Autumn Killing

67

Anders Dalstrom, images from a life

There are no explanations.

They’re pointless, and no one can be bothered to listen to them.

But this is my story, listen to it if you want to.

Father.

Your one working eye behind the lens of the camera, you say the pictures will resemble the way you see the world, with no depth of perception, and without any real hope. Did I inherit your hopelessness, your diffidence about life?

You must have been the most bitter and frustrated person on the planet, and you took that anger out on me, and I learned to creep out of the way, to disappear from the flat in Linghem and stay away until you calmed down.

People would see me, and there was talk about how you beat me and Mum because of your bitterness about your lost eye, your agony.

I saw you, Father, behind the camera, and I would run to you in spite of your anger, but I hesitated, instinctively, and I took that hesitancy with me in my dealings with other people.

At school I was alone at first, then they started getting at me, and none of the teachers could be bothered to care. They hunted me, hit me, mocked me, and I would shrink into the corners. One day, in year 4, they pulled my clothes off and I ran across the playground naked through the snow, and they chased me in front of a thousand eyes, and they kicked me when I fell.

They pulled me into the school building.

They forced my head into a toilet full of excrement and urine.

They did this over and over again and in the end I didn’t even try to escape. They could do what they liked, and my subordination made them even angrier, wilder, more bloodthirsty.

What had I done? Why me?

Because of the slouched shoulders you gave me, Father? The ones we have in common?

Stop, someone shouted one day, and then a muscular, confident frame was attacking the hunters, hitting them, giving them nosebleeds, shouting: ‘You’re not going to attack him again. Ever.’

And they didn’t.

I had finally gained an ally.

Andreas. Recently moved in from Vreta Kloster.

On his very first day at school he made me his. I’ve never understood why he wanted to be my friend, but maybe that’s just what friendship is like; just like evil, it suddenly shows up where you least expect it.

I lived through Andreas during those years, and his family would sometimes open their home to me, I remember the smell of fresh-baked buns and raspberry syrup, and his mother who used to leave us alone. What we got up to? The things boys do. We turned our little world into a big one, and I never really came home any more. You couldn’t reach me, Father, thanks to Andreas.

Your bitterness didn’t get hold of me, unless it actually did after all? Yes, it had probably already taken root.

You hit me, and I tried to make my way to whatever I thought was beyond the beatings, to what had to exist beyond the beatings.

Music. I found music, don’t ask me how, but it was inside me. Deep inside, and Andreas pushed me on, bought me a guitar with the money he earned picking strawberries one summer.

But then when we started high school something happened. Andreas pulled away, he wanted other people besides me, he dropped me as the world grew, but I never stopped hoping, because he was my friend, and I never managed to get close to anyone else in the same way.

He used to trail after Jerry Petersson, the coolest of the cool. And he used to fawn over the posh kids as well.

They weren’t even on my radar, not in my dreams. I knew I could never be like them.

And then Andreas died one New Year’s Eve.

Maybe I gave up then, Father?

I escaped into music.

And I sang at that last day of school, a song about what it’s like being born in Linkoping and growing up in the shadow of all manner of dreams, how we tried to drink the anxiety away in the Horticultural Society Park on those last evenings of high school, and I must have struck a chord, because the applause in the hall seemed to go on for ever. I was asked to sing it twice more, then that evening everyone wanted me to sing it on the grass in the park, even the posh girls.

You weren’t there in the audience in that hall with your camera, Father.

I started working in the health service, I rented a cottage in the forest to have space to write, and ended up staying there. I must have sent a hundred demo tapes to Stockholm, but I didn’t even get any replies to my letters to Sonet, Polar, Metronome, and the others.

Year followed year. I got a job in the old people’s home in Bjorsater. Often there were just two of us at night, we took turns sleeping, and nights suited me fine, they let me avoid other people. And you still hit me when you got the chance, even though you were almost blind from the cataracts in your eye.

I could have hit back, but I didn’t.

Why not? Because then I would have been like you. Violence and bitterness would have turned me into you.

Then Mum died, and you ended up in a home, completely blind now and your camera fallen silent for ever. Your fury a calm fury, your bitterness a gentle tone, your life a wait for death.

Sometimes I would read articles about Petersson, about how successful he was.

And it was as if something grew inside me, an invisible egg that grew bigger and bigger, until it cracked and out poured millions of tiny yellow snakes into my blood. They wore all my tormentors’ faces. Yours, Father, those of the boys in the school playground, even Axel Fagelsjo’s. I knew very well who he was, what he had done to you.

I wanted to get rid of the snakes. But they slithered wherever they wanted.

Then Jerry Petersson moved back. Bought the castle and the estate from Fagelsjo, and I got a letter, God knows who from, telling me the truth about that New Year’s Eve. It had never occurred to me that Jerry Petersson might have been driving. There were black-and-white photographs in with the letter, of him standing in the field, standing still with his eyes closed, as if he was meditating.

So I wrote my own letter, but my nerves let me down in the car park. He who had everything and who had taken everything from me, he stamped on me like I was an insect again.

But I crawled back up.

I swore to stand up for myself, he wasn’t going to break me and Andreas again, I’d demand money from him, even though I had no idea what I would do with it.

So early one morning I got in the car and drove out there.

The snakes were hissing, I could almost see them crawling inside me, see their leering faces mocking me.

I waited for him in front of the castle, with a heavy stone in my hand to protect myself, and one of Father’s knives in my pocket. Violence imprinted in the wooden handle he had held so often, with the Skogsa coat of arms branded on it — he must have stolen the knife when he worked there.

I had a piece of paper in my hand.

The snakes were seething.

Slithering within me. And they were fury and fear rolled into one.

I knew that something had reached its conclusion. And that something else was about to begin.