Yes. The appearance of swimsuits has changed over the thirty years since he and Maria were kissing behind the changing rooms, but the bikini Amanda was wearing not only had the same pattern, it was exactly the same.
And now it"s lying at the bottom of the pool.
The lights in the house are switched off, only the floodlights over the pool are shining. Frank looks around and tries the gate. It isn"t locked. He slips through, walks up four stone steps and stands by the edge of the pool.
There is the fresh smell of chlorine. The artificial light on the tiles and the still water give the whole experience a dreamlike character. Blue tiles make the water blue, make his skin blue. He ought to be nervous-breaking and entering isn"t his thing, his place is just outside the property boundaries-but he feels strangely calm. As if he is antic.i.p.ating a revelation.
He walks to the edge and looks down into the water.
The bikini is lying on the bottom, undulating slowly like an aquatic plant in the current of circulating water. In the blue light the yellow dots are green. Frank closes his eyes and rubs them hard.
So who were the people who were here?
While he is still ma.s.saging his eyelids, the feeling from earlier in the day returns. Something is piercing his head. Thin needles are being forced through his skin, his skull, penetrating deeper and deeper, moving around, searching. He wants to press his eyes tight shut against the pain, but instead he opens them.
At the very second his eyes open, the pressure disappears from his head, but he just has time to see. A number of threads, as fine as cobwebs, are floating between his head and the surface of the water. He just has time to see them before they melt away, or become invisible.
He blinks, fumbles in the air with his hand outstretched, but the threads are gone and the surface of the water...the surface of the water is covered in notes. He drops to his knees. Hundreds of thousand-kronor notes cover the entire pool like a lid. He shuffles forward.
The notes are real. Just a real as the picture he was waiting for, the bikini he was searching for. Frank puts his hands on his knees and laughs. Now he understands.
It"s all in my mind.
He laughs, shakes his head and sobs out loud. Because it"s tragic at the same time. The fact that his dream, the thing he wants most in the whole world, comes down to this. Pieces of paper.
Perhaps he knows exactly what he"s doing, perhaps not. He reaches down towards the water to pick up a note. As soon as his fingers touch the surface of the water, the notes disappear. Something clamps onto his skin, and in a reflex movement he tries to pull back his hand, but it is impossible. His hand, his arm are slowly sucked down into the water, and Frank follows. When his face is just a couple of centimetres from the surface, he catches a glimpse of the thing that is pulling him.
It"s one of those creatures that lives down at the bottom. In front of its mouth dangles something that looks like a precious stone, shimmering in every colour imaginable.
Finally the will to live takes over. Frank screams, braces himself with his free arm and tries to haul himself out of the water. The creature offers stubborn resistance, but Frank is fighting for his life, and he is stronger. One centimetre at a time he regains his arm. The creature has vanished, become one with the water again. Only the precious stone, the rainbow spot is still visible. It is pulsating.
"Frank?"
She clings to his arm. Maria. She is wearing her polka-dot bikini. He had forgotten how pretty she was. How could she ever have been interested in him?
"Frank, come on..."
Frank relaxes, opens his mouth to say that she doesn"t exist. That she is just one of a series of dreams that never came true. Before he has time to speak she gives a start and he loses his balance, falls into the warm water.
The creature resumes its proper form and swallows him.
When the pool man arrives in the morning to carry out his weekly cleaning duties, he sees something on the bottom and fishes it out with his net.
A mobile phone.
He shakes the water out of it and tries switching it on. Doesn"t work. He throws it in the bin and checks the water in the pool. It really is filthy. Full of fibres and fluff, discoloured. He makes several sweeps with the net, brings up sc.r.a.ps of fabric and...nails.
What the h.e.l.l have they been doing?
The water still looks terrible. He decides to change the lot, and opens the valve. The water in the pool slowly runs away. After half an hour, it"s empty.
The water continues on its way down to the purification plant. After pa.s.sing through a number of filters and cleansing processes, it slips back out into the sea via enormous pipes. There it disperses, merges with the greater water and remains the same.
Subst.i.tute.
When Matte rang me it was the first time I"d heard from him in twenty-two years. It"s a strange feeling, picking up the phone and there on the other end is a person you a.s.sumed was...well, maybe not dead, but gone. A person you will never b.u.mp into again. Gone.
"Hi. It"s Mats. Mats h.e.l.lberg."
"Matte?"
"Yes. How are you?"
"Fine. Fine. What about you?"
A three-second pause. During that time a number of different scenarios flickered through my mind. I knew something had gone wrong in the autumn of 1982. Something that meant Matte couldn"t come back to school. That was the last I heard. Something had gone wrong, and presumably it was still a problem. So the pause made me feel uncomfortable.
"There"s something I have to tell you. Can we meet?"
"I don"t know..."
"Please. It"s important. You"re the only one I could call."
"So what"s it all about?"
Another pause. I looked at the clock. Six Feet Under was due to start in two minutes, the last episode of the season, and I didn"t want to miss a second.
"Have you never wondered what happened?"
"What?"
"To me."
"Well yes, but-"
"It"s not what you think. It"s not even close to anything you might think. Can we meet?"
In the autumn of "82 there had been a great deal of speculation in my cla.s.s about what had really happened. Matte had killed someone, Matte had gone completely crazy and was in some loony bin. After Christmas he was as good as forgotten. Life went on. I suppose I thought about him from time to time because I was the person who"d been closest to him, as far as it was possible to be close to someone like Matte. But even I forgot about him. As you do, I told myself.
And yet my conscience was p.r.i.c.king me. Not because of what I did or didn"t do when we were thirteen, but because I hadn"t thought about him. So I said, "Yes, OK. When and where?"
"Can you come over here tomorrow? To my place?"
"Where do you live?"
He gave me the address of an apartment in Rcksta. I immediately thought it must be something the hospital had organised for him, and it turned out I was right.
It was exactly twenty past nine, and I would only be missing the t.i.tle sequence. But before I managed to hang up, Matte asked, "Listen, have you still got the cla.s.s photo?"
"Which one?"
"The last one. Year 6."
"I don"t know. Maybe."
"Could you have a look and bring it with you? It"s important."
"OK."
We said goodbye and hung up.
David and Claire were smoking hash, Nate was due to have an operation and I couldn"t stop thinking about the cla.s.s photo. Firstly, where was it, and did I actually still have it? And secondly, what was special about it?
As soon as the program was over I went down into the cellar and started rummaging through the archive of my life: three banana boxes full of photos, letters, magazines, tapes and all the other stuff you end up collecting if you"re that type, which I am.
I got hung up for a while on a concert program from Depeche Mode"s Black Celebration tour. Page after page of meaningless icons that I"d copied into my school books. A picture of Martin Gore, who"d been my role model. If only I"d had curly hair. But that was around 198586. I burrowed deeper.
I stayed down there for a good hour. I found what I was looking for and took the photograph back up to the apartment, where I sat down at the kitchen table to study it.
There was nothing strange about the picture. I paid particular attention to Mats. He was wearing an Iron Maiden sweatshirt and had longer hair than anyone else in the cla.s.s, including the girls. A studded bracelet around one wrist. If you looked at the picture without knowing anything else, you would say he had to be the cla.s.s hard man.
In a way it was true. In another way it wasn"t true at all.
He was hard in that he was impregnable. n.o.body gave him any c.r.a.p. Not because he could fight; he was as skinny and spindly as a ten-year-old, but it was as if there was an aura surrounding him, a sense that he wouldn"t hesitate to rip out your eyes if you messed with him.
He had nothing to lose.
When the picture was taken it was two years since his mother and older brother had been killed in a car accident. Mats had had so much time off school that he had been forced to repeat a year, and that was how he ended up in our cla.s.s. His style, the clothes he wore, all of it really belonged to his brother, Conny. His father hadn"t cleared out Conny"s room, he just couldn"t bring himself to do it, and Matte just helped himself to whatever he fancied.
His father went downhill after the accident. I didn"t go round to Matte"s place very often, and I just remember his dad as something sitting in an armchair. Something grey. I once asked Matte, "What does your dad actually do?"
"Nothing. He does nothing. He just sits at home."
I didn"t ask any more questions. But mainly I remember Matte"s dad as a ghost with a physical form. A weight, nothing more. I suppose they must have got by somehow, but I didn"t ask. You"re not really interested in that kind of thing when you"re twelve.
I looked at the cla.s.s photo. We were all standing close together on the patch of gra.s.s next to the flagpole. I didn"t know what had happened to any of them. I remembered all their names. Except the teacher. She was a subst.i.tute teacher who"d only been there for two weeks, and she was standing slightly apart from the cla.s.s, not wanting to look as if she belonged.
All those names. Pointlessly etched into the back of my brain, never to be forgotten. As if we still lived in villages, when the names of the people we went to school with became the names of the people we worked with, hunted with, ended up marrying. But that"s not the case now. Now they"re just names.
Ulrika Berggren, Andreas Milton, Tomas Karlsson, Anita Kohli.
Moved away, dispersed to the four winds, forgotten. Only the names remaining. There"s nothing to say about it. That"s how things are these days: everything must move aside to make room for the new, all the time.
And that"s the bottom layer in old boxes: melancholy, an indefinable sense of loss. You dig around and it comes swirling up to the top.
The following day was a Friday. We had decided that I would go round to Matte"s place at six, and I wasn"t planning to stay long. Laban was due at nine o"clock on Sat.u.r.day morning. Laban is my son, he"s ten years old, and he stays with me every other weekend.
That was one of the reasons why I wasn"t all that keen on seeing Matte on a Friday. I try to make sure I"m cheerful on Fridays, that I don"t start feeling down. No booze, no gloomy thoughts. On Sat.u.r.day mornings I want to be in top form, to be as good as any every-second-weekend dad can be. I think I"m doing a pretty good job. But I could sense that Matte was weighed down by something, something I could easily get tangled up in, and I didn"t want that. I"ve got enough with my own problems.
Anyway, I took the subway to Rcksta and wandered around among the apartment blocks before I found the right address. Even at that stage the weight started dragging at my feet. There"s something depressing about a minor collection of apartment blocks. An immense area like Rissne is one thing, there"s something grandiose about the insanity, a world of its own. But a clump like the one in Rcksta-that"s just ugly.
There were two h.e.l.lbergs on the board down by the main door, but I guessed that Matte was the one whose name was made up of the newest letters. Brand new, they looked. He couldn"t have been living here for long.
My suspicions were confirmed when I reached the fifth floor in the lift. There were no letters fixed on the letter box, just a handwritten note. Two notes, to be precise. The other one said "No junk mail". I rang the bell and the door opened immediately, as if he had been standing waiting just inside.
I had thought he would look like his dad. That there would be dust reaching all the way back from his eyes. But Matte had gone into his decline-if in fact it was a decline-the opposite way. He looked as if he had been blasted clean in a furnace.
He had actually grown a few centimetres since we were at school, but he was still short. And slim, really slim. His eyes were deep-set, his cheekbones were prominent and he had no hair on his head. That description doesn"t really convey the fact that he looked pretty good, in a haggard kind of way. If I say Michael Stipe, the lead singer with REM, perhaps that will help. But make the eyes smaller and the chin more rounded.
On his upper body hung a snow-white shirt. I say hung because that was what it looked like. The shirt and the black jeans looked as if they had been placed there, kind of, like one of those cut-out dolls. A powerful smell of soap powder.
"h.e.l.lo."
"h.e.l.lo."
He held out his hand and I took it. His grip was firm and dry.
"Come in."
His apartment was like his clothes. There was furniture and there were lamps and everything you might need, but none of it looked right, if you know what I mean. I lived in Kista for a while, and was invited to visit a family in my block who were refugees from Bosnia. They had been given a temporary apartment and that very temporariness was a little oppressive. The furniture had been given to them, or found, or bought cheap. Placed in position. Clean and tidy, but without any life. Just a place to wait. Same thing with Matte"s apartment.
"Would you like a cup of tea?"
"Tea would be very nice."
"What kind?"
"Oh, I don"t know. Just ordinary tea."
"Would that be Earl Grey?"
"I don"t drink all that much tea, so I don"t..."
"Hibiscus? Is that all right?"
"I expect so."
Matte disappeared into the kitchen, a little corner where everything shone. I looked around the living room, unable to shake off the feeling that-how shall I put it?-that Matte hadn"t invited me round to his place at all, but had set this apartment up specifically for the occasion.
There were no photographs on the walls, just pictures of American Indians and wolves at sunset, that kind of thing. The contents of the bookcase looked as if they had come straight from a Salvation Army shop. The Family Moskat by Singer, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown...the books that are always there. Something in the background of an interior design suggestion from Ikea. Nothing was in alphabetical order, and the impression was reinforced when I found another copy of The Family Moskat on a shelf lower down.
When Matte came in with a teapot and cups on a tray, I couldn"t help asking, "Have you read these?"