A Fool, Free

by Beate Grimsrud

  I get off the train and walk straight across the road. A car brakes and toots. Well, I don’t want them either. People are sitting at tables outside the cafés. What a fucking awful spring. I go into the nearest place. Order a beer and a double whisky. I don’t go out into the sun and sit with the others. I stand inside by the dark bar and down the whisky. I drink the beer in great gulps. Laugh. Is one not allowed to laugh? What did it say in my journal? ‘Unmotivated laughter.’

  I walk back up to the hospital, ring the bell and the door opens. The kind hospital priest is standing a couple of metres away. He has prayed for me. He has spoken to me. He has listened. He has lit a candle in a church abroad for me. I run towards him and punch him as hard as I can in the chest. He falls backwards onto the floor and lies there. The staff rush out and grab hold of me. I’m lifted and carried back to my room. I want to see if the priest has stood up or if he’s been hurt. I didn’t mean to. Of all people, not him. I’ve floored the kindest person of all. I’m restrained. Sleep all afternoon and think that it’s morning when I’m released in the evening.

  I’m not allowed to go to the workshop in the next corridor. I’m seen as being too unstable. But one day they let me. There are looms, a pottery and mixed materials. I choose the latter. I’m going to make a bust of myself from medicine cups. Four times a day, medicine is handed out in small plastic cups. White in the morning, yellow at two o’clock, blue in the evening and red at night. I mould some chicken wire around my head and shoulders. I manage to wriggle out and keep the beginnings of a bust of me. The idea is to attach the small coloured cups to the chicken wire. Red for the hair, yellow for the face, blue for the eyes and white for the body. I make two small holes at the bottom of each cup and then attach them to the chicken wire with steel thread. It requires patience. It will take weeks, but that doesn’t matter. The other patients start to save their medicine cups and give them to me. It’s a waste of resources, really, putting pills in a plastic cup then throwing the cup away.

  The plastic cups that start to cover the chicken wire stand out at right angles and make the bust far bigger than me. Gabriel has been sitting beside me for weeks. First turning a vase and then decorating it with a beautiful pattern. Gabriel jumped from the Skanstull Bridge and survived the freezing cold water. He’s been in here for several months and says that he will wander the hospital corridors until he dies. He doesn’t get dressed during the day, but walks around in his white hospital nightshirt. He says that he’s the youngest heterosexual in Sweden with HIV. He had just started in his final year at school, hadn’t had any relationships before, but then chatted up a woman from Botswana on the town late one night. He only discovered he had HIV when he went to give blood. Gabriel is convinced that he’s going to die soon. There’s no cure for his illness yet. He reads Shakespeare’s poems in English at night and tells me that he’s read my latest articles in the paper.

  The vase becomes more and more beautiful. He sits there and engraves the pattern with a thin engraver’s needle. One day he suddenly smashes it to pieces. I’m devastated and want to comfort him. The staff intervene and say that I should put my energy into my own creation. That patients mustn’t get emotionally involved with each other, which we do all the time. ‘Sometimes you have to destroy the thing you treasure most,’ they say. But it was almost finished. I can’t understand why he had to destroy it. I am too materialistic. I want to comfort him, but am not allowed to talk to Gabriel. I carry on with my own thing. Every afternoon I walk down the corridor to my room with my medicine cup bust, which grows and grows and gets lots of attention.

  From my medical journal: Starts by saying that she wants to stop taking her medication, that she thinks it makes her ill. As an example says that she was supposed to go to a screenplay writing course last week, but didn’t manage as she felt restless and unfocused. Pat has had major conflicts in connection with the completion of her film. Pat bitter that the producer sold herself as an artistic producer. Pat is of the opinion that the producer has never shown any interest in the content, and has only been concerned about saving money. Pat describes feelings of anxiety after a meeting between the hospital and the film team last week. ‘The world came from outside and inside me.’ Pat describes other feelings of anxiety as ‘sounding like two plastic bags being rubbed against each other.’ When the pat describes the frustrations she has experienced in connection with the film project, her symptoms are more comprehensible.

  I get boxing gloves from Tim, which the staff are none too happy about. I punch everything and everyone. But they will prove to be a very useful present. We’re filming the last scenes of the football film in my room at the unit. I go to the cutting room for a few hours every day and write and record the voiceover. I, who previously thought that I’d drawn the short straw, now feel that I have greater control over finishing up the film. It opens: ‘I dreamt that I had been playing football for more than twenty years. I woke up. I had been playing football for over twenty years.’ The film is a fifty-eight minute declaration of love to football. It ends when I give up football. And that was the intention. I did that in reality too. Finally. I think I have played myself out. I’m a grown woman now. Someone who works with culture, not sport.

  But then I get the boxing gloves. The need to move. I walk past a window where some people are sparring. You can’t be a proper woman until you’ve tried boxing, I think, and before I know it, I’m in there and before you can say Bob’s your uncle, I’ve started boxing. Boxing is defence and attack at the same time. To punch and not be punched. Mind and body. No time to waste. Always on your toes. The boxing trainer screams: ‘This is no Disneyland. Come on! You can’t fool me, you can only fool yourselves. I’m just shouting.’ The training sessions are demanding in a good way. Obey, suffer and play. The ache in my muscles is positive pain.

  I help to start the first boxing club for girls in the Nordic region. See it as my mission to document my life, so shortly after I decide that I should film the whole thing. From the point where we get a run-down cellar space and put together a boxing ring, sew punching bags from coarse tarpaulin and fill them with rags. Our stomachs and breasts shrink. Soon you can see the hard muscles in our bodies. Punch, don’t get punched. Intellectually, boxing feels ridiculous, but emotionally it feels absolutely right.

  I make two films about boxing and one wins a prize for best documentary.

  When I leave the hospital after nine months, I leave the medicine cup bust behind in the staff room. It’s called Healthcare Victim. I say that it’s a self-portrait of the painter Prince Eugen. It stays there for six months until I’m asked to come and collect it. I don’t know what to do with it, don’t want to have it in my flat. The whole point of it was the patience needed to attach each cup to the chicken wire. I understand Gabriel now. I want to smash it.

  But a fellow patient suggests that I should submit it to the spring exhibition at Liljevalchs Gallery. Healthcare Victim is accepted and is exhibited for all to see. When the exhibition closes, I take the bust to my workspace in a building that’s due to be demolished. When I move out, I leave Healthcare Victim and the large desk behind and they end up in the jaws of a bulldozer.

  3

  I found, I found something. Five good years. Harald moves in with me so I can be discharged from hospital and live at home. I learn to make food from scratch. Harald learned from his mother and so it’s goodbye to fried cabbage and garlic. We eat food from all corners of the world, Harald experiments. He lights candles and the conversation round the table stops when the candles have burned down.

  Harald moves out and Tim moves in. He, who is trained as an engineer, now works as a translator and can sit at home or in an office and work whenever he likes. Which is generally late in the evening and at night. He told me once that he was studying for a PhD and shared an office with only men. During a coffee break one day he suddenly thought: I can’t sit having coffee with these sort of men for the rest of my life. Tim’s theory is that if the patriarchy
disappeared, the world order would change entirely. So he signed up for the writing course and that is where we met. At home, he walks around in a loincloth rather than trousers. He thinks, and always takes a long time before he answers a question. He has thoughts about everything. Solutions to everything from the state of the world to technical appliances in the home. His mind is free, and moves in all directions. I enjoy talking to him about mathematical problems and life. He should be an inventor. He should be a poet. He should be everything. But he’s not the type to progress from thought to action.

  My birthday is coming up. Tim talks about the various dishes he’s going to make. He’s a fantastic cook. He has plans for a big dinner. ‘Not too big,’ I say carefully. ‘Sirloin steak, and what about champagne and strawberries for breakfast?’ I try to rein in my expectations, because I know Tim. But maybe this time, I think as always. He asks what I would like. I hardly dare to answer, because there’s so much. ‘I’ve got the money,’ he says, and throws open his arms.

  On my birthday, I’m woken by Tim moving around in the kitchen. I close my eyes and pull the duvet up over my face. He’ll come in soon. Best to pretend that I’m sleeping. I wait, but don’t hear any more sounds from the kitchen. He’s gone out to buy fresh bread, I think, and look at the clock. It’s nine. He’s gone a long time. I try to go back to sleep, but can’t. I listen for his footsteps. It can’t take over an hour to buy bread. I can’t bring myself to get up. Lie there with the feeling that I’m waiting for someone who’s not going to come. He will come. He doesn’t come.

  I get out of bed at midday. How stupid can you be? There’s no note in the kitchen. He’s had a cup of coffee and breakfast. I head off to our shared workspace. ‘Hi,’ he says, happily, when I come in. I burst into tears. ‘What’s wrong?’ ‘I lay in bed for three hours waiting for a stupid cup of coffee,’ I sob. ‘Oh, I thought you wanted to sleep so I didn’t wake you.’ How the hell could he think that I wanted to sleep?

  In the evening, Harald comes to the flat and makes an improvised buffet. Lolo comes with a present. If everyone was the same you’d only need one friend. In the future, I will be invited to countless dinners by Tim, who has changed from a pretty normal guy to a poet and inventor, and then back to a pretty normal guy.

  ‘You’ve got a monkey on your back,’ Jonathan says. He’s come to my workplace. ‘Your violent fantasies. Your past is a monkey on your back. Have you ever heard that expression?’

  ‘No.’ I’m shaking.

  ‘You’re not being threatened now. You’re free.’

  ‘Eli’s not here,’ I say. ‘It’s Erik. I am Erik.’

  ‘Yes, yes. But when I’m here, Eli has to be here. Can you get her out please?’

  I guffaw.

  ‘What are you laughing at?’

  ‘They say you don’t know them.’

  ‘Of course I know your voices and I respected them from the start. Their names are even in the programme. But only at certain times. You’ve not been following the programme. You should always contact someone at the weekend. You should start the day the same way. Turn on the light and the radio. Write.’

  He gets up. I normally sit on the bed when someone is here. It’s got a duvet and blankets. But Jonathan says no. I have to sit at my desk while we talk. Jonathan stands and looks at the bed. ‘What can we do? So you don’t go and lie down as soon as I’ve gone.’ He takes two big pieces of wood and places them in a cross on the bed. ‘It’ll get a little dirty, but now you know that you’re not allowed to go to bed.’

  I laugh.

  ‘What are they saying?’

  ‘That I’m falling apart.’

  ‘You’re not falling apart. You’ve never fallen apart.’

  ‘Yes, I have. Lots of times. When I lose myself, it feels like I’m falling apart. That’s what I’m afraid of.’

  ‘But you’re stronger now. Stronger than the voices. You said it so well yourself last time, that you’ve been reading your journals and seen a pattern. The voices talk about the same things that they did twenty years ago. They’ve not kept up. You’ve grown and developed, they haven’t. Who decides? You decide. Say it out loud.’

  ‘I decide.’

  Lolo and I buy a summer house in Roslagen. She’s too nervous to do the bidding so she leaves that to me. ‘We won’t get it anyway,’ she says, and escapes to the cinema. I bid and bid, ten thousand at a time. Threaten the other bidders by saying that I’m bidding with my emotions and won’t give up. Which means that I don’t have a ceiling. They back down. The house is ours.

  I can’t get hold of Lolo to tell her that she’s now the owner of a nineteenth-century torp, with an outside loo and twelve-thousand square metres of land. I would actually rather have a cabin on a cliff by the sea. But we don’t have the money for that. The thought of a cabin in the forest has made me anxious, and now I own one.

  Lolo and Harald use a chainsaw and tree after tree is felled. Eventually it’s possible to see fields and meadows and the sun can get in. Harald and Tim build a little guest house on the site so there’s room for everyone. They all think that I’ve bought it as a place to write. That I sit there at my desk for days on end, looking out over the fields. But it soon transpires that there’s loads of work to be done on what will become the garden, and I have to hide away up in my room to write in short bursts. Before more wood has to be chopped, more water has to be fetched, bonfires burned, branches broken, weeds weeded, meadows mown and delicious dinners prepared.

  I start a project called ‘Instead of a Novel’. I spend the whole summer putting together a shed and the next renovating second-hand garden furniture. Lolo has an eye for colours and paints the whole house in linseed paint. She’s quick and not very careful. I am slow and meticulous. We complement each other.

  To think about text, to write text, to talk about text. It’s the best thing I know. I enjoy it with my entire being. Sonja and I give our manuscripts to each other. We take turns in taking each other out for a meal. We were on the writing course together and have continued to share our writing with each other since then. Every line, every book from the beginning. We talk about structure and content. Associations, possible ways forward. I normally draw small patterns on the paper alongside her poems, to illustrate how I read them. I myself show her things at a very early stage. The fact is that I have barely written anything before I want to show it. Believe that with only the vaguest idea of the very first sentence the novel is finished and want to send it to the publishers. Sonja holds me back. She pulls me further and further into the writing. She shows me that I’m only at the start of a long journey.

  I’m a sprinter taking part in a marathon. I want to stop after only a short distance and be applauded. I want to have thoughts and feelings, others’ aha moments. I want to give them something they never would have thought of if they hadn’t read my text. When I wrote about my childhood and the publisher wanted to publish it, Sonja just said: ‘You can do better.’ She thumped the pile of paper down onto the table. Ordered a cognac that I was paying for. I was angry for a week, but then started working on it again. It took six months and became a far better book.

  It’s a matter of giving a little more and a little more. Like boxing, but it’s not boxing. It’s no Disneyland. It’s not a charter tour. It’s a lonely long-distance run, and you have to pull in the odd spectator to wave a flag and give you some water during the slog. It’s about remembering all the trainers I’ve had over the years and their encouragement never to give up, you can always be better. And after better, will, will, will. Muscle pain is positive pain.

  I go to see Kristin in Oslo. ‘You’re so thin,’ she says. I eat like a horse the whole weekend. I’m tired and I eat. Go to the loo and eat again. ‘There’s something wrong with your metabolism,’ Kristin says. She looks at my thyroid gland. ‘Promise that you’ll go to the doctor as soon as you get home?’ I promise, but don’t do it.

  My body isn’t working. I, who didn’t weigh much to begin with, lose tw
elve kilos in six months. Don’t have the energy to box. Eat constantly. Make stews in the morning that stand simmering all day. Think about an old Norwegian folktale where they chew on a boulder. Think I can hear the crunching sound between my teeth when I eat.

  I need some encouragement. I go to Mensa’s homepage, the organisation for people with the highest IQ in the country. I start doing their tests. I love trying to work out which shape fits into the series. I love the maths and the logic. Sit with my stew in front of the computer. Go and lie down for a while and ponder the problem. When I send in the test, I’m sent an invitation to join Mensa. I knew it. I’m proud as a peacock, I’m one of the smartest people in the country. Until I see that the test should have been done in an hour and I used the whole day. Smart, but slow.

  I go to see Kristin again, and am told that I’m not so smart. Not smart enough to go to the doctor. She’s a qualified doctor now and gives me a blood test the next day. I’ve had hyperthyreosis for nearly a year. Back in Stockholm, the doctor says that my values are like those of ninety-year-old. ‘How on earth did you manage to get up the steps to Söder Hospital?’

  After taking medication for a year, I’m well again. Start boxing again. Carry stones for a wall at the cottage and get a slipped disc. But I’m healthy. I’m not psychotic.

  It’s a beautiful spring day. I’m going out to the cottage and taking my bike with me on the bus. I fly along the cycle path, but in the wrong direction in the wrong lane. Suddenly there’s a bang and I’m lying beside my bike. Beside another bike and a large man in a police uniform. I stand up without a scratch. Pick up my bike, which is intact. The policeman’s bike is more like an accordion. I almost start to laugh. The front wheel is completely twisted. The light smashed. The policeman has a hole on one of his uniformed legs and blood is seeping out. He screams at me: ‘That was your fault. Look where you’re going, you idiot!’