Matte put the tray down on the coffee table and looked at the bookcase as if he"d only just discovered that it was there.
"No. But I thought I would. Eventually."
The tea looked peculiar, bright red. It smelled peculiar too. And it tasted peculiar. Bitter and flowery at the same time. Matte watched me as I lifted the cup to my lips, and I thought: He"s trying to poison me.
"Have you got any sugar? It"s slightly bitter."
"Sugar, no. Sorry. No sugar."
I put down the poisoned chalice and leaned back in the armchair. There was something about Matte that didn"t inspire small talk, so I said, "So what was it you wanted to tell me?"
"Did you find the photograph?"
I fetched the photo from my coat pocket in the hallway, put it down on the coffee table. Matte bent over it and nodded. Then he sat there staring at it for a while. I sat down again. When I thought the silence had gone on for long enough, I said, "What did we look like, eh?"
"Mm." Matte pointed at the teacher. "Do you remember her?"
"No, not really. She was a subst.i.tute, I think."
"A subst.i.tute teacher, yes."
Matte got up and went over to the stereo unit, one of those towers of plastic, k.n.o.bs and diodes that everyone had in the eighties; you can pick them up for a hundred kronor at flea markets all over the place these days. No CD player. Out of a drawer he took a magnifying gla.s.s, then came and sat down again. He pa.s.sed the magnifying gla.s.s over the photograph, making small noises to himself.
Two thoughts: One, he did actually have something in the drawers, it wasn"t all just set dressing.
Two, there was still something badly wrong with him.
I sipped my tea, which didn"t actually taste too bad once you got over the initial surprise. Matte put down the magnifying gla.s.s.
"OK. The thing I wanted to tell you is about her." Matte pointed to the subst.i.tute teacher. "Do you remember her name?"
"No. All I remember is...she played us some music, didn"t she?"
Matte suddenly laughed. A brief, joyless laugh. It struck me that his slow movements, social inept.i.tude and quiet, almost whispering voice were down to the fact that he was inst.i.tutionalised, or whatever it"s called. He"d been locked up for quite a long time, that was all.
"Her name was Vera and the music she played us was The Wall. You know, The Wall. Pink Floyd."
"Oh yes. Now you come to mention it. The Wall. That was it."
Matte looked me in the eye.
"You do remember this? You"re not just saying that because I said it?"
"No, I do remember. I thought that business of not needing an education was a bit odd, a teacher playing something like that. But what about it?"
"Do you remember her?"
I slid the photograph towards me and stared at the woman in the picture. Her face was no bigger than the nail on my little finger, and I made a movement to take the magnifying gla.s.s, but Matte stopped me.
"No. Not yet. Wait till I"ve told you."
I understood nothing, but I just had to let it go. I peered at the picture. The woman, Vera, had a round face that could have been really pretty if every element of it hadn"t been too small. Thin lips, small eyes and a straight, slender nose. As if everything had been pushed in towards the middle by a small but critical amount, giving her the expression of a skilfully painted balloon. The dark brown hair sat on her head like a helmet. Yes. A German helmet from the Second World War, the ends of her hair curling outwards a fraction to complete the resemblance.
The image came to life in my memory, and I recalled an unpleasant feeling. There had been some kind of disagreeable aura surrounding the woman who had come in when our usual teacher was on maternity leave.
"Do you remember?"
"Yes. I remember. There was something kind of unpleasant about her, as I recall."
Matte nodded.
"Yes, although I didn"t feel that way. At the time. As you might remember, things weren"t going too well for me just then. Dad"s dead, by the way. Killed himself six months after I...disappeared."
"I"m sorry to hear that."
"It"s a long time ago. I could...understand it in a way. The car, the vacuum-cleaner hose. It wasn"t really something that touched me. It was just part of everything that was going on. Everything will disappear. Anyway. This subst.i.tute teacher. Vera. When she arrived I didn"t take much notice. I sat at the back most of the time eating Refreshers, those chewy sweets with sherbet inside. But then she did that thing, if you remember. It was only her second day, and she brought in a ghetto blaster and said she wanted to play something to us."
"The Wall."
"Yes. The Wall. And when she pressed Play...as soon as those first chords, the sound of the guitar, those thin chords on the guitar, a fragile echo as if they were playing in a big room...you know the song? "Hey You"? Those chords at the beginning? Something got to me right from the start. It was something about the tone. And when he started singing..."
Matte looked at me, cleared his throat and started to sing. "Hey you..."
Now I remembered the song. Matte actually sounded better than the original, and the hairs stood up on my arms: Must get that alb.u.m.
Matte went on, "It was perfect, somehow. Love at first sound, as it were. Iron Maiden and all that c.r.a.p, it was just...that"s another story, but I never really liked it. This, on the other hand. This. .h.i.t the mark right away. The lyrics, of course, but I think it was mostly the atmosphere. The way it sounded. It was me, if you know what I mean. It was the sound of my life."
"The soundtrack of our lives."
"What?"
"Nothing. Go on."
"And it was as if she was playing it for me. Maybe she was, I don"t know. But it did for me completely. And then when the next one started, "Is there anybody out there?", it was just...it was perfect."
Matte leaned back in the armchair and closed his eyes. I couldn"t work out where this was going, but listening was OK. Things I thought had gone forever suddenly twitched and came to life again. I could see the light from the window falling on Ulrika"s hair as she sat in front of me. A hair slide in the shape of...a ladybird. Yes. A ladybird. The smell of scented erasers. Matte opened his eyes.
"I wanted to borrow it. But I was scared to ask. It was as if... looking back, I think I didn"t want to expose myself in that way. Ask for something. I didn"t like asking for anything."
"No. You were pretty much...closed up."
Matte ignored my comment.
"But the next day something happened that meant I could ask." He gestured towards the picture. "You remember she had a finger missing?"
Stupidly I looked at the picture to check his a.s.sertion, but Vera had her hands behind her back. Anyway, I remembered. The little finger on one hand was missing. We talked about it, but n.o.body asked her what had happened. Perhaps it was more exciting that way.
I nodded.
"OK. The following day she asked me to come to the blackboard. I think she wanted me to spell some word in English. I was pretty good at English, and maybe she wanted to encourage me, or..." Matte shook his head. "No, I mustn"t think in those terms. Not as far as she"s concerned. But that was what I thought at the time. Anyway. When I came up to the board and she handed me the chalk, I dropped it and we both bent down at the same time to pick it up. And when I saw that she was on her way down too, I looked up. And then I saw...I mean, her hair lay really flat against her head, but when she bent down and I was looking from a particular angle...I could see that she had no ear. On one side."
"No ear."
"No. There was just skin where the ear should have been. I didn"t have time to see whether there was a hole...whether the actual auditory ca.n.a.l was still there, but at any rate I could clearly see that the ear wasn"t there."
"You never said."
"No. I felt as if...it was my secret. Or hers and mine, if you like. At the end of the day I went and asked if I could borrow the tape. The Wall. The thing about her ear meant I could ask. I know why, I"ve thought about this a lot, I"ve had plenty of time to think about it, but it"s not important. Besides which, I think you understand."
"More or less."
Matte looked at me and something changed in his eyes.
"How are things with you, anyway? What"s life done to you?"
I shrugged and told him, keeping it short. The jobs, the drifting around, the travelling, the years with Helena, Laban. I summarised it like this: "A feeling that everything is kind of temporary, somehow. As if things never really get started. Or that it"s already over, and I haven"t noticed. But I"m still alive, and there"s Laban after all."
"And what about later on?"
"Later on?"
"When Laban"s grown up?"
"I...I don"t know. Video games are getting better and better."
"That doesn"t sound like much of a future."
"It"s perfectly OK. Many people are in a much worse position."
Matte looked at me for such a long time that I started to feel uncomfortable, and hid my face behind the teacup. The tea was cold, and tasted better than when it was hot.
"Good," he said eventually. "In that case I think...I think you"ll be able to understand."
"Understand what?"
"What I"m going to tell you."
Matte folded his hands on his knee and gazed at a point beyond the walls or behind his eyes. I waited. A sorrow so great surrounded Matte that you couldn"t even call it sorrow. It was more of a condition, the element in which he lived, like a deep sea fish in his black cave.
"I took the tape home and listened to it, over and over again. I had one of those bean bags, you know, filled with plastic beads, and I lay on it for hour after hour, only getting up to turn the tape over. That initial feeling never came back, but instead I really started to love the music. I just got the whole story. The Wall is about society and what it does to people, but above all I saw it as a requiem for a life that had ended before it had even begun."
"That was my line."
"Yes, and my way of thinking probably wasn"t quite so advanced at the time, but...loss. It"s about loss. And the form is in perfect harmony with the content...Anyway. Forget that. The following day I took the tape back to school, said I thought it was...I can"t remember which word I used, but anyway I was allowed to keep it. As I had hoped. So I spent another evening on the bean bag. My dad was completely out of it in those days, I don"t know if you remember. When I was hungry I just used to take money out of his wallet and go out and buy something.
"That evening I poured myself a decent measure of whisky too, topped it up with c.o.ke and drank it while I listened to the tape. It was...I thought it made the music even better. I went to the bathroom and threw up. Then I carried on listening."
"What a life. For a thirteen-year-old."
"Yes, but you know, while it was going on...I just felt...cool. I thought I understood so much that you kids couldn"t even begin to grasp. Tragic, absolutely, but I was also old enough to kind of play the role to myself, if you know what I mean. I could see myself from the outside. Anyway, kids drink at thirteen these days."
"Not on their own."
"No, that"s true. But it"s not my tragic upbringing we"re talking about here. The following day it was school again, and I felt like s.h.i.t."
"Sorry, Matte, I just have to ask. Have you been in a psychiatric hospital?"
"A psychiatric hospital, yes. Various kinds. For a long time."
"But I don"t get it...I"m sorry to come out with this, but...I kind of thought you"d be a bit...simple, if I can put it that way. But it"s obvious you"re more lucid than I am."
"Plenty of people in inst.i.tutions are lucid. When it comes to certain things. And completely useless when it comes to others. Living, for example. And I"m on medication. Very strong medication."
"So this business about the ear..."
Matte frowned and looked annoyed.
"It"s got nothing to do with that. The ear was gone. Or...it had never been there. I"ll get to that. Can I go on?"
"Of course. Sorry."
"OK. So in English the same thing happens again: she calls me up to the board to spell "conscious" while the rest of you are working in your books. And I pick up the chalk to write, and I remember this because it was...I knew the word "unconscious" and I was going to ask her if it was the same word without "un", you see. And of course it is, but my head was full of cotton wool that day, which is probably why I...instead of asking her, I prodded her in the back. I mean, you don"t normally do that to a teacher, but...I prodded her in the back to get her to turn around. And do you know what happened?"
"No."
"Nothing."
"What do you mean, nothing?"
"Nothing. I prodded her in the back and she didn"t react. So I prodded a bit harder. Nothing."
"Maybe she-"
"That"s what I thought too. That she was making a point."
Matte glanced at the photo.
"You said before that you thought she was...what did you say... kind of disagreeable. Can you remember why you felt that way?"
"No, it was just a feeling, I suppose."
"She never touched us. Never. Normally, if a child is sitting working on a task, if the teacher comes to help...she might put a hand on the child"s shoulder, stroke his arm or hair, something. But she never touched us, do you remember?"
I thought about it. It was true, I supposed: I couldn"t recall a single occasion when Vera had touched me, but when I thought back I couldn"t remember any other teacher touching me either. Except when Sundgren, the music master, grabbed me by the back of the neck when I was plucking the strings inside the piano. But that was something else altogether.
I shook my head, but my expression must have betrayed my thoughts to Matte.
"I know. You don"t remember. But I noticed it because when she said I could borrow the tape, I tried to be a bit grown-up. So I held out my hand to shake hers and say thank you. But she didn"t take it. She just made a gesture kind of like this..."