I assumed that sooner or later one of them would turn up and put me on the spot. Give me back my bag and ask me to explain why it had been lying on a folding chair in their hut. And what would I tell them if they did?
Gerard wasn’t at school either. People were saying he’d been suspended for the remainder of the term. Caroline Ljungman claimed she’d heard L.G. discussing it with the headmaster outside the front office. But nobody seemed to know anything for certain.
It was convenient for me. At least I didn’t need to worry about Gerard for a while. I’d had enough on my plate coming to terms with what had happened in the hut and Dad’s sudden return home.
On Wednesday after maths L.G. took me aside.
‘You were absent on Monday as well,’ he said. ‘Two afternoon lessons. And you can’t have been that ill because you were back yesterday.’
‘My dad came home,’ I said.
‘That’s no excuse.’
‘Yes, it is. He got out of prison. I hadn’t seen him for nearly a year.’
That line of reasoning worked. His eyes started to dart around. He cleared his throat nervously.
‘I understand. But you still could have let me know. I treat that sort of thing as confidential.’
It was so easy to lie, I thought, the words just flowed out of me like water. I didn’t even need to think in order to create a sort of logic in what I was saying.
‘I went home in my free period and suddenly he turned up with a mate, with presents and everything. I was really happy to see him, I just forgot about the time. Put yourself in my place, if you hadn’t seen each other in a year.’
L.G. hummed in agreement.
‘What about Tommy?’ I asked. ‘Is he ill?’
‘He’s asked permission to have the rest of the week off. One of his brothers has been injured. They need Tommy to help out at home.’
The creature, I thought. So something had happened when they went back to the hut.
‘We’ve lost a lot of men,’ said L.G. with half a smile. ‘By the way, have you thought about what I asked you the other day? If there’s something that’s happened to you involving your classmates? Or if there’s something you want to talk about?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Definitely.’
L.G. sighed and zipped his portfolio case shut.
‘Well then,’ he said, ‘I’ll just have to trust you, Petronella. But if anything changes, just get in touch with me. I promise to treat anything you say as confidential. Including that stuff about your dad. I suppose I should say congratulations. It must be nice to have him back home again.’
‘Really nice.’
‘And make sure you catch up on what you’ve missed. Especially maths.’
‘I promise.’
He gave a little jump when the headmaster suddenly walked past in the corridor.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’ve just got to speak to that chap there about something.’
About Gerard, I thought. That’s what everything was about these days.
On Thursday Gerard was suddenly back at school. When I arrived that morning, he was sitting on a table in the common room with an unlit fag in his mouth. The trailers had gathered round him: Ola, Peder and some lads from Year Eight. I took a detour so they wouldn’t catch sight of me, sought refuge behind the coat racks and managed to make it to my locker without being noticed.
I’d just taken off my jacket when the caretaker turned up, stopped in his tracks and pointed at him.
‘You have no permission to be here,’ he said calmly. ‘You know the rules. You’re excluded until further notice, and that applies to the entire school grounds. I want you to leave. The rest of you can go off to your lessons and all!’
‘Go fuck yourself!’ was Gerard’s brief reply.
‘The door is over there,’ bellowed the caretaker. ‘You’ve got exactly thirty seconds.’
The common room fell silent. People stood rooted to the spot, watching the caretaker and the gang.
‘You’ve got no right to ban him,’ Ola said calmly. ‘Education is compulsory in this country, isn’t it?’
Gerard sneered in agreement.
‘Exactly. It’s not just my right to be here. It’s also my duty.’
The caretaker looked at his watch and then at the gang. He was giving them an icy-cold stare that would have scared the shit out of anyone.
‘Fifteen seconds! I’ll pick you up and carry you out of here if you don’t go willingly. I’m warning you, lad!’
‘Go fuck yourself,’ said Gerard again.
I couldn’t believe he was still sitting there. The caretaker was close to six foot six with a big build. I’d seen him pick up rowdy pupils before, by the scruff of the neck like they were kittens.
‘I don’t give a damn what you or the headmaster say,’ Gerard added, taking a lighter out of his jacket pocket. He lit his cigarette and blew two perfect smoke rings. ‘I’ll stay here as long as I feel like. So you can clear off. Go and rewire a plug somewhere, you fucking faggot!’
‘Put that cigarette out before I give you a thump,’ the caretaker said.
He was furious now; his whole body was shaking. But Gerard sat there as cool as a cucumber, blowing smoke in his direction and taking a swig from a bottle of pop somebody in the crew had handed him.
‘Calm down. Here, want a puff, or are you thirsty? My treat!’
The situation seemed almost rehearsed, as if everybody knew exactly what they were going to do. When I looked round, I realised that more adults had turned up. The headmaster was standing at the foot of the stairs to the teachers’ lounge. Several teachers had formed a semicircle behind the caretaker. Oddly enough, it was still completely silent. Or maybe I was the only one who perceived it that way.
‘Okay laddie, I’m going to have to carry you out,’ said the caretaker, now a bit calmer. ‘And then I don’t want you to show your face here again until we’ve decided you’re allowed to come back.’
‘Give me a break! Do you actually, seriously think I’m scared of you? That I’m gonna run away like a bloody Jew just because you’re standing there trying to look all mean?’
‘All right. That’s it.’
It happened so fast, nobody had a chance to react. At the exact moment the caretaker took a step towards the table, Gerard was on him. There was not a single ounce of hesitation in his movements. It looked almost comical, like a scene from a cartoon, Tom and Jerry or something. Gerard smashed the drink bottle into the side of his head. You could hear the glass break and a dull thud from his skull. Something was switched off in the caretaker’s eyes and he collapsed onto the floor.
He lay there on his side in an unnatural position with blood gushing straight out from his temple like a fountain. Gerard was standing over him, landing one kick after another on his head, really hard, with no concern about the consequences. The caretaker’s head was bouncing all over on the floor. It was an unnaturally long time before somebody took action. And it wasn’t any of the teachers; it was Ola who pulled him away. ‘Come on, Gerard, bloody hell! Just leave the bastard... that’s enough now!’
Like a school of fish, the trailers made for the door. Before they disappeared out into the schoolyard, Gerard turned towards me. Maybe he just mouthed the words, maybe it was impossible to hear his voice in all the commotion that had broken out, the girls’ upset screams, somebody shouting to phone for an ambulance, the teachers and the headmaster crouching in a circle around the caretaker; maybe he said something else entirely, in which case it was just my imagination. But I thought I saw the words he was forming with his lips: ‘This is all your fault.’
The school was buzzing with rumours for the rest of the day. Someone claimed to have seen the gang on their scooters up by the newsagent’s kiosk, and when a police car approached they zoomed off into the woods on the path with the street lamps. Somebody else said they’d already been questioned at the police station and Ger
ard was being charged with grievous bodily harm.
Nicke Wester, dressed today in a ripped Ebba Grön T-shirt with a bandana knotted round his head, claimed to know why Gerard had been excluded: he’d threatened several of the teachers. Patrik Lagerberg, who had a different source, said the gang had brought back some hashish from Christiania at the end of the summer and sold it on to some older guys in town. But when someone asked why Gerard was the only one who’d been excluded, he had no reply.
Anyway, the caretaker seemed to have survived. When the ambulance came for him he was conscious, and one of the paramedics who was trying to calm down an upset teacher said that it looked a lot worse than it was, and there’s always a lot of blood when someone is bleeding from a head wound.
I felt like I was going to be sick, the more I thought about it. If the caretaker, a fully grown man, easily weighing forty kilos more than Gerard and nearly two heads taller, didn’t have a chance, what would happen to me or my brother if we happened to stand in his way?
During the last recess of the day I went over to the Year Seven wing to spend some time with Robert.
‘Gerard isn’t going to get away with this, is he?’ he asked hopefully as he perched on the banister dangling his legs, on his own as usual. ‘People must get sent to borstal at least, if they go after a caretaker?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But you’ve got to be careful. If you see him, get out of there.’
‘Are Ola and Peder still at school?’
‘No. They cleared off with their boss this morning. Nobody knows where they’re keeping themselves.’
‘Maybe the police took them in? What’s happening with the caretaker, anyway? Is he badly injured?’
‘I hope not. But you’ve got to promise me: if you catch sight of Gerard, you have to get away as fast as you can.’
‘Okay.’
My brother had removed the plaster from the lens of his glasses. His squint had returned.
‘Fortunately, Dad was in a good mood,’ he said when he noticed me looking at him, ‘and gave me my glasses back. At first I thought he was going to keep them. And maybe buy me a new pair, cooler ones. But he didn’t. At least I can see now.’
It was incredible that he was capable of refashioning reality in such a short time, like sweeping all the unpleasant stuff under the rug.
‘Shall we walk home together after school, Nella?’
‘Sure, if you want to.’
‘Do you think Leif’s going to stay over Christmas?’
‘I really don’t know.’
And that was the truth: I didn’t know I did still hope I’d be able to keep my room, because that was only the first night Leif had slept at ours. The following day he’d looked up an old girlfriend and asked if he could live there for a while. Dad was saying he should stay at ours. They had joint business, as he put it, loads of stuff that needed sorting out asap and it was better if they were living under the same roof. The previous night they’d disappeared with the car again without saying where they were going. I hoped they were involved in something illegal. And that they’d get caught before Christmas.
The house was empty when Robert and I got home. There was a note from Mum on the table in the hall. The Professor was looking for me. I phoned him while my brother went into the kitchen to see if there was anything to eat. He picked up straight away as if he’d been waiting for the phone to ring.
‘I was in Gothenburg yesterday,’ he said, ‘at the public library, checking into what you asked me about. I had a hospital appointment. My heart took a licking after my operations, as you know, and the doctors want to change my medication because the one I was on before had loads of side effects. But it went so well I could spend the rest of the day at the library afterwards. I’ve borrowed a few books that seem interesting. It would be good if you could pop by.’
I could hear my brother slamming cupboard doors and cursing under his breath.
‘When should I come?’
‘Now, if you’ve got time.’
‘I’ll be there as soon as I can.’
Out in the kitchen, my brother stood staring vacantly into the fridge.
‘Nothing today, either,’ he said. ‘Not even a piece of crispbread.’
He went over to the sink and filled a glass with lukewarm water – the old trick to fool your stomach. I noticed I was hungry myself. After what had happened to the caretaker, I didn’t manage to get anything down at lunch. And given the situation we were in, it could mean we’d have to go without food for an entire day, until the school canteen was open again.
‘I’m sorry there’s nothing here at home,’ I said. ‘I should’ve thought of that. Do you think you can manage on your own for a couple of hours? I’ve got to head over to the Professor’s for a bit. I might be able to bring something back from there.’
With his back turned towards me, my brother nodded.
‘I’ll come back as soon as I can, I promise. By the way, you need a haircut. Your fringe is hanging down over your glasses, and there are tangled knots on the back of your neck. If you can find the scissors, I’ll sort it out when I get back.’
The Professor was sitting in his reading room when I arrived. He was holding a teacup in his hand and had his glasses on.
‘How nice you could come,’ he said, pointing to one of the squashed-out armchairs. ‘Have a seat and I’ll show you what I’ve found.’
I could tell he’d done a thorough job. There was a stack of library books on the coffee table, with a notebook filled with jottings lying next to them.
‘It’ll be terrific to read your essay when it’s finished. If I don’t muddy things up for you with too many historical facts.’
With that, he picked up his notebook, looked inside and began to explain.
The first time mermaids appeared in the sources was during classical antiquity. They were called Naiads then, or Nereids, and they were a sort of freshwater nymph that ruled over lakes and river channels. According to the descriptions, they had fish-like scales on their abdomen, but the upper body of a woman. They were related to the tritons and other gods of the sea in Greek mythology, but they didn’t do a whole lot in comparison to those other figures... It would take another few hundred years, up until about AD 500 before the classic mermaid took shape. In a text called a “bestiarium” by one Physiologus, mermaids are described as a “fantastically shaped woman from the navel upwards, and like a fish from the navel downwards”. The creatures, he writes, are happy during storms but sad during periods of calm, and they exert a strange attraction on seafarers: they lure sailors to sleep with them, and then they kill them... ’
The Professor took a sip of tea and looked at me.
Is the vocabulary I’m using too complicated?’ he asked. ‘Let me know if it is.’
‘No, I’m getting the drift.’
‘Okay. I’ll carry on. In the fifteenth century the first more realistic reports of contacts between people and mermaids started to come in. In 1423 a Dutch monk by the name of John Gerbrandus wrote of a “wild sea-maid” that was washed ashore through a hole in a dyke in the Netherlands. The creature was found by some milkmaids and taken to a nearby farm. After they washed her and gave her some food and clothing, she remained on the farm where she learned to spin wool and perform simple kitchen tasks. After a while she was taken to a nunnery in Haarlem, where she lived until her death, without ever learning to speak.’
‘So you think that actually happened?’
The Professor chuckled.
‘No, I doubt it. Gerbrandus was not an eyewitness. He just wrote down a story he’d heard. That’s how it was in those days: monks collected stories about strange occurrences. And when you think about all the wonders described in the Bible, it didn’t seem unreasonable that the sea would be full of mermaids and other mystical creatures. God was the creator of everything, and nothing was impossible for God.’
He turned the page.
‘Reported sightings of mermaids continued to turn up at
regular intervals from voyages of exploration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This one’s interesting... ’
He paused at a bookmark in his notebook.
‘In the summer of 1658 the explorer Henry Hudson led a convoy of ships along the Arctic coast of Russia. Near Novaya Zemlya on the 15th of June he recorded this entry in the ship’s log: “This morning one of our sailors on the lookout for icebergs sighted a mermaid off the port side. When he summoned me, another mermaid came to the surface. The first one was quite near the bow and looked up sternly towards the men who had gathered at the ship’s rail. A great breaker took her, lifting her up and down. Her neck and back were those of a woman, her body of a size similar to ours, her skin very white. Her long hair, black in colour, hung down over her face. When she dived, we saw her tail, which resembled the fin of a large fish.’”
‘Is that made up as well?’ I asked.
The Professor looked at me, touched.
‘We’ll never know. Even today, the Arctic Ocean is still fairly unexplored. And of course there are deep sea trenches with their strange marine fauna. Or else, which seems most likely, Hudson just saw what he wanted to see. Sea voyages could last for many months in the 1600s. They must have been incredibly boring. But he did actually make some sketches... ’
He opened to a page in one of the books. In an old print there was a vague figure, half-seal, half-woman.
‘Curiously, a famous English zoologist, P.H. Gosse, read about this and dismissed the theory that they might have been elephant seals, sea cows, walruses or anything like that.’
‘What did he think they were instead?’
‘An as-yet-undiscovered species of mammal. Hudson’s experienced crew, he thought, would have been too familiar with large marine animals to err so greatly.’
That might be one possibility, I thought as I let my eyes wander round the Professor’s cluttered reading room, to the bookshelves, newspapers and clippings that lay in piles on the floor. Maybe they existed at one time but then died out? Or else I was going up a dead end.
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