Autumn Killing

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.