Autumn Killing

34

Jonas Karlsson, New Year’s Eve, 1984

I’m crawling over the snow towards her, I think she’s dead, she’s not moving and I’m going to bring her back, I’m going to, I’m going to blow air into her lungs and bring her back to life. There’s blood trickling from her ears and the whole world, all the business of New Year’s Eve, is ringing inside me and I hear nothing, but I see, and the car’s headlights are flickering, pumping out their dead light that makes it look like Jerry is moving in slow motion, he’s running through screaming black and white images and the cold is here and a silence, a black silence that I know will follow me for the rest of my life.

Jasmin, was that your name?

Andreas? Where is he? Jerry is standing next to me as I crawl forward, he’s yelling something but I can’t make out what. I want to listen to him, show myself worthy of being his friend, there’s nothing I want more than to be his friend.

I hold your head in my arms, Jasmin, and the snow around you is stained grey with grey blood, and why doesn’t this night have any sound, any colour? Not even the blood has the strength to be red.

And what’s Jerry shouting? What is it he’s shouting?

He wants something. And now I remember, how the words shot through the car, drive slower, slow down, and the world spun around, around, around, breaking into a thousand different sounds and the screams stopped and I was hanging upside down in the silence and looking at the steering wheel, at Jerry who was fiddling with a tape, and then I fell and started crawling.

I thought I could see someone standing above Andreas’s body.

A being with the colourless colour of fear.

And Jasmin in my arms. She’s breathing. How do I know that? Jerry is standing beside me, screaming: ‘She’s breathing, she’s breathing’, and slowly, coldly, as if through cotton wool, his words reach me, he’s screaming, looking at me with his relentless blue eyes, he wants something, he really does want something.

In a way that I will never want anything again.

I can drift back to that field now. It lies there still and pale in the rain and mist, in this raw cold that confuses even the voles that live there.

I’m not about to tell anyone about that evening, that night. About love and decisiveness and death and the white snow and the delicate trickles of blood running from a girl’s deaf ears, the blood that spread out beneath her like a soft pillow of the finest velvet.

I was angry.

Disappointed, but determined to push ahead with the life that was mine. I would become the most ruthless of all ruthless people.

I’m drifting higher now.

Looking at Skogsa from above. I can see Linnea Sjostedt’s little cottage, she’s sitting inside waiting for a death that won’t come to her for a long time yet.

The snow sails through the air in its perfect flakes, hardly bigger than motes of dust.

I used, I use my blue eyes.

I am standing in a field, a few square metres of the boundless, outstretched world that is mine, of the vastness of space that is now mine.

A boy ceases to be a boy, as the snow and rain come to rest on the ground.

Who was I, as I stood on the steps in front of a school building just a few months before, feeling the muted rays of the late-summer sun stroke my cheek?

35

Linkoping, 1984 and onwards

The boy, as he still is, stands on the steps of the Cathedral School in the late-summer sun, warm as the memory of his mother’s cold hand.

The boy doesn’t smoke like so many of the other students of Linkoping’s most prestigious high school. But he still stands on the steps, holding court, sees his people around him, learning each day how to manipulate them into doing what he wants, thinks that there’s nothing wrong with that, because the others don’t know what they want.

Then come the boys and girls from the large farms, the estates and castles throughout Ostergotland, and it doesn’t matter what he says or does, or how much the others look up at him, those people treat him as if he were air. They might talk to him and about him, but there’s always a sense of amusement, of distance, in what they say and do, the fact that they let him exist, yet somehow not.

He wants to be able not to give a damn about them, not to want their favour, but he can’t help himself, he tries to be amusing on the steps, in class, in the refectory, but it doesn’t get him anywhere.

There are closed societies in that school.

For the castle and estate boys, for doctors’ kids with family trees, but not for kids from Berga with a mother dead from rheumatism and a pointless father studying in adult education, of all fucking things.

He, the most handsome and smart of all, ought to be an obvious member of the Natural Science Society, or Belles-Lettres and Tradition, which, even though it’s where the poetic nerds hang out, is still full of status and validation.

Fuck you.

And the parties. The ones they hold and where they invite everyone except him. His brilliance threatens them, frightens them.

But Jerry merely sees a closed door.

A door that will be opened.

At all costs. And if the boys, with all their silly names and houses and cars, are ridiculous, it’s a different matter with the girls. The castle and estate girls with their fine-limbed bodies and soft blonde hair framing their narrow faces and even narrower lips.

There’s something beautiful, irresistible, in the way they move, and they all move towards the boy, like almost all girls do, but while the others allow themselves to be moved by his blue eyes, the nice girls look away at the last moment. The well-bred girls know who the boy is, where he comes from, they know he’s a sight worth seeing, a source of amusement rather than a person to be taken seriously.

But there is one girl, the most beautiful of the well-bred girls, who sees who he is beyond the person that he is, who sees the formidable boy he really is, the man he will become, and the life he will be able to offer.

She dares.

And so one evening, after an annual school competition and the party that followed, they make their way down to the Stangan as it winds through Linkoping, and they lie down together on a mattress in an abandoned pump house, and she is naked beneath him and her body is white and he fills her with his warm hard fleshy soul and they both know they will never get past this moment, the feeling of this instinctive love, how their unconscious can let go of all doubts and simply relax in the sweat, pain, explosion, and a space free from fear.

Then a New Year’s Eve.

White snow falling from a black sky on a blood-stained field.

A boy screaming the words that make him a man.

36

The sea is shimmering in shades of blue that Malin has never seen before, and the sun appears to see its task today as erasing the boundaries between the elements. Malin can feel her dress sticking fast to her lower