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?