by Jenny J
‘But, she’s coming back soon? She’ll be here tonight, won’t she?’
His voice was strangely tense.
The light went off and we sat there in the darkness and I watched the silhouette of the Virgin Mary dangling from the mirror.
‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’
Then I opened the car door and stepped out, because I was ashamed. Now I was feeling ashamed for my mum, who wasn’t there. For me, who had a mum who wasn’t there. And because she had rejected me.
The person who was not called Justin stayed in the car with the paper napkin over his face as I slammed the door, walked across the crunching gravel and up the steps to the front door. He stayed there while I unlocked the door, while I went in, and while I softly shut the front door.
After that, I don’t know what he did.
Carefully I lay down on the floor with my face against the hall mat, which said “Welcome”. Its bristly surface dug into my cheek. It smelled of dust.
Welcome. What a crap joke.
I longed for someone to touch me, to comfort me.
I longed so much for something, for someone, that it hurt. But when has longing ever given any concrete results?
I lay there for a while. Maybe ten minutes, maybe an hour, I don’t know. There was no one there to time me.
Then the phone rang. It was like an electric shock through my body.
I rolled onto my back and worked my mobile out of my damp trouser pocket. It wasn’t Mum. It was my admirable dad. My inspirational, responsible father. The disappointment was draining.
‘Hello.’
‘Hello! How’s my little Maja then?’ he said, just a bit too loudly, the way he did after he’d had a couple of pints.
My perspiring, intoxicated dad.
‘Good, really good.’ I said, my voice sounding husky, as if I had just woken up.
As I was lying there I realised everything was wet: my jacket, my trousers, my shoes. Water had dripped on them from the paddle.
‘How’s your thumb?’
‘So-so.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘You could say that.’
I knew he wanted me to tell him that it wasn’t a problem, that it was fine, so that he could go back to doing whatever it was he wanted to do, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t that generous. Before he had time to say anything else I asked:
‘Dad, what do you do?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What do you do when I’m not there? I mean, what are you doing now?’
‘Now? This very minute?’
‘Yes.’
He coughed. I heard music in the background, a singer with a high, girlish voice. Could it possibly be Debbie Harry? I saw an image of the blonde, dangerous Timberlake fan, recalled the way she kissed me on the cheek as thanks, the way I got all sticky from lipstick and saliva.
‘I’m sitting here with Ola, having a few drinks and chatting. Why?’
He sounded guarded, almost off-hand. He didn’t want to talk about what he was doing. He wanted to keep the conversation short and simple, show some fatherly concern and then carry on with his life. I was disappointed because I wanted him to tell me the truth: that he was going to Denise’s party. That he would drink like a fish, dance his arse off in some club he was too old for and, if he got lucky, shag Denise or some twenty-five year old culture victim with a bob. Someone who would be impressed that he was a semi-famous music journalist, as well as a single dad with an emotional, unstable teenager. Perhaps I should be happy that he talked about me but sometimes I got a feeling that he almost used me to show off, that he talked about me and my “problems” simply to score a few brownie points; that he used me to prove he was Mr Bloody Nice Guy, someone who could take responsibility, who didn’t cop out. It wasn’t just the stuff Denise had written – there had been others before her. Masses of others. All those relationships which went on completely outside my world, on his “free” weekends, at lunches, via text or email – he never said a word about them, never let on that they existed. But I had my own ways of getting information. And that’s exactly the reason why.
‘I was only wondering.’
This was the moment I ought to say something. To tell him Mum wasn’t here, that she had never turned up, that I was alone, alone, alone. I opened my mouth but just when I was about to tell him I heard Ola laugh in the background and I wondered what he was laughing at. What could be so flipping hilarious?
‘Well, Maja,’ said Dad, in that summing-up voice he always used when he wanted to hang up. I interrupted him. Always be the one to leave first.
‘Gotta go now,’ I said. ‘Jana’s coming. We’re going to … eat now.’
‘That’s great, Maja! Good! See you tomorrow then, yeah? Seven o’clock.’
He sounded relieved. Didn’t he? And I hated it, that sense of relief I thought I heard in his voice.
I said goodbye, but I hung up half way through the word because I wanted him to know that I was sad – no, upset. I wanted to make him phone me back, but he didn’t. He never understood that kind of thing, so it was totally pointless.
Jana’s coming.
That’s what I had said.
Jana’s coming.
I pretended it was true. I pretended that I heard her bare feet against the parquet floor, that sort of sticky sound of damp feet walking on polished wood. I pretended that I saw her coming round the corner, her hair swinging and dancing on her shoulders; pretended that she suddenly discovered me on the floor. With her eyes wide open in astonishment she bent down and gave me her hand, her voice gentle, sympathetic: Oh, are you lying here?
Yes. I’m lying here.
Little old me, lying here.
Laboriously I got to my feet, using my left elbow to lever myself up. I walked into the bathroom where I took off my clothes and ripped off the plastic bag covering my hand. The bandage felt spongy and wet. Naturally the bag had leaked. I stepped into the bath and sat on the pack of toilet rolls. I turned on the water and let it run, spraying down over me like cold April rain. My thumb pulsated aggressively. I was struck by the crystal clear image of its amputation, as if it was happening there and then. It was impossible to avoid it.
The grating, piercing sound.
The metal teeth, hacking into me.
The flesh. Exposed.
The blood. Snaking, pulsating, spurting.
The explosions. The pain.
I shook my head, wanting to shake off the memory, the images, the sound, the pain. I turned my head up to the shower head as if it were the sun, and sat there with my head rotating from side to side in one long denial. I allowed the water to run over my eyes, allowed my eyes to run. I allowed it all to run until the pack of toilet rolls began to soften and collapse.
Naked, I walked up to my room and dried the bandage with a hairdryer. It took ages and still it was wet on the inside, next to the skin.
I tipped my bag upside down on the bed. Clothes fell out over the duvet in heaps of black and white fabric. I pulled on a pair of black jodhpurs and a frilly white shirt that had very long sleeves. Dad called it my straitjacket. You were supposed to fold the cuffs back and fasten them with cufflinks, but I had left them behind in Stockholm. It was ridiculously hard to button the shirt without a functioning left thumb. I attached my smart black braces, the ones FAS-Lars had mocked, tied a silk scarf around my neck, carefully applied some make-up and put on a pair of big glittery earrings. Who was I getting dressed up for, I wondered?
I went downstairs again, opened the door and ate a few handfuls of muesli straight from the packet. It tasted like dry animal fodder. I looked around the kitchen as I chewed, at the crumbs under the table, the yellowing pile of newspapers, the overfull sink. I debated for a while whether to wash up but decided to leave it as it was. Shit, I certainly had good reason to.
I opened the fridge. Apart from a few bottles of carbonated water, an open packet of some thick, disgusting yogurt and some organic milk, it was
empty. I took out a bottle of water and drank almost half a litre in a few ice-cold gulps. The bubbles tickled my throat. Then I took out the milk. It smelled okay but it was two days past its sell-by date. There was no butter, no juice, no cheese. No breakfast for me. She usually bought that, at least.
Were all these clues?
The emptiness of the fridge was depressing. The freezer, on the other hand, was stuffed full of colourful rectangular boxes piled one on top of the other. Ready meals: pizza, lasagne, pies. Junk food. Worthless, unwholesome junk food.
I slammed the door shut. I had completely lost my appetite.
It felt so ugly, so wretchedly impoverished. Mum would have preferred to inject food if at all possible, so pronounced was her lack of interest. As it was now, I would gladly have done the same.
I finished the water in the bottle and lay down on the sofa. I needed a plan. I had to deal with this. Perhaps I ought to phone the police after all? The hospital? That presenter of that missing persons programme on TV?
I dismissed my own options. No, I shouldn’t. She had been in touch. She was alive. Not being here was her choice.
Quickly I got to my feet, leapt up the stairs a few at a time, and went into her office. I switched on the computer and looked at her email again. Perhaps I could read more into it.
Some longing.
I am very sorry that this is such short notice but I have to let you know that Maja can’t stay here this weekend.
Then I noticed something else that wasn’t right. Mum’s email address. It was new. It was a Gmail address I had never seen before. Why wasn’t she using her work email like she usually did?
If It’s Red the Blood Won’t Show
It started to get dark but the street lights hadn’t come on yet. I walked outside and sat down on the steps for a while, feeling the cold through my trouser legs. I shut my eyes and tried to think. I was envious of smokers who could have a cigg in peace and quiet and give themselves time to think. How long could it take to smoke a cigarette? Five minutes? I sat for five minutes, puffing on an imaginary cigarette and letting the thoughts come and go. Perhaps it helped because afterwards I stood up decisively, cut across the driveway and picked up a handful of gravel. To avoid being seen I squeezed through the gap in the hedge with my aching left hand pressed to my chest. If I couldn’t meet my own mother I was definitely unable to meet anyone else’s. The gravel was sharp and cut into the palm of my hand.
There. There was his window. It was lit from the inside, a warm, yellow light. I hesitated. Then I thought: what the hell.
I took aim and threw, but the very moment I let go of the gravel I saw the window being opened wide. The stones hit the glass then ricocheted back at enormous speed, straight out at first and then down over me like a meteor shower. One hit me like a bullet in the forehead. As I fell over I thought dramatically: I’m going to die now. But of course I didn’t. People seldom do.
‘Whoa!’ shouted Justin from somewhere up above me.
I managed to moan in reply.
It was a joke. It was a joke how I always managed to hit myself, be hit, saw pieces off myself, get splinters in my foot and stones in my head. I grabbed my forehead, looked at my fingers. Blood. Obviously it was blood.
‘I’m coming down,’ he yelled. ‘Stay there.’
I had no other plans so I lay still and looked up at the darkening leaf cover of something that must have been an oak. I heard my own breathing, panting at first, then calmer. The ground beneath me was cold and damp. It smelled of wet grass. The blood ran; I could feel it running warmly beside my nose and cheeks and down to my mouth. I wiped my face with my shirt sleeve and watched the white cuff turn red.
Yet again I was lying on the ground, in a white shirt, bleeding, unable to get up. It was getting so interminably boring.
Justin came round the corner still wearing his pink jeans; his feet pushed into his unlaced grubby basketball boots.
‘Hello,’ I said, with a kind of forced neutrality.
As if I wasn’t really lying bloody and knocked-out on the grass.
‘Oh my God, Maja! How did that happen?’
I tried to shrug my shoulders but that’s not so easy to do lying down.
‘You sound like you’ve got a cold,’ I said, because he did. His Ms became Bs.
He grabbed hold of my right hand and tried to pull me up, but never had gravity been so strong and never had my body felt so heavy. For a long time I hovered a few centimetres above the ground without either coming up or going back down. When I was finally on my feet I saw Justin smiling at me. A warm and – I hoped – tender smile. The corners of his mouth twitched as if he had been about to say something but stopped himself.
I wished he would say something. I wished he would say something lovely.
He continued to smile as he said:
‘You look like a clown.’
From his sitting room, where I had been less than twenty-four hours earlier, came the sound of a TV, but no one was in there. I glimpsed a close-up of a drowned, swollen female corpse, the Danish pathologist offensively crunching on an apple.
‘Where’s your mum?’
‘At our summer place in the country.’
‘But didn’t you say she was coming home?’
‘No-o, what I said was that she would kill me if she saw the bottles.’
‘What, so she hasn’t been here?’
‘Yes, but she went again.’
He noticed words. Like I did.
‘She wanted to fetch a hedge trimmer or something. They go there almost every weekend, her and the old man.’
I groaned inside. All that blood for no reason.
We walked upstairs and into the bathroom with the Freud quotation. There was a strong smell of cleaning fluid. In the bathroom mirror I could see that unfortunately I really did look like a clown. In my attempt to wipe away the blood I had spread it all over my face and now my nose and cheeks were as red as my mouth, which was circled with blood. The braces emphasised the clown impression. I shrugged them off quickly, letting them hang down by my side.
‘Scheisse. Now this shirt is ruined as well.’
‘You ought to wear red clothes, seeing as you’re so accident-prone,’ said Justin. ‘A red shirt. If it’s red the blood won’t show.’
I washed the blood from my face and dabbed the cut on my forehead with a piece of cotton wool, but miniscule fibres fastened in the sore. Justin sacrificed one of the guest hand towels, wetting it and pressing it repeatedly against my forehead. The towel was stained light red. Exactly the same shade as his trousers.
I looked a whole lot better once the blood was wiped off but there was an ugly cut with jagged edges.
‘I don’t think it needs stitching, but perhaps we ought to go to A&E and let them have a look at it,’ said Justin, and blew his nose loudly. ‘I can give you a lift if you like.’
‘No, there’s no need,’ I said hastily.
He raised his eyebrows, then shrugged his shoulders and took a box of plasters from the bathroom cabinet.
‘Well, it’s your head.’
‘Yes, unfortunately.’
He laughed, but I didn’t even smile.
I met his look in the mirror and I noticed his eyes were bloodshot. The cold, or a hangover? Or a combination of both? He took out a large plaster decorated with skulls and stuck it over the cut on my forehead. I said:
‘My mum’s missing.’
He pressed the sticky ends of the plaster with both thumbs and said:
‘I guessed as much.’
‘There has to be a logical explanation,’ said Justin, after I had told him everything. His voice was so convincing and calm that I thought I must be overreacting to the whole situation. We were in his bedroom and I was sitting on the bed and he was in a swivelly turquoise armchair, which he restlessly rotated a half turn to the right and then a half turn to the left, all the time not taking his eyes off me. I hoped he didn’t still think I looked like a clown.
‘Yes of course. Where does she work?’
The cut on my forehead hurt and I cautiously touched the plaster with my index finger.
‘Linköping University. The Institute of Psychology.’
He stopped rotating and leaned towards me where I sat on the bed, his bed. His reddish-blonde bangs fell over his face.
‘What does she do there?’
‘Research, mostly. Gives lectures to the students from time to time.’
‘Does she travel with her work?’
‘Yes … sometimes.’
‘You see! A sudden business trip. There you are, then.’
He flung out his hands and leant back in chair, looking pleased with himself. I was going to add: But not often and never spontaneously, but there was something in his tone that prevented me. It was so certain, so final.
And I so wanted to believe him.
‘The only reason it feels so mysterious … so … calamitous is that you are in her empty house, where she would otherwise be.’
Calamitous? I smiled. I had never heard anyone use that word before, only read it in books, and with Justin’s dialect, his distinct vowels, it sounded ridiculously old fashioned. Calamitous. Surely that had something to do with calamity? I resisted the impulse to ask what it really meant.
I ran my hand over the throw on Justin’s bed. It was yellow and smooth. I said:
‘The odd thing is, her laptop is at home, and her mobile, and she’s had several missed calls, the first one last Wednesday.’
‘If she’s going to lectures or meetings then she doesn’t need her laptop, does she? And she probably forgot her mobile. That can happen to anyone. Remember, she has actually sent an email.’
‘From some odd new address, yes.’
‘There could have been a pro memoria from work to only use the work email address for work-related things. Perhaps she was forced to set up a new private address.’
I looked at him doubtfully. He ran his hand through his bangs so that they lay flat against his head again. I stared at his hair and discovered to my horror that we had the same haircut! My hair was black and his was reddish-blond, but the actual styles were the same. We could never be together, I thought, childishly disappointed. Shit, you can’t be together with someone has the same haircut as you.
