The Uninvited

by Liz Jensen

  When the case was over she told me she found me very attractive and invited me out to dinner. Over this meal I learned she’d been brought up bilingual, so I tried out some Greek phrases on her. This made her smile, and led to her questioning me more, and what she heard seemed to excite her. She already knew all about Phipps & Wexman and she’d heard of Professor Whybray’s work on mass hysteria. She was impressed that I’d worked so closely with him, and that he’d been my mentor. When she invited me back to her home after dinner I didn’t need to draw a mental flow chart to know what this would mean. She had already told me about Freddy: he was five at the time. She described him as ‘born fatherless’, but changed the subject when I asked how that was technically possible. She did not have many taboos, but I quickly learned that Freddy Kalifakidis’ paternity was one of them.

  Kaitlin employed a live-in au-pair girl who had already fed the boy and put him to bed when we got in. This young woman then melted discreetly into her room. Kaitlin and I had sex that night and again the next morning. She had warned me we had to do it very quietly because of Freddy and the au pair, but silence is always fine by me. I find that women often make distracting noises during sex, right in one’s ear, necessitating the deployment of various coping mechanisms. I liked grabbing her Greek hair in my hands. If the lack of eye contact bothered her, she didn’t mention it.

  I discovered that Kaitlin was very straightforward and businesslike about what she wanted, in and out of bed. After a few dates, I grasped that I was being interviewed for a job I had not considered applying for. She told me she wanted a man in her life who could be a role model for her son, who respected her lifestyle and her work, who was compatible with her sexually and whom she could grow to love.

  ‘Is that how it works?’ I asked. It was not what I had gleaned from popular culture and empirical observation, or from anything Professor Whybray told me when his wife Helena was dying. When I expressed my doubts, she suggested a trial run of three months. I didn’t ask how many other men she had considered or why she wanted me. But she did. The trial period worked: Kaitlin liked the way Freddy and I fitted together mentally. I did too. I felt at ease around him from the start. And he felt the same. He liked watching me make origami models. He liked the folk tales I told him, and he enjoyed pulling at the hairs on my arm, and being swung high in the air, and testing his strength against me. We had arm-wrestling matches and developed a game involving the hurling of cushions which Kaitlin called ‘daily violence’. He had been starved of male company.

  I put up some shelving for my things, folded Kaitlin a Hot Crimson Kawasaki rose with a Jungle Khaki stalk and leaves and moved in.

  There is a popular theory that when a woman falls in love with a man, she falls in love with two men: the man he is, and the man she wants him to be.

  It soon became apparent that I could not become that man.

  By now I have studied Sverige Banken’s financial documents closely enough to have established that Jonas Svensson’s costly act of sabotage required him to make only five keystrokes on his computer. In or out of a dissociative state, it was the work of no more than eight seconds. More likely three. Tomorrow I will seek confirmation of this, and interview him accordingly. Pleased to have made progress, I allow myself the relaxation of watching the final part of a documentary on BBC World about Napoleon’s pyrrhic victory over Moscow in 1812. It’s followed by the late-night news. A disturbing murder has rocked France. A boy of ten shot his two uncles at point-blank range, in a forest. One died, the other survived with severe injuries. He used his father’s rifle. They were out hunting wild boar. It was not an accident: eight witnesses – including the boy’s father and some cousins – saw him do it. There was no obvious motive. Unsurprisingly, it’s being linked to the case of the Harrogate child now known to the public as Pyjama Girl.

  But to me she’s Child One. And the French boy is now Child Two.

  All night I kick.

  CHAPTER 4

  When Ashok skypes me in the morning the image is unclear. It gives him a cubist look which suits him. Whenever I think of the cubist movement, I think in particular of Georges Braque, because of all its adherents, he strikes me as the most mathematically aware.

  ‘How’s Sweden?’ Ashok wants to know. My screen tells me it’s 9.12 local time. It’s Thursday 20th September. This was my mother’s birthday. Had she lived she would now be seventy-one.

  ‘See for yourself.’ I angle my laptop to show him the view of the waterfront from my window, where ships, ferries and boats gleam dully under a low sun. ‘The forecast says it’ll be cloudy with light rain showers and a high of twelve.’

  ‘Neat,’ he says. ‘Must go there sometime. What are you up to then, Maestro?’

  ‘I had sex with a demographer.’ That wakes him up.

  ‘Well they don’t call you the Pussy Magnet for nothing. She Swedish? I hear they’re hot.’

  ‘Swiss–German. Attending a UN conference on the population crisis. What are you supposed to do when someone cries?’

  ‘You made her cry? You big, crazy heartbreaker!’

  ‘No. I’m talking about Jonas Svensson’s boss. Lars Axel. He cried when I interviewed him.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Not much. He cried. So what do you do, when it’s a man?’

  ‘Jeez, Hesketh. Same as a woman. You pat them on the arm or squeeze their shoulder or their hand or you might give them a hug. You tell them you understand this is a difficult situation and suggest you talk another time. Did you do any of that?’

  ‘No. But I think his colleagues did. He left the room crying, so I made him a lotus flower. Then later his PA called to apologise.’

  ‘OK. Well I just talked to the wife. Annika. Very dignified lady. She says you can visit Jonas in hospital this morning. She’ll be there. But she says she won’t guarantee you’ll get any sense out of him. He’s been in a confused state since he came out of the coma. Mental breakdown, whatever. But get what you can. By the way. Lotus flower: nice touch.’

  After he has said goodbye, this remark puzzles me. The lotus is a perennial plant that grows from a thick rhizome in altitudes up to 1,600 metres. It is almost entirely edible, and is seen in some Eastern cultures as a symbol of purity, or the movement of the human spirit towards a state of enlightenment. Was this symbolism what Ashok was referring to, when he said, ‘nice touch’? If so, he would be wrong. I constructed a lotus flower for Lars Axel because apart from ozuru, I work through my repertoire of twelve basic models on a rota system, and it was the turn of Model 8.

  Outside, altocumulus and cirrocumulus clouds drape the sky. At ten o’clock, I take the fourteen-and-a-half-minute walk from my hotel to the hospital. It’s an eight-storey modern structure with polished floors. There’s a huge courtyard with a bronze sculpture of a lion, surrounded by glass-sided lifts. It doesn’t have the sickly, claustrophobic smell of the British hospitals I visited during the years of my parents’ physical decline, or later, when Mrs Helena Whybray was dying and I accompanied the professor to help him ‘keep a grip’. This is an environment in which one can imagine people getting well at speed, where broken bodies are repaired and serviced by high-quality machines. At Reception I’m told that Jonas Svensson has been placed on the psychiatric ward where he is still being assessed. If he is deemed to be a danger to himself and others he will be moved to another unit. If not, he’ll be allowed home.

  Svensson has a room to himself, which I am directed to by a black male nurse with tribal markings on his cheeks. There’s a woman sitting outside it, angled oddly on a chair, like a perched ozuru. Annika Svensson is probably in her mid-fifties, and quite wrinkled. She is wearing a jacket in a green I particularly like: Bamboo Classic. When she sees me she rises, all long limbs and hinge-like joints. My height is often a useful barrier to eye contact. Not on this occasion: she is exceptionally tall, so I focus on her earring and greet her in Swedish. People are always glad when you address them in their own language, I have
found, even though your knowledge may not extend further than what you have memorised from a dictionary or phrase book. Annika Svensson has very clearly been crying, and her left cheek is bright red. She must see me noticing, because she puts her hand to it. Her fingers are very long.

  ‘How is your husband doing?’ I ask. ‘I hope you don’t mind speaking English.’

  ‘I went in there a minute ago and he hit me in the face. He’s never done anything like that before.’

  Abruptly, through the door, we hear a man shouting something and a woman’s voice trying to calm him.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ I ask. I caught only one word: fan, or ‘devil’. Scandinavian swearing is very tame compared to its Anglo-Saxon equivalent, which is why they import words like ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ into their vocabulary. They use them liberally and with far less inhibition than native English speakers.

  ‘It’s all nonsense,’ she answers. ‘It’s like he’s gone back to childhood. He says kids forced him into it.’ She shrugs. ‘This is not the Jonas I know. He was never violent. Never. He’s become another person.’

  ‘Can I go in?’

  ‘Ask Dr Aziz. She’s in there with him. But keep away from him, he’s very strong.’

  I knock. No one answers, so I go in.

  A young black-haired woman whom I take to be Dr Aziz is standing by the far window, speaking rapidly into a phone. She looks distressed and I can see why: Jonas Svensson, who is seated on the bed, is wearing nothing but a pair of sunglasses. When I saw his photo at the bank, he was not stark naked. He was clad in a quiet grey suit. And you could see his eyes: blue, like his wife’s. The glasses are a ski-style wrap-around design with mirror lenses. I am not cut out for this kind of encounter. His bare skin is almost translucent, in the same way as a maggot’s, and mapped with blue veins. The pale hair on his limbs and genital area catches the sunlight. His penis rests on his thigh, flaccid. He has a small pot belly. A hospital nightgown lies on the floor. He has apparently just removed it. Dr Aziz shakes her head and again points at the door, indicating I should leave. But just then Jonas Svensson turns his attention to me, shouting something in Swedish and motioning angrily at the chair. He wants me to sit. I hesitate. I don’t mind not having eye contact with him. But his mirror sunglasses are distracting. I have no wish to see my own alarmed face. I look at the floor and say, ‘I came to see you from London. I’m investigating what happened at the bank.’

  ‘So sit down.’ His Swedish accent is thicker than Annika’s.

  ‘I’ll let you stay for a moment,’ says the doctor, breaking off from her phone call. ‘But as you see he is very agitated.’ I nod, and she returns to her conversation. I sit on the plastic chair next to the bed, but I don’t know where to look.

  ‘There is a gang of them,’ says Jonas Svensson. He seems manic. ‘Anyway they are disgusting creatures, they just took my clothes off, those . . .’ He can’t find the word. Then he does. ‘Trolls.’

  ‘Trolls?’

  ‘Yes. Little kiddie trolls. I must’ve swallowed one. That’s how they get in, right? I’m just guessing. Like a tapeworm or something. They stink. Look at my hands. Do they look a normal size to you? Or do they look like they belong on a stinking kiddie troll?’

  He shoves his huge hands towards me, clenched into fists. I recoil. On a parallel track, I’m folding paper in my head. I speed it up, but I can’t do it fast enough to get the effect I need.

  I say, ‘They look a normal size. In fact they are on the large side.’

  ‘On the large side, is that what you think? Well think again man,’ he says with what seems to be contempt. ‘It made me fuck things up. I didn’t want to! Don’t you see?’ He’s shouting now. ‘It’s in me! It’s using me like a puppet!’

  ‘Sir, you should go,’ says Dr Aziz.

  ‘What’s using you like a puppet?’ I ask, hesitating.

  ‘The fucking . . . creature. It’s still in here.’ He thumps his chest. ‘It’s going to kill me.’

  ‘We won’t let that happen,’ says Dr Aziz, in English. Her voice is reassuring. She is preparing a syringe. ‘You’re safe in here, Jonas.’

  He laughs. ‘You think they came all this way for nothing? You think they’re just having fun? Ha!’ He whips off his sunglasses. I wish he hadn’t. My breath catches in my throat. His eyes are so bloodshot that there’s no white to be seen. Just two pale blue irises swimming in a sea of red. They are leaking a kind of glue. ‘And how do you think it feels to go blind, ha?’ he asks.

  ‘You’re not going blind. You just have a bad infection,’ says the doctor. ‘And a pressure build-up. The antibiotics will help, you’ll see.’ She addresses me. ‘Why don’t you come back another time when he’s calmer?’

  Svensson puts a fist to his brow next to his bulging right eye, then suddenly opens up his hand. It’s a baffling gesture. I think of a spread starfish. ‘That’s what happens next. Pop. Do you think we like what you did to us? Do you think we wanted to be the last?’ Dr Aziz addresses Svensson fast, in Swedish. I understand none of it, except ‘du’, meaning ‘you’, and ‘nu’, meaning ‘now’. He shoves his sunglasses back on then lifts his hands high above his head, splays his fingers again, and with a swift movement catches hold of my upper arm and digs his fingers in deep. The pain is shocking. I cry out sharply and the doctor buzzes an alarm. ‘You fucking grown-up,’ he says.

  ‘Security’s coming,’ says Dr Aziz, trying to pull Jonas off. But he shakes her away and tightens his grip. I start rocking. As I rock, I can see my own face moving back and forth in his distortive mirror lenses. My mouth is open, as if I am trying to shout but can’t. He’s remarkably strong. I can feel the tip of each finger digging into my flesh through the fabric of my sleeve. He digs in deeper and hisses, ‘Do you think we like starving, and fighting over food? You fucking lap-sap.’

  I freeze. Lap-sap isn’t Swedish. It’s Cantonese. It means rubbish. Just then the door opens wide and a tall blond security guard enters with the black nurse. At this Jonas utters a yelp, releases his grip on my arm, jumps up and dodges past the guard. The nurse grabs his hand, but he breaks free and hurtles through the open door and out. Dr Aziz slams at a button on the wall and the wail of an alarm sets up: the guard has already gone. Outside the door, I hear Annika screaming at Jonas to stop.

  Dr Aziz rushes out and I follow. There’s no sign of either Jonas or the nurse or the guard, but the swing doors are closing as Annika Svensson reaches them. She pushes them open again and bursts through, still calling after Jonas: Hold op Jonas! Hold op!

  When Dr Aziz and I reach Reception a cluster of people is pointing through the revolving door and staff are yelling into walkie-talkies. Annika speeds out and I follow. Outside, others are chasing him: some wear white coats. The nurse with tribal markings is crouched on the ground, groaning and clutching his stomach. Jonas must have punched him. Then I see him, far off, racing across the parking area in a zigzag sprint, his pale buttocks jiggling as he manoeuvres past the cars, occasionally ducking and popping up again. Everyone’s shouting. Jonas is still well ahead of everyone else, and clearly heading for the vehicle exit and the road beyond. I am a fast runner, but I know it’s hopeless trying to close the gap. I keep running anyway. Up ahead, Annika screams again.

  A different kind of scream.

  I have never seen a traffic accident actually happen before.

  The truck is a big one, with eight wheels. Dirty. Underneath the dirt, it’s red and yellow. It must weigh eight tons. There is a high screech of brakes as the driver sees Jonas and swerves to avoid him. He fails. The noise when it hits him: BAM or possibly KERTHUNK. The impact hurls Jonas sideways and upward, on a diagonal trajectory. He could be one of Freddy’s Action Men, flung gaily aside. I don’t see him land. But I see the truck smash into the wall on the opposite side of the road. There’s a huge reverberative thud and then the engine dies.

  In the silence that follows, my mind goes blank. I stand there rocking. I register a security guard shou
ting into a walkie-talkie; Annika Svensson sinking down on to the bare tarmac; paramedics rushing past with a stretcher; a man taking a photo on his mobile phone. Within seconds, blue lights are flashing everywhere and the site of the accident is seething with people.

  There’s nothing I can do, so I walk at high speed back into the hospital and find a bathroom where I vomit copiously. What comes out is dark because I ate Swedish crackers for breakfast, and these are made of rye. I also had smoked salmon, plus some fresh blueberries and redcurrants. There are traces of those too, making for a repellent colour mix.

  Back at the hotel, I call the hospital to find out the news, then take a long shower. I think about how I’d tell Freddy the story of Jonas and the truck.

  A Swedish man said that kiddie trolls made him ruin his work. He tried to kill himself with poison. When that failed he was locked away in a safe place. But it wasn’t safe enough. He ran under a truck. They’re operating on him now. He has suffered massive blood loss. The driver of the lorry has a broken clavicle and fractured ribs. And here’s what I know about Scandinavian trolls, Freddy K. They steal people and carry them off into the mountains. The English expression ‘off with the fairies’ stems from that belief. Trolls can change shape. Some can appear very dapper. Troll-women seduce men, but they can be spotted because they are only facades: they never show their backs. They come in all sizes. Some have tails. They never divulge their names.