forget there was someone at the other end of the line.
I pulled out my records and laid them in piles. It started to feel almost natural to have that sort of mute company in my ear. Whoever it was, we had now spent a while in each other’s company, and if it was Magnus I wasn’t going to do him the favor of making any more stupid pleas. There was a good chance he’d burst into laughter and make me feel ridiculous. I wasn’t going to give him that pleasure. If he wanted to play at not speaking, he was welcome to. I was just going to carry on as usual.
“Silence is easy,” I heard myself say in English.
I looked down at the Starsailor single and saw that that was the title of the song. There was complete silence at the other end of the line, but
I reasoned that I might as well say that as nothing at all. So I put “Weird Fishes” by Radiohead into the CD player and turned the volume up. I held the phone up to the speaker. When the song came to an end I clicked to end the call.
The next day I called my friend Dansson. It was a perfectly ordinary phone call, where both people talk, sometimes interrupt each other, agree on something, neither person just disappears, you say goodbye, and hang up. You don’t make the call and then not speak. No mysterious silence, no weird musical excursions. A perfectly normal phone call.
We agreed to meet up in Record King after work.
* * *
—
Because I was the only guy on the bakery counter and people prefer to be served by pretty girls, I always got the sense that people felt they had drawn the short straw when they ended up with me. Especially older men. Sometimes women got it into their heads that they were going to have to teach me a thing or two, or at least check if I knew the names of the different loaves and what spices they contained. Every so often people would tilt their heads and patronize me. But occasionally someone would ask to speak to me because they assumed I was the girls’ boss. I’m not sure which was more embarrassing.
That day people kept buying bread and pastries, and I took orders for five identical student-graduation cakes.
“You see,” a man in late middle age said to me after telling me to fetch a pen and paper, “I was thinking of something a bit special, if you follow?”
I assured him that I understood.
“I thought it would be nice if the cake looked like a graduation cap, if you get what I mean?”
I nodded and he gave me a knowing smile.
“A traditional princess cake, but with white icing instead of green, and with a black ribbon around it. And I thought it might be possible to give it a little peak on one side. Do you understand what I mean?”
I nodded once more. Evidently that wasn’t enough.
“The cake is a student graduation cap. Do you see?”
Record King was located in a basement at the bottom of a short flight of steps. The building had a lot of potential. The little sunlight that penetrated the dusty windows up by the ceiling served mostly to bleach the pale yellow vinyl records lined up as a vague sort of display, but really they just declared: we’ve given up.
Dansson and I were regulars there, but these days I couldn’t help feeling a bit uncomfortable as I browsed through what was probably the weakest aspect of the whole enterprise: the stock. The same old records in the same places they had been the year before and the year before that, and where they had perhaps always been, in dusty rows in the homemade racks the Record King himself had constructed sometime in the early 1980s.
Dansson was already standing over by the vinyl when I arrived. He looked up and nodded to me when the doorbell rang. I went down the steps and walked over to him to stand the way we usually stood, lost in covers and track lists.
* * *
—
Dansson was actually named Dan Hansson, but everyone had called him Dansson since high school or national service or whenever it was that someone was hungover enough to come up with the ingenious idea of combining his first and last names and ending up with Dansson.
I didn’t know how many people called him Dansson, but that’s what he said the first time we met: “Call me Dansson—everyone does.” It was just after we’d tossed a coin for a Human League single. He won and probably still felt a bit guilty about it.
We used to stand opposite each other in Record King, flicking through the racks back in the days when new stock would arrive each week. Back when there was always a line of expectant teenagers wanting to listen to twelve-inch singles and albums on the record player on the counter. Back when there was still a three-minute limit to trials and Dansson and I would listen together. Now you could listen as long as you wanted. The way I saw it, they were just happy to have anyone who wanted to listen to anything at all. I’d never met up with Dansson much outside Record King, except a few times at concerts or in clubs. Who knows, maybe I was the only person who ever called him Dansson? I’d never met any of his friends. I might even be Dansson’s only friend.
He had a particular ability to tell a story, and then tell it again with a few minor adjustments, which gave the impression that he was constantly tweaking the truth. Sometimes he said the same thing a third time, usually recounting what had happened to people he knew, things they had done or tried, pop and rock stars and celebrities and inventors they had met. I often got the feeling that if they weren’t actually imaginary friends, they were certainly exaggerated versions of real people. Possibly people he’d read or heard about. Unless he just made everything up on the spur of the moment? It didn’t really make any difference. I’d stopped paying much attention by then. I just used to mumble and nod as we wandered around looking at records.
I pulled out a Simple Minds double album that I must have looked at and decided not to buy at least a dozen times before. I turned it over, then put it back again.
“All right?” Dansson asked after a while.
“Yeah,” I said.
I saw that Rufus Wainwright’s Want One was among the new arrivals, even though it had been out several years. I thought about buying it for the final track, “Dinner at Eight,” but decided it was too expensive.
The doorbell rang and the Record King himself came down the steps with a microwave meal and a small carton of juice in a transparent plastic bag. He said hello and disappeared into the little room behind the counter. We could steal anything we wanted in here, I thought. But which of all these records would either of us actually want to steal?
“He’s DJing in the Bar the day after tomorrow,” Dansson said, nodding toward the back room.
“Oh,” I said.
“Are you going?”
“Not sure,” I said.
Dansson was examining a Prince picture disc. He ran his finger gently across the vinyl to feel if it was scratched.
“Do you remember Magnus Gabrielsson?” I said after a while.
“Roxette?” Dansson said.
“Yes, that’s him.”
A memory flashed through my head. On one occasion in Dansson’s company I happened to demonstrate a surprisingly comprehensive knowledge of Roxette, which had left him staring at me open-mouthed. He demanded an explanation. I had to confess to having spent a number of hours in the company of Roxette. But I explained that it had been a very long time ago, and it was all Magnus Gabrielsson’s fault. Which meant I had to tell him all about Magnus Gabrielsson.
When I was in high school I always used to wait outside the classroom for two or three tracks so I could go to my locker in peace and quiet, after most of the others had gone. Then I would pack my things together and walk down toward the shopping center, still with music in my ears.
There, for a brief period each afternoon, the kids from both schools merged to form a sea of children, which quickly overflowed past the bus station and newsagent and spread across the neighborhood. As if someone had poured a bucket of kids onto the streets, which ran in and out of the shops and across the squares, kicking bins and lampposts and anything else that wasn’t tied down, until a last trickle dispersed on the outskirts of the community. It was nice to be a bit behind everyone else. Even if it was impossible not to bump into someone from Berg School. They seemed to belong to a different species. Bigger, rougher, noisier.
* * *
—
Among them was one guy who didn’t seem to belong. Who always kept out of the way. I always expected them to shove and hit him, but that never happened. Quite the opposite, in fact. They all avoided him. It was as if he smelled. Of loneliness and isolation. No one wanted to get too close to that. Often he was just standing at the street corner by the post office. It was hard to see why. It was like he’d been dumped there. Left behin
d, abandoned. Like he was waiting for his mum to come and pick him up. Rescue him from this strange world. As if his whole life was just a mistake. A parenthesis.
But no one ever came.
* * *
—
I don’t remember the first time I noticed him. He was just there. As if he’d always been there. Like part of the furniture. You got used to him. He was often left standing by the post office, waiting, looking at his digital watch.
* * *
—
When he eventually started to move I noticed he was walking the same way as me. Walking without any expression at all on his face. Nothing about him stood out. He probably thought he was invisible, but in actual fact it was impossible not to notice his thin figure sliding along the facades of the buildings, backing away to make sure he didn’t get too close to anyone. Sometimes he and I were the only people around, but he still stayed at a safe distance of at least ten meters from me. When we emerged from the shopping center and I set off along the path, he often walked a little way into the forest and tried to keep out of the way by deploying a number of tactics that were impossible not to notice. As if he wanted to emphasize the fact that he didn’t belong. At first I just felt sorry for him and assumed he wasn’t all there. But as time passed it started to feel more like self-imposed exclusion. Something he was almost proud of, and clung to with irritating meticulousness. He never looked up, never spoke to anyone. Just kept looking at his watch almost obsessively, as if he was hoping we were about to enter a different time. That this would all be over, in the past. Long ago. He never showed any emotion and kept his distance with impressive persistence. As if the rest of us could never catch him. Even if we’d wanted to.
The Circus Page 4