It was a kind of homecoming. When he caught the familiar smell of wood, smoke, soap powder and general cellar aroma, it took him straight back to his childhood. He felt like an empty shell; he accepted the sensory awareness gratefully because it made him feel as if he contained something after all.
He had thought things would go all right with Lennart and Laila, but he could hardly bear to look at them either. Behind every face was another face, behind every sentence uttered, dark motives lurked. Yes, he had paranoid delusions. He’d even got a piece of paper to prove it.
The girl was waiting for him in the dimly lit room. Straight back, arms down by her sides and a drill in her hand. Jerry sat down on the bed and opened the guitar case.
‘Hi there, sis. Did you miss me?’
The girl didn’t reply. Jerry relaxed slightly. He played E-major seventh, and the girl picked up the note. A few more chords, an improvised sequence and the girl sang a melody. Jerry breathed a long sigh. The girl was standing in the darkness over by the CD player; he could only see her outline.
‘Bloody hell, sis,’ he said. ‘At least I can hang out with you.’
He put down the guitar and went over to the window to remove the blanket. When he lifted one corner, the girl whacked him on the thigh with the drill and screamed, ‘No!’
Jerry jerked backwards and let go of the blanket, which fell down. ‘What the fuck are you doing-’
He broke off. The girl was curled up in the corner, holding the drill in front of her as she peered up at the window. Jerry crouched down in front of her. ‘What’s the matter? You’re crazier than me, for fuck’s sake. Are you scared of the window?’
‘Big,’ said the girl. ‘Dangerous outside. Want to eat up Little One.’
‘What are you talking about? Are there big people out there who want to eat you up?’
‘Yes.’
Jerry nodded. ‘You’re not wrong there, sis. That’s the right attitude to have. I only wish I’d realised it earlier. So why do they want to do that, then?’
‘Hate in head.’
Jerry had an idea of what was going on here. He had been wondering how the hell Lennart and Laila were going to keep the girl indoors. Evidently they had come up with a solution.
‘So what about me, then? Why don’t I want to eat you up?’
‘Love in head.’
‘Love in…Are you saying I love you, kind of?’
The girl didn’t reply. A shadow flickered across the wall as, out in the garden, Lennart or Laila walked past. The girl jumped and curled up in a tighter ball. When Jerry hung the blanket up again, she relaxed and said, ‘Play. Sing.’
They jammed for a while. Jerry played songs in a minor key, and the girl made them even gloomier with her clear, flowing loops, transforming them from simple melodies into a lament on the whole of life and the human race. For a good fifteen minutes Jerry didn’t feel afraid at all. He could have gone on much longer if his increasingly robust efforts hadn’t broken one of the guitar strings.
His back was covered in sweat as he put the guitar back in its case and clicked the lock shut. ‘You know what?’ he said, without looking at Theres. ‘However fucking crazy you might be, you’re right. If I love anyone, it’s you.’
After that, Jerry’s visits became more regular again. It grieved Laila that he couldn’t really be bothered with her and Lennart anymore, but she took solace from the fact that spending time with the girl seemed to be doing Jerry good. The dark cloud that hung over him had always dispersed a little when he came up from the cellar.
Laila carried on teaching the girl. In time she was able to read words in both upper and lower case letters that had nothing to do with a song, although she did read with a strange, musical diction. It was time for the next step: teaching the girl to make the letters herself. To write.
This turned out to be an even harder labyrinth to negotiate. The girl could hold a pen, but flatly refused to draw the letters Laila wrote on a pad. When Laila tried to guide her hand, the girl growled or yelled out some swear word she had presumably picked up from Jerry. It might have been funny hearing her scream ‘Bloody hell!’ or ‘For fuck’s sake!’ if the words hadn’t been spewed out with such aggression, frequently accompanied by a blow as Laila tried to hold onto her hand. Laila abandoned that approach.
She tried drawing the letters with crayons, she tried letting the girl scratch them with the nails she had grown so fond of lately, but nothing worked. The nineteen steps leading down to the cellar seemed more and more depressing as the winter drew in, and her leg started to ache even more. She was not getting through; and Lennart didn’t have any helpful suggestions.
The girl’s new interest was hammering nails into pieces of wood. She would keep at it until there was no more space, and the piece of wood split from the amount of nails crammed into it. As Christmas approached Lennart taught her to crack nuts with the hammer: that too became an obsession.
And that was literally how the problem was cracked as well. One afternoon Laila was watching the girl as she sat on the floor, filled with grim concentration, smashing nuts on a chopping board. The arm moving up and down, the carefully judged blow, the monotonous motion. Tock, tock, tock.
An idea came into her head, and after all there was nothing to lose. In the store cupboard Laila found Lennart’s old portable Halda typewriter. She carried it in and placed it on the floor next to the chopping board. The girl looked at it for a while from different angles, then raised the hammer to deliver a blow, but Laila managed to snatch the machine away just in time.
Although it would turn out to be a good idea, it took almost a year before Laila’s efforts really came to fruition. Every key was a new obstacle to surmount, but by the time the girl was ten years old she had learned every sound that corresponded with a symbol that corresponded with a key, and she began to put together simple words.
Jerry’s visits tended to cause backsliding. The girl withdrew and didn’t want to do the exercises, but Laila was patient and didn’t mention it to Lennart. If the girl could bring Jerry a bit of happiness, it was worth the delay.
Besides which, Laila didn’t really know why she was doing this. What pleasure would the girl gain from being able to read and write? Would she ever participate in a society that required these skills?
Sometimes Laila grew tired of the tough, tedious, drawn-out project. Then she would put on a record, Bibi Johns or Mona Wessman, and sing for a while with the girl. It felt like a kind of togetherness, and gave her new strength to carry on.
Jerry didn’t like leaving his apartment, and conducted most of his contact with the outside world via the internet. His pension didn’t cover much more than food, rent and his internet connection. In the autumn of 2001 he came across something called Partypoker. Jerry was a moderately good player and began betting quite carefully, winning as much as he lost.
Six months later the number of players had increased significantly thanks to a couple of spots on cable TV and some articles in the press. New players started up who weren’t particularly good, and he found he could bring home a small profit. Not huge sums, but welcome additions to his meagre allocation from the state.
One evening he got into a game with a guy who called himself Bizznizz, and who played like an idiot. Jerry thought it had to be a ploy to drive up the stakes. However, he carried on. After a couple of hours it seemed to him to be perfectly obvious when the guy was bluffing and when he was seriously betting on his hand. By that stage Jerry had won just over a hundred dollars.
In the next hand Jerry held three tens, refusing to drop out as the stakes were pushed up, and in the end only he and Bizznizz were left in, with the pot at nine hundred dollars. Jerry thought the guy might be bluffing on a putative full house, but at the same time he realised with a sinking feeling that this could well be the hand Bizznizz had been laying the groundwork for. And yet Jerry still couldn’t drop out.
He raised with his last three hundred; despair clutched his heart with its cold fingers as Bizznizz declined to
