Autumn Killing

13

Linkoping, Berga, 1972 and onwards

The boy is just as surprised each time he feels pain, yet it is nevertheless in that moment, when the ambulance lurches for some unknown reason and his hastily splinted broken shinbone hits the edge of the stretcher, that he becomes aware that he has a memory and that this isn’t always a good thing. At that moment it causes more pain than anything he has ever felt in his life, and he is aware of it, it’s as if this new pain is the sum total of all the previous pain in his life, and all of a sudden he understands his mum, but his father remains hidden to him, a pain of the soul impossible to comprehend.

Neither Mum nor Dad has been allowed to travel in the ambulance, and he can see his own anxiety reflected in the man sitting beside him, stroking his hair gently and telling him that everything’s going to be all right. That June day was the start of the first UN environmental conference, the first of its kind, and the bombs are still raining down on Southeast Asia.

There’s no lift in the block of flats in Berga. Their flat is on the second floor and he knows Mum has trouble with the stairs, that she’s in pain, always in pain, but he doesn’t know that the ligaments in her knees are long since locked by rheumatism and that she has asked the doctors in the regional hospital to increase her dose of cortisone, and that they have refused: ‘Stick it out,’ they say, ‘we can’t do anything.’

And, in her exhaustion, she can’t do anything for him, during the hours after Grandma picks him up from school and before Dad comes home from his shift on the production line.

He is balancing on the narrow railing of the balcony, and the rose bed five metres below looks so soft with all the flowers, their red and pink glowing against the peeling facade of the 1950s blocks, against the unkempt lawns where the parks department staff usually lie when they have their morning beers and pass around the bottle of vodka from mouth to mouth.

He isn’t scared.

If you’re scared you fall.

She calls to the boy from the kitchen, too tired to get up from the chair that she had dragged to the stove where the pea soup or mutton with dill sauce or stuffed cabbage is cooking, she shouts anxiously and angrily: ‘Get down from there! You’ll get yourself killed!’

But the boy knows he isn’t going to get himself killed, he knows he’s not going to fall.

‘I’ll tell your dad, he’ll sort you out when he gets home.’

But Dad never sorts the boy out, not even when he’s drunk, because he can always get away. Instead he takes him into the bedroom when he’s sober, and whispers to him to scream as if he were being beaten, and that’s their shared secret.

Down in the sandpit in the yard there are two little kids, and Jojje’s big sister is sitting on the only intact swing hanging from the frame. All three of them are looking up at him, not worried, but convinced he’ll manage his balancing act.

Then the phone inside the flat rings. He wants to go and answer it, like he usually does, and he forgets he’s up on the railing and his upper body sways, first one way, then the other, he wonders if it’s Grandma calling, to invite him out to the country that weekend because she forgot to ask, and the narrow iron railing disappears from under his feet. He hears Mum scream, he hears Jojje’s big sister scream, then he sees the buildings and the blue early summer sky, then the rose bushes cut into his body, he hits his leg hard and then there’s a burning pain and he tries to move, but nothing happens.

He’ll have to accept the consequences.

They put him in plaster up to his thigh to keep him from moving. They give Mum more cortisone so she can look after him. Dad gets the pushchair out of the cellar and he rides in that when they go to the supermarket in the shopping centre, and people stare at him as if he were a baby lying in it.

When the plaster is removed he runs faster than he ever has before.

He knows what the bags mean now. He keeps his distance whenever they appear, and Dad’s bitter words reach him less and less often. He, Jerry, is a hundred steps ahead in everything, yet he still seeks Dad’s embrace sometimes, even though he knows that it can close around him like a wolf’s jaws, and Dad’s strong fingers can become the blades of the lawnmower cutting into his body, and his words can be their honed edges: ‘You’re good for nothing, lad.’

During the last weeks of summer, his last ever in nursery school, they have to do a test.

Remember the things on a picture. Pair things together. Things like that, and he realises what it means to be clever, the admiration it occasions in people who don’t expect intelligence in anyone. But the look, those pebble-sized eyes, are still unbeatable when it comes to getting what he wants.

His schoolteacher has seen the results of the tests from nursery school. She calls out his name with a note of expectation on his first day at school, then she sees his address on the report and feels disappointed, her shoulders slump, this could be a big problem, a kid from Berga with a brain.

He’s quickest at counting.

Best at writing.

Can read the most words. Sticks up his hand when no one else knows the answer, and he can see that his teacher feels distaste towards him, but he doesn’t yet know why. He doesn’t see the dirt on his clothes. The filth in his ears. His long, greasy hair. The holes in his sweater. He gives her the eyes instead, and something happens during the third year. She becomes his protector, takes him on, sees who he is and what he might become.

He stays out in the evenings. Creeping home, but sometimes Dad’s awake.

And he does what Dad might have wanted to do in the evenings once he’s quenched his thirst with wine and cheap beer. What Dad would never dare do: he hits when he says he’s going to.

He hits anyone who gets in his way. He hits the headteacher when Mum and Grandma have come to school for a meeting.

But he is allowed to stay.

An exceptional talent, his teacher says.

After that he hits people when they’re not looking.

He hits his way out of all the feelings, the nameless feelings that have nowhere to go in the closed circle of the backyard in Berga, the flat’s two rooms, Anestad Junior School, Grandma’s various homes, and his nimble feet drum restlessly on the ground, wondering what on earth this world is good for.