by Jenny J
Just as I was walking across the square, past the little Italian café in Örnsberg, my phone rang. I stopped and looked at the display. It was a mobile number I didn’t recognise. My heart did a double beat and I went hot.
Mum. It could be Mum. Or … Justin, maybe.
I answered, but it wasn’t Mum and it wasn’t Justin. It was a hoarse male voice that said:
‘Um, hello,’ in a broad Östgöta dialect.
‘Hello,’ I said, and sat down on one of the café’s bright orange plastic chairs. I couldn’t hide the disappointment in my voice. I put down my carrier bag containing the clippers and the hair colour and felt the afternoon sun on my face. I looked around at the café tables: half of them were full.
‘It’s Thomas, Thomas Hansson.’
Thomas Hansson. That meant nothing to me. It sounded like a made-up name. A salesman, perhaps. I considered ringing off, just like that, without listening to what he wanted. I prodded the bandage on my left thumb. It had gone a beigy-brown and did in fact look pretty disgusting. I pulled away a thread that was hanging loose.
‘Oh yeah,’ I replied wearily.
‘You phoned me,’ he went on. ‘Last Saturday.’
‘What? I don’t think … it must …’
Thomas?
Thomas on the photo, with the demented smile! It felt like I’d been given a shot of adrenalin straight in the heart. It was hard to sit still. The words poured out of me.
‘Yes! Yes, of course I phoned you. You … you don’t know me but … I’m Jana Müller’s daughter and as far as I understand it you two know each other? You and Jana?’
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose we do.’
He sounded unsure.
‘Can I ask how you know each other?’
‘Yes, but … why don’t you ask her yourself?’
Did he sound annoyed? Or just curious? I couldn’t decide.
‘Well, it’s just that…’
I scraped the paving stones with my foot and looked towards Hägerstensvägen where silver-coloured cars were moving past in a slow caravan. Shit, what was I going to say? I might as well get straight to the point.
‘It’s like this. She’s disappeared and I can’t get hold of her. I’m only wondering if … if you know where she is?’
It went silent at the other end. A little girl, about three or four years old, was running around the square in random circles. Her hair was white blonde and thin and she was wearing a dark blue jacket. The puller on the zip had been replaced with a keyring. She had a small yellow rucksack on her back with a cuddly dog sticking out of the top.
It just occurred to me that I had told Thomas Hansson something I hadn’t even told my dad.
‘What do you mean disappeared?’
He sounded sceptical.
‘Disappeared. Gone. Not at home and not answering her phone. Disappeared.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Well of course it’s true! Why would I make up something like that?’
He was silent for a moment, as if he was allowing the information to sink in.
‘But, well, I still can’t help you. We don’t see each other any more. Not in that way.’
‘Right. So you don’t know where she is?’
‘No. No, unfortunately not.’
The energy that had so recently made my body tingle drained out of me.
‘How … how do you know Jan …?’ I began, but he interrupted me.
‘Have you contacted the police?’
The little girl came up to the table and stood right in front of me, looking at me with huge, remarkably blue irises surrounded by blinding white. So white it almost looked light blue.
‘Yes.’
I said yes because it was easier. But of course, I should have done that straight away.
I heard him take a mouthful of something at the other end of the phone. I heard him swallow. But he said nothing. Neither did I. I looked at the little girl and she smiled at me. She was sweet, like candy floss, and I forced myself to smile back.
‘All right. We met at the university. We are both doing a PhD in psychology, but in different fields. We … well, we met a couple of times. Went out together, if you like.’
‘You … dated?’
I couldn’t take it in. The fact that Mum was seeing someone, that she was dating someone, seemed about as improbable as Dad becoming the pastor of a Pentecostal church and speaking in tongues.
‘Yes, you could say that. But it didn’t go anywhere, didn’t get serious.’
‘Why not?’
The girl ran off. Like a bee she flitted here and there among the tables.
‘You’re as straightforward as your mother, that’s for sure. Listen, your name’s Maja, right? This feels very strange. Why don’t you ask your mother?’
‘She’s gone missing! I’ve already told you that! Missing!’
‘Will the police be getting in touch with me, or what?’
‘I can’t imagine they would,’ I said, truthfully. ‘Would that be a problem, then?’
‘What? No, no of course not,’ he said quickly.
Too quickly?
He fell silent. I heard the twittering of the birds and his breathing in the phone.
‘Okay. Just because it’s you. Just because you’re her daughter. I liked her. I still do. But, I don’t know, I don’t think she’s so keen on me. At least, she doesn’t show it.’
‘That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,’ I murmured to myself.
‘So I left it. We’re friends. We have lunch together sometimes with a few other people and talk about our research. That’s about it.’
‘When did you last see her?’
‘No idea. A week ago, maybe.’
‘Isn’t that a long time when you’re working at the same place?’
If I had been in the police and this had been an interrogation he would have been the main suspect by now, I thought. A rejected man punishing the person who has rejected him, who didn’t give him what he wanted. Hadn’t he looked a bit crazy in that photo? A bit … disturbed?’
Thomas coughed.
‘Yes, perhaps it is, but sometimes we have to go away for various things, or we’re teaching or looking up information or material somewhere else, not at the university. Jana is quite secretive. She doesn’t say … well, she doesn’t talk much about herself, what she has done, where she is going.’
‘But think about it. When was the last time you saw her?’
‘Good Lord, how would I be able to remember that? Erm, I know I saw her last Monday, that’s a week ago, because there was some sort of information meeting … but I wonder if perhaps I’m …’
‘How was she? How did she seem last Monday?’
‘How did she seem? Well, she seemed fairly normal. I mean normal for Jana, if you’ll excuse me saying so.’
‘No.’
‘What?’
I didn’t excuse him. I looked at the sun and I didn’t excuse him.
‘Nothing. Was that the last time you saw her? Monday?’
‘Look, I’m just checking my calendar here and I think I actually saw her last Wednesday. She left before lunch time. I thought I’d ask her to come with us, there are a few of us who usually eat together but … she left a few minutes before.’
I sighed. The trail stopped there, then. Last Wednesday. Immediately before her appointment with Dr Roos. I got ready to say thank you but it was as if that thank you sat so deeply inside me I would have to cough it up like a gob of phlegm. A dirty grey bird of indeterminate species sat on the chair opposite mine and began picking at a few crumbs. I kicked out with my boot and it flew away, settling lazily a few metres further off on the paving stones. Birds in Stockholm are seriously damaged, I thought. They have no natural instincts left.
‘She talks quite a bit about you, actually,’ said Thomas, all of a sudden.
I sat up straight in my chair.
‘Oh, what does she say?’ I asked tensely, the sun shining directly into m
y eyes.
‘What she says? That you go your own way, you don’t care what other people think. That you are intelligent. You can tell she’s proud of you.’
I said thanks and he said something about hoping she would come back. I shut my eyes. The sunlight burned orange through my eyelids. No, Thomas Hansson wasn’t the reason for Mum’s disappearance. He was too nice for that. It was more likely that Dr Roos had something to do with it.
I ought to phone the hospital. That would be the logical thing to do. I ought to phone.
But I didn’t dare. Did I?
We rang off and I stood up. I phoned directory enquiries and was given the number for Vrinnevi Hospital in Norrköping and put through. But when they answered I hung up. I’ll phone later, I thought. I’ll phone … later.
My legs felt sort of springy. They did, in spite of everything. I waved at the little girl who had climbed into her buggy. She looked happily at me, but didn’t wave back. Then I ran across the square, rounded the corner at Hägerstensvägen and passed the mysterious shop which sold watches and glasses and had dusty spectacle frames from the nineties in its window. The words were echoing in my head:
She is proud of me, she is proud of me, she is proud of me!
A Bag Over the Head
I rang the doorbell and heard light footsteps that couldn’t belong to anyone except Enzo’s mother. When she opened the door she looked thinner than usual and when she hugged me I felt her ribs through the carefully ironed blouse. It seemed as if she went down a size each time I saw her.
‘Meu amorzinho! Maja!’ she exclaimed.
I smiled at her. I saw her looking at me, at my hair, my clothes, my cut, and my bandage. But she said nothing and I gave her credit for that. I had at least brushed the hairspray out of my bangs and removed the clay crater. Out of consideration for her. She did not appreciate macabre stunts. In fact, few people did. Fascinatingly few.
‘How are you, my lovely girl?’ she asked, and I replied ‘Good’ and she asked how Dad was and I replied ‘Really good’ and then she asked how Mum was and I replied ‘Good, good’ and then I got a pain in my stomach and I gave her a flower I had picked by a cable cabinet on the street. This small gesture thrilled her to bits and she said ‘Muito obrigada!’ so many times that I felt ashamed, because it wasn’t as if I had turned up with a bouquet of long-stemmed roses. After that she rabbled a long harangue in Portuguese that sounded lovely but was impossible for me to understand. Enzo appeared behind her in a T-shirt with an image of The Godfather on the front, smiled indulgently, and beckoned me in to his room.
I threw myself down on the bed and landed directly on top of a couple of CD cases. Enzo wasn’t the sort to download. He wanted to own “the physical product”, as he called it, and as a result his room was full of books, films and CDs. He waved the Control DVD under my nose while I did my best to remove the hard plastic case that was digging into my back. I whistled, impressed.
‘You … you seem happier now,’ said Enzo as I looked at the DVD case that showed a serious, glaring Ian Curtis with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.
‘My manic depression is so unpredictable. Right now I’m in the middle of a manic phase.’
‘Which lasts fifteen minutes, or what?’
‘More or less,’ I said, and grinned. ‘Shall we start with the hair?’
I looked at Enzo in the bathroom mirror. He was being overly careful as he shaved the back of my head, and small tufts of dark brown hair were falling onto the bathroom floor. He had done it once before and, as with everything else, he was meticulous to the point of absurdity.
Having someone touch your hair can be surprisingly intimate. We didn’t talk much. I held firmly onto my bangs; they were going to be saved or possibly trimmed a little, but I wanted to keep the length.
‘Sometimes I miss my Leningrad Cowboys haircut. Perhaps I ought to let it grow out a bit at the back?’
‘When did you have that, then?’
‘Well, don’t you remember? Last autumn, when we went back to school!’
‘Oh, was that Leningrad Cowboys, then?’
‘Yes. What did you think it was, for goodness’ sake?’
‘I don’t know. I thought it had more of an Elvis during his fat- years look.’
‘You swine!’
I turned round and stared at him, pretending to be offended.
‘That was supposed to be a compliment, you know,’ said Enzo, and I heard that he meant it.
‘Oh, right,’ I said, and he switched off the clippers and handed me a mirror so I could look at the back of my head.
‘Looks good.’
I mixed the hair colour, some cheap stuff bought in the local supermarket, and Enzo pulled on the plastic gloves. The top of the index finger and the middle finger on one of them immediately split.
‘What! I don’t believe it!’
‘We’ll have to tape them,’ I said, and ran into the kitchen to ask his mum for some freezer tape.
She showed me the flower that she had placed in a brandy glass and chatted for a while about how pretty it was and how happy my mum must be to have a daughter like me, and I wailed internally and made a mental note never to give her anything again. In the end I was given some normal tape but that worked just as well.
Enzo handed me an old towel to put over my shoulders. Then he massaged the colour into my roots, the back of my head and the sides and carried on until he reached my bangs, which dripped with the oily black liquid. To finish I put a clear plastic bag over my hair and fastened it by winding the tape around it a couple of times. I looked in the mirror and saw a black stain in the middle of my forehead, so I tore off a piece of paper that I wetted and pushed in under the bag. I managed to wipe off most of it so that only a grey shadow remained just below my hairline.
‘There!’
Enzo stared in the mirror with exaggeratedly wide eyes and a horrified expression. He pretended his gloved hands were out of control, that they had a life of their own. His hands closed in on his throat as he simulated an agonising strangulation. He emitted a half-choking sound and then slowly sank to the floor, his tongue sticking out of his mouth. Then he jumped up and said:
‘Now! Control!’
The film put us in such an excruciatingly beautiful melancholic mood that we totally forgot my head was covered in black hair dye. As we watched the credits roll just over two hours later we were sitting as if paralysed in front of the screen. I thought about life and how fragile it was, and about Mum. The longing was like an echo in my heart. Enzo looked at me sadly but then he raised one eyebrow in amusement.
‘Maja, you’ve got a plastic bag on your head.’
At that very moment I felt an intense itching spreading like wildfire over my scalp. I ran to the bathroom, tore off the plastic bag that was all warm and gooey, and bent my head over the bath. I turned on the shower without even thinking that the thumb bandage would get wet. The only thing that would help was ice-cold water. Immediately.
When the water running into the bath was no longer a dirty grey colour I turned off the shower. My head was numb with cold. Enzo came into the bathroom and surveyed my head for a long time.
‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Except it isn’t only your hair that’s gone black. It looks like someone has painted your head with a roller. Your scalp is completely black. It’s shining! You look like a boy doll with plastic hair! You look like Ken!’
And then he started to laugh, and he laughed so hard that he was forced to lean against the hand basin. I stared at myself in the mirror.
If only it was true. That I looked like Ken. But no.
I had the same flipping hairstyle as Hitler.
Well, obviously. If Justin had Hitler hair and my hairstyle was the same as his then it was logical.
A flipping Hitler haircut.
Scheisse!
TUESDAY, 17 APRIL
Sick in the Head?
On Tuesday morning I was woken by bright yellow sunlight shini
ng through my window and warming my face. I had forgotten to pull down the roller blind the previous evening. I stretched like a cat and without getting out of bed switched on my laptop which was on the chest of drawers beside my bed. Since coming home on Sunday I had checked my emails and Dad’s thirty times easily. On Monday I had even gone online via my mobile during lessons to check them. To find out something. The truth, perhaps. But no email so far.
As all the icons slowly fell into place on the screen I ran my hand over my breast, trying to feel what Justin had felt. It was as white as an English virgin, and as soft and inviting as a fresh marshmallow. So why didn’t he call?
His body on top of mine, the weight of it, over my breasts, stomach, thighs. The red bangs, the ice-blue eyes, freckles like a golden spray over the bridge of his nose. His hands warm on my body, his tongue in my mouth, the sound of his shoes thumping down the stairs …
My face turned warm at the memory and blood rushed to my cheeks. I hugged the duvet and fell back against the pillow with my eyes closed, trying to summon up the image of his face, but it didn’t work. I saw the details – the long bangs, the blue eyes – but couldn’t fit them together. Wasn’t it odd that such an image could so suddenly disappear? It was only two days since I had seen him, after all.
I sat up, pulled the laptop towards me and went into Dad’s emails. Nothing new from Mum. My thumb was hurting like mad so I pressed a painkiller out of the pack lying on the bedside table. I studied the bandage that in addition to beer, blood and earth now also bore traces of black hair dye. It really needed to be changed, I thought to myself. And then it hit me like a fist on the chin.
The follow-up appointment! I should have gone yesterday! Shit. I had totally forgotten. I groaned and hit myself on the forehead, which caused enormous waves of pain to radiate from the cut. God, I was a wreck. A leftover.
Still. No great damage had been done, I thought. All I had to do was phone and book a new appointment.
I went back to the laptop. Idly I clicked back to the inbox and furtively read a few uninteresting emails from journalists on some network that Dad belonged to, and an extra tragic message on Facebook with the heading “What happened??!!!???!!!” from pathetic Denise. She wrote that she didn’t understand a thing and promised never to get in touch again just as long as he could admit to feeling at least some “primitive carnal desire” for her. What a fascinatingly dreadful woman. I deleted it.