Me on the Floor, Bleeding

by Jenny J

  ‘What does pro memoria mean?’ I asked, after a moment’s silence.

  My curiosity won over my pride. Verbally he was my superior. That was both uplifting and depressing at the same time: uplifting to meet someone who also had words and could use them, like me, and depressing because words are my ace in the pack. My ace. Now I didn’t even have that. He had stolen it from me.

  ‘Hmm, pro memoria. It means a suggestion, but fairly strongly worded, if I have understood it correctly.’

  I nodded thoughtfully and then blurted out:

  ‘The milk is two days past its sell-by date. Mum never has old milk in the fridge.’

  Justin laughed a dry, dismissive ‘Please’.

  But I didn’t. I didn’t laugh. He didn’t know how important milk was for her. Or rather, he didn’t know how important coffee was. He hadn’t seen her whisk the milk for her cappuccino in that precise and frenzied way that was so typical of her. That’s what it was like. She always did the simplest jobs, like brushing her teeth, cutting her nails, washing up a glass, with a bewildering intensity. They weren’t things she did in passing, while talking, laughing, or watching TV. They were well thought-out, precise movements that demanded her full concentration.

  ‘You don’t know her,’ I snapped, because I wanted to get rid of the lump that had just formed in my throat.

  ‘No, of course I don’t,’ he said honestly.

  ‘You don’t know what she’s like.’

  ‘No, I don’t. What is she like?’

  “What is she like?” Did he really want to know? Did he? And if so, how would I be able to explain? How could you explain Mum to someone who didn’t know her, who didn’t know what she was like?

  How did you explain her inability to be … normal? How did you explain the long sessions in the shower, the excessive planning and her intense look, her eyes that rarely blinked, like a bird? How did you explain that she was totally obsessed with relationships and social interaction on a theoretical level but could just about manage to answer a simple harmless question about how she was, or say thank you when she was given something? And at the same time: her fantastically dry sense of humour and her ability to remember everything I said, which made me feel really important. If I ever mentioned something I was interested in – a band, a film, a book – then you could bet that the CD, DVD or book would arrive in the post a week or so later. But no little note floated out, however long you shook the jiffy bag. No “Lots of love from Mum” or even “Jana.” Never any comments.

  How did you explain Mum to someone who didn’t know?

  ‘She’s … she’s special.’

  ‘Okay,’ said Justin gently, sniffing back the snot with a grunt.

  ‘She is my mum,’ I said, and stared at him defiantly, as if he had said something different.

  He met my gaze and we sat like that for a long time, our eyes locked together. Finally he looked away and through the window where the dusk was a deep lilac blue, and that was lucky because a second later a tear ran down my chin. I wiped it away in irritation. I can’t do this any more, I thought. I can’t be here. I’ve had enough of myself and my pathetic excuse of a life. And as if he had read my thoughts he said: ‘Come on. Let’s go for a drive.’

  This is What Happens When You Go Out of Town

  We climbed into the old cherry-red Volvo PV and headed towards town. We randomly drove around the shopping centre and down the avenues lined with linden trees. The street lamps had begun to come on, casting circles of yellowish-white light. The radio was playing quietly. It was so nice sitting like that, next to each other, in silence. Justin was wearing a green woollen hat that was far too big and kept slipping down over his forehead. He had to keep pushing it back up.

  Finally he parked on a small street called Västgötagatan, on quite a steep slope. It went noticeably quiet when he switched off the engine. He nodded in the direction of a run-down building with a dirty yellow façade. In front was an outdoor café surrounded by dark green screens. Judging from the sign it was called The World Bar.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ he asked.

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  Justin went first and I followed. There were only a few people inside the place and I guessed we were out early for a Saturday. On the tables stood onion-shaped oil lamps, their long, white wicks suspended in light green oil. Further in was a smaller room with framed film posters from the fifties and sixties on the walls, and a jukebox in the corner. Arranged around the walls were fold-down cinema seats in red velvet. The room was empty.

  Justin raised his eyebrows at me and I nodded back. He sat down in one of the cinema seats and lit the oil lamp. I sat down opposite him, surreptitiously eased a painkiller out of my pocket and looked around, wide-eyed. I had actually never been to a bar on my own. Occasionally Dad and I had watched a football match in a dingy pub called Diset in Örnsberg, and another time in some shabby restaurant on Ringvägen, but that was it. When my eyes met Justin’s he smiled and I became aware how very far from worldly wise I seemed. I corrected my facial expression immediately: I raised my eyebrows and lowered my eyelids to look bored.

  Justin blew his nose in a metre-long strip of toilet paper that he pulled out from his pocket like a magician, and actually it wasn’t very pleasant, that snotty piece of paper, but I made allowances. Oh, how I made allowances. I asked if he was getting a cold or getting rid of one. He insisted he was getting rid of it but his glittering, feverish eyes told a different story.

  Then suddenly he fixed those glittering eyes on me and said:

  ‘How old are you really?’

  ‘What?’ I answered, annoyed. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘I asked first.’

  I didn’t dare answer. I just stared defiantly back at him. He tossed his bangs back.

  ‘Okay, okay. I’ll be twenty this summer, in July.’

  ‘Oh, well, you’re a little bit older than me, then,’ I said, pretending to look for something in my pocket to win time. He was younger than I thought and that made me inexplicably glad.

  ‘And that is …?’

  He blew his nose again and stared at me steadily from behind the edge of the snotty paper. I sighed to show how exceptionally uninteresting and idiotic the question was.

  ‘Stop rolling your eyes. Can’t you just tell me how old you are? How hard can that be?’

  ‘God, the nagging! I’m eighteen, okay?’

  ‘Okay. Eighteen. Why are you so pissed off?’

  I made my voice a little less hard as I said:

  ‘People always think I’m bloody sixteen. It’s so irritating.’

  ‘Okay, so now I know.’

  With the over-exaggerated patience of a teacher he said:

  ‘With that information I can actually ask my next question: Would you like some wine?’

  I felt my cheeks go red.

  ‘Yeah! Good idea! I can go,’ I said eagerly, to convince him I had reached drinking age, but I regretted it the minute I stood up. Because what would I do if they asked for ID?

  I walked slowly towards the bar. A girl with a slight sun tan and light red curly hair, and who didn’t look any older than me, was busy looking through some receipts behind the counter. I waited patiently until she had finished. A beam of light was pointing to the very spot where she was standing and made her sun-kissed skin shine like bronze, and I thought she was so beautiful that she ought to stand there all evening. She looked up at me and smiled and then she stared at the blood on my sleeve, and my dirty bandage, and the skull-patterned plaster on my forehead and, all credit to her, she said nothing. I ordered my very first bottle of wine and by some kind of miracle she didn’t ask for ID. That made me want to whisper ‘thank you’ into those light red curls, and I must have stared for too long because she looked away.

  She looked at the wine bottle and then the price list, but the wine was new and she had to go into the kitchen to ask the price. No one knew so she guessed at a hundred kronor and even I, with my extremely limited
knowledge of wine, spirits, bars – well, the whole world, while I’m at it – knew that was ridiculously too little. But I said nothing. Well, I’ve never been known for my high moral standing. I simply smiled at her until it suddenly struck me that I had no money, not a single krona, because my bag lay completely unsafe in Mum’s unlocked house. I managed to stutter an inarticulate ‘excuse me’ and ran back to Justin, who came to my rescue with a crumpled hundred kronor note. When I handed it to the red-haired girl and her suntanned skin turned pink, the triumph whirled around inside me, because the wine was a find and Justin was a find – if only I could manage to grab a little piece of him for me.

  I poured the wine, acting as if it was something I did on a regular basis. My earrings dangled hypnotically, or so it seemed to me anyway, judging from the reflection of my face in the colourful, framed poster on the wall, and we drank wine and talked about music and old school synth, and I pretended I knew what I was talking about. I was good at faking it, always have been. Justin didn’t like that type of music, he said it felt fascist. I insisted that I liked it because I think a few differences of opinion can be small glowing embers which can turn into sparks and become a bloody great forest fire, and actually I like black shiny boots and Front 242. At least Tragedy for You. While he talked animatedly and splashed wine on his own top I noticed a birth mark on his cheek. It made him look particularly vulnerable and I didn’t understand why, but when he smiled and the corners of his mouth turned up, I saw that the mark brought out something female in him, if not to say girlish, and I wondered if it was always female characteristics that gave the impression of vulnerability. How sad, in that case. I took a few gulps to drown any possible sadness, and Justin drank with me.

  Well, we drank and drank and drank the dark red wine with its aroma of earth and iron, and we ate absolutely nothing at all apart from a few handfuls of greasy peanuts, even though the hunger was drilling a massive hole in my stomach. I asked him if he was cold because he had kept his hat on and he said he was, even though the place was as warm as Italy.

  ‘Back soon,’ he said, standing up suddenly and heading off to the toilets. He walked slowly, with one hand clutching the piece of disgusting paper. I shut my eyes and thought of him, and how naked he was under his clothes. Small shocks rippled through my body, right the way down between my legs.

  I opened my eyes and stared at the table, and noticed something I hadn’t seen earlier. Under the glass table top were masses of little pieces of paper: flyers, receipts, concert tickets, shopping lists, poems – even photos. It was totally amazing! I found an entry from a lonely hearts column that I memorised:

  Hi, I’m a guy of 22 who comes from Skärblacka. My hobbies are partying and doing stuff. Looking for a girl who likes parties as well as doing stuff.

  I giggled. It was good to be specific. Perhaps he had met far too many girls who liked partying but not doing stuff. And perhaps some who liked doing stuff but not partying? I wrote a note of my own that I pushed under the glass top.

  If you wanna make an apple pie from scratch you have to start by making the universe.

  Outside it was getting dark unnaturally fast, as if God had turned a dimmer switch, and when I looked up again two of the tables were full of people in their twenties. One of them must have put some money in the jukebox because it was playing something mellow by the Beatles. The noise coming from the main room was all at once significantly louder and it was so odd because a couple of hours seemed to have passed and I hadn’t noticed.

  They were lovely; it was moving to see how lovely they looked. They were wearing make-up, they had put a lot of thought into what they were wearing, and they smelled good. That made me wonder what I was doing there, because I was bloody and weird and far too young and I really didn’t fit in, but on the other hand I never had.

  I don’t know if it was the wine – I tried to convince myself it was – but when Justin came back I had an overwhelming need to have his tongue in my mouth. Maybe it was me wanting to belong, to fit in, to be a part of it all. He sat down beside me on a wobbly seat, so close that his thigh was touching mine. We sat like that for a moment and I was painfully aware of his body. Every millimetre of my skin was super-sensitive.

  Suddenly he took hold of my hand and said:

  ‘Listen, this is the world’s best song. We’ve got to dance to it.’

  I instantly heard what it was, so I stood up, even though there was no dance floor, and he pulled me close to him.

  Slowly fading blue

  the eastern hollows catch

  the dying sun

  Night time follows

  Silent and black

  Mirror pool mirrors

  the lonely place

  where I meet you

  See your head

  in the fading light

  and through the dark

  your eyes shine bright

  His hand crept under my scarf, which made it almost impossible to breathe, and perhaps he had read my thoughts because in the middle of all the dancing he bent his head and kissed me.

  It wasn’t fantastic, not at first. His tongue darted about too fast, too hard, but it calmed down after a while. His hand found its way under my blouse and it was madness because the tables were crowded and no one except us was dancing. I sincerely hoped he had washed his snotty hands and I took that lovely hand away, but it was as if it had left an imprint on my waist. Not of snot, I don’t mean that. No, more like I could still feel the soft touch of his fingertips for a long time afterwards.

  We kissed and kissed and kissed and I was amazed that my body could feel the way it did. There was something whirling and pulsating: tiny, tiny bubbles struggling upwards. Again and again. But then he wrenched his mouth away from mine and took a deep breath as if he had just surfaced from the bottom of a lake.

  ‘Help,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to breathe.’

  His nose was so blocked that it was hard for him to breathe in and it spoiled the feeling a bit, but we carried on dancing and he leaned his forehead against mine and it was beautiful because he felt so close. That was until he bumped against my plaster with the skulls on and I shrieked because it burned like fire.

  And burn like fire

  Burn like fire in Cairo

  The track came to an end and everything seemed greyer but he took my hand in his – the left one first but I directed him to the right one – and his hand was warmer than mine. He must have had a temperature. We sat down and finished what was left in the bottle and he wiped his nose with the back of his hand. I turned towards him and kissed him on his cheek, right on the birthmark. I put my nose in his ear and breathed in. I felt a kind of indescribable thrill at the very centre of my fuzzy brain and I thought it must be love, and I hoped so very much that he felt the same.

  He wasn’t well, I knew that, but even so it was unbearably painful when he said we ought to go home. I felt warm after the dancing and the kisses, and my shirt was damp from sweat. The sweat cooled in an instant. Humiliation ran in cold, salty tracks down my backbone to my knickers.

  ‘I’ve got to get up early,’ he said, without a trace of regret in his voice.

  Hadn’t he felt it?

  ‘I understand,’ I said, as neutrally as I could, but that was a lie because I understood absolutely nothing. I would never have chosen to go.

  Then a track by Blondie came on – Blondie once again–and Justin nodded in appreciation towards the jukebox as if the machine had thought of it by itself, and drained his glass. I recalled Debbie’s killer heels and how my feet had moved out of their way in his sitting room almost exactly twenty-four hours ago.

  Justin pulled down his hat and put on his jacket and I stood helplessly looking on and then we went out into the April air that was sharp and the light that was blue-white and cold. Limp from the wine I hung un-independently round his neck. Like a heavy pendant I dangled there, my hands tightly clasped around his neck, my thumb sticking straight up in the air like a misleadingly positive si
gn. It hurt like hell. Something started falling from a tree close by, something fluffy and white, like small tufts of cotton wool. It couldn’t be snow, surely?

  I turned my face up to his and kissed him and he kissed me with a tongue warm from wine and maybe from fever and he pushed his groin against mine, worked his hands under my shirt, under my bra, and felt my breasts. I liked his hands and I loved the way he seemed to find it so difficult to stop touching me. I loved that I had that effect.

  He looked a bit stupid in that hat because you couldn’t see any hair, but it didn’t matter. He said:

  ‘Can’t you sleep with me? I’d only want to hold you.’

  And the remark was so ridiculously classic that I laughed. Didn’t he understand that? Not that anyone had ever said that to me before but hadn’t he heard the song, seen the film, read the book?

  ‘Do you even believe that yourself?’ I said, and I thought that perhaps now was the time to lower my eyes and appear to be attractively flirtatious. But I’ve never been one for that kind of thing.

  A green car drove past, pumping techno through the open windows.

  He kissed me again and I got goosebumps all over my arms and my nipples stiffened and he felt that because that’s where he had his hands, there and everywhere else.

  ‘I only want to hold you,’ he said again and I considered the idea for a while, I really did, but then he wriggled his hand inside my jodhpurs and that in itself was an achievement because they were so extraordinarily tight, and then into my knickers.

  It was extreme.

  It was shocking.

  It was like making five chess moves one after the other without waiting for your partner to move. It was too much.

  I stiffened and loosened the cramp-like hold I had on his neck.

  Was this what they did in the country?

  Was this the way it was?