Midwinter Sacrifice

71

Ljungsbro, 1961

The disgusting little shit.

I’m putting a terry nappy on him.

I’ve padded the inside walls of the wardrobe. I might toss him an apple, a bit of dry bread, but he doesn’t scream any more. If you hit a kid on the nose enough times he learns that screaming means pain, and that it doesn’t help.

So I shut him in.

He cries silently as I put his two and a half years in the wardrobe.

Post-natal depression.

Thanks a lot.

Child benefit.

Thanks a lot.

Drowned father. One thousand, six hundred and eighty-five kronor every month. They bought it, the authorities, seeing as it was so tragic. Fatherless. But I didn’t want to give him up and not get the money.

My lies aren’t lies because they’re mine alone. I am creating my own world. And the interloper in the wardrobe makes it real.

So I lock up.

And go off.

They sacked me from the factory when they saw my stomach; we can’t have that at the chocolate conveyor-belt, they said.

And now I lock the wardrobe and he cries and I want to open up and tell him that he only exists here because he doesn’t exist; choke on the apple, stop breathing, then perhaps you’ll get away. Fucking little brat. And yet not.

One thousand, six hundred and eighty-five old riksdaler a month.

I saunter through town to the grocer’s, and I hold my head high but I know how they whisper – Where’s she put the boy? Where’s the boy? – because they know you exist, and I feel like stopping and curtseying to the ladies, telling them that the boy, the sailor’s boy, I’ve got him in a dark, damp, padded wardrobe. I’ve even put in an air-vent, just like the one they put in the box when they kidnapped Lindbergh’s son; you probably saw the report in the Weekly News.

I am quiet around him, but still, somehow, words find their way into his head.

Mummy, Mummy

Mummy

Mummy

and those noises disgust me, they’re like damp snakes on a wet forest floor.

Sometimes I see Kalle. I named him after Kalle.

He looks at me.

He looks all wrong on his bicycle, and he’s given in to the bottle now, and the woman, the fair one, has borne him a son. What does he want that for? Does he imagine he can get any order to that bloodline? I’ve seen the boy. Blown up like a balloon, he is.

The secret is my revenge, a kiss blown through the air.

Don’t think you can get at me, Kalle. That you did get at me. No one gets at Rakel.

No one, no one, no one.

Then I open the wardrobe.

And he smiles.

The fucking little brat.

And I hit him to wipe the smile from his face.