‘Do you know what I am going to pick?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘I just know, that’s all. It happens all the time. I get a picture in my head.’
‘One more time. I won’t think this time, just choose.’
‘You can try.’
They played again. Oskar won easily with eight–two. Eli pretended to be enraged, turned to the wall.
‘I’m not playing with you. You cheat.’
Oskar looked at her white back. Did he dare? Yes, now that she wasn’t looking at her he could do it.
‘Eli. Will you go out with me?’
She turned around, pulled the covers up to her chin.
‘What does that mean?’
Oskar stared at the spines of the books in front of him, shrugged.
‘That…you would want to be together with me.’
‘What do you mean “together”?’
Her voice sounded suspicious, hard. Oskar hurriedly said, ‘Maybe you already have a guy at your school.’
‘No, I don’t…but Oskar, I can’t. I’m not a girl.’
Oskar snorted. ‘What do you mean? You’re a guy?’
‘No, no.’
‘Then what are you?’
‘Nothing.’
‘What do you mean, “nothing”?’
‘I’m nothing. Not a child. Not old. Not a boy. Not a girl. Nothing.’
Oskar ran his finger down the spine of The Rats, pinched his lips together and shook his head. ‘Will you go out with me or not?’
‘Oskar I’d really like to but…can’t we just be together like we already are?’
‘…Yes.’
‘Are you sad? We can kiss, if you like.’
‘No!’
‘You don’t want to?’
‘No, I don’t!’
Eli frowned.
‘Do you do anything in particular with someone you’re going out with?’
‘No.’
‘It’s just like normal?’
‘Yes.’
Eli looked suddenly happy, folded her arms over her stomach and gazed at Oskar.
‘Then we can go out. We can be together.’
‘We can?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good.’
With a quiet happiness in his belly Oskar kept studying the titles of the books. Eli lay still, waiting. After a while she said, ‘Is there anything else?’
‘No.’
‘Can’t we lie down together again like we did before?’
Oskar rolled over so his back was against her. She put her arms around him and he took her hands. They lay like that until Oskar started to get sleepy. His eyes felt sandy, it was hard to keep them open. Before he slid off into sleep he said, ‘Eli?’
‘Mmm?’
‘I’m glad you came over.’
‘Yes.’
‘Why…do you smell like gasoline?’
Elis’s hands gripped more tightly around his hands, against his heart. Hugged. The room grew larger all around Oskar, the walls and ceiling softened, the floor fell away and when he felt the whole bed floating in the air he knew he was asleep.
Saturday
31 October
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.
William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, III, v
Grey. Everything was grey. His eyes wouldn’t focus, it was like lying inside a rain cloud. Lying? Yes, he was lying down. There was pressure against his back, buttocks, heels. A hissing sound on his left side. The gas. The gas was on. No. It was turned off. Turned on. Something happened to his chest in time to the hissing sound. It filled and emptied in time to that sound.
Was he still at the pool? Was he hooked up to the gas? In that case, how could he be awake? Was he even awake?
Håkan tried to blink. Nothing happened, almost nothing. Something jerked in front of his one eye, murkying his sight further. His other eye wasn’t there. He tried to open his mouth. His mouth wasn’t there. He conjured up an image of his mouth, as he had seen it in mirrors, tried…but it wasn’t there. Nothing responded to his commands. Like trying to inject consciousness into a rock in order to get it to move. No contact.
A sensation of strong heat over his whole face. A dart of fear shooting into his stomach. His face was plastered with something warm, stiffening. Paraffin wax. A machine was doing his breathing because his whole face was covered in wax.
His thoughts stretched out towards his right hand. Yes. There it was. He opened it, made a fist, felt the tops of his fingers against his palm. Touch. He sighed with relief; imagined a sigh of relief, since his chest didn’t move according to his wishes.
He lifted his hand, slowly. A tightening sensation over his chest and shoulder. The hand entered his field of vision, a fuzzy lump. He moved it towards his face, stopped. There was a low beeping by his side. He carefully turned his head in its direction, felt something hard scrap against his chin. He moved his hand towards it.
A metal socket was implanted in his throat. A plastic tube fed into the metal socket. He followed the plastic tubing as far as he could, as far as a grooved metal piece where the tube ended. He understood. This was what he should pull out when he wanted to die. They had set it up like this for him. He rested his fingers against the end of the tube.
Eli. The pool, the boy. Acid.
His memory stopped at the part where he unscrewed the lid. He must have poured it over himself, all according to the plan. The only miscalculation was that he was still alive. He had seen pictures. Women who had gotten acid thrown into their faces, by jealous boyfriends. He didn’t want to feel his face, even less see it.
His hold on the tube tightened. It didn’t give way. Screwed in. He tried to turn the metal end and, as he had suspected, it turned. He kept unscrewing it. He searched for his left hand, but only sensed a prickling ball of pain where that hand should have been. With the tops of the fingers on his living hand he now felt a light, fluttering pressure. Air was starting to escape from around the seal, the hissing sound had changed slightly, become thinner.
The grey light around him was infiltrated by something blinking red. He tried to close his one eye. Thought about Socrates and the jar of poison. Because he had seduced the youth of Athens. Don’t forget to offer a rooster to…what was he called? Archimandros? No…
A sucking sound as a door was pushed open and a white figure moved towards him. He felt fingers prying open his fingers, prying them from the metal end. A woman’s voice.
‘What are you doing?’
Asclepius. Offer a cock to Asclepius.
‘Let go!’
A cock. To Asclepius. The god of healing.
A hissing sound when his fingers gave way and the tube was screwed back in place.
‘We’ll have to guard you from now on.’
Offer it to him, do not forget.
Eli was gone when Oskar woke up. He lay with his face towards the wall, his back was cold. He drew himself up on one elbow and looked around the room. The window was open a crack. She must have let herself out that way.
Naked.
He rolled over in his bed, pressed his face against the place where she had slept, sniffed. Nothing. He moved his nose back and forth across the sheet trying to discern the tiniest glimmer of her presence but nothing. Not even that smell of gasoline.
Had it really happened? He lay down on his stomach, thought about it.
Yes.
It was real. Her fingers on his back. The memory of her fingers on his back. Bulleribock. His mum had played it with him when he was little. But this was now. Not long ago. The hairs on his arms and on his neck stood up.
He got out of bed and started to pull his clothes on. When he had his pants on he walked to the window. No snowfall. Four degrees below zero. Good. If the snow had started to melt it would be too slushy to set the bags of advertising leaflets
down outside. He thought about crawling naked out of a window when it was four degrees below zero, down into snow-covered bushes, down into…
No.
He leaned forward, blinked.
The snow on the bushes was completely undisturbed.
Last night when he had stood there he had looked out onto a clean sweep of snow that ran down to the path. It looked exactly the same now. He opened the window a little more, stuck his head out. The bushes reached all the way up to the wall below his window, the snow cover as well. And it was undisturbed.
Oskar looked to the left, along the rough surface of the outside wall. Her window was three metres away.
Cold air swept over Oskar’s naked chest. It must have snowed last night after she went back to her room. That was the only explanation. But anyway…now that he thought about it: how had she made it up to the window? Had she climbed up the bushes?
But then the snow couldn’t look like this. And it hadn’t been snowing when he went to bed. Neither her body nor her hair had been damp, so it couldn’t have been snowing then. When did she go?
Some time between the time that she left and when she was here it must have snowed enough to cover the tracks of…
Oskar shut the window, continued to dress. It was unbelievable. He started thinking it was all a dream again. Then he saw the note. Folded and left under the clock on his desk. He took it out and unfolded it.
THEN WINDOW, LET DAY IN AND LET LIFE OUT
A heart, and then:
SEE YOU TONIGHT, ELI.
He read the note five times. Then he thought about her, standing here by the desk as she wrote it. Gene Simmons’ face on the wall, half a metre behind her, his tongue sticking out.
He leaned over the desk and took the poster down from the wall, crumpled it into a ball and threw it into the rubbish.
Then he read the short note three more times, folded it and put it in his pocket. Put on the last of his clothes. Today there could be five papers in each advertising packet as far as he was concerned. It would still be as easy as pie.
The room smelled of smoke and the dust particles danced in the rays of sunlight that filtered in through the blinds. Lacke had just woken up, was lying on his back in bed, coughing. Dust particles were doing a funny dance in front of his eyes. A smoker’s cough. He turned, managed to get a hold of the lighter and cigarette packet that was on the nightstand next to an overflowing ashtray.
He helped himself to a cigarette—Camel lights, Virginia was starting to get health conscious in her old age—lit it, rolled over onto his back again with one arm behind his head, and reflected on the situation.
Virginia had left for work a few hours earlier, probably fairly tired. They had stayed awake for a long time after making love, talked and smoked. It was close to two in the morning when Virginia put out the last cigarette and said it was time to sleep. Lacke had slipped out of bed after a while, had drained the dregs of the bottle of wine and smoked a few more cigarettes before he went back to bed. Maybe mostly because he liked crawling into bed next to a warm, sleeping body.
Too bad he hadn’t managed to arrange his life so he always had someone next to him. If there could have been someone, it would have been Virginia. Anyway…damn it, he had heard from others how things were for her. Rollercoaster times. Times when she drank too much in city pubs, dragged home any old guy. She didn’t want to talk about that, but she had aged more than she needed to these past few years.
If he and Virginia could have…yes, what? Sell everything, buy a house in the country, grow their own potatoes. Sure, but it wouldn’t last. After a month they would be getting on each other’s nerves, and she had her mum here, her job, and he had…well, his stamps.
No one knew about that, not even his sister, and he had kind of a guilty conscience about that.
His dad’s stamp collection, which had not been drawn up in the estate, was worth a small fortune as it turned out. He had raided it, a few stamps at a time, when he needed the cash.
Right now the market was at a low, and he didn’t have many stamps left. But soon he would have to sell them anyway. Maybe sell those special ones, Norway number one, and buy a round of beer in return for all the beers he had gotten people to buy him the last while. That’s what he should do.
Two houses in the country. Cottages. Close to each other. Cottages cost almost nothing. Then there was Virginia’s mother. Three cottages. And then her daughter, Lena. Four. Sure. Buy a whole village while you’re at it.
Virginia was only happy when she was with Lacke, she had said so herself. Lacke wasn’t sure he had the capacity to be happy, but Virginia was the only person he liked being with. Why shouldn’t they be able to make things work out somehow?
Lacke set the ashtray on his stomach, flicked ash from the tip, put the cigarette in his mouth and inhaled deeply.
The only person he liked being with these days. Since Jocke had…disappeared. Jocke had been good. The only one among all his acquaintances he counted as a friend. This thing about his body being missing was fucked up. It wasn’t natural. There should be a funeral at least. A corpse that you can look at, that prompts you to say: yes, there you are, my friend. And you are dead.
Lacke’s eyes filled with tears.
People always had so many damned friends, tossed the word around so lightly. He had had one, only one, and he happened to be the one who was taken from him by a cold-blooded mugger. Why the hell did that kid have to kill Jocke?
Somehow he knew that Gösta wasn’t lying or making it up, and Jocke was gone, but it seemed so damned meaningless. The only reasonable explanation was that drugs were involved. Jocke must have been involved in some drug shit and double-crossed the wrong person. But why hadn’t he said anything?
Before Lacke left the apartment he emptied the ashtray, stowed the empty wine bottle on the floor of the pantry. Had to put it in upside down so it would fit with all the other bottles.
Yes, damn it. Two cottages. A potato patch. Earth on your knees and lark song in springtime. And so on. Some day.
He put on his coat and went out. When he walked past the ICA store he threw a kiss to Virginia who was sitting at a register. She smiled and pouted at him.
On his way back to Ibsengatan he saw a young boy laden with two large paper bags. Someone who lived in his complex but Lacke didn’t know his name. Lacke nodded at him.
‘Looks heavy, what you’ve got there.’
‘It’s OK.’
Lacke gazed after the boy struggling on with his bags in the direction of some nearby apartment buildings. Looked so damned happy. That’s how you should be. Accept your burden and carry it, with joy.
That’s how you should be.
Inside the courtyard he hung around hoping to bump into the guy who had bought him the whiskies. The man was sometimes up and walking around at this time. Walked in circles around the courtyard. But he hadn’t seen him the last couple of days. Lacke peeked up at the covered windows to the apartment where he thought the man lived.
Probably in there drinking, of course. Could go ring the doorbell.
Maybe another day.
When it was starting to get dark Tommy and his mother went down to the graveyard. His dad’s grave was just inside the dyke that bordered Råcksta lake. His mum was quiet until they reached Kanaanvägen, and Tommy had thought it was because she was grieving but when they walked onto the little road that ran parallel to the lake his mum coughed and said, ‘So you know, Tommy…’
‘What?’
‘Staffan says that something has gone missing from his apartment. Since we were there last.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you know anything about it?’
Tommy scooped up some snow with his hand, shaped it into a ball and threw it at a tree. Bull’s eye.
‘Yeah. It’s lying under his balcony.’
‘It’s quite important to him because…’
‘I said, it’s in the bushes under his balcony.’
‘Ho
w did it end up there?’
A section of the snow-covered wall around the graveyard came into view. A soft red light illuminated the pine trees from below. The grave lantern that Tommy’s mum was carrying made a clinking sound. Tommy asked: ‘Do you have a light?’
‘Light? Oh yes. I have a lighter. How did it—’
‘I dropped it.’
Once he was inside the gate to the graveyard Tommy stopped and looked at the map; the different sections were marked with different letters. His dad was in section D.
If you thought about it, it was actually pretty sick. To do this. Burn people up, save the ashes, bury them in the ground and then called the spot ‘Grave 104, section D’.
Almost three years ago. Tommy had fuzzy memories of the funeral, or whatever it should be called. That thing with the coffin and a lot of people who alternated between crying and singing.
He remembered he had been wearing shoes that were too big for him, Daddy’s shoes, that his feet had slipped around in them on the way home. That he had been afraid of the coffin, sat staring at it the whole time, sure his dad was going to get up out of it and come alive again, but…changed.
Two weeks after the funeral he had gone around with a total fear of zombies. Especially when it was dark he looked in the shadows and thought he could make out the shrivelled being in the hospital bed, who was no longer his dad, come at him with arms held out stiffly, like in those movies.
The terror had stopped after they interred the urn. It had only been him, Mum, a gravedigger and a minister. The gravedigger had carried the urn and walked with a dignified stride while the minister comforted his mum. The whole thing was so fucking ridiculous. The little wooden box with a lid that a guy in carpenter overalls carried in front of him as he walked; that this had anything whatsoever to do with his dad.
It was one big joke.
But the terror had lifted and Tommy’s relationship to the grave had changed over time. Now he sometimes came here alone, sat a while by the gravestone and ran his fingers across the carved letters that formed his father’s name. That was what he came for. Not the box in the ground, but the name.
The distorted person in the hospital bed, the ashes in the box, none of that was Dad, but the name referred to the person he could remember and so he sometimes sat there and rubbed his finger over the depressions in the stone that formed the name MARTIN SAMUELSSON.
Let the Right One In Page 18