uncertainly, 'Frankie, of course.'
This reply would be quoted frequently in the future. Whenever anyone in the gang asked who someone was the reply would be, 'Frankie, of course.'
The episode was typical. A number of similar situations made it perfectly clear that even if Henrik and Bjorn were more or less OK, they were basically peasants and not worth bothering with.
When Martin climbed up into the alarm bell tower, it was a feat. When Henrik did the same thing a week or so later, nobody was interested, despite the fact that he climbed higher than Martin, so high that he could rap on the bell itself with his knuckles, and the tower ought really to have given way. What fools do has no importance.
Not that Anders got involved in the status of Henrik and Bjorn. That was the summer he and Cecilia went up to the rock one evening, and there were other things to think about. He also had Music Box at home in the city and read the music magazine OA' from time to time, so he was able to keep up and avoid the worst of the hidden reefs; he was even able to venture an opinion sometimes, 'I just don't know what George Michael is doing with Andrew Ridgeley. They must be at it or something.' But he was mainly into Depeche Mode, and he was on his own there.
One evening before it was time to head home at the end of the summer, he and Cecilia had been alone in Anders' house, and he had actually done it: he played 'Somebody' to her. To his boundless relief she really liked it, and wanted to hear it again. Then they'd snogged. A bit.
When Anders came out for Christmas, Henrik and Bjorn had changed. There was six months between them, but even in their physical and psychological changes they seemed to stick together like Siamese twins. Both had grown, both had a fine crop of pimples, and they had left behind the innocent naivety that had characterised them up to now: they were quieter, more introverted.
But they still hung out together from time to time during the week; they rode the moped over to Kattholmen and played the odd fantasy game in the forest. There was no need to spell out that this was not to be mentioned to anyone else, it was self-evident. Through the same silent agreement they also stopped calling each other dickhead. Those days were gone.
Anders told them about his new discovery: The Smiths. He had been given a Walkman for Christmas, and it played Hatful of Hollow more or less continuously. Henrik had been given the guest cottage in the garden as his own room, and they sat there listening to 'Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now' and 'Still 111'. When Anders was due to go back to the city, Henrik asked if Anders could make him a tape.
Anders gave him the one he'd brought with him, because he could easily make a new one when he got home.
When the summer came it was clear that Henrik and Bjorn had found their thing. Meat Is Murder had come out a few months earlier; Anders thought it was OK, but nowhere near as good as Hatful of Hollow. Henrik and Bjorn had a different view. They knew every single line of every single song, and both had become vegetarians, possibly the first ever on Domaro.
It isn't necessary to go into any more detail about the music that was cool that summer, suffice to say that The Smiths were definitely not cool. If Henrik and Bjorn had enjoyed a higher status, then perhaps the whole gang might have joined in and embraced the notion of meat-eating as murder, but that was not the case. With hindsight, of course, it was Henrik and Bjorn who were the most hip and the most London, but what good did it do them at the time? None. They were farmers, head cases.
They tried to get Anders to become a member of their private sect, but Anders wasn't having any of it. For one thing it wasn't in his nature to get so obsessed about something to do with music, and for another there was now a kind of sickness surrounding Hubba and Bubba. If you spent time with them you risked being seen as infected. They were still tolerated when the whole group was together, but nobody wanted to be regarded as their friend.
If the gang had gathered on the shore to barbecue sausages and drink weak beer, Henrik and Bjorn wouldn't eat any sausages, because meat is murder. If 'Forever Young' by Alphaville was playing on Joel's ghetto blaster, they would sit grinning scornfully at the infantile lyrics in poor English, making comparisons with the greatest living poet of the day: Stephen Patrick Morrissey.
And so on. They cultivated their outsider status, and knew they had a friend in the pale young man from Manchester. Someone who knew what it was like to grow up in a place where nothing happens. A brother in exile.
That winter Anders paid only a short visit to Domaro, and he avoided Henrik and Bjorn. They called him in the spring when they were about to embark on their pilgrimage to Stockholm to buy The Queen Is Dead, and wondered if they could stay over, but Anders said he was going to dinner with Cecilia's mother. Which he was, but not until the following week.
By the summer when everything got blown apart, Henrik and Bjorn's interest had escalated to unhealthy proportions. They dressed like Morrissey, both had acquired rockabilly haircuts, and when it turned out that Bjorn's eyesight was so bad he needed glasses, he was absolutely delighted, because it gave him a reason to get mottled grey frames like the army-issue ones, and even more like…well, you get the picture.
Close study of Smiths' lyrics made them more proficient in English than anyone else on Domaro, and when Wilde, Keats and Yeats were mentioned in 'Cemetery Gates', they made a point of ordering their stories and poems in the original at the library in Norrtalje, then spent the dirty grey spring deciphering the books with the help of dictionaries.
They could have been happy.
They didn't try to fit in, because they knew it was impossible, and they regarded the others with ill-concealed contempt, tying leather cords around their wrists and listening to bands with a 'z' in the name. They peppered their conversation with oblique references to Smiths' songs, translated into Swedish, with particular emphasis on the riches of the poor.
But that line came from the song 'I Want the One I Can't Have', and therein lay the problem. It would have been OK to have Henrik and Bjorn as a couple of oddballs on the fringes of the gang, if only they had known their place. If only they hadn't reached out for what they couldn't have.
Summer 1986. Olof Palme was dead, and the blueberry bushes on the south side of Domaro were regarded with suspicion as they stood there sucking up water from rain clouds moving in from the east.
Sonny Crockett from Miami Vice was a style icon, and everything was pastel colours on the one hand, Black Celebration on the other. And Anders stuck with Depeche Mode, despite the fact that Tracks was playing 'A Question of Lust' to death.
Henrik and Bjorn dismissed more or less the whole lot as dick- heads. The only thing that found favour in their eyes was I, Claudius, a fairly old production by the BBC. From England, from London. Bjorn could do an excellent imitation of the stammering emperor, but unfortunately this was as pearls before swine, since nobody apart from him and Henrik wanted to watch 'a load of old men wearing sheets and talking funny'.
Enough said. Some people remember how it was, and the rest will have to make do with these daubs-pastel splashes on a black background. Summer 1986. Mortal fear and white teeth, Armageddon and workouts. Enough said.
For the gang, that was the summer when they started to drink alcohol. It had started with the odd sneaky drink from their parents' supply the previous year, but in the summer of 1986 they started taking the ferry to Aland.
Martin was tall and well-built. He even had the start of a decent beard, which he made sure he cultivated a few days before they made a couple of trips in Joel's boat to transport the whole gang to Kapellskar, where they caught the ferry. Martin bought the booze in the duty-free shop, then they would slur their way around Mariehamn drinking as much as they dared.
Henrik and Bjorn weren't always included when the booze was doled out, and during the third trip that summer, at the beginning of August, they took the matter into their own hands. They were quieter than usual during the trip home, and only went into the duty-free shop to buy some sweets.
The reason for their secretive behaviour became clear when they had disembarked in Kapellskar, and were safe. They opened their jackets. In the waistband of their trousers and in their pockets they had stuffed twelve half-litre bottles of Bacardi. Everybody thought they were fucking crazy, and they were rewarded with pats on the back and places on the first run home in Joel's boat.
There was usually a litre or two of booze left over after a day in Mariehamn. Now they suddenly had a stash,
