He was skinny and thin and although he was twice my height I kicked him right in the stomach while Adam held him. Adam four years younger, but still stronger, run wild.
Dad in his wheelchair on the porch.
How it happened?
I don’t know.
They found him in the park one night. His back broken, his jaw too. Mother said he must have run into a real man there in the park and that it’s all over for Blackie now, and then she passed him another drink, let him drink himself to death, it’s high time, and oh how he drank. We would push him round the houses and he would rave in his drunkenness and try to stand up.
I was the one who found him when he fell downstairs. I was thirteen then. I came in from the garden where I’d been pulling unripe apples off the trees to throw at cars driving past on the road.
The eyes.
They were staring at me, white and dead, and his skin was grey instead of the usual red.
I was scared. Wanted to scream.
But instead I closed his eyes.
Mother came down the stairs, just out of the bath.
She stepped over the body, reached out to me and her hair was wet but still warm, and it smelled of flowers and leaves and she murmured in my ear, Jakob. My Jakob.
Then she whispered, If you have to do something, you don’t hesitate, do you? You know what has to be done, don’t you? And she hugged me tight, tight, and then I remember the church bells and the black-clad people on the patch of gravel in front of the church in Vreta Kloster.
What’s ours is ours, and no one can take it from us, Adam.
Mother’s voice with no space for me.
I was probably two the first time I realised that Dad hit him, that there was someone who was always there, but who was only there to be hit.
There is an obvious quality to violence that doesn’t exist in anything else. Drink your skull to pieces, smash a skull to pieces, smash to pieces, smash apart.
That’s how it is.
I smash things apart.
Mother.
She also likes things to be obvious.
Doubt, she says, isn’t for us.
It was different with the new kid.
He didn’t know.
Turkish. Came to our class in year five. From Stockholm. His mum and dad had got jobs in chocolate heaven. He must have thought he could mess me about. I was the little one, after all, the one on the edge, with all the stains on his clothes, the one you could, well, do what you liked with, just to prove you were someone in the new place.
So he hit me.
Or tried to.
He used some fucking judo technique and got me down, then he punched me until my nose started to bleed, and then, just when I was about to fly at him again, the teacher and the caretaker and the PE teacher, Bjorklund, showed up.
My brothers got to hear about it.
The Turk lived in Harna. We waited for him by the canal, under the birches by the water, hidden down the slope behind the tree trunks. The fool used to go home that way.
And he came, just as my brothers had planned.
They leapt up and knocked him off his bike and he was lying there in the gravel by the side of the canal, screaming and pointing at the tears in his jeans.
Jakob stared at him, Elias stared, and I stood by a birch tree and I remember wondering what was going to happen now, but I knew.
Elias started kicking the Turk’s bike, and when he tried to get up Jakob kicked him, first in the stomach and then in the mouth, and the Turk started whimpering and blood was coming out of the corners of his mouth.
And then I bent the bike frame and heaved the bike right out into the canal. And I ran up and kicked the
