The Gingerbread House

by Carin Gerhardsen

  Monday Morning

  The water was running in the bath and she was standing by the bedroom window, looking out over the courtyard. Some kids were sitting in the sandpit, making a mess in the wet sand. They had warm caps and waterproofs on and didn’t seem to notice the biting wind and bleak sky. Their mothers sat shivering on a bench, hands in their jacket pockets and collars turned up. Otherwise the courtyard was empty, at this time of day. The bigger kids were at school or nursery.

  She had lived here her whole life and never felt any longing to leave. She grew up in one of the buildings on the other side of the courtyard, where her parents still lived. When she and Jörgen moved in together, it never occurred to her to move to a different part of town, and when an apartment became available on the block, they seized the opportunity without hesitation. Being so close to her parents also meant that childcare had never been a problem.

  The hours before noon were nice, when she could be by herself and just sit at home and take it easy. Therese, their fourteen-year-old, was in school and Tobias, who was seventeen, worked as a postman and did not come home until after lunch, if he came home at all. Jörgen was at his job in the ball-bearing factory, and she did not have to leave to clean before two o’clock.

  She had taken early retirement a few years ago because of chronic pain in her back and arms from her low-paid cleaning job at the hospital. She went to the doctor and was granted extended sick leave, and a few years later she was allowed so-called sickness benefits, without any further discussion. It did not hurt so badly that she couldn’t clean at all, so now she cleaned people’s homes cash in hand in the afternoons and collected a pension too. That way she brought in considerably more money to the household treasury than Jörgen did, even though he worked full-time. They sometimes discussed whether he should do the same thing, but he was not keen on taking cleaning jobs. That was women’s work, he thought.

  She went into the bathroom and turned off the tap, brought out the tub of water and set it on the wall-to-wall carpet in the living room. She sank down in the armchair, carefully lowered her feet into the hot water and lit a cigarette. Ricki Lake and a dozen obese Americans were trying to make themselves heard on the topic ‘My partner is unfaithful with my best friend – the lie detector can prove it’. She had never been unfaithful herself, not since she and Jörgen got married anyway, and that was more than twenty years ago. She could well imagine Jörgen having had a fling or two, but, if he had, she didn’t care all that much about it.

  They lived under the same roof, but that was about it. They didn’t talk much. He had his interests and she had hers. He had the guys, bandy and football, and she had TV and the kids. Sometimes she went to The Sapphire and danced with a girlfriend, but otherwise it was mostly soap operas, the cleaning job and housekeeping for the rest of the family that occupied her time. Pretty thin gruel, you might say, but she did not complain.

  The doorbell rang and she cursed to herself because, as usual, she had forgotten to bring the towel with her from the bathroom. The door was open anyway, so she didn’t have to get up.

  ‘It’s just me! What are you doing?’

  ‘Mum, will you get my towel from the bathroom? I’m taking a footbath.’

  Her mother was a somewhat overweight woman, about sixty-five, but her dark-brown hair had only minimal streaks of grey. She had just had a perm and looked quite stylish.

  ‘Your hair looks really nice,’ said Lise-Lott.

  ‘I just came from the hairdresser. Do you think it turned out okay?’

  Her mother handed over the towel and sat down on the couch.

  ‘I said your hair looks really nice.’

  Lise-Lott stubbed out her cigarette and lit another.

  ‘Would you like one?’ she asked, tossing the pack on to the coffee table, in front of her mother.

  ‘I’ll put the coffee on,’ her mother said, getting up and disappearing into the kitchen.

  The audience was booing and Ricki Lake was shaking her head, gasping in surprise at the evidence of the lie detector. Shaquil looked relaxed in his chair, but he was shaking his head too, and stubbornly maintained that the lie detector was lying, while Cheyenne was jumping up and down in fury, screaming a lot of things that had to be bleeped out. Her best friend, Sarah-O, just sat and smiled in embarrassment, rolling her eyes.

  Her mother came in with two cups of coffee and sat back down on the sofa, took a cigarette from the pack on the table and got involved in the programme. They watched a while in silence, until there was an ad break.

  ‘Was Jörgen at the match yesterday?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Don’t you ever go along?’

  ‘Why would I?’

  ‘Irene asked if I wanted to go to the theatre on Sunday. There’s a play at Cosmos.’

  ‘So, are you going?’

  ‘Are you nuts? She thinks she’s something, Irene, that’s what I say.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘I guess it’s ’cause of her kid. He’s at college. Whatever good that will do.’

  ‘What’s Dad up to?’

  ‘He’s watching Oprah. I think this is more interesting. I bought a chemise for Therese.’

  ‘Really? Where?’

  ‘At Åhlén’s, on sale. It only cost a hundred kronor.’

  ‘Do you think she’ll like it?’

  ‘Sure, all the girls have them. White, you know, with thin shoulder straps.’

  ‘Sounds cute. I can take it instead.’

  ‘You can fight over it,’ her mother laughed and puffed out a large smoke ring that slowly dispersed on its way up to the ceiling.

  ‘I think she’s the one who’s lying, not him,’ said Lise-Lott about a girl on the TV. ‘I’m sure she’s a lesbian too. There was one on before.’

  ‘You don’t say.’

  ‘Yeah, she slept with her boyfriend’s sister.’

  ‘They’re out of their minds in America.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Dad says that guy in number 10 is a homo. Niklas, you know.’

  ‘What makes him say that?’ Lise-Lott asked.

  ‘I don’t know. You can tell by his looks, he says. I don’t think there are any homos in Katrineholm.’

  ‘There must be homos everywhere.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. They all live in Stockholm.’

  ‘Therese is going to Stockholm.’

  ‘She is? Why?’

  ‘Clothes shopping.’

  ‘Are you letting her do that?’

  ‘Depends on what you mean by letting her. She pretty much does what she wants anyway. The other girls are going.’

  ‘Maybe you and I should go to Stockholm and do some shopping.’

  ‘It’s pretty expensive. You can find good clothes here.’

  ‘We could go to Norrköping.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Just to do something.’

  ‘We could do that. Then we’ll go to McDonald’s,’ Lise-Lott suggested.

  ‘I don’t like hamburgers.’

  ‘So what do you like?’

  ‘Whatever. Chinese food.’

  ‘You can just as well have that here in town.’

  ‘But we never do.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s expensive.’

  ‘Do you think it’s cheaper in Norrköping?’

  ‘Now just give it up! You think we should take the camping stove and make our own food?’

  ‘You were the one who didn’t want to go to McDonald’s.’

  ‘I never said that! I just said I don’t like hamburgers.’

  ‘It’s the same thing.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. They have other things.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘I don’t know! You’re the one who wanted to go to McDonald’s!’

  ‘Don’t you want to go there?’

  ‘Sure. We’ll just have to see what they have.’

  ‘I’m sure they have the same thi
ngs they have here in town.’

  ‘Probably.’

  The conversation died out and they finished watching the programme. Her mother got up.

  ‘Well, I have to get home to Dad. He’ll probably want coffee.’

  ‘See you. Say hi.’

  ‘Thanks for the coffee. Bye now, love.’

  TV-Shop started and she remained sitting in front of two idiots cheering over a set of frying pans. She wondered whether they were genuinely enthused that the frying pans produced such splendid results or whether they were paid actors. In that case they were almost unbelievably skilful. And the whole audience too, standing up and applauding the great food. She decided they were probably for real, but that there was some trickery with the frying pans. She had never seen such impressive results in real life, either for herself or anywhere else.

  She lit a cigarette and switched to another channel, where her favourite British soap opera was just about to start. There was a rustling at the letter box and a dull thud was heard on the hall floor when the post arrived. She remembered that it was Monday and hoped that OK! magazine was waiting for her out there. But first she would see how things were going for the Dingles in Emmerdale.

  She never found out. Twenty minutes later she was dead.

  Diary of a Murderer, November 2006, Monday

  I never imagined that it would be so simple! You just step into people’s lives for a few minutes and then out again. As if nothing has happened. Easy as pie. That’s the advantage of being an invisible person like me. It’s true you don’t get noticed when you want to, but when you don’t want to be noticed, it’s excellent.

  I’m one of the invisible people. The invisible people who cower through life, regardless of weather and business cycles. For us it’s always a recession, always fog. We always cower for fear of a fist in the face or a kick in the guts. For no good reason – nobody sees us anyway.

  Nobody looks at me and thinks, ‘Nice hairdo. I think I’ll get my hair cut that way too.’ Nobody looks at me and thinks, ‘Yuck, what a terrible jacket! That’s been out of style for years!’ Nobody looks at me at all. Not if I’m standing in the way, not if I’m holding open the door, not if I offer someone my seat on the metro, and not if I don’t. Not any more. I was visible as a child. To children. Not to grown-ups. It was as if, as a child, I carried a big, yellow sign that said, ‘Look at me! I’m ugly and ridiculous! I wear strange clothes and say weird things! Hit me, mock me! Do it, do it – hurt me! Beat the abnormality out of me so I can become a normal person!’ But they didn’t succeed. ’Cause I became a grown-up, but not normal.

  Nobody saw me when I bought the train ticket to Katrineholm. Nobody saw me as I looked out of the window at the landscape of my childhood. The oak hills and lakes of Södermanland, enchanted forests and pastures.

  I take the short cut to my childhood street – and Lise-Lott’s. From the train station I simply follow Storgatan for a while, which then turns into Stockholmsvägen. Take a left towards East School and you’re there. She still lives here, after all these years, in this godforsaken place. If I’d stayed here I would have been dead a long time ago. But I’m alive and it’s Lise-Lott who’s dead.

  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I’m walking between the apartment buildings, into the courtyard. Same courtyard, new equipment for the children. A few kids are playing in the sandpit and their mothers are sitting on a bench watching, otherwise the courtyard is deserted. The bushes with the big white berries that pop when you step on them are still there alongside the buildings. The bushes were so big you could walk around inside them, play hide-and-seek and make forts. Now they look rather unassuming.

  That was where Lise-Lott and a few others – her sister and friends from the estate – tore off all my clothes and smeared mud all over me. They hung my clothes over the climbing frame and when the game was over I had to choose between going naked out on to the courtyard and taking down the clothes, in full view of everyone, or sneaking into the basement. I chose the latter, and when the children scattered and I dared go back to the courtyard to fetch my clothes, they were gone. The kids and the clothes.

  The climbing frame. It’s been replaced by a new, more modern version, with a climbing wall and ropes and a built-in slide. You could crawl inside the old one – a big sphere of air encased by red steel bars – and climb up and hang by your knees. I spent an afternoon there, tormented by Lise-Lott and her like-minded gang. I sat on the top, my legs dangling, sweaty with the fear of what would happen if I came down. They threw clods of dirt at me, and snowballs. A few times they tried to drag me down by pulling on my feet, but I held on for dear life. They screamed at me and insulted me – shouted how ugly and stupid I was – and sometimes they retreated a little, to lure me into venturing down. When I did, they came rushing back again. The whole thing ended when Lise-Lott packed some pieces of glass into a snowball and threw it at me. One piece cut a deep gash in my neck, the pain caused me to release my desperate hold and I fell to the ground. I got a concussion in the process. I vomited, to the children’s delight, but when they saw the blood they ran away. I staggered home, had to go to the hospital and get stitches, and then stay in bed for a few days. One good thing came out of it anyway.

  Lise-Lott’s dad locked me in the basement once, because I told Lise-Lott that my dad was a cop, which, of course, was something I had made up. True, Lise-Lott’s dad wasn’t a cop either, although she said he was on a daily basis – so you wouldn’t dare talk back, I guess – but he clearly had the authority to lock people up anyway. If I remember rightly, he worked as an assistant at Karsudden, a mental hospital for criminals. Of course, he must have learned that trick there. It worked: I never lied about my dad again, but Lise-Lott carried on as usual. At home it was not considered a good idea to lock people in the basement, so we never tried it on Lise-Lott, despite dogged attempts at persuasion on my part.

  After pondering my miserable childhood for a while, I make my way via the basement into Lise-Lott’s current building. In the stairwell I run into her mum, who is on her way out of the apartment. So Lise-Lott is at home and I can both see and hear that the door is unlocked, which makes the whole thing even simpler. The mother is her usual self. She’s put on a bit of weight, but she has the same matronly perm, the same ruminating chewing gum, and the same surly, arrogant expression. Of course she doesn’t see me, even though we brush against each other in passing. I hear muted TV voices from inside the apartment before the door closes. Then I know where to find her.

  I go up a few more flights and wait for several minutes by a window that faces on to the street. The outside door slams shut and someone comes running up the stairs. The postman rushes by, taking no notice of the insignificant figure he passes, and then he’s back again, on his way down through the building with the mail. He takes no notice of me this time either.

  When he is gone I go down to Lise-Lott’s apartment, carefully open the door, sneak into the dark hallway, soundlessly close the door behind me and lock it.

  She is sitting taking a footbath with a cigarette in her hand, while some idiotic soap opera plays out on the TV in front of her. I think that reality often surpasses fiction, and then I step out into the light. She does not even look surprised, but instead just gives me a dull, furtive look and asks what this is about. I tell her what this is about, while her gaze wanders between me and the TV with no noticeable reaction.

  ‘I have no memory of that,’ she says simply, taking a few deep puffs on her cigarette before she returns to her TV-watching.

  I take a few steps forward and grab hold of her neck with one hand.

  ‘Try to remember then,’ I say threateningly, but she only stares at me in surprise.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ she says calmly. ‘Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I answer.

  ‘Let go of me!’ she says angrily.

  ‘Then remember,’ I say, pressing my fingers hard against her neck. ‘Remember what you did
to my neck.’

  I try to get her to remember. I tell her, but she just stares back stupidly. Then I throw her down on to the floor in a kneeling position – keeping a firm grip on her neck – and force her head into the basin of water. I hold her under the water’s surface for a little while and she flails her arms and legs, without letting go of the cigarette between her index and middle finger. When I finally let her up again, she’s livened up. She snorts and blinks to get the water out of her eyes and to see me clearly.

  ‘What do you want from me?’ she moans at last, when her breathing has recovered enough.

  ‘I want you to remember,’ I say, still grasping her neck. ‘Remember, understand and ask for forgiveness.’

  ‘But I don’t remember! I can’t help –’

  ‘You have to remember,’ I interrupt. ‘You have to remember how you tortured me for days on end. You have to understand that you can’t abuse a person the way you and your friends did, without leaving marks. Lasting impressions, incurable wounds. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you understand that it could be your child lying out there in the mud, with a beaten-up face and their clothes in rags? How would that feel?’

  ‘That … that would feel horrible,’ she whimpers, and tears well up in her eyes, run down and mix with the streams of water on her cheeks.

  ‘So why did you do it?’

  ‘I don’t even know if I did!’ she cries desperately. ‘We were just kids, I can’t believe …’

  I am getting tired of her talk and her bad memory, so I press her down under the water again – for longer this time. I see the cigarette burning down to her fingers, and she finally lets it go when it burns her. When I decide to let her up again, she is completely done in and can no longer hold herself up, so I have to release my grip on her neck and lift her head by the hair. I throw her head back and forth and she coughs and puffs for several minutes, not able to get a word out. During that time I tell her about crushed dreams, about a childhood without sunlight, about a life in loneliness, about a naked, withered soul. When she regains her ability to speak, she hisses out, ‘I’m sorry.’ I don’t believe her, but that doesn’t matter; she’s going to die anyway.