Me on the Floor, Bleeding

by Jenny J

  ‘You know, I really don’t know what I’m going to do with you. I can’t have you here. Like, I’ve got to sleep and my sister’s coming tonight from Bristol and well … it’s not really convenient.’

  She looked at me apologetically – but not that apologetically – and before the feeling of rejection seeped into my body and made me go cold I had time to think: ‘Sister? Is there another one like her?’ A small suspicion that she was lying rose up and stuck there, stubbornly refusing to leave. But what did that matter? The essence was: she didn’t want me here. No one wanted me with them.

  ‘But I’ve been thinking. It doesn’t seem like you want to go home. I mean, I couldn’t help noticing that your dad’s phoned you a number of times. You’ll have to excuse me looking in your bag but it buzzed once every fifteen minutes. Well, anyway. I could take you home to Jens, if that’s okay?’

  And I thought: ‘Who the hell is that?’ but I didn’t know what else to do with myself so I looked her in the eye and nodded bravely. I felt the naked, soft tip of my thumb warily, over the skin where black threads had left their mark.

  Sarah and I took the 116 bus out to Smedby and it was only when we were getting off at Mum’s bus stop by the shop that I realised it was Justin she meant. That Justin was Jens and Jens was Justin. I turned to her and said:

  ‘No.’

  And I began to walk back towards town and a cold wind made my body shudder.

  ‘What do you mean, no?’

  ‘What do you mean, “what do you mean no”? No as in no as in no.’

  She ran the few metres I had walked to catch up with me and took hold of my arm, but I refused to look at her.

  ‘Is it hard that your mum lives here?’

  ‘No. Or, yes, perhaps, but that’s not why.’

  ‘Well what is it then?’

  ‘It’s nothing, it’s just … no.’

  ‘Come on!’

  She held me resolutely under my arm and started to walk towards the houses. I resisted but she pulled me so hard my arm started to hurt and I stopped struggling. I didn’t need any more pain.

  ‘He’s really nice. Kind. Funny.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I was there, remember?’

  She gave a laugh. I turned to her, questioningly. Her pale hair flapped in the wind.

  ‘It’s really weird, I can’t believe we were together, him and me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘But that was a hundred years ago,’ she said swiftly, and added: ‘At least.’

  He hasn’t phoned me, he hasn’t phoned me, he hasn’t phoned me, and I’m so exposed now because we had sex and it totally knocked out my ability to navigate and I can’t take any more, I can’t fix it, and as if everything else wasn’t enough, as if having a mum on a psychiatric ward wasn’t enough, it turns out he’s even shagged Sarah and why would he choose me after being with her? It is so embarrassingly pathetic to think like that but it actually does seem as if no one wants me. As if no one at all. Wants me. Me. I’ll stand on the street with a For Sale sign round my neck – no, better still, I’ll advertise myself in an online paper, or maybe even put myself up for auction online. That’s more my style. Me, young me. Me who craps the internet.

  So Sarah rang his door and I stood like a victim in Valter’s bloodstained T-shirt which smelled of sweat and stale cologne and was generally rank just like me, and Mum’s house was dark, dark and silent, and that was to be expected because of course she wasn’t there. I realised it was better before, when I didn’t know where she was, when I could believe anything had happened, but not that, not the way it was now.

  Sarah must have phoned him while I was asleep because he didn’t look surprised to see me when he opened the door, with pale blue jeans and matching eyes, and he would have done otherwise, wouldn’t he? He invited us in and we stood in his hall where I had stood before, barefoot that time with only splinters in my foot and possibly a thorn in my heart, but not like now with a sodding great wooden pole through my frontal lobe that had made my brain run out and lie there rather attractively on my shoulder like an accessory.

  He asked if we wanted coffee and Sarah said:

  ‘Hell yeah,’ and I could clearly see them ripping each other’s clothes off, taking it in turns to suck each other’s nipples, their eyes closed in desire like in the movies, and I was a prop. My whole being was an accessory, an old, ugly, useless, pointless accessory.

  But Sarah left before the coffee was even made, blowing a kiss at Justin and was it only me but did that kiss land on his dick? She gave me a kiss me on the cheek and said:

  ‘Cat, it’s all going to be okay. You don’t think so now but it will all be okay, I promise you. I bet you a hundred kronor.’

  A hundred kronor.

  For some reason that didn’t comfort me.

  After Sarah left it went quiet. I sat on a chair in the kitchen and Justin stood by the cooker. He cut off the top half of a coffee filter and said:

  ‘It’s too big for this machine.’

  And I thought: I’m too big for this world or else the world is too small for both of us or else this kitchen is. Nervously I flicked through a newspaper. Idly I looked at the small ads. Found a perfect one that I tore out.

  Am a well-built man, 58. Do you want to moor at my jetty? Obese need not reply.

  Like a pensioner Justin counted out loud the number of coffee scoops he put in the machine and then pressed the red button. The machine began to gurgle and bubble. Then he switched on the extractor fan over the cooker and smoked under it, standing in what looked like a very uncomfortable position. I noticed his hands were dirty, oil stained, and there was a wound, fairly recent: a pink fleshy cut right across the back of his hand.

  ‘Watch out your hair doesn’t get caught,’ I said, and I meant in the fan but didn’t say that and it was a joke but neither of us laughed, and then it was quiet for quite a long time, an uncomfortable silence, and I became aware that we no longer had the same hair style. And I heard music playing quietly in the other room, something instrumental, jazz-like.

  ‘I didn’t think I’d be seeing any more of you,’ he said then.

  ‘Really? Why not? My mum lives next door, for God’s sake.’

  He looked at me from over by the cooker, he looked at me as if I’d said something unsuitable – inappropriate in fact – and then he poured coffee into two cups. When he replaced the glass jug he spilled coffee onto the warming plate and it sizzled. Then finally he sat down; sat down opposite me.

  We sat there sourly drinking our scalding coffee, which was also pretty sour, and I would have liked milk in mine but I wasn’t effing well going to ask him for anything, wasn’t going ask anyone for anything ever again. So I looked out of the window directly across to Mum’s house that seemed so inaccessible, so uninhabited, and I saw the flower pots, the garden tools and the lawn mower under the steps and realised that the hedge was shapeless and straggly and not, like everyone else’s, well-trimmed. Hedges, lives. Then suddenly Justin took hold of my hand and placed it in his greasy one. He stroked the palm with the tips of his fingers, and then one finger at a time: little finger, ring finger … my hand tingled and the tingle transplanted itself to my lower arm, through my upper arm, into my ribcage and my thudding heart. And I thought: don’t you try comforting me.

  ‘Shit, half your thumb’s gone,’ he said softly.

  That was an obvious exaggeration but I said nothing and with his thumb he stroked the pinky-red flat part where the skin was so thin that you could feel the bone directly underneath. The bone. The chopped-off bone. The filed-down bone.

  There was a flash.

  The saw.

  The flesh.

  The blood.

  The pain.

  He studied at close range the tiny holes where the stitches had been. Twelve tiny holes. He stroked and stroked and it felt as if he was stroking the piece that was missing, which was no longer there, and it hurt so much but it didn’t matter because it was bittersweet and th
at’s exactly how it was.

  He smiled at me but I didn’t return his smile and it slowly died.

  I looked away. The kitchen clock ticked. The music in the other room had become wilder, more discordant.

  ‘Why didn’t you phone?’ I asked.

  He dropped my hand as if it had burned him. It lay there dead on the table, the thumb-top pink, like the nose of a stiff, lifeless mouse. Silently we sat there. His gaze on the table, mine fixed rigidly on his eyes. When he looked up I would capture it, his look.

  ‘God knows. I thought of it but … I didn’t do it.’

  He looked up and I tried, but failed, to capture it. Of course I couldn’t.

  I didn’t want to ask because I already knew the answer, but still there was some wicked little masochistic part of me that could not leave it alone.

  ‘You saw the note?’

  I so hoped he hadn’t seen it, that it had blown away as it had done in my imagination.

  ‘Yeah.’

  I was quiet. He went on:

  ‘I’ve still got time to do that, to call you. It hasn’t been that many days. More coffee?’

  He stood up and went over to the coffee machine.

  ‘So are you planning on doing that?’

  ‘Do you want me to phone now?’ he grinned and I said:

  ‘Yes. I do.’

  So he picked up his mobile, dug out my note from a traditionally decorated letter basket on the wall and keyed in my number. My phone started to ring in my jacket pocket and it vibrated against my breast. I made no attempt to answer.

  ‘Are you playing hard to get?’ he asked.

  ‘No, it’s just that I’m not home,’ I replied. He smiled his lopsided smile but he was standing half turned away so I wasn’t certain if that smile was cool or warm.

  Suddenly I felt I’d had enough. Everything was enough. I stood up.

  ‘Look, I really appreciate the … um … coffee and … and I …’

  If I wasn’t careful I’d start sounding like Enzo.

  ‘… I really want to go home. To Stockholm. But I haven’t got any money. I really hate to ask but can you lend me a couple of hundred kronor?’

  He looked astonished. Caught with his trousers down. I thought about that expression. I didn’t know if I wanted to catch him with his trousers down any more. I didn’t know if I wanted to catch him anywhere. By his dick, possibly. But that hole I was feeling in my stomach, that sweaty void, surely that wasn’t for him? It was only hunger and anxiety, not love, surely?

  ‘Of course.’

  He sat down again.

  ‘But you know what,’ he said, taking a gulp of his coffee. ‘If you haven’t got anything against it I can give you a lift instead. I’ve got to go to Stockholm anyway. I hadn’t planned to go today but it’s not a problem, I can do it. I’ve got to deliver the Volvo to Sundbyberg.’

  He nodded in the direction of the cherry-red PV that was standing shining in the hazy sunshine.

  ‘Have you? Why?’

  ‘I’ve sold it.’

  ‘What do you mean, sold? I thought it was yours?’

  ‘It was mine but now it isn’t. I buy cars cheap, wrecks really, recondition them and sell them on. For loads of money.’

  He took a wallet out of his back pocket, a thin, well-used leather thing, and slid a business card across to me. In shining gold seventies-style lettering it said:

  Foxy Cars – we buy, sell, recondition.

  With a telephone number but no name. Suspect.

  ‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘Then you can always phone me.’

  ‘Fuck you,’ I said, and stuck my tongue out at him. And he said: ‘I’d love to’, and did the same and his tongue was lovely and pink and I went over to him and he tried to get up but I pushed him down onto the chair again and straddled him, and then we kissed. I mean, we might as well, we were already half way.

  ‘I’ll Buy a Glock’

  It was six-fifteen by the time we arrived in Örnsberg. Justin pulled up outside the front entrance of my block of flats and as I opened the car door to climb out he grabbed my jacket sleeve and drew me towards him. With his fingers resting lightly in the spaces between my ribs, one finger for each space, he kissed me. It was a warm kiss with plenty of tongue and those pale eyelashes lay flat against his cheeks, but I didn’t close my eyes. I didn’t dare to because I was afraid he would disappear. When eventually I got out of the car I was accompanied by a slight feeling of giddiness. He closed the door from inside and raised his eyebrows in farewell before starting the engine and steering the cherry-red car round the corner of Torsten Alms Gata, down to Stenkilsgatan and away. The chrome trim looked like flowing quicksilver in the evening sun.

  I stood outside the door for easily ten minutes. I really didn’t want to go up. The sky was a whitish blue, a delicate spring sky, and you wouldn’t believe for a second that it had snowed only the day before. What is it with the weather, I asked myself. It was as confused as I was.

  Finally I made myself tap in the door code with my phantom-pain thumb and walk up the three floors to our flat. As I stepped in Dad immediately rushed up to me from some indeterminate point in the hall.

  ‘Maja! Maja! Maja!’ he shouted, hugging me hard, and I relaxed and sagged heavily in his arms and I thought he smelled of stale sweat and I wanted to stay there forever. But then he pushed me away so roughly that I almost fell over onto the hall floor, and he yelled:

  ‘Where the hell have you been? Have you any idea how worried I’ve been, any idea at all?’

  ‘Yes but …’

  ‘Be quiet!’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Be quiet, I said! BE QUIET! I didn’t get a minute’s sleep last night, not a single minute! I phoned Enzo and Jana and anyone else I could bloody well think of who might know, who might just have a clue where you were!’

  ‘I…’

  ‘SHUT UP!’ he roared, and he was so furious I actually backed away.

  ‘I had something important to tell you yesterday, Maja. I spent all day wondering how on earth I was going to do it. And when I came home and you weren’t here I thought at first, good, I’ve been given some extra time, but I was still anxious and believe me it only got worse. I ate alone but I was thinking of you all the time, how you would take it, how the make-up would run in black lines down your face. When it got to eleven o’clock and no one knew where you were I called the police. I reported you as missing. I thought if you’ve been raped I’ll kill every bastard in the whole of bloody Stockholm. I’ll buy a Glock on the street at Sergels Square and gun down every dealer and every pimp and … and … and if you’re dead then I’ll kill myself, I will! Can you understand what you’ve put me through? Can you?’

  His voice was softer now, almost beseeching, and I realised where my mass-shooting tendencies came from.

  ‘No,’ I whispered, deeply repentant. The tears were brimming up in my eyes and about to run in those black streaks.

  He stood silently, looking at me. For several minutes he stood like that. Time after time I saw the anger sweep across his face like a dark cloud, without him saying anything. Finally he closed his eyes and breathed out.

  ‘Jana is … in hospital Maja. She’s been taken into a psychiatric clinic.’

  He looked at me so gravely that time seemed to stand still. I heard every sound as if amplified: the cars on the street outside, his breathing, the humming of the computer. I saw every colour more intensely, radiating towards me as if from a TV: his blue T-shirt, the red hall mat, the yellow Wellington boots in the photo.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  His eyes opened wide. They were bloodshot and he looked old, my dad. He looked a hundred years old.

  ‘You know?’

  ‘Yes, I know. I know because I was there.’

  END OF APRIL, AND MAY

  Like Small Flames Licking My Ribs

  I didn’t go to Mum’s the following weekend. Even if she had been capable of having me it felt impossible to continue with
those Norrköping weekends as if nothing had happened. As if she hadn’t disappeared. As if she hadn’t said: You mustn’t be here. However hard I tried to see it from her perspective, the feeling was incredibly strong. I didn’t want to. I really didn’t want to.

  I stayed at home in Stockholm instead. Met Enzo, went to an occupational therapist and was given exercises for my thumb, finished my project in art and design and did my best not to bring my grade down, at the very least. The theme of the art project was “contact”, which was ironic now, in the aftermath of Mum’s disappearance, because recently time has been marked by such a lack of contact. I made my own interpretation of the lonely hearts ads I had been collecting over the past months. I painted in oils, water colours, and inks, made collages and stuck on beads, razor blades, stones, and whatever I could find. Even a flamingo. They ended up completely over the top, those pictures, and that’s what Valter said too, in a tone that sounded as if he couldn’t decide whether they were good or awful, ugly or appealing. I couldn’t either, even if I leaned more towards good and ugly. The whole project had an air of more is more. Less has never been one of my strong points and anyway I’ve never been especially good at less or, for that matter, interested in it.

  I managed to avoid telling Dad exactly how I had found out that Mum was in hospital. I mumbled something about finding her diary and phoning Dr Roos, “forgetting” to mention the fact that he had never answered my calls. What upset Dad most was that I had spent the weekend alone in Mum’s house without telling him, and he droned on about how we shouldn’t keep such big secrets from each other. But I replied that there were obviously a whole lot of things he hadn’t told me either, and that shut him up.

  Walpurgis Night came with its celebration of spring and Enzo asked if I wanted to cycle down to Vinterviken and look at the bonfire. I can’t say I’ve ever understood the point of it but I went with him anyway. I hung like a heavy sack over the handlebars, forcing my legs to pedal. It was such hard work, as if I was ill or too much lactic acid had accumulated in my muscles. We parked the bikes beside a tall birch tree near the allotments, my front wheel embedded in a pile of cigarette butts. My thumb was throbbing with pain as it did all the time these days as soon as I overdid things.