Autumn Killing

47

Lund, 1986 and onwards

The young man taps his finger against the silken paper of the law textbook.

He’s got plugs in his ears to shut out all the noise of his corridor in the block for students from Ostergotland in Lund. He uses his implacable blue eyes to photograph the pages of the book. Look, see, memorise. Law is the simplest of subjects for him, words to fix in his memory, and then use as required.

He is in Lund for three years. He doesn’t need any longer to accumulate the points and the marks he needs to serve at the district court in Stockholm. Three years of forgetfulness, to suppress the narrowness of a city like Linkoping, of a school like the Cathedral School, of a life like his has been.

Of course they are here as well, people with surnames that are inscribed with quill pens in the House of Nobility, but less notice is taken of them here.

He scales the facade of the Academic Association’s handsome building one night. Down below the girls stand and scream. The boys scream as well. He travels to Copenhagen to buy amphetamines so he can stay awake and study. He smuggles the pills beneath his foreskin, smiling at the customs officials in Malmo.

He keeps to the edges of the carnival that takes place during his second year. He arrives late at pubs and bars, shows his face, fuelling the rumours about who’s the smartest of all the smart students, about who gets the prettiest girls.

He is merely a body in Lund. Yet also whispers and guesses. Who is he, where does he come from, and one evening he beats up a boy from Linkoping in a car park behind one of the student union buildings. He had told anyone who wanted to know who Jerry Petersson really was: a nobody. A nobody from a nothing flat in a nothing area of a nothing city.

‘You know nothing about me,’ he screams as he stands over the prostrate boy, who is no more than a black shape in the light of a solitary street lamp. ‘So you won’t say anything. You let me be whoever I want to be. Otherwise I’ll kill you, you bastard.’ He leans over, picks up a piece of metal from the ground, holds it like a knife against the boy’s throat, screams: ‘Do you hear this, do you hear them? Do you hear the lawnmower, you bastard?’

He learns all about the female gender. Its softness, its warmth, and that they’re all different and can be transformed in different ways, and that they can act as his chrysalis and give birth to him time after time after time.

He learns what physical longing means as he lies in his student room and dreams about the woman who should have been his, the woman he still dreams will one day be his.

Those dreams are his secret.

The secret that makes him human.