The Merman

by Carl-Johan Vallgren

  Robert was born just after I turned two. It was around Christmas, several months early. He had to stay in an incubator in the hospital in Varberg. Mum and I would go there to look after him. I have vague memories of a little doll asleep in an oxygen tent, a doll with loads of tubes and drips in his arms that you wanted to stroke, even though it was prohibited. You weren’t allowed to touch him, and you could hardly talk when you were in the vicinity. Nobody knew if he was going to make it. The doctors couldn’t say anything for certain, so we had to take it one day at a time. Dad never came along. By that time his criminal career had taken off.

  I have clear memories of events from the time I was four. I remember the week when we got evicted from our flat in Vinberg and had to move into a council flat in town. And the night when the police entered the flat and turned everything upside down in their hunt for stolen goods, and how strange it felt because in everyone else’s world the police are nice, helpful people. Another time I watched as Dad got beaten up by two blokes he owed money to. It was a summer evening when they rang the doorbell, and when Mum opened the door they chucked her aside like an old rag and headed straight for the sofa, where Dad sat watching TV with Robert and me on his lap. They hit him with a bottle and kicked him as he lay there. I don’t know what possessed me, but I tried to protect my brother by grabbing hold of one of the men’s legs. They didn’t even notice me, just carried on punching and kicking until Mum came rushing in with her purse and they emptied it of all the banknotes and disappeared.

  I have a load of sick memories like that. Of parties where total strangers turn up and stay for several days and engage in marathon drinking sessions, and when one passes out the next takes over, so it’s basically never quiet at home. There’s always someone left to carry on while the others rest up for the next shift. People whose names nobody knows, because they’re only there once and then disappear, never to resurface, or ones whose names you do know, perversely enough, because they’re sort of regulars at the end of the month when the benefits are paid. People who don’t give a damn about your existence, who attempt to appear interested or concerned with a wine bottle in their hand, who knock on the door to your room and say, ‘How ya doing in there little girl, hope we’re not disturbing you.’ They’re actually worse than the ones who are complete bastards, because with bastards you at least know what you’re dealing with: disgusting blokes who try to touch you up or undress you with their eyes. One time I heard my mum when some guy suggested we should have a shower together. She went completely mental and chased him out with a bread knife. Even so, the nice ones are almost worse – the ones who say they feel sorry for you, even though they’re trashing the place just like the rest of them. And the sick thing is that you end up believing that’s how things have to be, that it’s normal to have a load of drunks in your house who try to come in and make small talk with you as if it were the most natural thing in the world: How old are you, little girl? How are things at school? Or with a trembling voice, they’ll say they think it’s disgusting that we have to put up with people like themselves.

  Shortly after I turned six we moved out of our flat in Falkenberg. The house constituted a health hazard. There was mould in the bathroom and kitchen. The wallpaper had started to come off the walls, and the lino was curling up in the corners. It smelled musty, and the smell of mould even permeated our clothes. Mum complained to social services until out of pure pity they sorted out a place in the newly built maisonettes in Skogstorp. That’s how we ended up here. I was going to start school that autumn, and I remember I was happy about it. Even though I was just little, I went round hoping that our circumstances would change for the better.

  And they actually did, at first. It was nice here then. Everything was brand new. There was a playground nearby, and the street was surrounded by trees and flowers. It was as if Mum and Dad had been given a new opportunity, and they realised and were prepared to seize it. Mum made some curtains and bought furniture from the charity shop. My brother and I each got our own room. I’ll never forget the day when they showed me where we were going to live. A whole room of my own with a fitted wardrobe and a view out over the street. It didn’t really matter that the walls were paper-thin, that everything was built from the cheapest materials and that when somebody went to the toilet downstairs you could hear it throughout the whole apartment. Mum and I hung up a Bamse Bear poster together, and I got a new bed and new sheets with a Pippi Longstocking design on them. Dad happened to have some money. He had made a few deals and had also got a job at a mink farm in Olofsbo. That was in the summer, and sometimes my brother and I got to go there along with him. I don’t know why I have such strong memories of that. Maybe because normally he hardly ever talked to us, kept himself to himself and looked at us as if we were strangers who just happened to end up under the same roof. And then suddenly he was transformed: open, almost happy. He had got a job he wanted to show us: the long mink sheds with no walls, with a saddle roof to keep the rain out; the silky animals who looked so friendly, almost like cuddly toys, five to a cage. Lovely animals, but dangerous. You mustn’t stick your fingers into the cages because they could easily bite off a child’s finger. You mustn’t forget they are wild animals, Dad said. One of his tasks was to prepare the feed. He fetched fish silage from the boats down in Glommen and chicken innards from Torsåsen and mixed them with flour and water and ground it all down into mink feed. He stayed sober during that time, except during skinning. Then they all drank at the mink farm, to endure the blood and the smell of flayed animal carcasses.

  That first year in Skogstorp I hardly ever needed to look after my brother. Mum was at home. Dad was working and avoided his old acquaintances. Four days a week Robert went to nursery, and that autumn I started at school.

  I’ve saved that first class photo, and it’s strange to see everyone there, just six or seven years old, like little prototypes of themselves. Peder and Gerard are standing in the back row, showing the gaps in their milk teeth, already best friends back then, both wearing Lee jeans and denim jackets. They are about half their current size but still to scale; shrunken in time. I am crouching at the bottom over to the left, attempting to smile, as if I don’t really know how.

  It may not be evident from this school photo, but the fact is that I was an outsider from the very first day. Nobody teased me or did anything in particular, but it was just as if I didn’t exist. Perhaps Mum and Dad’s reputation had accompanied me all the way into the classroom? Perhaps the other parents had asked their kids to stay away from my brother and me? Or maybe it was because we lived in the new maisonettes on Liljevägen, which were viewed as a sort of slum where social services cases lived, and everyone else lived in detached houses or proper terraced houses with well-kept gardens; or the fact that I constantly went round in hideous clothes and my hair was straggly because my mum had forgotten to buy shampoo. As I remember it, I didn’t care. Life had actually got much easier since we’d moved here.

  When I was in Year Four, Dad owed somebody some money and stole in order to pay the debt. He ended up inside again, only for three months that time, but it was enough to put us back to square one. I remember when we visited him that autumn in Halmstad. That was the first time I’d been in a prison, and people were very nice to us. A female prison guard took Robert and me to a playroom where we would have to wait. We were given cheese sandwiches and squash, and while Mum was with Dad in the visiting room, the woman explained what a prison is. I didn’t listen too closely because there were loads of toys in there, and then we got crayons and paper to draw on while we were waiting. I still have one of the drawings. It shows Dad in what I imagined was a prison uniform: black and white striped, the way they look in comics. Later, when he came down to us accompanied by a screw, I realised it wasn’t like that. He was wearing the same tracksuit as at home, with a T-shirt underneath, sockless in a pair of brown sandals.

  Children weren’t actually allowed up in the wing, but they made an exception for us. Dad
showed us his cell, which had real bars behind the window pane, and there was a bed and a table which were fastened to the floor. Robert was absolutely thrilled, as if he were in the midst of the plot of an exciting movie.

  I don’t know how the kids at school got wind that Dad was inside. Maybe it was the teacher who told them, or maybe the rumour just spread spontaneously. At any rate, everything changed. The others in the class started to call me names, they hid my clothes, put dog shit in my wellies and were generally nasty. And yet my brother’s fate was many times worse. The kids in his class didn’t even care about shunning him; they went after him physically right from the start. I dedicated the majority of my upper primary years to attempting to protect him, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t always be there. His problems just kept growing, with difficulties paying attention and truanting: he might vanish from school at any time, just disappear during recess and head down to the sea and stay there until evening. And then he started pissing his pants...

  He got educational support and special teachers who helped him, but all this made him stick out that much more in the eyes of the others. Finally, people could do anything at all to him with no shame. Spit on him, kick his bike apart, pelt him with snowballs so hard that his glasses broke. And the words they spat at him, even though they were just young children: pig, puke, spazz, pissypants. Things like that.

  The autumn when Robert started in Year Seven was initially a relief for me. I hadn’t been able to be there for him the previous two years. As for me, I’d sort of fallen by the wayside as far as the others were concerned since Tommy joined our class. Apart from certain insults, like Ironing Board, nobody was particularly nasty to me any more. Gerard and his gang didn’t give a damn about us. At the very most, Tommy and I were a sort of vacuum in their world. And now my brother and I would suddenly be in the same building and sharing the playground. I would be able to keep a closer eye on the situation. And Tommy had also promised to help out, so if we both kept our eyes peeled we’d increase the chances of rescuing him.

  That’s what I had hoped. But instead everything just got worse. Murphy’s Law, as the lads at school would say.

  Early on Saturday morning I finally got hold of Tommy. It was one of his brothers who answered. I was just about to say that I’d seen him at the fisherman’s huts the day before, but stopped myself at the last second. It took a while before Tommy came to the phone. The radio was on in the background. Somebody was clattering around with the crockery in the kitchen.

  ‘I heard what happened at school,’ was the first thing he said when he picked up. ‘You should report them.’

  ‘How do you know that? You weren’t even there.’

  ‘One of the lads from next door came here and told me. He said Gerard and his gang fed you grass.’

  I told him about the kitten and all the rest, but I spared him certain details of what had happened in the woods.

  ‘So now they think you blabbed?’

  ‘It seems that way.’

  I could hear him inhaling and exhaling, out of breath, as if he had run over to the phone.

  ‘Or else he just made that up in order to give somebody a hard time. It happened to be you this time, it could just as well have been me or anybody else.’

  ‘They wouldn’t try it on with you. You’ve got your brothers.’

  It struck me that Tommy didn’t sound the slightest bit ill. Maybe he’d just been playing truant the past week.

  ‘And they’re saying they’re going to take it all out on Robert.’

  ‘What’s he got to do with it?’

  ‘Nothing, as far as I know.’

  He was silent for a moment. Someone turned up the radio in the background.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’

  ‘Pay Gerard a grand so he’ll leave us alone. And to cap it all, my dad’s on his way home with a mate of his to ruin the rest of our autumn.’

  ‘Bloody hell... But how does Gerard know somebody blabbed?’

  ‘Peder said he had to go up to the headmaster’s office, and L.G. knew about what had happened. And since he hadn’t reported it himself, it must have been somebody else.’

  ‘Who else is there to choose from?’

  ‘The lads in the gang, maybe one of the younger ones.’

  ‘But wouldn’t Gerard have checked that out? They practically shit themselves whenever he so much as looks at them. They would spontaneously confess without him needing to ask them.’

  ‘It could be Peder or Ola,’ I said. ‘Didn’t Peder have a cat at home when we were in Year Seven? She might have had kittens. It might have been one of them. A kitten his little sister got or something. And then Gerard just took it for himself, even though Peder didn’t want him to.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘Well, somebody blabbed, and it wasn’t me. Somebody who thinks he’s gone too far.’

  I heard a rustling on the line and the outlines of a voice whispering in the background.

  ‘Are you still there?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah... I’m here. How are you going to get hold of a thousand kronor?’

  ‘It’ll work out somehow. I was thinking of going into town later today... I’ve got some plans.’

  ‘It might be best if you stayed off school for a while. Until things calm down.’

  ‘Gerard would just view that as proof that it was me who blabbed. I’m going to go in as if nothing happened. The hard part will be persuading my brother. Normally it’s the Year Sevens who go after him. Now it’s the Year Nines.’

  ‘You’ve got to speak to someone... a grown-up, I mean.’

  ‘Who with? My mum? You must be joking.’

  Neither of us said anything. I considered the option of asking Tommy’s brothers to do something. They had been known as fighters when they were younger. For a brief period they had even hung around a bit in Dad’s circle, in the days when he worked at the mink farm. But since they had taken on the boat a few years ago, they had calmed down. They might be able to scare Gerard, but only for a short while. He was too messed up to go round being frightened for very long. And besides, I realised, it would only add to his rage.

  ‘I saw your brothers yesterday,’ I said. ‘Robert and I headed down to Glommen after it happened. If you hadn’t been ill we would have knocked for you.’

  ‘What did you see?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. They were just there... ’

  ‘Where was that?’

  ‘By the hut. Shall we meet up this weekend? You sound like you’re better now.’

  ‘I can’t. I’ve got some stuff to do.’

  ‘What stuff?’

  ‘Nothing in particular.’

  His voice sounded odd again. I couldn’t say exactly how, but something was not right.

  ‘Have you had your phone switched off at home?’ I asked.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I’ve been ringing every day since Wednesday, but nobody answered.’

  ‘I had a temperature. Over 39 degrees. The phone is downstairs. I couldn’t get up and answer it.’

  ‘What about your mum and dad then? Or your brothers?’

  ‘I’ve really got to go now,’ said Tommy. ‘I’ll see you on Monday’

  ‘Can’t we keep talking a little longer? I need some help to think.’

  ‘Some other time, Nella, I’ll see you around... ’

  There was a click on the line. I was utterly confused.

  It had stopped raining when my brother and I rode our bikes down Solrosvägen that morning. There were a few lads playing hockey in front of the shop. A bunch of teenagers came roller-skating down from the E6. Early-rising fathers were out washing their cars. They stood in their driveways with their hoses and sponges, with cigarettes in the corner of their mouths and impenetrable expressions. Behind the curtains in the detached houses, families sat eating breakfast and children looked forward to the day – games, trips into town and crisps in front of the TV that evening. It could have been
us sitting there, I thought, in a parallel universe our physics teacher told us about, where everything looked exactly the same as in this one, only with tiny differences, like all right-handed people would be left-handed, or everyone who had brown eyes would have blue eyes instead. But something had gone wrong, and Robert and I had drawn the short straw as usual.

  My plan was to start at Junior Centre, a clothing shop in Nygatan. People’s child benefit had just been paid for the month, so it would be packed in there. Girls and boys around my age, with parents bringing up the rear with their wallets wide open. People from nice families who would never set foot in discount stores. Besides, they had stuff that would be easy to convert into cash. A reversible Mickey Mouse sweatshirt would sell for thirty kronor at school, and a pair of brand-name jeans for double that. Pricier clothes brought better returns, but they were also monitored more closely. I would start there and then continue on to the shops closer to the centre of town.

  ‘We’ll start with JC,’ I told my brother. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what you need to do... ’

  Nobody paid us any notice as we went in through the door. There was a guy in his twenties standing behind the counter, bagging up purchases at the till. Two other shop assistants were helping people over by the changing rooms. There was a queue; kids were waiting with jeans and sweaters in their arms. My brother stayed by the entrance while I went round and did a recce.

  JC was quite small inside. There were no mirrors on the ceiling for the simple reason that they were not needed; the entire shop was in plain view, with no concealed angles or dark corners. Light entered en masse via the display windows facing Köpmansgatan. In the middle of the shop was the jeans display, with piles of Dobbers and Levi’s. There were sweaters and T-shirts on a shelf behind them. I went back over to my brother.