The Invisible Man from Salem

by Christoffer Carlsson

  ‘Yes. He thought her death was down to me.’

  ‘Was it?’ Levin asks, with no visible emotion, as though his interest in the answer were purely professional.

  XIX

  Towards the end of the summer holidays, someone sprayed one of the doorways in the centre of Salem with black spraypaint. FUCKING NIGGERS GO HOME, read the text, written in spiky, uneven letters, and framed with swastikas. The next day, a well-known skinhead was seriously beaten, close to Rönninge High School. Neither of the two perpetrators were Swedes. I knew it, since that’s how it always worked. The events made the press, but the story was soon dropped. There was nothing to suggest that the skinhead who’d been beaten had written the graffiti on the doorway, but that was neither here nor there. Three days later, a black kid got kicked in the face. His name was Mikael Persson, born in Sweden but with an Egyptian father. Another few days passed and another skinhead was assaulted near the water tower in Salem. The victim had a shaved head, denim jacket, and combat trousers, and was a member of the Swedish Left Party and several anti-racist organisations. His assailants didn’t know that. They thought he was a neo-Nazi, because he looked like one.

  These events coloured the end of the summer, although their effect on me was only fleeting. Julia and I split up after that time when Grim came home while we were in her bed. It wasn’t something we talked about and then decided upon. The ending just crystallised of its own accord, unsaid yet unmistakeable.

  At first I kept away from Grim, too; just the thought of him made me think of Julia, which made me heartbroken. I’d never known pain like it, and for four days I didn’t talk to a soul, not even my parents. They got worried, and went and got my brother, which just made things worse. On the fifth day, I realised that I couldn’t deal with this on my own. I needed someone, and the only person I could contemplate was Grim. I couldn’t tell him, but he could distract me. When I called him, he sounded worried.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you answer? Has something happened?’

  ‘Sorry. Nothing. I’ve been ill.’

  ‘Ill?’

  ‘Just the flu. But today’s the first day with no fever.’ I hesitated. ‘Shall we meet up?’

  GRIM NOTICED THAT something was wrong, I could tell. We didn’t need to do anything; the only thing I felt was the need to have him close by. To not be alone. He understood that. We spent time in hidden-away parks, or on forgotten benches — me with a book or music, and Grim with his ID cards. He practised non-stop, but since his time at the summer camp, Klas was much stricter about what he got up to in his room, so he had to practise in other places. We sat at my place several times, and for a while my desk was more Grim’s than mine, until my dad noticed and asked in a nervous voice what we were doing. We used our fake IDs and went to Wednesday Club on Södermalm, got drunk on cocktails, and giggled at the forbidden nature of it all when the barman wasn’t looking.

  I wondered how Julia was getting on. If this was even affecting her. After a while, probably so that I could deal with everything, I convinced myself that this was easy for her. But my friendship with Grim had been saved. Perhaps it would all work out in the end. I thought about what Julia had said that time, that if she could travel in time she would go forwards, to see how everything turned out. I was starting to understand what she meant. The uncertainty, this feeling of having lost something, perhaps for nothing, was almost the hardest part.

  One day, I had my bedroom window open. So did someone else, nearby, because I could hear N.W.A.’s ‘I Just Want to Celebrate’ through distorted speakers. I went over to the window and felt the warmth of the sun. Julia was down there, out walking with a friend, a blonde girl called Bella. I’d met her a couple of times that summer, with Julia. They were laughing about something, and Julia seemed to be happy.

  I tried to focus on the fact that I’d got Grim back, but all I could think of was how I’d lost Julia.

  Something was boiling, deep, deep inside me.

  It was then, in those last few days of the summer holidays, that I saw that Tim was back in Salem.

  TIM NORDIN was a year younger than me, and the first time I saw him he was sitting on his own by a playground on the outskirts of Salem. I was thirteen at the time, and I was so angry I was close to tears. Soon the rage turned to shame, and I didn’t want to go home. Vlad and Fred had been more aggressive, more threatening, than usual. It was one of the few occasions when I’d tried to fight back, and it had resulted in one of them putting a knee in my guts. That humiliation of attempting yet failing to resist was worse than not doing anything; it made everything feel even more hopeless. It was like a confirmation that I was weak. Whenever I hadn’t tried to fight back, I could always tell myself that I could have, if I’d wanted to — however childish that may seem.

  I’d managed to get away, and after struggling to get some air in my lungs, I started wandering around aimlessly. When I saw Tim at the playground, something burned inside me. Something forced its way out of me — the need to fight back against powerlessness, humiliation.

  I went over to Tim, who didn’t seem to have heard me. He was a wiry little kid; he wore a cap with the peak facing backwards, and baggy clothes that were too big, to make him seem bigger than he was.

  ‘Hello,’ I said when I got within a couple of steps of him.

  He didn’t respond.

  ‘Hello.’

  Tim still didn’t look up. The rage burned inside me and I looked around. We were alone. I took the last paces over to him and smacked his cap off. That made him jump and pull his earphones out.

  ‘Why don’t you answer when I’m talking to you?’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said and waved the earphones demonstratively. ‘I didn’t hear.’

  He was scared. I could see that in his eyes, alert and dark, dark brown. His thin face, with its sharp little chin and thin lips, made his eyes look round and unnaturally large. He’s actually scared of me, I thought to myself again.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said and bent over.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Tim stopped.

  ‘My cap.’

  I smiled.

  ‘It’s not your cap.’

  ‘I got it from …’ he began, but didn’t complete the sentence.

  ‘From your mum?’ I mocked. ‘Did you get it from your little old mum?’

  He looked at me, without reacting.

  ‘Answer me!’ I screamed.

  Tim nodded silently and looked away. I picked up the cap, scrunched it up, and stuffed it into the back pocket of my jeans. On the bench beside him was an orange-yellow peel, and I was standing so close to him that I could smell clementine or orange on his fingers.

  ‘A purple cap,’ I said. ‘Purple. Are you bent?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘ “Are you bent?” I asked. Are you deaf, too?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘What are you shaking your head at?’

  ‘I’m not deaf,’ Tim said quietly.

  ‘Well, answer me then. Are you bent?’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘Eh?’ I said and leant in to him. ‘Louder.’

  ‘I’m twelve,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know what I am.’

  I laughed at him.

  I DIDN’T HIT HIM THEN. That would come later. As I left, I passed a building site. I chucked the purple cap in a skip, making sure that it fell so far that Tim wouldn’t be able to reach it even if he did notice it, which was unlikely.

  I felt relieved, as though I had deserved restitution and had got it, which may be why my conscience never reacted.

  For two years I used Tim Nordin as a tool to purge myself with, to feel superior, just as Vlad and Fred had used me, I suppose. Maybe
that’s how it was — everything just a reaction to something that had happened earlier. Someone always ended up in the firing line, everyone turned on someone else, and I was neither better nor worse than any of them. I just was.

  Then something happened that caused Tim Nordin to move away from Salem. Maybe it was to do with his family; I don’t know. He disappeared, and I didn’t give it a lot of thought. I never told anyone what I’d done, and I don’t think Tim did either. After that, nothing, until Julia mentioned him when we were sitting up on the water tower.

  NOW HE WAS BACK, taller but just as wiry. He walked past the Triad one morning when I was sitting having breakfast. I didn’t recognise him at first, from so far away, but as my eyes followed him, it was obvious that I was watching someone who didn’t want to be seen. Tim always walked like that. The trouble with trying not to be visible is that the effort it takes is so obvious, and itself becomes visible.

  ‘Leo,’ Dad said, on his way out to work. ‘Is everything okay? You’ve seemed … different this past week.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Everything’s okay.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Sure.’

  He nodded, disappointed, and took his keys, walked out, and locked the door behind him. An hour later the scene was repeated, with my mum this time. I stayed by the kitchen window, waiting for Grim to call. This time I was going to ask him how Julia was. I needed to know how she was feeling. People laugh for lots of reasons, and the fact that I’d seen Julia doing it didn’t mean she was fine.

  An hour later he rang, and we brought a football along and kicked it ahead of us on the way down to the rec. Grim didn’t like sport — the only thing he’d ever shown an interest in was shooting on television — but he said that kicking a ball as hard as he could was a good feeling. I agreed with him there.

  The recreation ground lay deserted, waiting for us. I picked the ball out of the net that Grim had just kicked it into.

  ‘You know who Tim Nordin is, don’t you?’ I asked.

  ‘Tim …’ Grim said and frowned. ‘Yes. He was Julia’s friend when she was little, but I think he moved away. No one, not even Julia, knows why.’ He dropped the ball to the ground. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I thought I saw him earlier.’

  ‘What, you know him?’

  ‘No, no. But a friend of mine went to nursery with him, so I know who he is.’

  I never asked about Julia; I couldn’t. From tomorrow on, she would be going to the same school as me.

  THAT FIRST DAY BACK, I didn’t see Julia at all. Didn’t see Grim either. I hung out with my classmates instead, and that felt weird. It wasn’t that I didn’t like them; it was more that I’d hardly seen any of them over the summer, which had been so long and in which so much had happened. I had lived in another dimension for those long months.

  The second day, I had maths in one of the classrooms at the furthest end of the factory-like building. When I came round the corner, the big corridor was empty. I was a few minutes late, and the lesson had already started. Rows of lockers lined the walls; several of them had already been defaced with graffiti tags. A big, black swastika had been painted on one of the locker doors.

  The door to one of the toilets opened and closed, and Julia came walking towards me. She had a ring-binder and a stack of books under one arm, her eyes fixed on a piece of paper that flapped in time with her strides. When she looked up, she froze, and it was this — the look in her eyes — that made the world rock underneath my feet.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, without stopping.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, and stopped. ‘How are things?’

  ‘Confused,’ she said. She looked down at her timetable and carried on past me.

  I watched her, hoping that she would turn her head, but she didn’t. That was the thing that made me feel silly, duped. Crushed. I wanted to cry because this was how it was going to be from now on, and I couldn’t see an end to it.

  Later that day, I found out that Tim Nordin had come back to Salem because his parents had divorced, and Tim’s dad wasn’t exactly the kind of person who could raise a child. Tim had to live with his mum instead, and they’d moved back because she missed Salem. I mean, that on its own was enough. He should clearly have refused to move back.

  THAT WEEKEND, there was a big outdoor party at the recreation ground where Grim and I had been a week earlier. Word got around, thanks to scraps of paper pushed into lockers and passed around during lessons. Me and Grim went with a Coke bottle each, half-filled with booze that we had decanted from our parents’ drinks cabinets. I’d only managed a few measures of vodka, so I had to dilute it with pop. The bubbles made it taste worse than normal.

  ‘Do you know if Julia’s coming?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Grim said. ‘I didn’t mention it to her, so I hope she doesn’t. I can’t be arsed keeping an eye on her.’

  ‘Why do you need to?’

  ‘It’s my sister, for fuck’s sake. And she’s been a bit weird recently.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said, and could feel my pulse rising. I unscrewed the bottle top and took a deep, burning gulp. ‘You can’t be so overprotective all the time. She’s nearly sixteen, man. She can look after herself,’ I went on and then, unable to stop myself, added: ‘Stop treating her like a child.’

  Grim avoided eye contact.

  ‘You don’t get it, do you?’

  ‘What’s to get?’

  ‘She’s the only reason we stick together, that our family works. And Mum and Dad can’t protect her.’

  ‘But why does she need protecting? And why does it have to be you that protects her? Social Ser —’

  ‘It was their fucking fault I ended up in Jumkil. If they take me or Julia, we’ve had it.’

  I took another swig from my bottle. I remember thinking that perhaps one of them had the problem, as opposed to the problem being between them, in the make-up of the family. That the problem wasn’t that they risked being pulled apart, but rather that they tried so hard to be a family. I couldn’t really articulate the thought.

  ‘But is it that important? That you stick together? I mean, maybe there’s something negative about that, too.’

  I just didn’t know how to express it.

  ‘You only have one family,’ was all Grim said. ‘Only in good families do people think, “I’d be better off without them.” ’ He looked me in the eye. ‘So shut your mouth. You haven’t got a clue.’

  For the first time, I was scared of Grim, without knowing why. Maybe it was because I was starting to feel drunk, but there was something about his stare. It was a foreboding fear like when you imagine what severe pain might feel like, the kind of fear that instantly makes you feel shaky and insecure for no reason.

  THE RECREATION GROUND was full of people sitting around in groups, laughing, drinking. Music was being played from heavy ghetto-blasters, and some people entertained themselves by climbing up the goalposts and sitting on the crossbar. Grim and I sat with a few people he knew. They asked him about the camp and the guy who’d been stabbed. Grim shrugged, not wanting to talk about it. They asked what he’d done to his hair, and Grim told them that he’d thought it was getting too long, so he’d cut it off. That’s when I saw Julia walking towards us, wearing dark jeans and a white T-shirt with the word JUMPER written across the chest. She had a Coke bottle in her hand, and seemed to be looking for someone.

  I looked at the bottle in my hand. It was dark now, and to see how much I’d drunk I had to hold it up above my head, against the sky. This movement made Julia turn her head. She carefully raised her own bottle to me, and I felt embarrassed. She thought I was waving. Julia smiled like she did when she was a little bit drunk.

  Grim spotted her and sighed.

  ‘I knew it.’

  He waved to her to come over and sit w
ith us.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said.

  ‘Well, if she’s got to be here, it’s better if she at least sits with us,’ Grim slurred.

  She came over and knelt down.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  A girl behind us squealed as one of the guys who’d been sitting on the crossbar fell down. Everything except the music went quiet, until we heard the guy laugh, still lying there, beer can still in his hand. We laughed, too, all of us.

  Julia’s knee touched mine, and I found it hard to control my hands. Scenes from the summer, good scenes, whizzed past me and I longed to go back. She took a swig of whatever it was in her bottle, and winced. Nearby, from one of the ghetto-blasters, Radiohead was singing ‘Karma Police’, and more people arrived at the recreation ground. Most of the pitch was covered with people from school. Older guys turned up, but soon left again. They just wanted to be paid back for the alcohol they’d bought for people. Some started arguing, but it was soon settled. I wondered what Julia was thinking, wondered if she knew that Tim Nordin had moved back, whether that news would make her happy, whether she’d regretted us splitting up. My head started spinning, and the thoughts led nowhere, just round and round.

  ‘I need a piss,’ Grim said, and looked at me. ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  His eyes flitted between me and Julia.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and headed down to the bushes.

  Only then did I notice that Julia was nervous. She was drinking quickly and laughing a bit too much at stuff the people we were sitting with were saying.

  ‘Good party,’ I said.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Did you come with anyone?’

  ‘Yes.’ She looked around. ‘But I don’t know where they are.’