Autumn Killing

23

Linkoping, spring 1974 and onwards

The light pulsates in the eyes of the boy who owns the playground of Anestad School.

The previous week the retirement age in Social-Democratic Sweden was lowered to sixty-five, and a few months ago the Mariner 10 spacecraft flew past Mercury and sent pictures of the lonely planet back to earth.

Here and now, in the school playground, in the sharp rays of the sun, the verdant foliage of the birch trees rustles and the boy runs after the ball, catches it with one foot, spins around and then kicks the white leather ball with his toes and the ball shoots off towards the fence where Jesper is standing, ready to fend it off, but something goes wrong. The ball hits his nose and the blood that gushes out of his nostrils a moment later is a deeper, livelier red than the colour of the bricks in the walls of the low school building.

Eva, the teacher, saw what happened and rushes over to the boy. Yelling, she grabs his arm and shakes him before comforting the crying Jesper. She seems to want to scold rather than offer comfort, and she shouts right in the boy’s ear: ‘I saw that, Jerry, I saw that, you did that on purpose’, and he gets dragged away, he knows he didn’t hurt anyone on purpose, but maybe he ought to, he thinks as the door of the classroom closes and he is expected to wait for something, but what?

Jesper.

A doctor’s kid from the villas of Wimanshall. His dad’s evidently the sort of doctor who cuts people up.

The boy already knows that they treat the kids from the villas differently from him and the others from the blocks of flats in Berga.

It happens in the little things they think nine-year-olds don’t notice: who gets to sing the solo at the end-of-year assembly, who is suspected of misbehaving on purpose, who gets most attention and praise in class.

So a girl sings in the gymnasium, two boys play the flute, and he doesn’t recognise any of them from the place where he lives, and all of them apart from him are dressed in white and all of them apart from him have their parents there.

But he doesn’t feel lonely, feels no shame, he’s worked out that shame, even if he doesn’t understand the word itself, is pointless. That he isn’t like Mum, or Dad.

Unless he is, really? When he stands in the second row on the penalty-line of the handball court and is expected to sing songs decided by others for people he doesn’t care about, is he not like Mum and Dad then? Doesn’t everyone want him to be like his parents then?

Maybe he did aim for the nose after all?

Enjoyed watching the blood gush out from stupid Jesper’s nose, like it had been cut by the blades of a lawnmower?

There, in the gym hall, he actually knows nothing about the world, except that he is going to make it his.

He spends all summer drifting around the backyard on his own. He spends many summers doing this.

Mum has long since given up.

She developed an allergy to the cortisone they pumped into her to help the ache in her joints, and becomes stiffer and stiffer in a whimpering, corrosive pain that is gradually wearing away the woman she once was to the sum total of mute fury. Grandma has had a stroke, the cottage has been sold, Dad took redundancy from Saab and has drunk the last of the pay-off during the autumn. They had no need for his skills when they went over to production of the Viggen. He could have got work as a cleaner, or in the canteen, but wasn’t it better that he took the money, and looked ahead, to the future?

Dad likes the company of the parks department workers. The lawnmower, with its comfortably sprung seat. The blokes in the parks team don’t judge him, they don’t judge their own.

And the boy longs for the end of the summer holidays, for football training to start again. There are no differences out on the pitch. On the pitch he decides. On the pitch he can be a bit rougher, and what does it matter if the boy from Sturefors falls badly and breaks his arm?

He has friends. Like Rasmus, who’s the son of a sales manager for Cloetta chocolate. They moved here from Stockholm, and one evening the boy is around at Rasmus’s when Rasmus’s dad has business colleagues there for dinner, and his dad asks Rasmus to show the guests that he can do forty press-ups in a row, and someone suggests a competition. And then they are lying there on the parquet floor of the living room, him and Rasmus, doing press-ups alongside each other, and he goes on and on, long after Rasmus is lying flat on the floor, and their audience are shouting: ‘Enough, enough, point taken, young man.’

Rasmus’s dad says: ‘Rasmus, he’s not too good at school. But Jerry’s supposed to be pretty smart.’ Then he sends Rasmus to bed and the boy has to leave, and he is eleven years old and is left standing in the cold autumn evening outside the sales manager’s rented villa in Wimanshall looking up at the vibrant starry sky.

He goes home. The windows of the blocks of flats are like closed eyes, their bodies black shapes against the dark sky.

Mum is asleep in bed.

Dad is asleep on the green sofa.

Beside him a pizza box and half a bottle of Explorer vodka. The flat stinks of dirt.

But this isn’t my crap, the boy thinks as he creeps into bed beside his mother, feeling the heat from her sleeping body.