The Circus

by Jonas Karlsson

  * * *

  —

  For several weeks we carried on like that, skirting around each other. After a while I began to wonder if he had started waiting for me. It felt almost as if he was trying to attract my attention with his weird way of keeping to himself. I wondered if he was hanging about by the post office simply so he could set off at the same time as me. Hiding and making a big deal of it. As soon as we reached the path he would always walk parallel to me in among the trees. Even if he never looked in my direction, it was as if he was constantly keeping an eye on me with that expression of self-proclaimed inferiority and idiocy. Big eyes, mouth open. Rucksack slung over both shoulders. Nobody normal ever used more than one strap.

  One day I stopped and looked straight at him with Alphaville’s “Forever Young” in my ears. He stopped too. Red-cheeked. Runny nose. He wiped his nose on his coat sleeve. Everyone else had already gone off ahead of us. He and I were the only ones left on the path leading to the blocks of flats. I don’t know what he was thinking. Perhaps this was the moment he’d been waiting for. Perhaps he wanted me to make contact? Either way, he didn’t do anything at all. Just stood there staring stupidly at me. In the end I stuck my middle finger up at him. I don’t know why I did that. I’d probably just had enough. Unless I wanted to show him which of us was in charge. He stuck his finger up back at me and I don’t know why that annoyed me so much. Maybe I was just surprised that he had the nerve to do it. Perhaps I thought it was childish, unimaginative, unless I was just confident that I could deal with him—that he was playing with fire. What on earth was he thinking? Without realizing what I was doing, I jumped across the ditch, ran over to him, and shoved him hard in the chest, knocking him to the ground.

  * * *

  —

  It was so easy. No sooner had my hands struck his thin frame than he tumbled back, his woolly hat falling off. He didn’t make any attempt to defend himself. Just tumbled into the undergrowth with a look of surprise. I regretted what I’d done at once and crouched down to see if he was OK.

  “What the hell…,” he muttered.

  “Just take it easy,” I said, pulling my headphones off. “Are you hurt?”

  “Oh, not too badly,” he said as he sat up and rolled his head about as if to check he hadn’t injured his neck. As if he was used to it. It felt like he knew exactly what to do after that sort of attack.

  “What did you do that for?” he said.

  I shook my head and mumbled an apology.

  I helped him to his feet and brushed the leaves off him, the way I’d seen adults do with other kids. I picked up his rucksack and carried it for him as we set off along the path again, side by side.

  * * *

  —

  “Do you like synth music or hard rock?” I asked after a while.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “That means you like synth music,” I said.

  He nodded, and after that we didn’t say much. He kept quiet, and I had my headphones on. In the end I started to talk about the music I was listening to. I explained the running order. Why they’d been arranged like that. The thinking behind it. He nodded and seemed to want to hear more. I told him about the different groups, how they fitted together, what the differences were between them, and who did what. I described the splits in different bands, who had been in them and how they had changed over time.

  We ended up walking together most days. I would pick him up outside the post office, then we would walk out of the shopping center together. When we got to the path we usually branched off and went in among the trees instead.

  * * *

  —

  I explained that the difference between synth music and hard rock was mostly about attitude, a feeling that could be difficult to describe to the uninitiated. I explained, for instance, that someone who liked synth music could pretty much listen to any sort of music, as long as it wasn’t metal. It just had to have a synthy feel to it.

  “You have to steer clear of monsters and crucified women and chainsaws…stuff like that. Definitely no chainsaws. Not too much guitar distortion. But ordinary guitars are no problem. A lot of people are needlessly frightened of guitars.”

  “They are?” Magnus said.

  I nodded.

  “There are quite a lot of guitars even in synth music,” I explained.

  “Are there?”

  “Sure, just think of groups like Spandau Ballet or Duran Duran. They use a lot of guitars.”

  I gave him a few moments to absorb this information. Perhaps he’d never thought of them as synth groups until now. Perhaps he didn’t even know who they were. He was clearly a novice and needed to be educated.

  “Just from the way they look, some groups can be difficult to distinguish from hard-rock groups,” I went on. “Dead or Alive, for instance. I know a lot of people who wonder about them.”

  I didn’t know any, but I’d been a bit unsure myself at first.

  “You have to look at the details,” I continued. “Then when you listen to them it’s obvious, of course.”

  I played one track after another to illustrate the differences.

  Sometimes he had to hear a song several times before he understood properly. He nodded and smiled when he realized what I meant. I used the Cure to explain the direct connection between synth music and miserablist rock, which was nothing to do with hard rock. Magnus soaked up the information like a sponge. After a while he began to ask intelligent follow-up questions, and I could see he was keeping up. He seemed genuinely interested. The lost kid outside the post office had turned into a true connoisseur, thanks to my musical instruction. He was learning to tell the difference between fakes and originals, one-hit wonders from artists with real staying power. The good thing about Magnus was that he was such a quick learner. You never had to browbeat him or explain things too many times. I thought he was an excellent pupil.

  * * *

  —

  Magnus went to Berg School. But probably not all that regularly. I didn’t know anything about the state of his education, but he always showed up, whether or not we’d arranged to meet. I got the feeling that he was neglecting his schoolwork in order to hang out with me. Who knows—maybe he’d stopped going to school altogether?

  * * *

  —

  Besides listening to music we used to run around the patch of land behind the industrial park where the spring meltwater made its way down to the marsh. We wandered about in the big, tranquil forest with its tall firs and deep moss in almost perpetual motion. We slid down rocks and clambered up slopes covered with slippery grass, low branches scratching our faces.

  The marsh was treacherous. Everyone knew that. According to local legend, there was quicksand beneath it that would suck everything down into it. Some of the businesses in the industrial park, which seemed to change hands regularly, were obviously dumping their rubbish there. There were all sorts of things—empty oil drums, tins, old crates, rags, scraps of metal, lamps and cables, all squelching among the branches and mounds of grass, which stuck up like islands from the brown sludge. In the middle of a clearing, on top of a pile of leaves, or what had once been leaves—half leaves, half soil—there was a big velour armchair that oozed water if you pressed it. With each passing day the garbage would sink a little deeper into the marsh, and after a while it swallowed everything. Its appetite seemed insatiable. By the edge of the marsh we found some sodden pages torn from porn magazines, which we hung to dry in the trees and tried to put back together. The water had stuck some of the pages together, making them impossible to pry apart no matter how hard we tried. But we spent most of our time down there just wandering around, kicking the rubbish sticking out of the water and trying not to get our feet wet, passing the time by talking about all manner of things.

  We used to race each other, commenting on our performance li
ke sports presenters. It was always more of a game than a real competition. Not like PE classes at school. We got up to everything and nothing. Walked. Talked. Often we didn’t have to say much. We seemed to understand each other intuitively. And there was always music. Anything could be interrupted at any moment for a discussion of which albums Trevor Horn might end up producing next year. We could go from jumping from rock to rock to a conversation about Kraftwerk’s early albums with Ralf and Florian. Before Kraftwerk were Kraftwerk. Unless they were actually already Kraftwerk even then?

  It soon became apparent that the whole music thing was more than a casual interest to Magnus. He wanted to learn everything, he said. About what was happening now, and what had gone on in the past. Every so often he would ask me to run through the various lineups of different groups and tell him what I thought might happen in the future. Was Alan Wilder likely to stay in Depeche Mode, or would he leave after the next album? And maybe Martin Gore never really felt like a fully fledged member of the group, seeing as he replaced Vince Clarke, who’d been there from the start? What buildings was Jean-Michel Jarre going to perform on next? What was going to happen to the Fun Boy Three now that Terry Hall had started working with the Bananarama girls? Which producers were lined up to work on which groups’ next albums? And were they good choices? Was the background you could see on the cover of Gosh It’s…Bad Manners actually a live recording studio? And if so, was that where they recorded “Don’t Be Angry”? Did I think we could expect the follow-up to be a live album?

  I tried to answer as comprehensively as I could and couldn’t help thinking that some of my guesses were pretty well informed.

  * * *

  —

  After a while I started to make special mix tapes that I would mark with different colors. Then I would run through them with Magnus down by the marsh.

  We hardly ever spoke about school. But from time to time we would compare our experiences. And I soon figured out that everything was much, much worse at Berg School. In comparison, life at Vira Elementary seemed almost comfortable.

  * * *

  —

  For me it was mostly a question of annoying pranks. For instance, I was given the nickname Ant because I once suggested that ants were one of the strongest animals in the world, which was based on a misunderstanding but caused much hilarity among teacher and pupils, and was later used as a recurrent example of the dangers of mixing up relative values with actual ones.

  But everything was always worse for Magnus.

  The same day I got whipped with wet towels in the shower at my school, Magnus got beaten up at Berg. And by that I mean properly beaten up.

  In my case it was mostly just high jinks that got out of hand. Dennis or Sören or someone had seen somewhere that if you twisted a wet towel you could make a decent whip, so they tried it out on the Ant while they discussed the best way to get the most force behind their blows.

  Obviously they weren’t out to get me. But seeing as I was the last person in the shower, I was the only person they could practice on. And they clearly didn’t have any idea how much it hurt. I jumped out of the way for as long as I could until they got me so many times that I slipped and fell over. I hit my knee on the tiled floor so hard that I felt something inside crack.

  * * *

  —

  I had to go and see the school nurse, and was sent to the health center to get my knee checked out. The upshot was that I got told off by the PE teacher for running on the slippery tiled floor in the shower.

  “We’ve talked about this enough times,” he said as the rest of the class nodded. “Running in the shower can be lethal. You were lucky it was only your knee this time. Next time it could be this.” He slapped me across the head to indicate what he meant.

  * * *

  —

  When I limped over to meet Magnus that afternoon he was in much worse shape. They’d beaten him with sticks in the parking lot behind the school cafeteria. He was a mass of bruises. One of them had brought his stick down right on Magnus’s head. He lowered his head and pointed to a large bump with a nasty cut across his scalp. I stared at his battered body.

  “You don’t think you should go to the hospital?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “It’ll heal.”

  “Why did they do it?” I asked.

  “They’re frightened.”

  “Of what?”

  “Me.”

  “Why are they frightened of you?”

  “I don’t know. There’s just something about me.”

  “What?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t know. Something. What about you?”

  “What about me?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Nothing.”

  “So why do they hit you?”

  “They don’t hit me.”

  “No?”

  “Not the way they hit you.”

  * * *

  —

  In the end we got bored of the marsh and spent more and more time in my room, sitting on the bed listening to music. Record after record. Looking at album covers and discussing the running order. Analyzing titles. Singing along at the same time, as out of synch as Adam Green and Kimya Dawson in “Steak for Chicken.”

  * * *

  —

  It was around then that he showed up with that Roxette album, Look Sharp! He thought it had “rhythm.” He thought Per and Marie sang well together. That they were kind of “adventurous.” I asked if he had learned nothing from me, but he persisted, saying it had its good points and pointing out that I had said it was OK to listen to some chart music. I didn’t have the heart to deny him those stupid songs. So we listened to them as well. After a while I got used to it, and even started to appreciate some production aspects, at least on the first album, Pearls of Passion.

  But I made no mention of this to Dansson.

  “What about him?” Dansson said as he piled records up beside him.

  The Record King was still in the little room behind the counter.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “He’s disappeared.”

  Dansson looked up at me.

  “Roxette? Disappeared?”

  “Yes.”

  “Disappeared, how?”

  “I can’t get hold of him.”

  “Really?” Dansson said as he started to look through the jazz section. “Maybe he’s killed himself?”

  I pushed some records back and leaned against the display.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “People do it all the time. It’s more common than you’d think.”

  I ran my finger over the records and glanced at Dansson, who was still looking through the jazz.

  “So why would he take me to the circus, then?”

  “The circus?”

  “Yeah…”

  He looked at me.

  “You went to the circus together?” he said, frowning.

  “Well, he asked me to go. Then he got involved in one of the acts.”

  “What sort of act?”

  “The magic act, obviously.”

  “He took part in a magic trick?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did he get sawn in half?”

  “No.”

  “What sort of trick was it, then?”

  “Just a normal magic trick.”

  “With knives?”

  “No, mirrors.”

  Dansson nodded seriously. He repeated what I’d said.

  “Mirrors?”

  “Yes. Then he didn’t come back. And now I can’t get hold of him.”

  Dansson nodded silently to himself. Then he came around to my side of the racks.

  “Did he volunteer?” he said.

  “How do you mean?”


  He looked at me sternly.

  “Did he volunteer to take part in the magic act?”

  I nodded.

  “You know what that means, don’t you?” he said.

  “No,” I said.

  “He wanted to make a statement.”

  The Record King came out behind the counter and put a record by the National up above the till. I did my best to look like I was interested in the stock and tried to spot something I might want to buy, but I couldn’t find anything.

  * * *

  —

  As we stepped out onto the street Dansson turned to me and said, “I knew someone who disappeared.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “And I mean properly disappeared,” Dansson went on, fastening his green camouflage army-surplus jacket. “He became invisible.”

  “What do you mean by invisible?”

  “He stopped being visible.”

  I could feel a laugh bubbling up inside me.

  Dansson gave me an affronted look.

  “What, don’t you believe me?”

  “Well…like the invisible man or something?”

  “I swear. He could disappear. Just like that. When we were at a concert, for instance. One moment you could see him. Next moment he was gone.”

  “OK…?”

  “I’ve got proof, if you still don’t believe me.”

  “What proof?” I said.

  “Photographic proof.”

  Dansson dug about in the inside pocket of his army jacket—he seemed to have a lot of things tucked away in there—and eventually pulled out a battered photograph of several people.

  “Take a look at this,” he said, pointing at the picture. “This was at Hultsfred. When I was there with Nasim, Jovan, Lena, and Tom. Here we all are in front of the main stage.”