was a shame, Jerry. But there’ll be other times. Maybe we can do it next Friday instead?’
Jerry nodded and stayed in his seat as the teacher hurried off to join the Stenmark supporters in the hall. He didn’t scream, he didn’t cry, he didn’t set fire to the school. He got up slowly, put his guitar back in its case and gave up.
If the Alpine Skiing World Cup had been another day, if Stenmark had done his run five minutes later, if the Principal hadn’t been in such a good mood…
Everything could have been different.
Jerry didn’t play the following Friday, nor any other Friday. He couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm again. He knew his opportunity had slipped through his fingers. Stenmark won, by the way. As always.
Jerry’s remaining years at junior school were spent in the special limbo reserved for the victim of low-grade bullying. It wasn’t so bad that he refused to go to school, and he wasn’t sufficiently ostracised to let him feel calm when he was there. He simply stuck it out.
He stopped playing the guitar and devoted his time to comics about superheroes, glam rock and model planes. Lennart tried to force him back to music, but Jerry had a strong will, at least when it came to negatives. He flatly refused. He had shoved the guitar under his bed, and there it stayed.
The signs started to announce themselves during his last term in Year 9. Jerry’s body was changing. He grew five centimetres in just a few months, and everything began to bulk up. When school finished it was as if he had been released from a press, and his body blew out in every direction.
He had to eat more just to keep up with this hothouse growth, and became a frequent visitor at the pizzeria on the main square in Norrtalje. It was there he got to know Roy and Elvis. They were two years older than Jerry and had also, improbably enough, been named after music legends. Perhaps that influenced them to let Jerry become one of the gang. Elvis, Roy and Jerry. It sounded good.
In the autumn Jerry started at the grammar school, taking mainly technical subjects. Nobody from his old class was there and he was able to make a fresh start. He was a fairly big lad with something sly in his expression; it was probably best not to mess with him.
In October Roy and Elvis initiated him into their speciality: burgling holiday houses. They would head off on their mopeds to isolated cottages with feeble locks and ransack them for anything of value, mostly garden equipment and household items that Roy sold for next to nothing to a guy he knew in Stockholm.
Sometimes they found booze, and Jerry was happy to join in with the celebration after a successful outing. Roy had his own cottage with a TV and video player, where they could drink their haul undisturbed while enjoying films like
He wasn’t sick in the head. He didn’t feel the slightest desire to do those kind of things, and he thought the debate about moral harm that was raging just then was ridiculous. But somehow the films captured how it
His final grades in Year 9 had been less than impressive, and he had only just got into grammar school. Things were going better now. Not despite but because of his leisure activities, he felt contented with life. His homework might possibly have suffered, but on the other hand he was able to concentrate when he was in school, because he didn’t have to be on his guard all the time.
He finished the year with a much better grade than anyone could have hoped for. Lennart and Laila rewarded him with a computer, a ZX81 which absorbed a great deal of his attention in the weeks after he left school. A charming little story, all in all.
Everything could have been different.
At the beginning of July he met Roy and Elvis at the pizza place as usual. Elvis was a bit agitated. A friend of a friend had been to Amsterdam and brought back a decent lump of hash; he had given Elvis a little taster.
Well, you have to try these things. Later in the evening they sat down behind a tree in the local park and, with a fair amount of difficulty, rolled a joint; they passed it around, then did it again.
Jerry thought it was fantastic. He had heard that hash made you feel heavy and dull, but he felt completely on top of the world. It might possibly be a little bit more difficult to move his body than usual, but his mind! He could see everything so clearly, he knew exactly what was what.
Arms slung around each other, they strolled off towards Love Point where people usually gathered in the evenings. They were invincible, they were the Three Musketeers, they were the entire bloody history of rock and roll in one package.
There was some kind of party going on, a gang of people about their own age sitting around a bonfire. Someone was strumming away on a guitar. In walked Los Rockers making one hell of a racket! There was no messing about, people just had to make some room for them. Roy grabbed a bottle of wine to share with his compadres.
Jerry couldn’t take his eyes off the guitar. It woke something in him. His fingers began to grope in thin air, remembering the wood, the strings, the frets. He could still do it. The guitar was longing for his fingers to release the music hidden inside it…
Someone spoke. A voice was tapping away at his consciousness, saying his name. With difficulty he dragged himself out of the guitar’s hypnotic power, turned his head towards the voice and said, ‘What?’
Two metres away sat Mats, known as Mats the Love Machine ever since he started driving around a couple of years earlier on a souped-up moped with an imitation leopard’s tail dangling from the antenna. He had once pissed on Jerry in the showers. Among other things.
Mats leaned forward and said, ‘I’m talking to you: wanna play, fat boy?’
It happened so fast. Everything had been moving in slow motion for a while and now somebody had pressed fast forward. Before Jerry had time to think, he had grabbed a lump of wood that was sticking out of the fire, walked over to Mats and smashed him across the face with the burning end.
Mats fell backwards with a scream and Jerry looked at the cooling, pointed piece of wood in his hand. He looked at Mats, writhing on the ground with his hands over his face. His mind started working again, his thoughts crystal clear. He could see exactly what the situation was. Mats was in fact a vampire. Simple as that.
Which meant there was only one thing for it. He grabbed the glowing stake with both hands and drove it into Mats’ chest. Sparks flew, there was a hissing sound, and by the time Elvis and Roy got hold of Jerry, Mats had already started coughing up blood like the vampire he was. Or had been.
Events that had taken perhaps fifteen seconds would define Jerry’s life for a long time to come. It involved police and lawyers, social services and youth services. Mats survived; he got away with the loss of an eye, a few shattered ribs and slight damage to one lung.
But something had gone wrong inside Jerry’s head during the cannabis rush, and it refused to go back to normal. In that moment of clarity when he realised he had to free the world from a repulsive blood-sucker, an insight had taken root in his mind and refused to let go when the rush subsided.
There was a truth in what he had seen.
During a meeting with the family therapist, Laila explained what had really happened to her knee. The therapist regarded this as a possible breakthrough and a chance to move on, but for Jerry it merely provided further confirmation of what he already knew: the world was evil, people were evil, and there was no point in even trying.
When all the investigations and analyses were over, Jerry had slipped so far behind in his schoolwork that he couldn’t go back. Didn’t want to anyway. During his absence Elvis had passed his driving test, which opened up all kinds of new possibilities.
Freed from the burden of normality, Jerry let go of any semblance of ambition. The three of them moved on from summer cottages to bigger houses, and robbed a couple of petrol stations before they got caught. Jerry got a year in a youth offenders’ institution, which only served to reinforce his view of the world.
When he came out, they started again. An old man was at home in one of the houses, and they knocked him down. When he started screaming abuse at them, they kicked him a few times until he shut his mouth. This played on Jerry’s conscience for a time, but it passed. He was becoming hardened.
One day when he was shaving, he caught sight of himself and looked carefully. He examined his feelings, and realised he had crossed an important line. He could kill someone without it breaking him. If necessary. That was
