Me on the Floor, Bleeding

by Jenny J

I came to think of my English hairdresser, Rob, back home in Stockholm, and the warnings he had given me the previous autumn. I had been in Norrköping over the summer and in a sudden panic about my hair had gone to a hairdresser’s in some back street. I should have known better because the salon was dusty and the posters on the wall were from the eighties and there were adverts for some hair gel I had never even heard of.

  I walked out of there with a crew cut. A frigging crew cut!

  Not that anyone has ever looked good in that haircut, but me, I looked terrible. Rob had to make an emergency intervention as soon as I was back in Stockholm and I have never forgotten his words:

  “This is what happens when you go out of town.”

  That’s what he had said, and he had wagged a finger at me.

  That’s what I thought of as I stood there with Justin’s hand inside my knickers.

  This is what happens when you go out of town.

  His fingers were cold and I felt that he felt that I was warm and moist, but I hoped he understood that was from his earlier efforts, and he groaned in a restrained way in my ear, which also became warm and moist, and then everything became just all too much and I was forced to drag his hand out of my trousers and pull myself away.

  Quickly I backed off a few metres and shook myself like a dog shaking off water. He stared at me blearily, as if he had hardly seen me before.

  But I have to admit it. Had it not been for cold hands and had it not been for restrained groaning or the fact that Mum could easily be dead there and then, well, I might have shagged him that night.

  But as it happened, I didn’t.

  We took a taxi home. Just like that. “We took a taxi”. That was something I could tell someone I wanted to impress. Except I couldn’t think who that might be. Enzo saw right through me; he would immediately notice the poorly disguised satisfaction behind the mock indifferent expression.

  We sat a long way apart from each other on the back seat, each leaning against an ice-cold window while that unlikely white fluffy stuff fell from the trees or perhaps the sky. I didn’t want to believe it was snow.

  ‘Listen,’ said Justin, staring dreamily out of the window. ‘Why don’t you just email her? Using the new address?’

  He turned to face me, his mouth hanging open slightly, and at the same moment the car stopped outside his house.

  Yes, why didn’t I do that? I hadn’t even thought of it.

  I got out. Before I shut the door I heard Justin sniff and pay the one hundred and sixty-two kronor that I absolutely did not have.

  The birds were twittering. I don’t know why but to me they sounded desperate. Do birds really twitter at night like that or was it a sign that the world was off balance and about to go under?

  Justin climbed out. We both watched as the taxi drove off and then we didn’t know where to look. He stared up at the sky and ran his hand through his hair and I gazed at the asphalt and kind of like fell against him.

  It was a last pointless hug with heavy arms that wouldn’t reach all the way round.

  I sat at the computer for a long time that night, the wine pulsating through my bloodstream. My fingers were placed in the correct positions on the keyboard, precisely as my journalist dad had taught me – forced me – to do. Apart from my thumb, of course, which I held rigidly upright. My thumb in its filthy bandage.

  I waited for inspiration but none came. Compulsively I ate one rice cake after the other and they tasted of salt and dusty air. I put my fingers back in the correct position again, trying to concentrate. The white screen flickered. The kitchen clock ticked and at regular intervals the tap dripped a fat drop of water that shattered as it hit the stainless steel of the sink. For a moment the sounds became synchronised but then the clock overtook and they were out of step again. After a short while they found their matching rhythm. It was somehow hypnotic. It wasn’t possible for the sounds to get louder but it felt as if they did. I stared unseeing at the screen.

  I wanted to be honest in my email but didn’t know if I could. It was exhausting. My hands lay heavily on the keyboard and my head felt heavy. Finally I was so tired that I simply let a flow of words run from my fingers. The email filled just over a page and then I spent half an hour sifting out everything that was irrelevant or untrue. Eventually only the core remained:

  Hello Jana

  I wonder where you are. Why you can’t see me at the weekend.

  Why you can’t see me now.

  Please phone me.

  Maja x

  I read the email several times, reading the words one by one. I held the cursor over the Send button ready to click, held it there a long time.

  The clock ticked.

  The tap dripped.

  But I did nothing. I didn’t click. I didn’t send.

  I couldn’t.

  Instead I saved the email in Drafts and went into Dad’s inbox and then his Facebook page. I read a new pathetic message from love-sick Denise and regretted it the minute I did so. Not because I had a guilty conscience but because it was so revolting. She had sent it yesterday, before the party. It was insanely expectant and cluttered with jaunty, endless exclamation marks.

  Great that you can come! You really know how to make a girl happy! Sooo cool!!!

  I considered deleting it but took a deep breath, summoned up my common sense, and marked it as unread.

  I went back to Dad’s emails and sent the following fairly abrupt email:

  Hello Jana

  I received your email about not being able to have Maja at the weekend. I assume you have your reasons even though I really think you could have explained why. Contact me as soon as possible so that we can discuss your future contact with Maja, preferably by email because it will be very hard to reach me by phone during the coming week.

  Regards, Jonas

  I sent the email without any hesitation. Then I deleted it from the Sent file and emptied the recycle bin. Totally exhausted, I fell into bed.

  SUNDAY, 15 APRIL

  A Good and Honourable Initiative

  Suffering from the worst hangover I had ever had, I opened the top drawer in the kitchen – where I always thought the cutlery belonged, because Dad and every other normal person keeps their cutlery in the top drawer – only to find Mum’s dark pink diary among the hundreds of pens that were rolling around in there. It wasn’t meant to be in there. That drawer was exclusively for pens.

  The diary was absolutely her most important possession, more important than her purse, her mobile, and her keys. She always carried it with her. I couldn’t understand how she had left the house without it.

  Something was wrong. Terribly wrong.

  This was the first time since realising she had gone that I felt more concerned about her than about myself. A prickly wave of guilt washed over me. It was about her now, not me. Something must have happened to her. But what? What?

  I hardly dared look at it, even less pick it up.

  I gently closed the drawer, taking instead a spoon from the full cutlery rack on the draining board, and sat down to eat my cereal. My eyes wandered repeatedly towards the drawer and I ate so slowly that the cereal went soggy in the milk, the milk that was now three days past its sell-by date.

  Mum wrote in her diary every evening and looked in it countless times during the day. I had given it to her as a Christmas present. It had become something of a tradition, me giving her a diary every year. It was the best present she could possibly have, she used to say, and she was always effusive in her thanks. I was painfully aware that it was also the only present she got apart from the box filled with salami, bars of marzipan, and hand-knitted socks that her parents sent from Germany each Christmas. Between ourselves, Mum always called it “the diary you gave me”, never just “the diary.” She would say: “Now I’m going to sit down and write in the diary you gave me”, as if there was a shedload of other diaries to choose from. Once I asked her what she wrote in it. All she said was:

  “Everything.”


  “Everything?” I had asked.

  “Everything that is important.”

  I got up quickly, walked the few steps over to the draining board, and touched the handle of the top drawer. My fingers ran over the cool, smooth metal.

  Looking in that diary would really be overstepping the mark. I felt nervous even at the thought of it. It was so incredibly private, so forbidden, so wrong. I walked back to the table and sat down heavily.

  Yet there was, of course, something particularly tempting about it, about finding out what was written in that book. Perhaps it contained what she had been thinking about. What she had been feeling. Where she was.

  It was strange, really, that without any pangs of conscience I could read Dad’s emails, almost feeling like I had a right to do it, but I had such respect for Mum’s private notes. It was as if her integrity had infected the diary and made it inaccessible.

  There was an unexpected ring on the door, an intrusive, grating sound. I don’t remember ever hearing it before. We didn’t get too many visitors. It made me drop the spoon into the bowl and the milk sprayed onto my nightdress. I was paralysed. I looked at the drops that hadn’t been absorbed by the silk fabric, but lay like a string of pearls across my chest.

  Perhaps it was the police? Perhaps it was the police who had something to tell me.

  It rang again.

  I stopped breathing and went freezing cold and then burning hot within the space of a few seconds. There is only one thing the police inform people on the doorstep. In my mind I saw images, silent images: raising my hand to my mouth, staring into their sympathetic eyes, collapsing in a helpless heap on the floor, being lifted up by strong police arms.

  I regained my ability to move, stood up, and ran through the kitchen and into the hall to open up, but stopped myself and stood motionless in front of the door for a few seconds.

  Mum, let it be you.

  Let it not be the police.

  I opened.

  It wasn’t the police. And it wasn’t Mum.

  It was stupid of me to think it would be the police because I wasn’t living in an American TV series. And it was stupid of me to think it was Mum, because she would never have rung her own front door. But that’s what I’m like. Stupid.

  It was Justin. It was him standing there with his shiny copper-coloured stubble and his eyes full of self-reproach.

  ‘Hello’ he said.

  He sounded worn out.

  ‘Hello,’ I said, unconsciously putting my bandaged left arm over my heart.

  ‘Well, here I am,’ he said, and he grinned and flung out his hands in the best sing-along style.

  ‘Yes, so you are …’ I replied hesitantly.

  ‘I thought of something,’ he said, looking down at his shoes.

  I stood in silence.

  ‘Well …’

  A cold wind took hold of my hair and blew it to one side, revealing to him my entire unmade-up face, and that made me feel more naked than my naked body underneath my nightdress.

  ‘Well,’ he tried again.

  I let go of the handle. It sprung back with a metallic sound.

  ‘I was thinking, perhaps I … perhaps I didn’t take it too seriously, you know, what you told me yesterday. About your mum. I don’t know, maybe I was … She hasn’t come home?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I thought … I thought perhaps you ought to phone the police after all.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I got a bit of a … guilty conscience.’

  I wondered if that was really true. Or was it because of his cold hand between my legs?

  He stepped into the hall and because I didn’t move he walked right into me and he opened his mouth and I opened my mouth and we kissed, standing there, and he kissed me and he kissed me and he was so tall I had to stand on tiptoe, and he fumbled about behind him and pushed the door closed with a slam and then he walked forwards, kind of driving me back, and I stumbled backwards through the hall, diagonally through the sitting room, and towards the stairs with him glued to me. Well, I might have steered a little.

  I felt his body, which was soft and hard at the same time, and we went all the way up staircase with me first, walking backwards, which was good because it made him the right height, and he kissed me and he kissed me and he kissed me. His tongue was warm and he tasted of cigarettes and coffee and salt. I must have tasted sweet from the milk and that went well together, didn’t it, sweet and salt, in some kind of contradictory way?

  He was wearing his shoes and his pale blue jacket with the checked lining and when we reached the landing he laid me down on the floor, or was it me who pulled him over me? It wasn’t entirely clear. Then he lay on top of me and my shoulder blades were pressed against the wooden flooring by his weight. I held my left hand with the thumb above my head to protect it. His hands glided over the grey silk, glided under it, glided. They were rough and his fingertips had blisters and I wondered whether he played the guitar. I felt him through his clothes. He was hard, and I undid the buttons in his jeans, those washed-out, faded pink ones, because they seemed so tight. I undid the buttons with one hand, I did, as if I had never done anything else, and he pulled down his underpants and I helped him, and I felt him in my hand and wasn’t he smoother than silk? I touched him even though I didn’t know what you were supposed to do, stroked him like you stroke a fragile little animal, and I wanted him even though I didn’t know what you did because although I wasn’t exactly a virgin I wasn’t that bloody far from it. He pulled up my nightdress to my breasts and he worked off my knickers and I helped and he kicked off his shoes and they bumped down a couple of stairs. Then he yanked a condom out of his pocket and that surprised me because did he always go around with a condom in his pocket or had he planned all of this? Was he turned on by abandoned young women or was he turned on by me me me or what was this all about? And he asked:

  ‘Do you want to?’ And I nodded silently because I couldn’t think what else to do.

  He knelt up and rolled that pale, pale yellow condom onto his penis and as for the condom, well, it really was a good and honourable initiative really really really but it certainly was a little bit weird that he walked around with it in his pocket and, as I said, I’d had sex before, maybe once or twice, well sure, a few times, but not with such good and honourable people.

  His cock was hard and stood straight up and I forgot what I was doing and pulled my hand through my hair, trying to get a good view, but it was my left hand and the bandage clip fastened in a strand of hair and it was so excruciatingly painful that I couldn’t get a good view. No, there was no such view to be had because he was on top of me with his warm weight and his heavy warm body and I thought:

  help

  what’s happening?

  He moved and he moved, hard and purposefully, and I wanted him to be inside me – I did want that didn’t I? So I said it:

  ‘I want you inside me, I want you inside me, I want you inside me.’

  And he did, he wanted to, there was no discussion about whether he wanted to, and it went a bit fast and it was as if someone had stuck a knife between my legs. Nothing but a warm, sharp knife and I screwed up my eyes as if that would make it hurt less.

  Even so, I wanted him to continue. Why did I want that?

  Somewhere I was probably thinking that it was taking away everything else: all the gnawing anxiety, all the embarrassing loneliness, all the pointless questions without answers. So he continued and I lay there with my hand above my head and it was a knife and it was a knife and it was a knife.

  And then suddenly it wasn’t a knife any more.

  The sharpness disappeared and it was as if a warm wave drifted through my body. I opened my eyes with the surprise of it.

  It got a bit nicer.

  The only thing I could feel was his body inside mine, in me.

  And it got a bit nicer.

  The only thing I saw were his closed eyes, his thin, pale eyelids hiding that ice-b
lue gaze.

  And it got a bit nicer.

  The only thing I could hear was his heavy breathing and then mine.

  It got a bit nicer and then it got even nicer and finally it felt so amazingly incredibly nice that I forgot everything to do with mums and dads, mysterious disappearances and sawn-off body parts, and I shut my eyes tight and then I looked up in astonishment and then he pulled himself out, backed away and met my eyes. And asked if I had a bed. Of course I did, and that’s where we ended up.

  How I don’t remember; I don’t recall the move itself, but I could have beamed us there, I could have teleported us, I could have developed every possibly supernatural ability to get us there, because everything else was so superbly amazing right there and right then that being able to do that wouldn’t have surprised me in the slightest.

  Afterwards, when we were lying with our heads close, close together, I plaited his bangs with mine. Both of us with the same haircut. And surely that didn’t matter? Because it looked so beautiful together, his copper-red and my black, that we simply had to belong to each other somehow.

  He smiled and lit a cigarette, and blew out the smoke between the black bars of my bed, and I released the strands of hair and they unravelled and were free again. I looked at the glowing end of the cigarette and the ash it had created, and I looked at his fair eyelashes and freckly nose and I couldn’t remember when I had last been so close to anyone, and it was like a film except that he was quite red in the face and they hardly ever are, in films.

  ‘I feel almost better now,’ he said and sniffed, contradicting himself. I looked at his black-rimmed fingernails and thought pathetically that even life had a black edge like that, so it suited really well.

  ‘Weren’t you going to get up early this morning?’

  I tried to make my voice sound jokey but I have to admit it sounded more like a reproach.

  ‘You might say it all went wrong from the kick-off,’ he said, and either he snorted or chuckled, I couldn’t decide which.

  ‘What kick-off?’ I asked.

  He pointed at me and said: