Me on the Floor, Bleeding

by Jenny J

  ‘This is Maja, your daughter. It is Friday and I am here in Norrköping. It is my weekend. Or your weekend, depending on how you look at it. Our weekend. Do you remember? Ring me, I have sawn off my thumb and I need a mother’s tender, loving care.’

  Right. What now? I lay on my side and read the book spines. The Existential Conversation by Emmy van Deurzen, The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, Crisis and Development by Johan Cullberg.

  I suddenly remembered today’s date. Friday the thirteenth. Maybe there was something in it after all? Maybe something had happened? Something unlucky.

  Perhaps she had … she was …

  If so, how ironic. Mum, who was so dismissive about superstitions that she demonstratively walked under ladders and left her keys on the table.

  I opened the drawer of the bedside table with my toes – it took a while – and pushed the mouth guard into it with my foot. I didn’t want to look at it any more. To tell the truth it disgusted me a bit. I stood up, saying loudly to myself:

  ‘Well, how about using this crisis as an opportunity to develop a little?’

  A Diabolical Conspiracy

  I put on an old yellow down jacket that I found in the wardrobe and took a cushion outside to the sun lounger which was still on the terrace. Mum had left it there all winter and there was rust on the hinges.

  It was here I used to spend most of my weekends during the summer months. Right here, in this chair, with Mum a few metres away in an identical sun lounger, reading. Always reading. Books about psychology. Always. Her head bowed, her neck bent over like a flamingo’s. That was the reason for the shelf. A bookshelf.

  We didn’t say much but sometimes she asked me what I thought about something she had just read. It could be about associations, developmental psychology or different types of therapy. Things I knew absolutely nothing about, of course. She wanted to hear my opinion anyway, she said, and always listened closely with a worried wrinkle between her eyebrows. She took great care to understand exactly what I meant and asked me loads of follow-up questions. That kind of attention made me feel important, made me feel she really was taking me seriously. But at times it was hard to formulate the words exactly the way she wanted, and I could feel backed against a wall by her sharp, fixed stare and her constant “In what way? What do you mean?”

  The chair creaked as I sat down and I was unexpectedly thrown backwards into the maximum horizontal position. I found I could look straight up into space from that angle. The air was clear and cold and the sky a deep blue, turning whiter towards the horizon. A car drove into a driveway somewhere close by: I heard the tyres crunch on the gravel and then the engine being switched off. And perhaps, only perhaps, I saw a shooting star, or was it an aircraft coming down to land at Kungsängen airport? I ought to make a wish, I thought.

  When Mum was expecting me she saw a shooting star. She did the only superstitious thing she has ever done in her entire life and made a wish.

  She wished for a little girl, she said.

  She wished for me.

  ‘It was probably only the hormones,’ she later commented.

  But even so. She wished for me.

  And me? I wished for Mum.

  My body was relaxed and heavy. A pleasant tiredness came over me and I let the thoughts come and go like the clouds that were leisurely gliding across the evening sky. I could smell the earth and the dampness and hear last year’s leaves rustling in the wind. It was so lovely that I almost forgot my mum had been officially missing for a couple of hours.

  I was woken by a cool breeze on my face and I had no idea how long I’d been asleep. I looked around me, thinking perhaps I ought to get a book and do a bit of reading. Because if I sat in the chair and read I could pretend everything was normal.

  And perhaps it would make her come home.

  I hauled myself up and went back into the house without putting on my shoes. I got my socks damp, naturally; it was only April after all. I took them off and hung them over a radiator. Then I grabbed one of the many books that were lying on the kitchen table and went outside again to my chair. I had just reached it when I felt a sudden burning under my foot, like a wasp sting.

  I had to go back once more into the kitchen. I leaned against the kitchen table and lifted the sole of my foot to the light. Of course. Three really thick, dark splinters had burrowed their way under the skin on the ball of my foot, immediately below my toes. One was perhaps half a centimetre but the others were over a centimetre long. I shook my head and said out loud to myself:

  ‘What the flipping hell is going on? What kind of diabolical conspiracy am I the victim of, exactly?’

  I limped into the bathroom to get a pair of tweezers and searched through drawers, shelves, and small woven baskets, which without doubt my Mum had been given by someone else. I observed she had very few bathroom-related items in the bathroom, mainly things easily damaged by water: books, newspapers, receipts. Oh, and loo paper, of course. A whole pack of them, wrapped in plastic, in the bath.

  Why would you save receipts from the supermarket in a little basket in the bathroom? Yet another question to ask her when she finally turned up. The weird thing was I had never thought about it before, even though now I could recall it being there for years. Mum’s absence seemed to highlight the oddness of it all.

  But no tweezers as far as the eye could see. This was almost worse than sawing off my thumb, I thought, and as soon as I thought “thumb” I felt the pain wake up and make itself known in pulsating, aggressive thuds. I sat down in the middle of the floor and tried to get the splinters out using my fingernails, but it was hard to turn the sole of my foot up towards the light when one hand was practically useless. I almost succeeded with one splinter and felt the beginnings of the sweet smell of victory until the splinter broke off and I had to admit defeat.

  In the first round, at least.

  Crapping the Internet

  The house to the right, a bungalow built of greyish-white bricks, was in darkness. There was no car parked outside. The one to the left, on the other hand, was bathed in light and when I listened I could make out the rhythmic thud of a heavy-duty bass. Two cars were parked in the drive, one a yellow American sports car and the other a cherry-red rusty, old Volvo.

  I rang the door of the grey brick house, hoping someone was hiding inside in the darkness, a nurse or someone similar, who did nothing but slice open feet and remove splinters quickly and pain free. After five minute’s silence that was broken only by my insistent ringing on the doorbell, I had to admit there was no one home, which I could in fact have worked out with my arse.

  Dispirited I limped across to the other house.

  I stood looking in at the yellow light and at the people moving about inside. Their illuminated faces suggested belonging and company. I felt like the girl in that story by Hans Christian Andersen, the one with the matchsticks.

  Except I had mine in my foot.

  Shit.

  I stood there weighing up whether to go back to Mum’s house again, but when I rested my weight on the foot with the splinters I was convinced I had to do something about it. And to be honest, I was feeling quite lonely.

  I summoned up my courage, hobbled up to the front door and rang the bell. I waited. No one opened. Cautiously I tried the handle. The door was unlocked. I stopped, took a deep breath, and then opened the door.

  A wave of sound met me: loud, thumping music and people shouting and laughing.

  A party, in fact.

  Parties are not really my thing. At least, not the kind I had so far had the honour of being invited to. They were so chaotic. I missed a concrete plan of action. What was the point, exactly? What were you supposed to do? Obviously I got that it was a social thing, I wasn’t that much of a loser. But the social aspect was so loosely maintained, so frayed at the edges, that it sort of fell apart for me. Introduce an activity – bowling, ping-pong relay or whatever you flipping well like – and that was cool. But I couldn’t just stan
d there and talk and drink alcohol for seven hours. Not without doing something else. Luckily I didn’t have to put myself through it too often. Party invitations were hardly dropping out of the sky and into my lap.

  I walked through the doorway, my heart beating so fast that you’d think I was on the way to my own execution. I inched my way through the hall, partly because I couldn’t walk any other way with those splinters in my foot and partly because I was actually scared.

  At first I didn’t see anyone, and then I still didn’t see anyone, and then I saw everyone all at the same time. They were in the kitchen. I backed away slightly, half hiding myself behind the door frame. the majority of them must have been about twenty to twenty-five years old. They were standing chatting and laughing in groups of three or four, so loudly that I felt like I would go deaf. The contrast to the silence in Mum’s house was enormous.

  ‘Hello?’ I said.

  But my voice couldn’t break through. There was kind of like no room for it in between their thick dialect, beside the fat l’s and exaggerated i’s and er’s. A guy with a hat that was far too small laughed so violently that he had to grab his stomach and bend over. His hat fell off but he didn’t seem to care.

  No one took any notice of me. Someone yelled:

  ‘Don’t make me laaarrrff. I’m allorrgeck!’

  It took a while before I realised she meant “allergic”. I cleared my throat and said, slightly louder this time:

  ‘Excuse me …er…hello.’

  A dark-haired guy with orangey-brown freckles turned around and looked at me in a bored way. In places the freckles were so close together that they formed little islands and made his cheeks look dirty. He studied me critically. I actually saw his eyes move from place to place over my body. My hair. My face. My breasts. The bandage.

  I was suddenly conscious of the puffy yellow jacket, hoping it was so outrageously ugly that it was cool, but I was forced to painfully admit that it didn’t quite make the grade. The freckly one was wearing a bizarre T-shirt showing a hot dog high-fiving a can of lemonade. He looked down at my naked feet and turned back to his mates.

  I stood there for a long time, not quite knowing what to do with myself, wondering if it was possible to back out without attracting anyone’s attention. I slid one foot back slightly, then the other. I was just about to disappear into the hall when an ultra-blonde girl with bangs that ended three or four centimetres above her eyebrows broke away from the crowd. Her hips swayed exaggeratedly with each step, as if she was on a catwalk and she was wearing black boots with stiletto heels as thin as pencils. She wasn’t entirely unlike Debbie Harry, the one from Blondie. She must have been twenty-four, twenty-five, something like that.

  ‘You moonwalking?’ she asked, taking a deep gulp of her lime-green drink. She looked at me, narrowing her eyes above the rim of the glass.

  I was so ashamed at being caught in the act of escape that I couldn’t answer. I just looked at her, wide eyed. She looked worn out, as if she hadn’t slept for several days. Her skin was milky white and her mouth was painted a bright cerise. She was wearing a yellow dress with a very low neckline and, as far as I could see, no bra.

  ‘What a lovely colour your … hair is,’ she went on in a drawl. She had a slight accent that may have been British and her voice was as rough as sandpaper. It sounded like she had smoked two packets of ciggs a day since her confirmation. She pushed my long, quite ordinary, black-dyed bangs out of my eyes and ran her hand down my temple, where the hair was shorter and the skin so fine that her touch seemed to leave an imprint. It made me remember I hadn’t had time to shave it.

  ‘You’re not leaving already? The party’s hardly got started. We’ve got to dance!’

  I coughed but couldn’t manage a reply this time either. She smiled warmly and pulled me playfully by the arm in the direction of the kitchen. Unwillingly I went back in with her. When we reached the doorway she left me without saying a word and walked right into the crowd of laughing people. Then she clapped her hands, a few short claps like a teacher who is impatiently waiting for the children to be quiet. She staggered momentarily on the high heels and put her hands on her hips as if to steady herself. It did not look entirely relaxed.

  ‘Hello, hello!’

  Faces turned towards her, most of them amused and clearly interested, one or two looking slightly irritated.

  ‘I have a question!’

  A guy who was unusually young to have an arm full of blue-black tattoos shouted:

  ‘The answer’s yes! No problem, my bed is wide enough and I always use a condom.’

  ‘You wish,’ said Debbie, rolling her eyes. ‘As I said, I have a question!’

  ‘You already said that,’ said a girl with long curly hair. Dramatically she threw her head back and took a swallow of her beer. Her hair bounced on her shoulders like in a shampoo ad. Not in slow motion, obviously, but even so.

  ‘Look I’m just wondering …’ Debbie tried to make herself heard.

  ‘Ou’ weth it then!’ yelled the bloke with the little hat.

  ‘You can shut your BIG MOUTH!’ bellowed Debbie so loudly that it made me jump. She looked around the kitchen furiously, her eyes black with anger.

  ‘Fucking farmers! What does it take to ask a question round here?’

  ‘Well, ask it then for God’s sake!’ shouted the girl with the advertisement hair.

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m trying to do!’ Look, is there anyone here who can download music? I want to listen to Five Minutes by Justin Timberlake,’ said Debbie.

  The anger made her voice hoarse. She went on:

  ‘But I can’t get find it. Can anyone help me?’

  Someone said:

  ‘Hello? Spotify?’

  ‘Yeah but it’s not there! You’ve got to download it from somewhere else.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because it’s called Four Minutes,’ said the guy with the sausage T-shirt.

  Debbie hissed: ‘You think I don’t know what it’s called? It’s Five Minutes!’

  She gave him such a look of hate it made me flinch. The sausage guy didn’t seem to care.

  ‘In that case he’s done another one because the one he did with Madonna is called Four Minutes, I bet you a million.’

  ‘Take your sodding million and stuff it up your arse! It’s called Five fucking Minutes.’

  Debbie was fuming.

  ‘Isn’t there anyone who can help me?’

  Someone over at the kitchen table mumbled: ‘After being called fucking farmers? Shouldn’t think so.’

  Debbie swore, tottered to one side and fell against a cupboard with large leaded glass doors. There was a massive clatter as cups and glasses crashed into each other and broke. After a last little clink from a broken shard as it hit the floor, I noticed the music in the other room had gone quiet.

  Debbie struggled up onto her feet, straightened her dress and clicked her neck. Then she turned towards me. A thin index finger was pointed directly at my nose. The nail was short with peeling cerise nail varnish.

  ‘You! You’re young! Aren’t you?’

  I looked around in embarrassment. The eyes that had been directed towards her now turned their attention to me and stuck like glue. Instinctively I lifted my bandaged left hand to my chest, holding it carefully with my right hand. It felt like my whole skeleton ached, if that was possible.

  Debbie came a few steps closer without lowering her finger.

  ‘Um, yes.’

  Yes, I was young. But she was hardly at death’s door, was she?

  ‘Young people know all about technology, right? They are one with technology. They were born with the internet. They eat, sleep and crap the internet. You can download, surely? You know what to do?’

  I scraped my foot over the floor like some nervous old mare.

  ‘Well … I don’t know that I’ve done much internet crapping. I don’t think I can help you. Unfortunately.’

  In actual fact I would easily have been able to
find that track for her, but because the atmosphere at that moment was so nasty I didn’t dare say yes. But of course I crap the internet. I wasn’t a hacker exactly but I crap the internet just as well as anyone else my age, although I think my use of the internet is different from most other people. I take pride in using that particular medium in a meaningful way: to search for information. Not to upload pictures of myself in a series of degrading poses. Not to write some onanistic, introverted blog about what I’ve just eaten or bought, to trick myself into believing that someone is actually interested. Not to collect pretend friends in some overrated community with enough pop-ups to trigger an epilepsy attack. And not to press the “like” button when one of these pretend friends updates their status bar with exclamations such as “film night with Katta and Jessi! Cosy!” If people really were having such a flipping cosy time why did they waste time shouting about it on Facebook? Why weren’t they just doing it? Why does every other idiot have to know?

  Debbie slunk past me, swearing.

  ‘Who’d have thought it would be so hard to hear a bit of Justin fucking Timberlake?’

  Silence fell like a blanket over the gathering.

  It was unbearable.

  I don’t usually feel like that. I usually like silences. They are often more relevant than words, but this silence was in fact unbearable. So I broke it the only way I could think of:

  ‘Er, has anyone got any tweezers?’

  Justin Case

  I sat on the toilet lid with my foot ten centimetres away from the concentrated face of a totally unknown young man. He was crouching in front of me and if I wasn’t mistaken he had, only minutes earlier, presented himself as Justin Case. Maybe a stage name, maybe a joke. What did I know?

  He must have been twenty-three or thereabouts and he was incredibly tall, you could see that even when he was sitting down. Almost two metres, easily. His eyes were the palest blue I have ever seen and his hair was reddish-blonde and greasy and combed forward diagonally in a style that actually resembled Hitler’s. No other similarities, I hoped.