A Fairy Tale

by Jonas Bengtsson

  She turns over in her sleep as if she can feel my gaze on her. I want to kiss her on the forehead, but I’m afraid of waking her up.

  I sit on the windowsill in my room, smoking a joint out the open window. The house is quiet. The neighbourhood is quiet. The last drop of red wine has been drunk, the murder on the TV screen has been solved. Tomorrow is another day, not much different from today. But it’ll be a good day, a new day organized with small magnets on the fridge. Don’t forget to feed the rabbit. Whose turn is it to vacuum? Lasagna for dinner.

  The smoke reaches my lungs. I suppress the urge to cough and I feel the heat rise up my throat and across my eyes. Like a thin membrane that turns the glow of the moon more yellow and the fog that lies across the railway tracks into big balls of blue cotton wool.

  The man sticks his arm right down into the terrarium. He holds his hand still until the grasshoppers forget that he’s alive. Then he reaches out and catches one of them, his fingers delicately pinching its body. It joins the others in a white plastic tub which used to contain Neapolitan ice cream. The man who owns the pet shop is in his early fifties. Perhaps he has a wife and children; perhaps he has old friends and flies south, to the Mediterranean, for his holidays. But I find it easier to imagine him in a house lit up by aquariums, sitting in an armchair with reading glasses on his nose and a book about saltwater fish in his lap.

  He hands me the plastic tub. I ease open the lid, take out the first grasshopper, and drop it into another terrarium.

  The monitor lizard stands so still it looks as if it is stuffed. Then its tongue shoots out, lightning quick, blink and you’ll miss it. It crunches grasshopper wings and legs before it swallows.

  I drop another couple of grasshoppers down to it, but the monitor lizard has lost interest.

  “It needs a home,” the man says. “I take good care of them, but they go a little stir crazy if they stay here for too long. Not enough room and too many school kids tapping on the glass.”

  He rests his hand on the rim of the terrarium. “Think about it if you want it. At that price it’s a giveaway.”

  I walk down the main street, past the pizzeria, the florist, the post office, and the pharmacy. My class is doing German now. Right now our teacher is walking around, looking down at the open exercise books.

  He can spot an incorrectly conjugated verb at a glance.

  I walk through the town centre to the park, which has benches and a metal sculpture whose spikes spear fallen fruit in the autumn.

  I can hear voices and people laughing before I reach the skateboard park.

  There are never more than a few people skateboarding, sometimes none at all. Most of them sit on the ramp, smoking joints and drinking cheap beer from the nearest supermarket. I say hi to Søren. He was adopted from Korea, but everyone calls him the Inuit.

  “Have you seen Christian?” I ask him.

  “Not today.” He flicks his cigarette into the bushes. “But if you see him, tell him I’ve got some money for him.”

  I go back to the residential neighbourhood. A couple of streets from Karin and Michael’s house I turn left and walk down the road to where Christian lives.

  His mum opens the door. She’s blonde, wears an apron, and has a dab of flour on her cheek. Christian’s mum keeps in shape. She appears in many of the locals’ wet dreams.

  “Oh good, another guinea pig,” she says, and laughs.

  I follow her down the hallway and can easily imagine a film crew waiting for her in the kitchen: Hold up that packet of flour, smile, yes, that’s it.

  “I’m experimenting with something for Maja’s birthday. Healthy birthday buns.” She lowers her voice, her perfume is sweet. “Maja is getting a little chubby, you know.”

  Christian is sitting at the dining table. “If I knew you were coming, I would have warned you about the buns.”

  His mum brings us each a glass of juice. Then she disappears back into the kitchen.

  “You’ve been smoking,” Christian says to me.

  “Is it obvious?”

  “Not to my mum. And, anyway, she already thinks you’re dangerous. That you belong to some sort of sect. But . . . I think she likes you.”

  These days I barely notice all the mothers smiling at me with exaggerated warmth. Since I came to live here, they’ve paid for all my movie tickets. I’m “the other,” someone their children would undoubtedly benefit from meeting.

  Christian looks at me. “Can you still write?”

  His mum enters with a plate of bread rolls and a butter dish.

  “Fortunately you two don’t have to watch your weight.” She sits down opposite us. “Eat,” she says, resting her chin in her hand and looking at us expectantly.

  The bread rolls are dark grey. They need a thick layer of butter not to stick to the roof of your mouth.

  “I’m so proud that Christian is helping you. I know it sounds silly, but I’m really proud. I told his teachers and they think it’s really great, too. A couple of years ago he wasn’t particularly academic, remember? But you two have fun together, don’t you?”

  When we’ve eaten the bread rolls, we go to Christian’s room.

  He removes a couple of books from the bookcase and slips in his arm.

  “I’m afraid that’s all I’ve got,” he says, putting a small brown nugget on the table in front of me. It’s one gram maximum. “I know I owe you. I’m out right now. If you come to the party on Friday . . .”

  “Party?”

  “The party one of your little friends from school’s having. You’re probably not invited. I’m only going there to deal. If you turn up, I’ll have the rest for you.”

  Christian turns on his computer and I sit down in front of the keyboard. He produces his homework from his bag, a five-page essay on Pelle the Conqueror for tomorrow.

  “Roll me a joint,” I say to him.

  He opens the window and finds the pine-scented room spray. He’s about to pick up my nugget from the table, but I slap the back of his hand with the mouse.

  “Screw you,” he says, rubbing his hand.

  “I know you’ve kept some for yourself, roll it out of that.”

  Christian pretends to sulk and finds another lump from the bookcase. Then he locks the door and starts to roll. He lights the joint, takes a couple of drags, and passes it to me.

  “They want to throw me out of school,” I say to him while I smoke and write.

  “So you’ll be reduced to working your ass off at the supermarket.”

  “They want to send me to another school, as far away as possible.”

  “Full of hyperactive kids and girls who cut themselves?”

  He grins right until it dawns on him what it means. Not for me, but for him. The last couple of years I’ve written all his essays. He has gone from getting fives to sixes. Then from sevens to eights and nines. Despite his poor exam results, he managed to get into university. It was my idea that he should see a therapist who specializes in performance anxiety. Ever since then, his teachers have been forgiving when he writes incoherent essays during exams and gets tongue-tied in front of an examiner.

  “I hope you’ll stay,” he says.

  The fight starts in the bedroom, where Karin is putting on makeup, and continues down the stairs, through the living room, into the kitchen, and back into the bedroom. When they argue like this it’s always about me. I know it even though I can only hear the odd word here and there and my name is never mentioned. I go to Clara’s room; she’s sitting on the floor engrossed in her plastic ponies.

  Her parents are now standing at the foot of the stairs; words reach us, angry and suppressed. The ponies jump into the air, they flick their pink manes, Clara hums loudly to herself.

  The row ends where it started. The babysitter has cancelled due to boyfriend trouble and Karin’s mother still isn’t fully recovered a
fter a blood clot in her leg, so if they want to go out tonight and not waste 1,000 kroner’s worth of tickets to the Royal Theatre, I’ll have to look after Clara.

  Eventually Michael comes up the stairs. I can tell it’s him from the footsteps: heavier than Karin’s, but with a certain lightness. Every Sunday he goes for long runs in a nearby forest; he comes back dripping with sweat in his tight-fitting Lycra running clothes.

  He puts his arm around my shoulder in a matey fashion he’s tried a couple of times before, then he takes it away again. He has stuck up for me.

  “Is that okay?” he asks, knowing that I must have been listening in. “There’s money on the kitchen table so you can order a pizza. You can take a beer from the fridge if you like.”

  I nod; Michael hesitates for a moment before he goes back downstairs.

  “Right, Clara,” I say to my sister. “What do you say we torch this place while your folks are out?”

  She looks up from her ponies and grins.

  “What does ‘torch’ mean?” she asks me.

  I go down with her to the front door so she can wave goodbye to her parents.

  Karin is wearing a dress in a dark, shiny fabric and a string of pearls around her neck that matches her earrings. Michael wears a suit and a shirt with no tie.

  “Have you got the tickets?” he asks.

  “Have you got the car keys?” she asks.

  As she walks out the door, Karin smiles anxiously at us. “If the phone rings, don’t pick up. Let the answering machine deal with it.”

  Michael sends me a trusting I-know-you-can-do-it look.

  Then they run outside to the dark blue station wagon. Karin traps her dress in the car door, opens it, and slams it shut again. The headlights come on and they’re gone.

  I take my sister to the kitchen. The pizza leaflet is stuck to the fridge with a magnet, a laminated picture of a saint they bought on holiday in Rome.

  “Who ever heard of putting pineapple on a pizza? What next, apples and pears? Or how about banana? A big banana pizza? A monkey pizza?”

  Clara stands with her hands on her hips like I’ve seen her mum do. She’s not budging.

  “I want a princess pizza.” That’s what she calls it.

  When the doorbell rings, she races out into the hallway and jumps up and down. She still finds it hard to believe that you can say some numbers into a telephone and a pizza appears as if by magic.

  We eat and watch a cartoon Clara has seen twenty, thirty times before. A film with princesses and princes and horses the princesses can ride on. When it’s finished, we watch the first twenty minutes of The Exorcist until Clara is too scared to peek out from behind her cushion. I show her where her parents hide the sweets, the good sweets, the stuff with artificial colouring and preservatives.

  When she has stuffed herself, I take her to the bathroom on the first floor.

  “Everyone has to brush their teeth,” I say.

  She shakes her head, refuses to open her mouth.

  “Have you ever seen a princess with black teeth?”

  “A black princess.”

  “You muppet, black people don’t have . . . Get a move on or I’ll wee all over you.”

  She looks at me; she laughs and takes the toothbrush.

  I help her put on her pyjamas.

  I read The Little Prince to her, but there aren’t any princesses in it so I read three picture books to her afterwards.

  “I can’t sleep,’ she says, when I turn over the last page. She looks at me, her eyes wide open.

  “Do you want me to read you another book?”

  “I can’t sleep.” She grins; she knows full well that it’s my problem. That I have to do something about it. I look at the clock; Karin and Michael won’t be back for another couple of hours.

  I pull her out of bed. First I put her into a warm sweater, then trousers and a winter coat on top of her pyjamas.

  It’s cold outside, and dark. She presses against me. Slowly we walk down the road, moving our legs in unison.

  After a couple of houses she stops and points to a large white building. We both know this game.

  I say: “Are you sure you want me to tell you?”

  She nods.

  “And you promise not to tell anyone?”

  She nods.

  “The people who live in that house landed on earth in a spaceship a couple of years ago. They’re green all over, but they’re dressed up as real people when you see them. They were actually trying to get to Copenhagen, but they must have misread the map. They keep their spaceship in the garage. They work on it on weekends and during holidays; they hope to go home soon.”

  We walk on. A couple of houses later she points again.

  “The people living there? Are you sure you want to know?”

  She squeezes my hand.

  “Okay, but I did warn you.”

  Clara looks up at me.

  “It’s actually quite gross. But you’re a big girl now. So . . . Last Christmas, they couldn’t get a duck. They tried everywhere, every supermarket and butcher’s, but everyone was sold out. So they ended up eating the next door neighbour’s dog. With caramelized potatoes and red cabbage. The next day they picked the bones clean. Now they’re hoping no one will ever find out.”

  We walk on, more houses, Clara points.

  I’m just taking the key out of the lock when we hear the telephone ring. Clara is faster than me. When I enter the living room, she hands me the receiver.

  The woman on the other end tells me she’s my paternal grandmother; she pronounces every word very clearly, as if I wouldn’t be able to understand her otherwise.

  She says she’s tried calling several times, but got no reply.

  Clara looks at me quizzically. I gesture for her to go out into the hallway and take off her coat. The woman on the telephone says she has to see me, that it’s important. When Clara comes back, I’m still standing with the telephone receiver in my hand.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  I shake my head.

  I lie next to Clara and look at her closed eyes. Her hands reach out for something that isn’t there.

  I sit on the sofa waiting for Karin and Michael to come home.

  I find it hard to concentrate on the television.

  I hear the key in the lock. They’re both giggling. They’ve had a couple of glasses of wine and were probably relieved not to find cars with flashing lights on the roof as they came home. Karin asks me if anyone called. I shake my head.

  The cinema has a glass front; the small café inside sells sandwiches and foamy coffee. There’s only one screen. I don’t ask what they’re showing, I just buy a ticket and take my seat. In one of the back rows an older man is polishing his glasses. Two little boys sit at the front; they throw popcorn at each other and laugh, then they fall silent and glance over their shoulders. They’re scared to be caught skipping school, like in that cartoon with Donald Duck and his nephews. When the ads have finished, the lights go down and the film begins. It’s about a policeman who can talk to his dog. Together they look for some stolen paintings.

  After ten minutes the darkness in the theatre fills with faces I can’t name anymore. I’ve stopped thinking about my dad, that’s what I tell myself, but perhaps I think about him all the time.

  I don’t know very much about what happened. I got an explanation, disjointed and child-friendly. The rest is just fragments, words I’ve heard through doors left ajar.

  I know that he went to university, like Karin.

  He studied theology, like his father and his grandfather before him.

  I know that he was working on his Ph.D. when it went wrong. Those aren’t my words. Nerves, stress, I’ve heard it called several things, but it went wrong. So they moved. I was very young. They moved to the countryside, a place
where my dad could finish his doctoral thesis in peace. Only that’s not what happened, it went wrong. Karin was going to take me and leave, but my dad beat her to it.

  Whenever I’ve asked about him, it has always ended with Karin running upstairs to cry in the bedroom. I stay down with Michael, who tells me it hasn’t been easy for her. Sometimes he tells me only with his eyes.

  The dog on the screen keeps talking, the boys in the front row laugh. I get up and leave the theatre. The washrooms are next to the café. I stand on the toilet seat and find a joint in my pocket. I open the window a little and blow smoke outside so I don’t trigger the alarm.

  When the joint is finished, I go back into the theatre.

  The man behind me is snoring, the boys are laughing. I sit with my eyes half-shut. The dog on the screen talks and keeps getting the policeman into trouble. It ruins a big cake at a birthday party and farts so that everyone in the elevator has to pinch their noses. At the end the two of them catch the art thieves.

  I can hear the party as soon as I turn the corner.

  The bass is so loud it makes the windows rattle. Outside the house, stacks of bicycles are leaning against the hedge.

  I walk up the garden path. A boy from my year comes running around the house; he hasn’t got a shirt on and his chest is scratched. He trips over a coiled garden hose, his hand brushes the ground. Then he continues to run around the house.

  I walk past a girl sitting on the steps crying, the jacket she’s wearing is inside out, her friend has her arm around her. The hallway is filled with coats and beers in plastic bags. The floor is shaking; inside the living room people are jumping up and down, lit up by flashing red and blue lights.