The guy from the billiard hall wrinkled his nose as he became aware of the smell. He pointed at Jerry’s soiled backside and said, ‘I take it that means you get it now.’ He waved his hand in a circular movement over the dark, deserted car park. ‘I warned you, fat boy. We’re going for a little drive. There’s going to be blood and shit all over the gravel, but look on the bright side. You’re bound to lose a few kilos.’
From inside the car, Broderna Djup were squealing and grunting as they imitated all the animals they were going to buy when they had sold their possessions. Jerry wept and whispered, ‘Please, please, no. You can have anything you want.’
The guy smirked. ‘Like what? You’ve got fuck all. We’ve just taken everything.’
Jerry was about to vomit with fear, and tried to form his lips around the words that would promise them all his savings, all his…everything. Before he had the chance, the guy taped his mouth shut and said, ‘We don’t want to wake the neighbours, now do we?’ Then he got in the car and revved the engine, dousing Jerry in a cloud of exhaust fumes.
He was dragged across the gravel and his shirt ripped, baring his back to the sharp stones. He plunged into a vortex of imagining the skin, the muscles being ripped from his body until his naked skeleton was screaming against the ground. He wanted to lose consciousness, he wanted to die quickly, he wanted…
He didn’t even notice when the car stopped, ten metres from where it had started. All three of them climbed out, stood around him and pissed on him. Then they unhooked him from the tow bar. He heard a voice in his ear, ‘Next time it’ll be the full treatment, OK?’
Doors slammed shut and gravel sprayed over his face as the car shot away. He lay there staring up at the night sky and the bright winter stars. His back was burning, and he was breathing heavily and unevenly through his nose.
It took ten minutes before he managed to get up and rip the tape from his mouth. His feet were still fastened together, and he stank of piss and shit. Shuffling and hopping, he made his way towards the lights and the apartment blocks, barely noticing when he fell and cut his cheek open on a sharp stone. Something inside him had broken beyond repair.
When Jerry hadn’t been in touch for a month, Laila began to get worried. Although there had been periods before when they went for months without hearing from him, they usually spoke every couple of weeks or so. But Jerry didn’t ring, and when Laila rang him there was no reply.
She might have investigated the matter more closely, she might even have broken the taboo and gone to visit Jerry-if she hadn’t had a new project that took up so much of her time and her attention.
She had started teaching the girl to read.
She still couldn’t imagine what the future might look like. The girl was around eight years old now, she would probably be nine soon, and what was going to happen when she got older? When she reached puberty, when she became a teenager, when she became…an adult? Would she and Lennart be sitting here as pensioners with a grown woman in the cellar, a woman who had never set foot outside the door?
It didn’t bear thinking about, so Laila took one day at a time. She had created a compensatory fantasy in which the girl was a refugee threatened with deportation, and that was why they were keeping her hidden. She had read about such cases in the local newspaper, and the fantasy fitted in well with the unpleasant story Lennart had served up to the girl. A hostile world was out to get her, and if she showed herself she would be sent away, perhaps even killed. Like Anne Frank. It made Laila feel much better.
Since the girl was disinclined to speak, it was no easy matter to teach her the alphabet, to get her to repeat and imitate the sounds that corresponded with the letters. To begin with it was downright impossible. For example, Laila wrote ‘A’ on a piece of paper and said the letter out loud. The girl wouldn’t look at the paper, didn’t make a sound.
Laila tried with other letters, other ways of writing them or illustrating them. She drew pictures of objects the girl would recognise, wrote their names in big letters, said them out loud. The girl showed no interest whatsoever; she simply sat there playing with her drill, or arranging nails in dead straight lines without even acknowledging Laila’s existence.
When Laila eventually came up with the solution, she could have kicked herself for her stupidity. It was just so obvious. She
It took several weeks, but eventually it happened. The girl began to associate the symbol with the sound. When Laila held up the piece of paper with U on it on front of her face, there was silence for a little while as the girl waited for the note. When it didn’t come she supplied it herself, a humming but perfectly clear ‘Uuuu…’
Lennart was in the middle of one of his studio periods again, but listened to Laila’s stories of the girl’s progress and made encouraging comments and suggestions. For example, when Laila explained that she was having a problem with the consonants, he suggested that she should use lyrics the girl already knew, isolating individual words and getting the girl to sing them.
Laila decided on the Swedish version of ‘Strangers in the Night’ by Lasse Lonndahl, as Lasse had a tendency to extend the vowels, but still enunciated the consonants clearly, which made it easier to sing individual words.
Laila began with the word ‘en’, extending the word as she held the piece of paper with the word on it in front of her. ‘Eeennn…eeennn…’ She had to repeat it over and over again, and go through the song many times with sudden interruptions and much scribbling on the paper, but eventually the girl was singing from the same hymn sheet, so to speak.
As they approached the summer, Laila could hold up a piece of paper with the word
Laila had rung and rung, she had even gone to Jerry’s apartment, struggled up the stairs and rung the bell. No one had opened the door, but when Laila peered through the letterbox she could see that there was no post or junk mail on the floor. Jerry was still around somewhere. She had shouted through the letterbox, but there was no response.
And then one day in early June, there he was standing on the porch steps. Laila hardly recognised him; it was a stranger she invited to sit down at the kitchen table. When Lennart emerged from the studio he reacted the same way, and seemed on the point of asking who he was.
If Laila had lost maybe ten kilos by watching what she ate since the winter, Jerry had lost three times as much in less time. There were bags under his eyes, and a few grey hairs had come in at his temples. A badly healed scar ran across his right cheek. The air of self-evident authority with which he had commanded a room was gone. He had begun to look like Lennart.
They sat in silence for a while. Then Laila asked, ‘What’s happened to you, love?’
A shadow of his former ironic smile passed over Jerry’s lips. ‘You might well ask. I’m on a disability pension, for a start.’
‘A disability pension? But you’re only thirty-three!’
Jerry shrugged his shoulders. ‘I managed to convince them.’
‘Of what?’
‘That I can’t work. That I’m finished. That I can’t be around people.’
Laila reached across the table to stroke Jerry’s arm, but he moved it away. She said, ‘But why, love?’
Jerry scratched the scar, pale beneath the stubble, looked her in the eye and said, ‘Because I hate them. Because I can’t cope with seeing them. Because I’m scared of them. Will that do?’
Jerry got up from the table and when Laila tried to stop him, he pulled away from her. He picked up the guitar he had left in the hallway and went down to the cellar.
