wheeling and dealing from Max Hansen and had decided to play the heavy and hope for the best. But out on the landing stood a frightened little girl aged about fifteen who almost fell backwards down the stairs when he flung the door open.
‘Hi,’ said the girl, so quietly that it was difficult to hear. ‘Is Theres home?’
‘Who are you?’
The girl gabbled her reply like something that must have been repeated many times, ‘My name’s Linn sorry if I’m disturbing you.’
Jerry sighed and stepped to one side. ‘Welcome Linn-sorry-if-I’m-disturbing-you. Theres is in there.’
The girl quickly kicked off her shoes and padded off to Theres’ room. Soon after that the door closed. Jerry stood in the hallway looking at Linn’s tiny red trainers.
Something told him he was witnessing the birth of a monster. As it turned out, he was absolutely right.
The family came home early from the mountains when Goran and Maria finally realised that Teresa’s condition wasn’t something that could be cured with painkillers. She wasn’t catatonic, but she wasn’t far from it. She refused to eat anything for two days, and when Goran and Maria asked in despair if there was anything she might fancy, she came out with just two words: ‘Baby food.’
So they bought baby food. Teresa ate a few spoonfuls when she was fed, drank a little water, then curled up in her bed and stroked the nose of an old cuddly toy until it was threadbare.
Goran and Maria were ordinary people. It had never occurred to them that one of their children might suffer from problems that came under the heading ‘psychiatric’, and it wasn’t stupidity or negligence that stopped them from contacting the Psychiatric Service for Children and Adolescents. It just wasn’t on their radar.
For reasons they couldn’t work out, their daughter had suddenly become very, very unhappy.
A few days passed, Teresa ate small portions of baby food, drank water and lay in her bed. It was only when she gradually began to talk that they realised they might need some help after all.
It was Goran who was sitting by her bed trying to get her to drink a little more water when Teresa suddenly said, ‘There’s nothing.’
Perhaps he should have been pleased that she was talking at long last so they could work out what was wrong, but what she said wasn’t exactly something to celebrate.
‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘There’s…there’s everything. Everything exists.’
‘Not for me.’
Goran’s eyes darted around the room as if he were searching for something to hold up as real, as evidence. He fastened on a bowl of yellow plastic beads, and a distant memory drifted up like a mist, struggling to find a solid form, and failing. Something about yellow beads and existing. Something about Teresa and another, better time. Teresa mumbled something and Goran leaned closer. ‘What did you say?’
‘I have to go to the other side.’
‘What other side?’
‘Where you become dead and are given life.’
Three hours later Goran and Maria were sitting with Teresa between them in a room at the psychiatric service centre in Rimsta. Teresa’s temporary descent into leaden misery was one thing, but her talk about dying crossed a line. They couldn’t ignore that.
Goran and Maria’s ideas about psychiatric care were somewhat exaggerated. They had expected a lot of white, and silence. White coats, white rooms, closed doors; so they were positively stunned when the person who greeted them was a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman in street clothes. She showed them into a room which looked considerably less sterile than a normal doctor’s surgery.
A long conversation followed, during which Goran and Maria described the period leading up to Teresa’s present condition as best they could, and explained what had finally made them contact the psychiatric service. Teresa didn’t say a word.
Eventually the doctor turned to her and asked, ‘How do you feel? Are your parents right to think you want to take your own life?’
Teresa slowly shook her head without saying anything. When the doctor had waited a while and was on the point of asking a follow-up question, Teresa said, ‘I have no life. It’s empty. I can’t take it. No one can take it.’
The doctor stood up and went over to Goran and Maria. ‘Would you mind waiting outside for a while so that I can have a little chat with Teresa on her own?’
Ten minutes later they were called back in. The doctor was sitting next to Teresa with one hand resting on the arm of her chair as if establishing some kind of ownership. When Goran and Maria had sat down she said, ‘I think we’re going to let Teresa stay here for a couple of days, then we’ll see how we get on.’
‘But what’s the matter with her?’ asked Maria.
‘It’s a little early to say, but I think it would be helpful if we could talk a little more with Teresa.’
While they were waiting Goran had read through some of the information leaflets in the other room, including one on suicidal tendencies in young people. He was therefore able to ask, ‘Will you be keeping her under observation?’
The doctor smiled. ‘We will, yes. You can feel completely reassured.’
But they didn’t feel reassured. As Goran and Maria were driving home to fetch some things for Teresa, Maria launched into a long and mildly hysterical monologue, the key point of which was
Goran, who had got some idea from the information leaflets, tried to reassure her that depression was often a purely medical condition, a chemical imbalance for which no one could be blamed, but Maria didn’t want to hear that. She went through the last few months with a fine-tooth comb, and reached the obvious conclusion: it was those trips to Stockholm. What had she actually been doing there?
Goran, on the other hand, maintained that Teresa had been much happier since she started spending time with Theres, but to no avail. The trips to Stockholm were the element in Teresa’s life that had changed, and in some way they were at the root of the problem.
As Maria packed a bag with clothes, books and her MP3 player in Teresa’s room, Goran stood looking at the bowl of yellow beads. When he picked one up and held it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, his left hand found its way up to his collarbone. And he remembered.
Picking her up from the childminder. The afternoons at the kitchen table. All those necklaces made from plastic beads. Where did they go?
Goran’s stomach contracted and he began to cry. Maria asked him to stop.
Teresa was taken into care. People were taking care of her. They passed like shadows outside the window of her eyes. Sometimes their voices reached her, sometimes food was pushed into her mouth and she swallowed it. Right at the back of her consciousness sat a very small Teresa who was perfectly aware of what was happening, but her clarity of mind did not reach the big body. She vegetated. She waited.
From time to time there were periods when her brain worked as it should. She would think, she would feel. It was the emptiness that was the problem. She couldn’t remember how it had felt not to be empty, to have a wall of flesh and blood to protect her from the world. It no longer existed.
Her situation could be described as a state of constant
