A Fairy Tale

by Jonas Bengtsson

  I drink a glass of punch that tastes of vodka and pineapple while I look for Christian. He’s on the sofa, leaning over a girl, one hand resting on her shoulder, the other somewhere between her legs.

  I pull him to standing. At first he looks as if he might punch me, then he follows me.

  “Do you know how old that Amanda is?” he asks me when we reach the hallway.

  “You mean Amalie?”

  “Yes, Amalie. She has turned fifteen, hasn’t she?”

  “Like you care?”

  “I do a bit.”

  “Do you have something for me?”

  “Erm, I didn’t think you were coming. You didn’t sound as if . . .”

  “Do you have something?”

  “You should’ve been here a couple of hours ago. I’ve sold out.”

  “You’re an idiot, Christian.”

  “I know it’s not cool. But I could easily have sold another ten grams.”

  He takes two bottles of beer from a plastic bag on the floor. Opens them with his lighter and hands me one.

  “On Monday I’ll definitely have some again, I promise.”

  He raises the beer in a toast and goes back into the living room.

  I drink from the bottle. I’m about to start looking for my jacket in the pile on the floor when I hear a voice behind me.

  “I hope you’re enjoying my beer.”

  I turn around and see Camilla from my class. “Sorry,” I say.

  She laughs. “I don’t care, they’re not mine.” She walks past me and stops in the doorway. “I’ve got a joint we can share.”

  I follow her through the house. Camilla only comes up to my chest; she has blonde, messy hair that looks as if she never combs it. I’m quite sure it’s intentional, and it must be a real struggle to find child-sized Doc Martens. We walk through the kitchen, where mini-meatballs have been used as ashtrays and carrot sticks have been stuffed into condoms. Camilla opens the kitchen door and we walk out onto a covered terrace.

  We sit down on the steps leading to the garden. There’s no swimming pool here, but a small pond with bamboo. Camilla takes the joint from her inside pocket; it’s lying in a transparent, pale-blue plastic bag.

  “I didn’t think this was your scene,” I say to her while she lights the joint.

  “I was bored at home. I decided to give our classmates one last chance. I’m regretting that, obviously.”

  She passes me the joint, I take a drag, the cannabis is stronger and better than the stuff Christian sells at school.

  Camilla takes a blanket from one of the garden chairs and spreads it across our knees. Every time she raises the joint to her lips, I can see a small drawing of a spider on the back of her hand. I’ve been in the same class as her for five, six years now, but I don’t know her. She rarely says anything during lessons, not unless she’s made to. I know that she plays bass in a punk band. One day she showed the other girls the blisters on her index finger. They gave her advice on which hand lotions to use and Camilla fell silent again.

  “You’re stoned,” she says, having caught me staring at her. “That didn’t take long.”

  I look across the garden at the swing moving back and forth every time there’s a gust of wind. There’s a discarded tricycle on the lawn, its front wheel is pointing up to the sky. At the bottom of the garden is a wooden playhouse painted red. I can’t stop myself from giggling; perhaps the joint is kicking in.

  Camilla looks at me.

  “Is Viktor throwing this party?” I ask.

  She nods, but looks puzzled.

  “He wanks off in that playhouse.”

  “What, right now?”

  “No, but at least once a day.”

  “I don’t know if I should believe you,” she says.

  “He told me down at the skateboard park. After five premium beers and a couple of joints. It’s his big secret.”

  “Which you’ll take with you to the grave.”

  “I don’t really like him.”

  “I’m with you there.”

  Again I accidentally look at her a little too long. I’ve never noticed the slight gap between her front teeth before.

  She stubs out the joint, flicks it away; it flies in a long arc across the lawn and lands in the small pond.

  “Stay where you are,” she says. “I’ll go get some beers.”

  I’m pretty sure she won’t be coming back. I decide to sit here for a couple more minutes and then walk home through the suburb, piss in a hedge. I’m about to get up when I hear the kitchen door open. Camilla clinks two bottles against each other.

  “So why did you come tonight?” I ask her while she makes herself comfortable under the blanket.

  “You don’t believe my story about giving my classmates one more chance?”

  “No.” I can feel her knee against mine.

  “Today’s a kind of anniversary.” Now she, too, is looking across the lawn. “I don’t really know how old my baby sister would have been. She had Downs and a heart defect. My parents are going on a mini break tomorrow. Today they walk around the house, my mum lights candles and they don’t say a lot.”

  We take turns going back inside the house for more beers from the many bags in the hallway.

  We stay on the steps. We talk about our classmates. About the teachers. We discuss music for a long time. Inside the party reaches its peak, things get broken and people shout.

  In the early morning hours we walk down streets from which all life has been eradicated as if by a deadly virus. Soon the first cars will reverse out of their garages for fresh bread and juice. They’ll drive to one of the neighbourhood’s two bakeries. Which of them is the better is discussed at length at dinner parties.

  “I hear they’re about to throw you out,” Camilla says, her voice husky from cigarettes and beer.

  “Yes. If I don’t apologize.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet.”

  The sun is rising, the birds start to chirp.

  “This is where I live,” she says. We’re standing in front of a large house. “I’m glad you walked me home. Now you know where to come tonight.”

  I’m eating cornflakes and drinking orange juice. Karin and Michael smile at each other, happy that I’ve done something normal, that I’ve been out drinking all night.

  Karin puts my little sister’s coat on her; they’re going shopping for her birthday party. Clara’s birthday is the same week as Christian’s little sister’s. The last couple of years it has turned into a competition: they show each other their presents and clothes and one of them invariably ends up in tears.

  While Karin looks for Clara’s woolly cap in the hallway, Michael asks me if I’d like to come with him to the home and garden store.

  “We’re getting your sister a swing,” he whispers. “I need you to help me carry it.”

  “Just like in the cartoon?”

  He grins and nods. We’ve both been forced to watch that film many times, the one where the princess sits on her swing and the frog comes jumping past.

  Karin and my sister get dropped off at the shops and we drive on.

  “Tell me if you want me to shut up,” Michael says, tuning the radio. He finds U2, “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” He turns up the volume and the music fills the car.

  We both remember what happened last time.

  It was just after New Year’s and someone had thrown fireworks into our mailbox and blown it up, so we had to get a new one.

  “How are you really?” he’d asked, as we stood in front of several rows of mailboxes.

  He then spent an hour trying to extract even the tiniest bit of information from me. Some fragment, a tiny, shiny nugget he could put in his pocket and proudly show to Karin when we got home. I made the boy talk, he’s gay
, he’s depressed. He wants a dog, a hamster, an annual zoo pass.

  I gave him nothing.

  After one hour we bought a red mailbox, the exact same model they’d had before.

  We join the motorway.

  “I don’t want to trap you in the car and make you talk to me,” Michael says, turning down the radio. “Your principal called me at work. He said that if you go to his office, he won’t ask you to apologize. He doesn’t want to humiliate you. He really doesn’t want to expel you.”

  We drive through an industrial estate with grey warehouses.

  “So the man’s a hypocrite. So am I. It’s another word for growing up.” Michael turns his head. “Sometimes you smile in the wrong places, did you know that?”

  We park in front of the home and garden store and walk down long aisles with tall metal shelves on both sides. We pass big yellow signs with special offers for smoke detectors and hammer drills.

  “Fingers crossed they’ll have a swing with princesses on it,” Michael says.

  It’s not the season for swings, so they’re hidden away at the back. A middle-aged man with a folding rule comes over to assist us. Michael adopts the same tone with him that he uses to talk to builders and mechanics.

  “So is this one galvanized?” he asks. “Does it meet all the safety requirements?”

  “Everything we sell does.”

  Of course we don’t buy the cheapest model because it’s bound to rust. Michael laughs along with the man with the folding rule. They laugh at the fools who think they’re saving money. People who don’t understand it’ll only cost them more in the long run.

  “Do you have one with princesses on it?” I ask. The man from the home and garden store looks at me.

  “Oh, it’s for you is it?” he grins, resting his hands on his belt.

  “Yes,” I reply.

  “No, not at the . . . No, we don’t.”

  Once we’ve got the swing up on the rented trailer, we buy hot dogs from a stand in the parking lot.

  I tell Michael I’d like to visit a girl tonight, maybe stay over at her place. He licks ketchup from his fingers.

  “Who is she?”

  “Camilla from my class.”

  “That small one . . . I’ll need to talk to your mum. But I don’t think it’ll be a problem.” I’m always allowed to do normal stuff.

  We get back before Karin and my sister. The swing lies unassembled on the trailer and we quickly carry it inside the garden shed. Michael drives off to return the trailer; I fill a rucksack with clothes.

  I walk up the garden path and ring the doorbell. It’s late afternoon. The house looks bigger than it did this morning; its dark windows watch me.

  Camilla opens the door. She wears a faded T-shirt and ripped black jeans.

  For a moment I’m scared that I misunderstood her invitation or that she might have had second thoughts. She turns and gestures with her hand for me to follow her. Her bare feet are small and light.

  She has opened a bottle of wine and poured some for herself in a water glass on the kitchen table.

  “My dad says you should always drink Sauvignon Blanc while it’s still young, so I think we should help him.”

  She jumps up to sit on the kitchen table and offers me a cigarette from an open packet. Then she looks down at her feet, which are dangling far above the floor.

  “I’m not small. I’m just very far away.”

  After a couple of glasses of white wine it no longer feels quite so awkward to be alone with her in the big, empty house.

  “I bet you’re hungry,” she says and takes out a sandwich toaster, the kind you close around two slices of bread, from a kitchen cupboard.

  “My parents worry about me.”

  She plugs it in and a red button on the machine lights up.

  “But I can’t be bothered to cook so I’ve been living on toasties for a year and a half now. We never eat anything else when we rehearse. And when I get home at night, it’s the easiest thing to make.”

  She takes a plate with cold chicken from the fridge, along with a jar of barbecue spices and a red bell pepper; she puts the food on the kitchen table.

  “My parents took me to see a dietician to find out if you can really live on toasties alone. If it makes you ill. They paid for several appointments.”

  Camilla’s laugh starts in her throat and ends up somewhere in her nose. It sounds weird, but I like it. The kind of laughter you can only have if you don’t care or you’re used to laughing with other girls dressed in black in an old, damp, soundproof shipping container.

  “Or we could order a pizza. This is just a bad habit.”

  I shake my head. I’m more curious than hungry.

  “If it fits between two slices of bread, then it’s a toastie. That’s the rule.”

  When the food is ready, we carry it into the living room. She takes the plates; I bring the glasses and the wine.

  We put everything on the coffee table.

  “I’m just going to get something.”

  She returns with a videotape in her hand.

  “Dario Argento,” she says, tapping the cassette. “A girl from my band thinks Argento’s films are essential viewing. All of them.”

  We eat and drink the rest of the wine while we watch Profondo Rosso.

  Women scream and are murdered with a meat cleaver on the screen. Camilla sits only a few centimetres away from me. Not wrapped in a thick winter coat this time. No noise from drunken people behind us.

  When only crusts are left on our plates, we smoke a joint.

  “It’s very hot in here, don’t you think?” Camilla says when the credits roll. “Perhaps we should take our clothes off.”

  The duvet has been kicked to the end of the bed. we’re both naked. I open the curtain, small drops of water have gathered on the inside of the windowpane. Camilla’s room is dark red: outside, the sun is rising. There’s a plastic clock shaped like a skull on the chest of drawers. It’s early in the morning, but I’m running late.

  I find the bathroom and splash water on my face. I borrow a blob of toothpaste from a tube and rub it on my gums.

  I can’t have been asleep for more than a couple of hours. Maybe just the one.

  My underwear and socks are lying on the floor, tangled up with her clothes. Camilla rests on her elbow; she watches me while I put my on underwear.

  “I need to go away for a couple of days,” I say, taking the joint lying on the windowsill, the one we didn’t get round to smoking yesterday. I hold it up and she nods, I can have it.

  I kiss her. On my way down the stairs I find my T-shirt. In the living room are my trousers and my hoodie. My rucksack is in the hallway where I left it.

  The cold morning air makes me shiver. The sidewalk is wet and smooth. I walk as quickly as I can until I reach the street where Karin and Michael live.

  I find pen and paper in my rucksack and use a white Citroën for support. The hood of the car is wet from morning dew and the pen keeps going through the paper and onto the paintwork. I’m as brief as I can be. I write that I’m going away. I tell them not to worry about me. I’ll be back in a couple of days.

  I don’t explain why. Karin knows where I’ve gone. She must know: she spoke to my grandmother on the telephone and chose not to tell me about it.

  I post the letter through their mailbox and think about my sister. She’s lying up there, she’s so very small. When she sleeps, she drools a little; not very much, but enough to leave snail traces on her pillow.

  I run down the street, past the road where Christian lives. Down the main street and past the pet shop.

  I sit in the empty train carriage, trying to catch my breath.

  The train pulls away from the station. I lean my head against the cold window, my breath steams it up, I watch the houses go past.


  I get off at Hovedbanegården. The sidewalks are littered with cigarette butts and squashed chewing gum. I have twelve minutes to buy my ticket and find the right platform.

  The carriage fills up with young people with gym bags and beers. A couple of stations later a family gets on.

  “Do you think Granny will have some sweets for us?” a little boy asks.

  His mum nods, yes, absolutely.

  I show my ticket to the ticket inspector and sink back into my seat.

  The train drives on board the ferry. I stand on the deck during the whole crossing. The air is cold, my eyes water. I get splashes of salt water in my face and I laugh, but no one can hear me over the ferry’s engine. When I get back inside the train, I can no longer feel my fingers or toes.

  The passengers around me change as I travel through the country.

  I still have many hours’ travelling ahead of me, but it doesn’t matter. When I half-close my eyes, I’m back in Camilla’s room. She has a birthmark on her shoulder and her hair smells of smoke and apples. I can feel her fingers on my arms. Her bare feet are cold against my back. The candles on the windowsill drip wax onto the carpet.

  During the night we go down to the kitchen to make more toasties. The house is cold; we’re naked and the sweat dries on our backs. She sits on the marble kitchen table, says she’s scared of getting frozen to it, and I kiss her on the lips.

  The train steward’s trolley bumps into my knee. He apologizes. I buy a sandwich with halved meatballs and red cabbage even though I’m not hungry.

  Outside, towns glide past. Some small, others bigger.

  We reach the last stop; the day has passed on the train. I’m one of a handful of people getting off. I walk through the railway station where the newsstand is closed, continue through an underpass, and then reach the bus station. I find a shelter; I tighten my jacket around me. Half an hour later the bus arrives.

  The light inside the bus is so dim I can barely see my hands. Other passengers sit scattered around. When they get on, they nod to the driver and perhaps to a fellow passenger, but none of them speaks. We drive past fields and through small towns that I recognize. Or towns that look similar. Places I lived when I was a child.