Me on the Floor, Bleeding

by Jenny J

  I continued scrolling through the emails from April and backwards. March, February.

  Then.

  Suddenly one name stood out.

  Jana Müller.

  The air left my lungs and it became hard to breathe. This one I had clearly missed. It was from her usual work email, sent on the twenty-sixth of February. I opened it apprehensively, as if I was afraid a bomb would explode.

  Hello Jonas

  I know you think I’m very direct but it’s the only approach I know. So here goes.

  For some time now I have been in contact with a psychiatrist regarding certain difficulties I have been experiencing, mainly in relation to other people. I’m sure you know what I mean.

  We had our first meeting in October last year. After only a few conversations – too few, I think – my psychiatrist Dr Evald Roos suggested I undergo tests to establish whether my problems are severe enough for a diagnosis to be made. They suspect a particular diagnosis but I do not want to tell you what it is before everything is completed. Without going into detail I can say it concerns a social disability, in other words inadequacies regarding social interaction.

  Over the last six months I have talked with Dr Roos and he has made a detailed background analysis. I have also met and been tested by a psychologist and also an occupational therapist. Now they want to carry out something they call a “family interview”. I’m sure you understand that I can hardly expect my parents to leave Hanover, travel to Sweden and then be subjected to an interview, even if I wanted them to. And I do not want that. Naturally, Maja is also completely out of the question. I don’t want to get her involved and I hope you will respect my wish not to tell her about any of this.

  You can hardly be called a “relative” any longer but I still think of you as the person who knows me best, even though we have little regular contact these days. And I don’t think – unfortunately, I might add, in this regard – that I have changed to any great extent during the past thirteen, fourteen years. What I want to say is that I feel you could provide a true picture of what I am like. And the difficulties and – I hope – the strengths that I have. My question is this: will you agree to a family interview?

  Regards,

  Jana.

  I looked up from the screen. It felt as if someone had injected zero-degree water under my skin. A chilling feeling that instantly bored its way deep inside me. Fam. Int. Family Interview. Okay, now I understood. But:

  Diagnosis?

  Psychiatrist?

  Psychologist?

  Was Mum ill? Was she sick in the head?

  Are You Alone Too?

  When I arrived at school, a whole twenty minutes early for once, there was a carrier bag hanging from my locker. Inside were Valter’s bloodstained T-shirt and a pale yellow post-it note that read:

  Design studio open from 5. I’ll come and lock up at 9. Ring if you need any help, I’ll still be here. Machinery workshop open if you need sandpaper etc.

  Valter had drawn an arrow at the bottom so I turned the note over. It said:

  BUT under no circumstances are you to use electrical tools e.g. electric drill, electric saw, etc! Not only because I’m afraid you’ll cut off more body parts but also for the simple reason that I could get the sack. Valter

  I squashed the carrier into my own bag and there was a waft of Valter’s sweet, heavy cologne as the air was pressed out. Why was he doing this for me?

  I walked about like a zombie all day and in the school toilets the mirrors, cracked and smeared with dirty pink soap, told me I was pale and hollow-eyed. And despite the fact that the sun was shining as if it were the middle of summer, a November-grey, doomsday darkness hung like a sack over my head.

  During the maths lesson I crept out and phoned Vrinnevi Hospital. I asked for Dr Roos and my voice was so shaky and weak that the receptionist had to ask me to repeat the name. But Dr Roos was busy and when she asked me if I wanted to leave a message I said ‘No’ and hung up.

  At break time I went to the IT room and googled diagnosis because even though I had a vague idea what it meant I could only associate it at that moment with school diagnostic tests. A quick search led me to:

  A diagnosis is the process of attempting to determine a specific physical or psychological condition. The diagnosis is based on the patient’s own description of the symptoms in combination with physiological and/or psychological examinations or tests. Additional descriptions of the condition, supplied by family members (especially if children are concerned) can complete the investigation. Diagnostics is a central part of medicine as the diagnosis forms the basis for treatment. Anamnesis (the history of the illness or disease) plays an important role in determining a diagnosis.

  That might have made me a little wiser but it certainly didn’t make me any flipping happier.

  Enzo looked worried about my mental absence, which was decent of him but not especially attractive. Sympathy seldom suits the bearer. It’s something to do with the altered position of the eyebrows in relation to the face.

  He was to be admired for his persistent attempts to get me to react. He literally spat out nasty comments about our stupid fellow human beings, most of all FAS-Lars and Vendela, made politically incorrect remarks and from time to time gave me a friendly whack on the arm. That kind of thing would usually get me going, but I only groaned and went back to what I was doing.

  After lunch, which consisted of a soup so thin it looked like snot-coloured water, soggy bread, and those rectangular, pale-yellow plastic squares they call cheese, I went outside. In actual fact I think it’s ridiculous to routinely slag off school food. It’s like kicking someone who’s already lying on the ground and rolling about in the throes of death. It’s not sportsmanlike. But on this particular day, I joined the crowd and despised it like they did.

  It was crawling with students. Dressed for summer they ran about on the asphalt like frisky young animals, playfully tugging each other’s pony tails, jumpers, dicks as well, for all I knew. I was the only one who was cold. I turned my coat collar up to my cheeks. An over-bleached blonde girl, her mouth dripping with lip gloss, shouted:

  ‘Maja! Are you a vampire or what?’

  And someone else added:

  ‘No! Can’t you see she’s one of the undead?’

  And I, who normally always had something to say, said nothing, but I knew what they were thinking because I had my gleaming black hair combed back, a hole in the head, and I was as pale as an English corpse. I was the walking dead.

  With the sun in my eyes and Joy Division in my ears I slowly started walking. I walked past all the smiles because they weren’t meant for me anyway, and I walked past all the warm, animated bodies because they weren’t mine to touch. My feet walked forwards, onwards, away, home.

  I left school and rounded the corner towards Fridhemsplan. I walked the length of Västerbro bridge and thought about all the people who had jumped off it into the beautiful, glittering water. But I thought even more about those who had managed to stay on the bridge despite their hearts which were heavy and their feet which were way too light. How admirable they were. How strong.

  I passed Hornstull and walked over Liljeholm’s bridge with its aggressive roar of traffic and cyclists whizzing past my ears like meat projectiles. I thought about the words that had been on a roof below the bridge for ages: ARE YOU ALONE TOO? Fat white capitals on a black background. But they were gone now, the roof sanitised and empty.

  Yes, I’m alone too, I thought. I am so very alone.

  And I was close, extremely close, to walking right into legendary tattoo artist Doc Forest’s, slapping a few thousand-kronor notes down on the counter and shouting:

  ‘Mixed dicks and swastikas, please!’

  But naturally I didn’t. And for the two hundred in my purse I would just about get the top of a knob.

  In my ears I heard Joy Division singing:

  When routine bites hard

  And ambitions are low

  And res
entment rides high

  But emotions won’t grow

  And we’re changing our ways,

  Taking different roads

  Love, love will tear us apart again.

  And wasn’t love the root of all the suffering, all the evil in the world? Because if you didn’t love, you wouldn’t care.

  It was only towards evening that I started to come awake. As dusk fell and darkness began to fill the flat, I regained some energy, like the vampire I so clearly resembled. I pulled Valter’s T-shirt out of the plastic bag. Without thinking what I was doing I picked up a marker pen and wrote right across the circular blood stain: I CAN VERBALISE MY ANXIETY! Then I grabbed hold of my bangs and cut them off. Because I couldn’t walk around looking like some old Nazi.

  At twenty-past six, ten minutes before the time Dad had announced he would be home, I put on the T-shirt, threw my bangs into the bin, and set off for school.

  Dark shadows lay like thin, grey blankets in every corner of the design studio. Only one weak yellowish lamp was shining over by the whiteboard. Without looking I reached out to the right and on the three light switches lined up in a vertical row on the wall. The fluorescent tubes crackled and lit up one after the other. I discovered they hummed, quite loudly in fact, something I had never noticed in the daytime. One of the lights flickered nervously for a second or two before coming on fully.

  I was back in the room where it had all happened.

  There was a flash in my head.

  The grating, piercing sound.

  The metal teeth, hacking into me.

  The flesh. Exposed.

  The blood. Snaking, pulsating, spurting.

  The explosions. The pain.

  The horror of it made me shudder. It was the sound, the memory of the sound that was the worst. The sound when the metal teeth chopped into my flesh, cutting through the bone.

  My thumb felt excruciatingly painful, as if someone had hammered rusty nails right into the bone. I lifted my left hand to my heart and cupped the right one over it protectively.

  I walked past the rows of benches, stopping beside the one where I had last worked. Couldn’t I make out a faint outline on the floor, next to one of the bench legs? I bent down but no, it wasn’t my blood, just the silhouette of a lamp that had tricked me. The caretaker had obviously done a good job. For some reason I felt disappointed.

  I carried on into the storeroom. My shelf was standing on the floor, half hidden behind a couple of oil portraits still in progress. I pulled it out and the underneath scraped against the rough stone floor. I turned it over. The blood had been carelessly removed: red streaks daubed the lower shelf as if someone had superficially dragged a piece of dry loo paper over the wood a couple of times. In one place you could see the blood clearly, a large, dried rust-red stain.

  I took the shelf out into the main room, back to “my” bench, and stood it up. I studied it: the blood, the side supports with the flamingos, the pencil lines I had sawn along before the saw had suddenly lost its grip and sawn thin air, sawn me. Sawn off parts of me.

  I walked to the machine workshop where the large dark-green saw, drill, and planing machines stood silent after a day’s industrious work. I cut through the adjacent room, the bench workshop, where a remaining student was painstakingly oiling a beautifully-carved table. She looked up at me and I raised my hand in a hello. I asked her if she knew where the handsaws were kept and she looked uncertain but pointed towards a tall, narrow cupboard. I lifted out a handsaw. Obediently I was avoiding anything electrical. Then I heard her clear her throat behind me. I turned around.

  ‘Excuse me, but aren’t you the one who sawed off her thumb?’

  She looked kind: brown, medium-length hair and a round face with no make-up.

  ‘Um, yeah. How do you know?’

  She gave a laugh.

  ‘Who doesn’t? That photo has circulated throughout the entire school by now.’

  What photo? And the very moment I thought that thought, I understood. Simon’s photo. Of course.

  ‘Have you got it? Can I see?’

  ‘Haven’t you seen it yourself?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Oh, I thought … sorry, I didn’t mean to …’

  ‘It’s cool. Can I see the picture?’

  She wiped her hands on her work trousers and took her mobile out of her pocket. It was a flashy new model with a large display. She scrolled down the screen with her index finger and then held the phone up to me.

  It wasn’t the photo I had been expecting. Not the one he had taken when I had turned to face him, or a close-up of my thumb. This must have been taken a few minutes afterwards. I looked at myself on the illuminated display as I lay unconscious in a sea of blood, my arms crossed over the splattered shirt front, my right hand protecting my left. It looked so peaceful. It looked like I was dead. As if I had finally – what was it Freud had said? – adapted myself to the world.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘That’s me on the floor, bleeding.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She gave a nervous laugh.

  I shoved the saw into a plastic bag I found on a bench and grabbed some sandpaper, one sheet of coarse and one of fine, from the sandpaper holder on the wall, as well as a tin of transparent wood varnish and a brush, and began to walk towards the door. For a second it looked as if she was going to stop me because she took a step forwards and opened her mouth. But when I ignored her she simply let me walk past.

  I sawed neatly along the pencilled lines, concentrating so intensely that everything else became hazy and unimportant and kind of disappeared out to the periphery. Slowly my flamingo materialised, its neck curved as if it had its head buried in a book. Pretty ugly, but a flamingo nonetheless.

  I smoothed the edges carefully with the sandpaper, felt them with my fingers, and sanded again.

  I took a piece of stiff paper and a pair of scissors from Valter’s desk. Freehand I cut a heart-shaped hole in the middle. The edges were uneven but that’s the way it was, I thought. That was how my heart was. Imperfect. Defective.

  I lay the template over the bloodstained patch and fastened it with tape. Then I painted the varnish inside the heart-shaped paper hole. A shiny red heart. Tomorrow I would clean off the blood left outside the template, the part that hadn’t been varnished. That way only the heart would be left, the heart made of my own blood. I tossed my head to get my bangs out of my eyes, an old habit, but simultaneously remembered that it was no longer necessary. I ran my fingers over my forehead, along my hairline. The hair was a few millimetres long on the left-hand side but got shorter and shorter the further right I went. I had cut it off exactly at the roots.

  All of a sudden the door opened. I jumped. It was Valter. Already? I took a look at the clock and it was ten past nine. I had been there for over two hours.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘Good.’

  He walked in. On his head he was wearing a beret. His soft curls stuck out from under the rim like clown hair.

  ‘I thought I’d leave now, so you’d better start getting your things together. Do you need any help with anything?’

  He went up to the front desk, pulled open the top drawer and took out a packet of cigarillos that he shoved into his jacket pocket.

  ‘No, it’s cool. I’ve nearly finished. I’ll take it home and finish it there, if that’s okay.’

  I didn’t want to say anything about the heart in case he thought I was being morbid, and maybe I was. But I didn’t care about that. At least it was beautiful.

  ‘Of course,’ he said absently. ‘As long as you bring it back so that I can give it a grade when it’s completely finished.’

  ‘Absolutely,’ I nodded.

  He walked around the shelf and inspected the flamingo.

  ‘Nice. A bit more sandpapering to do just there. Who are you going to give it to? Or are you going to keep it yourself?’

  He removed his beret and self-consciously straightened his hair.


  ‘No, it’s for Mum. It’s her birthday soon.’

  ‘Oh. Then that’ll make her happy. It’s a bookshelf, isn’t it? Does she like books?’

  ‘Yes, a lot.’

  I returned the varnish to the storeroom, poured water into an empty glass jar with half a mustard label on the outside, and put in the brush. Before I put the lid back on the tin of varnish I breathed the smell deep into my nostrils, my eyes closed. I loved that smell.

  It was unexpectedly silent in the design studio. Suddenly I realised I was wearing Valter’s t-shirt under my jacket. Valter’s T-shirt that I had now irrevocably destroyed. I stretched out the fabric, stared at the text and sighed.

  I CAN VERBALISE MY ANXIETY!

  Fuck. What the hell had I done?

  I hung about, not wanting to leave the storeroom. Then he called:

  ‘I assume you had to let on about the shelf when you damaged your thumb?’

  It went quiet. I considered not answering but it was obvious I must have heard. I went back out into the room. Valter had sat down at the teacher’s desk.

  ‘No, I didn’t, actually.’

  ‘So she doesn’t know about the shelf?’

  ‘No, not that either.’

  I looked at him confrontationally. He looked at me with curiosity.

  ‘What? Do you mean she doesn’t even know about the thumb?’

  ‘No.’

  He stared at me, mastering the art of looking both stupid and ugly at the same time.

  ‘Why not?’

  Here we go, I thought.

  ‘She lives in Norrköping and … she’s been away.’

  ‘Oh I see. You don’t live with her?’

  ‘No.’

  Obviously not, I thought. Do you think I commute to Stockholm every day, or what? Moron.

  The irritation ate away at me as I lifted the shelf from the workbench.