The Circus

by Jonas Karlsson

  “So?” I said.

  “You can see for yourself. Tom isn’t there.”

  I looked at the picture, and sure enough Tom wasn’t there.

  I suddenly remembered the note Jallo had given me, and felt for it in my pocket. Yep, there it was, the receipt with Bondegatan 3A on the back. Perhaps it was worth a try?

  There was no Bondegatan 3A. There was a Bondegatan 3, an unassuming doorway with a coded lock, but I could see no sign of a 3A.

  Next door was a dry cleaner that might well have the same address. I went in.

  The shop’s owner was a man in his fifties, with his hair pulled into a little ponytail with a beige hairband. I caught sight of him toward the back in another room. He waved at me to indicate that he’d seen me but waited awhile before coming out. There was a bench next to the counter with a pile of papers and a portable CD player on it. Next to that was a unsteady stack of CDs that looked like they’d topple over if you so much as touched the bench. I put my head to one side and counted seven Absolute Music albums.

  In spite of the limited material he had to work with, the shop’s owner still managed to give the impression that he had lots of hair, and when he turned toward me I saw how pale he was. It looked almost like he never left his shop. Perhaps he didn’t?

  He was wearing one of those pale blue shirts that never look creased no matter how much they’ve been worn. The sort of shirt that looks like it came from a discount store, or has been worn and washed so much it has ended up looking like a cheap shirt. Or one that might have been part of some sort of council uniform. White, or very pale blue. The sort of shirt you know is sweaty under the arms even if you can’t tell by looking at it. Even if they’re covered by a thick jacket, you just know they’re wet with sweat.

  That sort of shirt only exists for people with sweaty armpits.

  The shirt in the back room, with its armpits and associated body, and the head with the long thin hair, slowly began to move, until eventually the whole package was standing in front of me, breathing heavily.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Is this Bondegatan 3A?” I asked.

  The man in the shirt nodded.

  “I’m looking for someone called Magnus,” I said.

  “Magnus?” the shirt said.

  “I was told he was here.”

  He looked at me and scratched his chin.

  “Do you want something cleaned?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. There’s no Magnus here.”

  “Magnus Gabrielsson?”

  “No.”

  A short, thickset woman was pulling thin plastic bags over freshly laundered white shirts that had a papery look to them. She was wearing an outfit somewhere between a dress and a cleaner’s tunic. I could see her bra through the fabric as she hung the garments up and attached labels to them. She hadn’t deigned to look in my direction at all.

  * * *

  —

  These people looked utterly unruffled, but that didn’t necessarily mean that they didn’t know what I was talking about. Perhaps you had to give some sort of code word, but Jallo hadn’t mentioned anything about that. I sighed at his habit of always giving incomplete information and just assuming that things would work themselves out. It was so typical of him, that whole mañana attitude. There was no such thing as a problem. Only opportunities. How many times had he tried to recruit me to the telesales business that formed the core of his activities? It covered everything from selling socks and mobile contracts to acting as a kind of emergency psychological helpline.

  “You can choose,” he kept saying. “Whatever you fancy doing.”

  With the premium-rate numbers the main point was to keep people talking for as long as possible. According to Jallo that didn’t require any special qualifications or experience. All you had to do was keep talking, but that wasn’t exactly my strong point.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Jallo said. “If you like you can do the tarot cards. You’d be good at that.”

  “I don’t know anything about tarot.”

  “You’ll soon pick it up. You just have to sit there with the cards and say stuff. The more cryptic the better. That could be your thing…quiet and mysterious.”

  “But it wouldn’t be real.”

  “What the hell is real? Trust me, you’d soon pick it up. They just want someone to talk to.”

  * * *

  —

  I looked around the dry cleaner. There was a picture on one wall, the same sort of messy, incomprehensible thing that Jallo had in his office. I found that sort of picture unsettling. I didn’t want to spend too long looking at them. They always felt a bit like an optical trap. Colorful patterns that could turn into anything at all when you least expected it. Perhaps the whole dry-cleaning business was just a front? A cover for an entirely different sort of business.

  I leaned forward in what I thought was a pointed, conspiratorial way. Like I was trying to let on that I knew what was going on. That I knew about everything, but that they didn’t have to worry about me saying anything. I raised one eyebrow.

  “Look,” I said slowly. “Jallo said it would be OK.”

  “Jallo?”

  I winked and nodded. The man in the shirt stared wearily at me.

  “That’s nice,” he said, equally slowly. “But if you don’t want to have anything dry-cleaned, I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  He turned around and started to sort through some plastic-wrapped suits.

  “Isn’t this Bondegatan 3A?” I asked.

  “It’s number 3. There’s no A here.”

  That evening I took a walk past Magnus’s flat, but it still looked empty. Abandoned. I stood outside the 7-Eleven for a while looking up at the dark windows. I realized that the window where I’d seen a light go on a few days before might not belong to Magnus. After a while I went into the shop and bought some chewing gum. I sat down in the same place as before and noticed the cashier watching me surreptitiously. Veronica Maggio was playing from the speakers, that song with the line “this situation is so sick.” I thought about the girls on the bakery counter, who had asked if I wanted to go to a party this evening. They always asked me when they were going to do something because they knew I had the good sense to decline any offer of socializing with girls who were ten or fifteen years younger than me.

  In the street was the same advertisement that was outside my building. The guy in white underpants. Presumably an ad for an underwear company, though it could have been for aftershave or deodorant. Unfortunately for the advertiser, there was a tear in the poster just where the company’s name was, so it was impossible to know what brand they wanted you to buy.

  I looked up at Magnus’s flat again and wondered if he was the sort of person who might commit suicide. Why would he do that? And it would seem odd if he’d done it now. Unnecessary, somehow. At school maybe, but now?

  I remembered the badge Magnus used to wear on his breast pocket, LIVE HARD AND DIE YOUNG. That was so wrong. Having a badge like that was ridiculous. Because everyone knew that if there was one thing Magnus didn’t do, it was live hard. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, and had hardly ever ridden so much as a moped. He ran around the marsh with me, or sat on my bed listening to records. LIVE HARD AND DIE YOUNG. But it was only a badge. I tried to persuade him to take it off, but he kept wearing it.

  A couple came into the shop and bought a bottle of Coke, which they shared between kisses. I sat for a while, feeling tired, and thought of the way Magnus could stand and stare at couples like that without the least embarrassment. He thought it was cute. Sure, when you’re a teenager, but you soon learn better. You realize what a nuisance it is once the first flush of infatuation is over, when everything goes back to normal. At best, it might be exciting to begin with, but then the nagging starts, and you have to change your habits, and be
fore you know it the jealousy and arguments start. And even if you think she’s attractive and fun, it always ends up leading to loads of problems, no matter how you try to deal with it. Arguments about what to eat and who to see and why you don’t want to merge your record collections. If she’s got one. And if she hasn’t there’s always a load of talk about why you have a collection and why can’t you just download whatever you feel like listening to? Before you know it you’re standing there with tablecloths and curtains and wondering if it’s really what you want. You start to argue, get upset, and whatever happiness you once felt turns into pain that’s many times worse.

  Magnus kept falling in love with girls in a very unhealthy way. He would associate them with a particular type of music, confusing the lyrics of love songs with real life. He saw the lyrics as a way of expressing his love, but hardly ever dared to approach anyone. Then he would see them with other guys and be mortified. Many was the time I had to sit with Magnus trying to comfort him and running through my own thoughts on the subject, usually getting caught up in the horrifying example of my own parents. A long-term relationship that was always on the brink of disharmony, like a drawn-out Allan Pettersson symphony. I kept telling him he needed to learn how things worked. How you make yourself tougher. Untouchable. Otherwise you risk being destroyed. I don’t think he ever really learned that.

  It soon occurred to me that I ought to go back to the circus and talk to someone there. Maybe they knew where he’d gone. I remembered the old rule from school outings in the forest: that if you got lost or didn’t know where everyone else was, you should make your way back to where you last saw them and wait there, hugging a tree or something.

  Then I realized I wasn’t sure where the circus was. I’d gone there with Magnus, and we spent the whole way talking, so I wasn’t paying attention. But presumably it was out on the field a few stations away, where circuses usually pitched their tents.

  Live hard and die young. Well, that depends on how you look at things. I slid off my chair and went out into the cool spring air, put my headphones on, and switched on my portable CD player, then set off toward the station. When I went inside I saw that they were working on the escalators down to the platform. A man in a hi-vis jacket gestured to me to take my headphones off.

  “What line?” he asked.

  I looked down at the CD player.

  “Two,” I said.

  “OK, that way,” he said, pointing to a temporary flight of steps.

  I walked down it, got on a train, and went the three stations to the circus. I emerged from the end of the station closest to the field, barely even noticing that I had the road to myself. I didn’t look up until I reached the grass, when I saw that it was gone. The field was completely empty, the grass standing tall, swaying in the breeze. There was no trace of any tents or caravans.

  It was as if the circus had never been there.

  That night the phone rang again.

  “Magnus?” I said, but there was no response. Just the nervous breathing. Was it someone from the circus?

  “Magnus, is that you?” I asked again.

  No response.

  I went and sat down in front of the television without switching it on. I sat there for a long time looking at my own shadow on the screen, feeling the presence of the silent person on the telephone line. After several minutes, during which neither of us said anything, I went over to the stereo and put on “Lilac Wine” by Jeff Buckley and held the receiver up to the speaker.

  When the track ended I hung up and walked into the bedroom, lay down on top of the bed, and leafed through the latest issue of Uncut. Nothing in it really caught my attention. I was having trouble concentrating. How could the circus be gone all of a sudden? Was it possible to move an entire cavalcade of people and vehicles in such a way that they didn’t leave any trace of having been there? Surely the grass at least ought to have been flattened? Shouldn’t there be a few scraps of circus detritus about the place, a bit of tinsel or a plastic cup and a few napkins from the kiosk? Why didn’t the person who kept calling me say anything, and what had Magnus meant when he waved like that in the mirror?

  * * *

  —

  I must have dozed off, because the next time I opened my eyes it was dark inside the flat. I sat up, stared at the pitch-black room, and wasn’t altogether sure if I was asleep or awake. But I thought it was odd for the phone to be ringing in a dream. It rang and rang and rang—an old-fashioned ringtone. I answered. It was Magnus.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Hello, this is Magnus Gabrielsson. But a long time ago.”

  “Oh?” I said.

  “I was wondering if you’ve got Kurt Cobain’s number. From when he was a child?”

  The next day was a day in which nothing happened. Nothing out of the ordinary, anyway. Only the sort of thing you might expect to happen on a Wednesday.

  I woke up, went to work, worked, had lunch.

  It was the sort of day when I saw stir-fried noodles and thought they looked tempting, and then saw stir-fried noodles and thought they looked disgusting, and in between those reactions nothing much happened apart from me eating rather a lot of stir-fried noodles.

  I tried putting Sheena Easton between Prince and Wendy and Lisa because it ought to work—theoretically, anyway—but it didn’t feel right at all.

  In the end I decided to do what Jallo had suggested and try writing a letter. I got a pen and some paper and sat down to write.

  “Dear Magnus!” I began, then wondered if that sounded too pompous, before concluding that it didn’t matter. I couldn’t let myself get bogged down in that sort of detail. The important thing was to get in touch with him. Not the tone of the letter itself. Besides, I thought it sounded rather nice. “Dear Magnus!” Kind of ceremonial. It felt good to write it. I concluded with “Best wishes.”

  When I was finished I dug out an envelope, wrote his address on it, added a stamp, and went and mailed it.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon with Dictaphone and their album Poems from a Rooftop.

  It was the sort of day that passed like any other, and I reasoned that Magnus Gabrielsson couldn’t possibly have committed suicide. I got confirmation of that the following day.

  I spent all of Thursday behind the bakery counter humming “Dinner at Eight” by Rufus Wainwright as I served the old women who wanted pastries and cakes in the shape of graduation caps. I was glad it wasn’t “Love and Marriage” and wondered if perhaps “Dinner at Eight” might have the opposite effect.

  When I got to Record King after work I spent a while searching for the Rufus Wainwright album I’d seen the other day but couldn’t find it anywhere. Could it really have been sold? Had Record King had a customer?

  I walked home and sang out loud to myself in a Rufus Wainwright style as I changed into a shirt that I soon discovered smelled of sweat, so I had to change back again.

  I tried moving the whole Motown section down three shelves but quickly realized that that messed up the other end, where part of old-style hip-hop ended up next to Americana, so I had to move the whole lot back again.

  Then I wolfed down some sweet corn straight from the tin I’d opened the night before last. It tasted a bit metallic but not too bad. I shook my head and chuckled at the thought of She & Him next to Young MC. I didn’t really feel like going out but felt I ought to for Dansson’s sake.

  * * *

  —

  A bit further along the same street as Record King lay what, back in the glory days of vinyl, used to be the Record King Bar but was now an Irish theme pub. It wasn’t called the Record King Bar anymore, but it still had pretty much the same clientele and fairly decent music, and it was where the Record King was apparently going to DJ.

  I ordered a beer and sat down at the bar beside an empty stool to indicate that I was waiting for someone. I hoped D
ansson would show up soon.

  * * *

  —

  I was left sitting there on my own for a long time, listening to the music. I thought about asking the Record King to play “Dinner at Eight” if he had it, but decided against it. I’d never asked a DJ to play anything, and I wasn’t about to start now. I got another beer and thought about an article about vinyl collectors I’d read at a newsstand. I’d just started to get annoyed at the memory of the phrase “airy quality to the sound” when someone interrupted my musings.

  In the middle of Jeff Beck’s “You Had It Coming,” Janne Markstedt was suddenly standing in front of me waving his hands. I lit up the way you do when you meet someone you haven’t seen for several years and are expected to want to know all about them.

  “Janne?!” I said.

  “That’s me.” He grinned. “It’s been a while!”

  There was something so familiar about him, something that had always been there and probably always would be. The way he moved his head and spoke, his whole body language. The hard-rock attitude. But I could see how old he’d got. A proper grown-up with gray hair and a receding hairline. When did that happen? I’d always assumed we were the same age. It felt like it, especially as we’d been in the same class and everything.

  I didn’t know what to say, so I asked loudly, “You doing OK?”

  “Good,” he said. I noticed that he was swaying slightly to the sound of the guitar from the speakers.

  “Good to see you again,” he said after a while. “Do you still see anyone else from school?”

  “No, not really,” I said. “You know how it is.”

  I thought about how I did my best to avoid anything connected to the past and only saw Jallo and Magnus from those days. I thought about what Janne had meant to me at school. Essentially nothing, aside from being part of the crowd of hard-rock fans who always trailed after Dennis and his gang. The ones who kept quiet and watched.