National Encyclopaedia. He’d explained that it was a whole lot of thick books with absolutely everything in them. Teresa had begun to wonder if this National Encyclopaedia really existed. At any rate, she’d never seen it.
‘We-ell,’ said Teresa. ‘At least it
‘Why not-haven’t you heard of pigeon post?’
‘And flying motorbikes? And magic umbrellas? Are they in your encyclopaedia too?’
Johannes folded his arms tightly across his chest and glowered at the ground. Teresa was extremely pleased with herself. It was usually Johannes who fixed things so that you were left with no possible answer. Now she’d done it. She pulled the box of stones towards her and started arranging them in order of size, humming as she worked.
After a while she heard a strange noise. Like a frog, or the sound you make when you’ve got something stuck in your throat. She looked up and saw that Johannes’ shoulders were moving up and down. Was he laughing? She tried to come up with something caustic to say, but then she realised he was crying, and the corrosion trickled away.
He was crying in his own way. An almost mechanical ‘uh-uh-uh’ was coming out of his mouth as his shoulders kept time, bobbing up and down. He would have looked like someone
Johannes took a deep breath and wiped his face with the sleeve of his jacket. Then he said, ‘Can we pretend something?’
Teresa’s body felt soft. If it would make Johannes feel better to pretend, then she could certainly give it a go, so she said, ‘Like what?’
‘Can we pretend we’re dead?’
‘How do we do that?’
‘We just lie down. And pretend we don’t exist. Or we can pretend it’s a funeral.’
Johannes lay down and stretched out. For once he didn’t seem to mind about his clothes. Teresa lay down next to him and looked up at the angular ceiling of the cave. They lay like that for a while. Teresa tried to think about nothing and discovered that it wasn’t too difficult.
Eventually Johannes said, ‘Now we’re dead.’
‘Yes,’ said Teresa.
‘We’re lying in a grave together, and everyone has gone home.’
‘How can we talk, then? If we’re dead?’
‘The dead can talk to one another.’
‘I don’t believe that.’
‘We’re pretending.’
‘OK.’
Teresa looked up at the grey stone ceiling and tried to imagine it was earth. It was impossible. Then she tried to imagine it was a grave like the Vikings had, where they put stones over the corpse. That was easier. She was dead and she was lying beneath a mound of stones. It was rather nice.
‘We are the dead,’ said Johannes.
‘Yes.’
‘Nobody is going to come knocking, nobody is going to ask us to do anything.’
‘No.’
‘Everyone has forgotten us.’
The faint sounds from outside faded away as Teresa drifted into a dense bubble of silence. She had been worried about her lost gym shorts, she had been worried about the darkness under her bed, but now she was no longer worried. It was so simple, being dead. She became completely calm. She might have dropped off to sleep for a moment when she heard Johannes’ voice as if from far away.
‘Teresa?’
‘Yes.’
‘When we grow up-shall we get married?’
‘Yes. Although I don’t think we can say that now. Not when we’re dead.’
‘No. But later. We’ll get married. And then we’ll die at the same time. And lie in a grave together.’
‘Yes. Good.’
In the autumn when Teresa was in Year 5, the class was given the task of writing about their summer. Teresa devoted most of the space available to a description of the family’s trip to Skara Sommarland, although it had only lasted three days and she hadn’t enjoyed herself at all. In the last couple of lines she mentioned that she had also been swimming, cycling, and played board games. The things she had done with Johannes, the things that had taken up most of the rest of the holiday. She didn’t mention his name.
Of course the rest of the class knew that she and Johannes were friends; it was unavoidable in a small place. But Johannes was nothing to boast about. He wore short-sleeved shirts, beautifully ironed; when he wore shorts he pulled his socks up too high, and he became stiff and awkward as soon as they bumped into other children their own age. The fact that he had a bicycle with twenty-four gears didn’t help at all in the circumstances.
So she avoided mentioning Johannes. During the summer she had had to put up with a great deal of teasing, not to mention sneering, when she was seen with him. She didn’t want to hear the sniggering or vomiting noises from her classmates if her essay about the summer was read out.
On one level, therefore, you could say that Teresa’s account of the summer was untruthful. On another level, it wasn’t. She merely avoided mentioning details that might show her in an unfavourable light; remodelled the facts where necessary.
She knew it was normal and right to visit Skara Sommarland and describe the feeling of her stomach dropping away on the highest water slide, even though she hadn’t been on it. She knew it was OK to complain a bit about how cramped the chalets were, but not to say how tired she was of her father, who never had the energy to join in
And yet her account was not a lie. She had had a lovely summer holiday, but she didn’t want to write about what had made it so enjoyable. So everything she had written was true, it was just that it had happened in a different way.
For Christmas that year Johannes was given a Playstation 2, which changed a lot of things. By unspoken agreement they had already abandoned the cave during the summer. Too childish. When the autumn came it was as if they were looking for a new direction, a new way of being together.
Once the gossip about Teresa and Johannes started to circulate around the village, her brothers started to be nastier to Johannes, which meant that her home was no longer the sanctuary it had been. She didn’t like being in his house; there was something about the atmosphere that made her uncomfortable, almost afraid.
For a while they did a lot of cycling, riding around the lanes and exploring dilapidated barns and old gravel pits, or visiting the sheep grazing in a field a couple of kilometres away. Sometimes they cycled into Osteryd, and it was on one of these excursions that they ended up in the library. Despite the fact that it was a small place, Osteryd had a decent library with various sections, secluded reading areas and a couple of chess boards.
It soon started to get dark earlier and earlier, and for a while they cycled to the library straight after school and played draughts on the chess board, since Johannes wasn’t quite such an expert in that game, or read books and talked quietly.
Things might well have gone on like that if Johannes hadn’t been given the Playstation for Christmas. By the spring Teresa was forced to spend some time at his house in spite of everything if she wanted to be with him.
The shiny black leather sofas and the glass table. Johannes’ mother, sneaking in with juice and biscuits. A tough guy by the name of Max Payne, shooting people dead on the TV screen. Johannes’ fingers, flying over the buttons and control sticks. And the cold. It was cold in the house. Teresa had to have a blanket over her as she sat
