‘Hole in Your Soul’ faded away, and the introductory piano notes of ‘Thank You for the Music’ floated out across the room.
I’m nothing special, in fact I’m a bit of a bore…
Laila sang along. Even if she couldn’t quite get Agnetha’s clarity—or her high notes—it sounded pretty good. She was accompanied by the girl, who picked up the melody instinctively, adding her own voice a fraction of a second after Abba’s voices reached her ears.
Lennart got a lump in his throat. When the chorus came around he just couldn’t help joining in too:
So I say thank you for the music, the songs I’m singing
Thanks for all the joy they’re bringing…
They were singing about the thing that united them. They swayed together on the sofa, and the girl swayed along with them. When the song came to an end amid the sound of crackling, both Lennart and Laila had tears in their eyes, and their heads almost collided as they both leaned down at the same time to kiss the girl on the top of her head.
It was a lovely evening.
The girl had started leaving her room. It was remarkable that it had taken so long, but now the day had come when she wanted to expand her world.
Her development was slow in every other area too, except music. Her toilet training had taken a long time, she was awkward and clumsy when she moved and she had the eating habits of a small child. She still refused to eat anything except jars of baby food, and Lennart had to travel to shopping centres a long way from home to stock up on Semper and Findus without arousing suspicion. She had a tendency to become attached to inanimate objects rather than living things, and her use of language was developing very slowly. She seemed to understand everything that was said to her, but spoke only in sentences of three or four words in which she referred to herself as ‘Little One’.
‘Little One more food.’ ‘Little One have it.’ ‘Away.’ The exception was lyrics. Given the girl’s limited vocabulary, it was astonishing to hear her sitting there singing, in perfectly pronounced English, a song she had heard. ‘Singing’ is perhaps the wrong word. She reproduced the song. The day after the wedding anniversary, for example, she wandered around the cellar singing with Agnetha Fältskog’s particular diction, and she knew almost all the words.
After that evening Lennart relaxed his restrictions, and Laila was allowed to share her taste in music with the girl. Schubert and Beethoven were joined on the CD player by Stikkan Anderson and Peter Himmelstrand.
But the problem Lennart had refused to face was now a fact. They couldn’t let the girl show herself outside the house. One possibility was to lock her in, but that wasn’t really an option. So what were they going to do?
‘Lennart,’ said Laila a couple of days later when they were out in the garden hanging up yet another bird box, ‘we have to accept that it’s over now.’
Lennart was right at the top of the ladder, and dropped the bird box he was hanging up. He clung to the tree and leaned his forehead against the trunk. Then he came down, sat on the third rung and looked Laila in the eye.
‘Can you imagine it?’ he said. ‘Handing her over and never seeing her again?’
Laila thought about it, tried to imagine it. The absence. The cellar empty, the jars of baby food gone, the girl’s voice never to be heard again. No. She didn’t want that.
‘Don’t you think we’d be allowed to adopt her, then? I mean, regardless of how it all started, we’re the ones she’s used to now. They’d have to take that into account, surely.’
‘For a start, I’m not sure they’d be so understanding, and secondly…’ He took Laila’s hand and squeezed it. ‘I mean we know, don’t we? There’s something wrong with her. Seriously wrong. They’d put her in an institution. A place where they wouldn’t even appreciate what we value about her. They’d just see her as…damaged.’
‘But what are we going to do, Lennart? Sooner or later she’s going to walk out of the front door, and then we’ll have even less chance of keeping her. What are we going to do?’
‘I don’t know, Laila. I don’t know.’
It was what Laila had said about the front door that gave Lennart the idea. The problem could be expressed very simply: the girl could not be allowed to go out the front door. Their house was quite sheltered and there was very little risk that anyone would see her through the window. The only person who came to visit was Jerry.
However, if she went out through the door, she could carry on up the drive. Out onto the road. Into the forest, into town. To other people who would set in motion the machinery that would take her away from them.
Lennart came up with the solution. He didn’t know if it would work, but it was the only thing he could think of. Without mentioning it to Laila, he made up a story. When it was ready, he told the girl his story.
It went like this: the world was a place populated by big people. People like Lennart, Laila and Jerry. Once upon a time there had been little people as well. People like the girl. Like Little One. But the big people had killed all the little people.
When Lennart saw that the girl didn’t understand the word ‘kill’, he changed it to ‘eaten up’. Like food. The big people had eaten up all the little people.
At that point in the story the girl did something extremely unusual. She asked a question. With her gaze firmly fixed on the wall, she asked him, ‘Why?’
Lennart hadn’t exactly polished his story, and had to come up with an answer very quickly. He said it depended on what was in your head. Almost all people had hatred and hunger in their heads. Then there were people like Lennart, Laila and Jerry who had love in their heads.
The girl tasted the word she had sung so many times, but never actually spoken, ‘Love’.
‘Yes,’ said Lennart. ‘And when you have love in your head, you want to love and take care of the little people, you don’t want to eat them up.’ He carried on telling her about all the big people he had seen sneaking around the garden, hunting for a little person to eat. Things were so bad that if the girl went outside, she probably wouldn’t even manage to get through one song before a big person grabbed her and ate her up.
The girl looked anxiously over towards the window, and Lennart stroked her back reassuringly.
‘There’s no danger as long as you stay indoors. Do you understand? You have to stay in the house. You mustn’t stand looking out of the window, and you must never, ever go out through the big door. Do you understand, Little One?’
The girl had crawled up into the very corner of the bed and was still looking over at the window with an anxious expression. Lennart began to wonder if he had succeeded too well with his story. He took her bare feet in his hands and caressed them with his thumb.
‘We’ll protect you, Little One. There’s no need to be afraid. Nothing is going to happen to you.’
When he left the girl’s room a little while later, Lennart forgave himself for his horrible story. Partly because it was necessary, and partly because there was a grain of truth in it. He was convinced that the world out there would eat her up, if not quite as brutally as he had suggested.
However much Lennart might have forgiven himself, his story had a powerful effect on the girl. She no longer dared to leave her room, and insisted on the window being covered so that the big people wouldn’t catch sight of her. One day when Laila came into the room, the girl was sitting with a Mora knife she had fetched from the tool cupboard and was making threatening gestures towards the blanket hanging over the window.
Laila didn’t understand what had happened, but from odd words the girl said she began to piece things together, and eventually she pinned Lennart down: What had he actually said?
Lennart told her about his story, but left out the worst bits. In the end Laila agreed not to correct the girl’s view of the world. She didn’t like what Lennart had done, but since she was unable to come up with a better idea, the girl could go on living with her misconceptions.
Lennart also had his doubts about
whether it had been a wise move. The incident with the Mora knife was only the beginning. When Lennart locked it away, she fetched a chisel, a screwdriver, a saw. She placed the tools around her on the bed like an arsenal of weapons at the ready for when the Big People arrived. When Lennart tried to take them away, she let out a single, heart-rending scream.
He had to be a little more cunning. He swapped the most dangerous tools one at a time for less dangerous items. The saw for a hammer, the chisel for a file. They were hardly suitable toys, but the girl never hurt herself. She just wanted the tools as a kind of magic circle, a spell surrounding her as she sat on the bed.
If she moved to the floor, she took the tools with her and arranged them neatly around her. They had become her new friends; she sang to them, whispered to them and patted them. She was never calmer than when she was lying curled up inside her circle with a Mozart adagio on the CD player. Sometimes she would fall asleep like that. After one slip-up, Lennart learned that he must always move the tools with her when he put her to bed, otherwise she woke up screaming.
Time passed, and the girl’s fear moderated to anxiety which in turn moderated to watchfulness. The quantity of tools was reduced. One day when Lennart had left the drill out, he came into the girl’s room to find her sitting with it on her knee, talking quietly to it. From time to time she would press the button and the drill would buzz in response, whereupon the conversation would continue.
It became her new favourite, and Lennart let her keep it, because she allowed him to remove all the rest. It enabled her to move about more as well. She was once again brave enough to set off on small journeys of discovery, but always with the drill in her hand.
Lennart had to smile as he watched her sneaking around the cellar with the tool at the ready, as alert as the sheriff waiting for the black hats to ride into town. She couldn’t sleep unless she was clutching the drill.
The girl had reached the age of seven by the time she showed an interest in the drill’s normal function. Each day she came one step closer to Lennart as he stood at the workbench in the cellar. She didn’t protest when he picked her up and sat her on the bench; instead she clutched the drill to her chest and watched what he was doing.
He had just finished yet another nesting box, and showed it to the girl. She had been staring intently at it while he was working, but looked away when he held it up in front of her. That was normal.
Lennart picked up the new drill he had bought after he let the girl keep the old one. Just for fun he revved the motor a couple of times, pretending that his drill wanted to talk to hers. She wasn’t interested.
He had a size 10 bit in the chuck, and Lennart finished off the box as he usually did. ‘Right, now we’re going to drill the entrance hole. This is where the birds will go in and out. Cheep, cheep. Birds.’
The girl watched as Lennart drilled out the hole, then sat staring at it as if she were waiting for something. When Lennart lifted her down from the bench, she growled and walloped him across the shoulder with her drill. He put her back and she leaned close to the hole, whispering, ‘Cheep, cheep,’ as she continued to stare at it.
A feeling of sorrow plummeted through Lennart’s stomach. He decided to make an exception.
Early next morning he took the girl out into the hallway. When he opened the front door, her eyes widened. She struggled to free herself from his grip, and filled her lungs with air ready to scream. Lennart just had time to say, ‘Ssh! SSH! They can hear us!’
The girl’s mouth snapped shut and her little body began to shake as Lennart cautiously opened the door and pretended to peer out into the garden. ‘Quiet,’ he said. ‘Careful. Not a sound.’
He bundled the girl out through the door, but had to pick her up in order to get her to the nearest tree where there was a nesting box. Her body was clenched, as hard as ice.
It was a May morning, and the birdsong was cascading through the shrubs and trees. Lennart lifted the girl’s head towards the box, which was exactly the same as the one he had made the previous evening.
Suddenly her mouth opened and she relaxed in his arms. A robin emerged from the hole and sat there for a moment looking around with rapid, jerky movements before it flew away. The girl followed it with her eyes and a dribble of saliva ran down her chin.
Lennart had no idea how she might interpret what she had just seen. Did she think drilling holes made the birds appear, or disappear, or did she in fact understand perfectly?
He put her down on the ground and said, ‘The birds live in there, they fly around—’
But he had hardly begun the sentence before she raced back to the house and slammed the front door behind her.
By February 2000 greed had got its claws into Jerry after all, and it was all Apple’s fault. The Power Mac G4 with the 500 MHz processor was finally due for release after the initial hassle with Motorola, and was going to cost around thirty thousand kronor. So far, so good. He had the money, he’d started to save a year ago when he picked up the first rumours.
But then there was Cinema Display. Along with the release of the new G4 there was to be a 22-inch flat screen with the best definition and the slickest design ever. And that would cost around thirty thousand as well.
The dumpy iMac on Jerry’s computer desk suddenly felt like something from the stone age. He’d started messing around with Cubase 4 for writing songs, but it was so slow. He wanted to upgrade to 4.1, he wanted to run it through the 500 processor and he wanted to see it on that big, flat screen.
It became an obsession. Jerry imagined that when he had that silver chassis standing underneath his desk and that stylish screen with its transparent frame sitting on top, everything would be perfect. There would be nothing more to strive for. He longed for that computer as a believer longs for redemption. When it was his, when it was all in place, he would feel a peace and purity that would wipe every trace of dirt from his life.
But to achieve this state of bliss some fancy footwork would be required. He had to sell more cigarettes. He had already doubled his order with Ingemar in December, and in January he took one hundred and fifty cartons, and also put the price up by ten kronor from the previous month.
The demand from his regular customers couldn’t meet Jerry’s supply, however gallantly they puffed away. Mats, who ran the billiard hall, had discovered Jerry’s activities, and he now dealt from home. He asked his regulars to spread the word among their connections that there were cheap fags available at Jerry’s address.
The connections duly turned up, and soon their connections came as well. By February Jerry had managed to scrape together twelve thousand kronor in addition to the thirty thousand he already had, and placed another big order with Ingemar.
A week or so later he had a visitor at the billiard hall. A guy of his own age came in—shaved head, tribal tattoo snaking up his neck beneath the biker jacket—and leaned on the bar. He looked Jerry in the eye and informed him that his business activities would cease immediately.
Jerry pretended he didn’t understand; he wondered aloud what the visitor’s problem with the billiard hall was, and explained that he wasn’t actually the owner. If he wanted it shut down, he would have to speak to Mats. The guy didn’t even crack a smile; he just said that Jerry had been warned, and if he carried on, things could get very nasty.
Jerry’s hands were shaking slightly when the man left, but he wasn’t really scared. He’d heard about a gang who had got together in the offenders’ institution in Norrtälje; they called themselves Bröderna Djup after the singing group, which was an incredibly stupid name for a criminal organisation, and was one reason why Jerry didn’t take the threat seriously. Besides which, there was nothing to suggest that this guy really did belong to some kind of gang. He was probably a free agent like Jerry himself, but with a slightly harder attitude.
Jerry was a bit more careful about checking the spy hole in the door before he opened it, but he kept on selling his cigarettes. No slap-head pumped up on steroids w
as going to come between him and his Cinema Display, his heart’s desire.
He had only fifty cartons left of the latest delivery when his life was once again kicked in a new direction. One evening at the beginning of March, the doorbell rang. Jerry got up from the infinitely slow download of a web manual on creating homepages and went to look through the spy hole.
Outside stood a friend of a friend whose name he didn’t know, but who had bought from him a couple of times before. He opened the door. As soon as he saw the expression on the man’s face close up, he realised something was wrong. From behind his back the man produced a long metal shoehorn and despite the fact that Jerry didn’t understand what the danger actually was, he moved to shut the door. Too late. The shoehorn had been shoved into the opening and it was impossible to close the door.
Then he heard running footsteps on the stairs, and seconds later they were in. The man with the shoehorn whispered, ‘Sorry, no choice,’ and took off.
There were three of them: the guy who had been in the billiard hall and two more who at first glance were barely distinguishable from him. Same shaved heads, same jackets.
They took the sacks of cigarettes. They forced Jerry to show them where he kept his money, and took that as well. Then they took Jerry. Calmly and politely they led him down the stairs to a waiting car. Jerry was numb with fear, and it didn’t even occur to him to scream. Half-slumped in their arms he noticed they had a Volvo 740. A real hick’s car. However, the reason for it soon became apparent. The car was equipped with a tow bar.
They drove Jerry down to the gravelled car park next to the Lommar swimming pool. Beneath the sign that announced Sweden’s second-longest water slide, they threw him on the ground and handcuffed his feet together. Then they ran a chain from the handcuffs to the tow bar. When they put on ‘We Live in the Country’ by Bröderna Djup at full volume, Jerry shat himself.
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