beyond the beatings.
Music. I found music, don’t ask me how, but it was inside me. Deep inside, and Andreas pushed me on, bought me a guitar with the money he earned picking strawberries one summer.
But then when we started high school something happened. Andreas pulled away, he wanted other people besides me, he dropped me as the world grew, but I never stopped hoping, because he was my friend, and I never managed to get close to anyone else in the same way.
He used to trail after Jerry Petersson, the coolest of the cool. And he used to fawn over the posh kids as well.
They weren’t even on my radar, not in my dreams. I knew I could never be like them.
And then Andreas died one New Year’s Eve.
Maybe I gave up then, Father?
I escaped into music.
And I sang at that last day of school, a song about what it’s like being born in Linkoping and growing up in the shadow of all manner of dreams, how we tried to drink the anxiety away in the Horticultural Society Park on those last evenings of high school, and I must have struck a chord, because the applause in the hall seemed to go on for ever. I was asked to sing it twice more, then that evening everyone wanted me to sing it on the grass in the park, even the posh girls.
You weren’t there in the audience in that hall with your camera, Father.
I started working in the health service, I rented a cottage in the forest to have space to write, and ended up staying there. I must have sent a hundred demo tapes to Stockholm, but I didn’t even get any replies to my letters to Sonet, Polar, Metronome, and the others.
Year followed year. I got a job in the old people’s home in Bjorsater. Often there were just two of us at night, we took turns sleeping, and nights suited me fine, they let me avoid other people. And you still hit me when you got the chance, even though you were almost blind from the cataracts in your eye.
I could have hit back, but I didn’t.
Why not? Because then I would have been like you. Violence and bitterness would have turned me into you.
Then Mum died, and you ended up in a home, completely blind now and your camera fallen silent for ever. Your fury a calm fury, your bitterness a gentle tone, your life a wait for death.
Sometimes I would read articles about Petersson, about how successful he was.
And it was as if something grew inside me, an invisible egg that grew bigger and bigger, until it cracked and out poured millions of tiny yellow snakes into my blood. They wore all my tormentors’ faces. Yours, Father, those of the boys in the school playground, even Axel Fagelsjo’s. I knew very well who he was, what he had done to you.
I wanted to get rid of the snakes. But they slithered wherever they wanted.
Then Jerry Petersson moved back. Bought the castle and the estate from Fagelsjo, and I got a letter, God knows who from, telling me the truth about that New Year’s Eve. It had never occurred to me that Jerry Petersson might have been driving. There were black-and-white photographs in with the letter, of him standing in the field, standing still with his eyes closed, as if he was meditating.
So I wrote my own letter, but my nerves let me down in the car park. He who had everything and who had taken everything from me, he stamped on me like I was an insect again.
But I crawled back up.
I swore to stand up for myself, he wasn’t going to break me and Andreas again, I’d demand money from him, even though I had no idea what I would do with it.
So early one morning I got in the car and drove out there.
The snakes were hissing, I could almost see them crawling inside me, see their leering faces mocking me.
I waited for him in front of the castle, with a heavy stone in my hand to protect myself, and one of Father’s knives in my pocket. Violence imprinted in the wooden handle he had held so often, with the Skogsa coat of arms branded on it — he must have stolen the knife when he worked there.
I had a piece of paper in my hand.
The snakes were seething.
Slithering within me. And they were fury and fear rolled into one.
I knew that something had reached its conclusion. And that something else was about to begin.
68
69
Jerry looks ahead through the fog, gripping the shaking steering wheel. The Range Rover carries him over the ground.
Who’s that waiting up ahead? Is that you, Katarina, finally come back to me?
Or is it someone else? Some obstinate bastard? Tell me it’s you, Katarina. It’s you, isn’t it?
It isn’t you, Katarina.
It’s never you.
I get out of the car and see Anders Dalstrom in front of me, his face desperate, his black hair wet, he’s holding a stone in one hand. He refuses to give up and I fix my gaze on him, but nothing happens, he doesn’t back down.
‘I want five million,’ Anders Dalstrom yells, and I laugh and say: ‘You’re not getting anything. I’ll crush you like a little rat if you don’t leave now. It’ll be worse than in the car park.’
Anders Dalstrom holds out a note with his free hand.
‘My account number,’ he yells, and the rain makes the ink on the note illegible and I laugh again.
He gives me the note.
‘Five million, within a week.’
An amused grin crosses my lips, but then I get bored, crumple the note and toss it onto the gravel, not giving a damn about Anders Dalstrom and his damn stone.
Anders Dalstrom picks up the note with his free hand and puts it in the pocket of his jacket.
I turn to walk away, then hear a howl from the depths.
I see something black coming towards me, feel a sudden pain and I fall. Then decades of cumulative fury are sitting on top of me and it burns and burns and burns in my stomach and Anders Dalstrom crawls away from me and I feel my brain, my thoughts vanish into pain.
I crawl across the gravel, the pain in my head and my guts feels like the final pain of all, spreading through my whole body like an ancient wind.
He’s killing me, I manage to think, as I crawl under the chain around the moat, and I imagine I see a stone hit the surface of the water.
Is that blood running over my eyes?
