The guy from the billiard hall wrinkled his nose as he became aware of the smell. He pointed at Jerry’s soiled backside and said, ‘I take it that means you get it now.’ He waved his hand in a circular movement over the dark, deserted car park. ‘I warned you, fat boy. We’re going for a little drive. There’s going to be blood and shit all over the gravel, but look on the bright side. You’re bound to lose a few kilos.’
From inside the car, Bröderna Djup were squealing and grunting as they imitated all the animals they were going to buy when they had sold their possessions. Jerry wept and whispered, ‘Please, please, no. You can have anything you want.’
The guy smirked. ‘Like what? You’ve got fuck all. We’ve just taken everything.’
Jerry was about to vomit with fear, and tried to form his lips around the words that would promise them all his savings, all his…everything. Before he had the chance, the guy taped his mouth shut and said, ‘We don’t want to wake the neighbours, now do we?’ Then he got in the car and revved the engine, dousing Jerry in a cloud of exhaust fumes.
He was dragged across the gravel and his shirt ripped, baring his back to the sharp stones. He plunged into a vortex of imagining the skin, the muscles being ripped from his body until his naked skeleton was screaming against the ground. He wanted to lose consciousness, he wanted to die quickly, he wanted…
He didn’t even notice when the car stopped, ten metres from where it had started. All three of them climbed out, stood around him and pissed on him. Then they unhooked him from the tow bar. He heard a voice in his ear, ‘Next time it’ll be the full treatment, OK?’
Doors slammed shut and gravel sprayed over his face as the car shot away. He lay there staring up at the night sky and the bright winter stars. His back was burning, and he was breathing heavily and unevenly through his nose.
It took ten minutes before he managed to get up and rip the tape from his mouth. His feet were still fastened together, and he stank of piss and shit. Shuffling and hopping, he made his way towards the lights and the apartment blocks, barely noticing when he fell and cut his cheek open on a sharp stone. Something inside him had broken beyond repair.
When Jerry hadn’t been in touch for a month, Laila began to get worried. Although there had been periods before when they went for months without hearing from him, they usually spoke every couple of weeks or so. But Jerry didn’t ring, and when Laila rang him there was no reply.
She might have investigated the matter more closely, she might even have broken the taboo and gone to visit Jerry—if she hadn’t had a new project that took up so much of her time and her attention.
She had started teaching the girl to read.
She still couldn’t imagine what the future might look like. The girl was around eight years old now, she would probably be nine soon, and what was going to happen when she got older? When she reached puberty, when she became a teenager, when she became…an adult? Would she and Lennart be sitting here as pensioners with a grown woman in the cellar, a woman who had never set foot outside the door?
It didn’t bear thinking about, so Laila took one day at a time. She had created a compensatory fantasy in which the girl was a refugee threatened with deportation, and that was why they were keeping her hidden. She had read about such cases in the local newspaper, and the fantasy fitted in well with the unpleasant story Lennart had served up to the girl. A hostile world was out to get her, and if she showed herself she would be sent away, perhaps even killed. Like Anne Frank. It made Laila feel much better.
Since the girl was disinclined to speak, it was no easy matter to teach her the alphabet, to get her to repeat and imitate the sounds that corresponded with the letters. To begin with it was downright impossible. For example, Laila wrote ‘A’ on a piece of paper and said the letter out loud. The girl wouldn’t look at the paper, didn’t make a sound.
Laila tried with other letters, other ways of writing them or illustrating them. She drew pictures of objects the girl would recognise, wrote their names in big letters, said them out loud. The girl showed no interest whatsoever; she simply sat there playing with her drill, or arranging nails in dead straight lines without even acknowledging Laila’s existence.
When Laila eventually came up with the solution, she could have kicked herself for her stupidity. It was just so obvious. She sang the letters. The girl imitated her. Laila held the piece of paper with the letter on it in front of her face so that the girl wouldn’t look away, and sang ‘Aaa’ as if the letter itself was singing. When she swiftly lowered the paper she could see that the girl had looked, before her eyes slid away. She carried on with the rest of the vowels in the same way.
It took several weeks, but eventually it happened. The girl began to associate the symbol with the sound. When Laila held up the piece of paper with U on it on front of her face, there was silence for a little while as the girl waited for the note. When it didn’t come she supplied it herself, a humming but perfectly clear ‘Uuuu…’
Lennart was in the middle of one of his studio periods again, but listened to Laila’s stories of the girl’s progress and made encouraging comments and suggestions. For example, when Laila explained that she was having a problem with the consonants, he suggested that she should use lyrics the girl already knew, isolating individual words and getting the girl to sing them.
Laila decided on the Swedish version of ‘Strangers in the Night’ by Lasse Lönndahl, as Lasse had a tendency to extend the vowels, but still enunciated the consonants clearly, which made it easier to sing individual words.
Tusen och en natt, låg jag allena
Drömmande och matt…
Laila began with the word ‘en’, extending the word as she held the piece of paper with the word on it in front of her. ‘Eeennn…eeennn…’ She had to repeat it over and over again, and go through the song many times with sudden interruptions and much scribbling on the paper, but eventually the girl was singing from the same hymn sheet, so to speak.
As they approached the summer, Laila could hold up a piece of paper with the word ‘tusen’ or ‘natt’ on it, and the girl would sing what was written there.
Laila had rung and rung, she had even gone to Jerry’s apartment, struggled up the stairs and rung the bell. No one had opened the door, but when Laila peered through the letterbox she could see that there was no post or junk mail on the floor. Jerry was still around somewhere. She had shouted through the letterbox, but there was no response.
And then one day in early June, there he was standing on the porch steps. Laila hardly recognised him; it was a stranger she invited to sit down at the kitchen table. When Lennart emerged from the studio he reacted the same way, and seemed on the point of asking who he was.
If Laila had lost maybe ten kilos by watching what she ate since the winter, Jerry had lost three times as much in less time. There were bags under his eyes, and a few grey hairs had come in at his temples. A badly healed scar ran across his right cheek. The air of self-evident authority with which he had commanded a room was gone. He had begun to look like Lennart.
They sat in silence for a while. Then Laila asked, ‘What’s happened to you, love?’
A shadow of his former ironic smile passed over Jerry’s lips. ‘You might well ask. I’m on a disability pension, for a start.’
‘A disability pension? But you’re only thirty-three!’
Jerry shrugged his shoulders. ‘I managed to convince them.’
‘Of what?’
‘That I can’t work. That I’m finished. That I can’t be around people.’
Laila reached across the table to stroke Jerry’s arm, but he moved it away. She said, ‘But why, love?’
Jerry scratched the scar, pale beneath the stubble, looked her in the eye and said, ‘Because I hate them. Because I can’t cope with seeing them. Because I’m scared of them. Will that do?’
Jerry got up from the table and when Laila tried to stop him, he pulled away from her. He picked up the guitar he had left in
the hallway and went down to the cellar.
It was a kind of homecoming. When he caught the familiar smell of wood, smoke, soap powder and general cellar aroma, it took him straight back to his childhood. He felt like an empty shell; he accepted the sensory awareness gratefully because it made him feel as if he contained something after all.
He had thought things would go all right with Lennart and Laila, but he could hardly bear to look at them either. Behind every face was another face, behind every sentence uttered, dark motives lurked. Yes, he had paranoid delusions. He’d even got a piece of paper to prove it.
The girl was waiting for him in the dimly lit room. Straight back, arms down by her sides and a drill in her hand. Jerry sat down on the bed and opened the guitar case.
‘Hi there, sis. Did you miss me?’
The girl didn’t reply. Jerry relaxed slightly. He played E-major seventh, and the girl picked up the note. A few more chords, an improvised sequence and the girl sang a melody. Jerry breathed a long sigh. The girl was standing in the darkness over by the CD player; he could only see her outline.
‘Bloody hell, sis,’ he said. ‘At least I can hang out with you.’
He put down the guitar and went over to the window to remove the blanket. When he lifted one corner, the girl whacked him on the thigh with the drill and screamed, ‘No!’
Jerry jerked backwards and let go of the blanket, which fell down. ‘What the fuck are you doing—’
He broke off. The girl was curled up in the corner, holding the drill in front of her as she peered up at the window. Jerry crouched down in front of her. ‘What’s the matter? You’re crazier than me, for fuck’s sake. Are you scared of the window?’
‘Big,’ said the girl. ‘Dangerous outside. Want to eat up Little One.’
‘What are you talking about? Are there big people out there who want to eat you up?’
‘Yes.’
Jerry nodded. ‘You’re not wrong there, sis. That’s the right attitude to have. I only wish I’d realised it earlier. So why do they want to do that, then?’
‘Hate in head.’
Jerry had an idea of what was going on here. He had been wondering how the hell Lennart and Laila were going to keep the girl indoors. Evidently they had come up with a solution.
‘So what about me, then? Why don’t I want to eat you up?’
‘Love in head.’
‘Love in…Are you saying I love you, kind of?’
The girl didn’t reply. A shadow flickered across the wall as, out in the garden, Lennart or Laila walked past. The girl jumped and curled up in a tighter ball. When Jerry hung the blanket up again, she relaxed and said, ‘Play. Sing.’
They jammed for a while. Jerry played songs in a minor key, and the girl made them even gloomier with her clear, flowing loops, transforming them from simple melodies into a lament on the whole of life and the human race. For a good fifteen minutes Jerry didn’t feel afraid at all. He could have gone on much longer if his increasingly robust efforts hadn’t broken one of the guitar strings.
His back was covered in sweat as he put the guitar back in its case and clicked the lock shut. ‘You know what?’ he said, without looking at Theres. ‘However fucking crazy you might be, you’re right. If I love anyone, it’s you.’
After that, Jerry’s visits became more regular again. It grieved Laila that he couldn’t really be bothered with her and Lennart anymore, but she took solace from the fact that spending time with the girl seemed to be doing Jerry good. The dark cloud that hung over him had always dispersed a little when he came up from the cellar.
Laila carried on teaching the girl. In time she was able to read words in both upper and lower case letters that had nothing to do with a song, although she did read with a strange, musical diction. It was time for the next step: teaching the girl to make the letters herself. To write.
This turned out to be an even harder labyrinth to negotiate. The girl could hold a pen, but flatly refused to draw the letters Laila wrote on a pad. When Laila tried to guide her hand, the girl growled or yelled out some swear word she had presumably picked up from Jerry. It might have been funny hearing her scream ‘Bloody hell!’ or ‘For fuck’s sake!’ if the words hadn’t been spewed out with such aggression, frequently accompanied by a blow as Laila tried to hold onto her hand. Laila abandoned that approach.
She tried drawing the letters with crayons, she tried letting the girl scratch them with the nails she had grown so fond of lately, but nothing worked. The nineteen steps leading down to the cellar seemed more and more depressing as the winter drew in, and her leg started to ache even more. She was not getting through; and Lennart didn’t have any helpful suggestions.
The girl’s new interest was hammering nails into pieces of wood. She would keep at it until there was no more space, and the piece of wood split from the amount of nails crammed into it. As Christmas approached Lennart taught her to crack nuts with the hammer: that too became an obsession.
And that was literally how the problem was cracked as well. One afternoon Laila was watching the girl as she sat on the floor, filled with grim concentration, smashing nuts on a chopping board. The arm moving up and down, the carefully judged blow, the monotonous motion. Tock, tock, tock.
An idea came into her head, and after all there was nothing to lose. In the store cupboard Laila found Lennart’s old portable Halda typewriter. She carried it in and placed it on the floor next to the chopping board. The girl looked at it for a while from different angles, then raised the hammer to deliver a blow, but Laila managed to snatch the machine away just in time.
Although it would turn out to be a good idea, it took almost a year before Laila’s efforts really came to fruition. Every key was a new obstacle to surmount, but by the time the girl was ten years old she had learned every sound that corresponded with a symbol that corresponded with a key, and she began to put together simple words.
Jerry’s visits tended to cause backsliding. The girl withdrew and didn’t want to do the exercises, but Laila was patient and didn’t mention it to Lennart. If the girl could bring Jerry a bit of happiness, it was worth the delay.
Besides which, Laila didn’t really know why she was doing this. What pleasure would the girl gain from being able to read and write? Would she ever participate in a society that required these skills?
Sometimes Laila grew tired of the tough, tedious, drawn-out project. Then she would put on a record, Bibi Johns or Mona Wessman, and sing for a while with the girl. It felt like a kind of togetherness, and gave her new strength to carry on.
Jerry didn’t like leaving his apartment, and conducted most of his contact with the outside world via the internet. His pension didn’t cover much more than food, rent and his internet connection. In the autumn of 2001 he came across something called Partypoker. Jerry was a moderately good player and began betting quite carefully, winning as much as he lost.
Six months later the number of players had increased significantly thanks to a couple of spots on cable TV and some articles in the press. New players started up who weren’t particularly good, and he found he could bring home a small profit. Not huge sums, but welcome additions to his meagre allocation from the state.
One evening he got into a game with a guy who called himself Bizznizz, and who played like an idiot. Jerry thought it had to be a ploy to drive up the stakes. However, he carried on. After a couple of hours it seemed to him to be perfectly obvious when the guy was bluffing and when he was seriously betting on his hand. By that stage Jerry had won just over a hundred dollars.
In the next hand Jerry held three tens, refusing to drop out as the stakes were pushed up, and in the end only he and Bizznizz were left in, with the pot at nine hundred dollars. Jerry thought the guy might be bluffing on a putative full house, but at the same time he realised with a sinking feeling that this could well be the hand Bizznizz had been laying the groundwork for. And yet Jerry still couldn’t drop out.
He raised with his last th
ree hundred; despair clutched his heart with its cold fingers as Bizznizz declined to fold, and went for the showdown. It was three weeks until pension day, and Jerry would have nothing left to live on.
He didn’t understand what he was seeing when the other guy’s cards came up. There was a moment of disconnect as his eyes flicked between the open cards and Bizznizz’s cards. It looked as if the idiot only had a pair of threes!
Only when the money came rattling into his account did he realise it wasn’t a misunderstanding. The idiot had sat there bluffing with a low pair, and then been stupid enough to go for the showdown! Jerry had won something in the region of five thousand kronor from Mr Bizznizz.
He didn’t play any more that night. The game had given him an important insight. There were any number of total idiots out there playing on the net. Idiots with money. All he had to do was find them, and make sure he ended up at the same table.
Jerry began by methodically scanning every website, blog and discussion forum that had anything to do with poker. He gathered information. After a couple of weeks he had a fairly clear picture of the kind of people who played on the net, at least in Sweden. It was true that most used different aliases and usernames when they played and when they were in a discussion, but some were so attached to their names that they couldn’t help using them even when money was involved.
Jerry’s stroke of genius was to start secretly reading forums for people who were likely to have a knack for earning money quickly and easily. Stockbrokers and the IT crowd. He even looked at some of the forums on Dagens Industri, the Swedish equivalent of the Financial Times. A discussion page for property owners in Danderyd proved useless; he combed through page after page on renovations and cheap tradesmen without finding what he was looking for, but a page for owners of Abyssinians—a fashionable and expensive breed of cat—turned out to be pure gold.
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