by Alex Dahl
I draw the pictures that hung on the wall in the Poland-house because they were funny: a dog that looked like a sausage, wearing a hat and smoking a cigar; a very angry duck with a sailor smock and no underpants screaming at three small duck boys; a train with a face blowing steam clouds from a tall chimney. Then I draw all the trees I can remember that stood around the house in Østerøysvingen 8, forty-one of them; the one with the broken, dead branch trailing downwards, the one with peeling white bark, the one with a gnarled, fat trunk that I like to sit beneath because I can always feel it whisper when I put my hands on it. My eyes feel tired, but I rub them and keep drawing. One night soon, I’m going to go back to the house to see the trees. The family is nice, but they almost never let me be alone, even though I know how to be alone.
I wake on the floor, stretched out on top of the drawing pad, still holding a green crayon. Are you okay, Tobias? asks the man, and I nod, but I feel very angry because I know that the burning feeling in my cheeks makes them really red, and he will think there is something wrong with me. I climb into the bed and turn towards the wall, waiting for him to go away, but he doesn’t. Instead, he sits down on the edge of the bed and just waits. I wait, too, and I think I’m probably better than him at waiting, because after a while he gets back up and walks slowly to the door. I hear him pause for a moment before he speaks: If, uh, you want to talk... And then he’s gone.
The girls are nice to me, at least most of the time, but not to each other. Every time Hermine says something, Nicoline rolls her eyes as if it isn’t okay for her little sister to speak. When Nicoline speaks, Hermine sticks her tongue out, or shouts Blablablabla, so Nicoline has to hit her. I’m not really sure why they do this. Their mother and father get angry when they do this. One day when we were having breakfast before school, Hermine took a Cheerio from Nicoline’s bowl. Nicoline slapped Hermine’s small hand very hard, so she cried. Nicoline called her You little bitch. The mother didn’t say anything but she looked into her coffee as if she couldn’t hear them screaming and then she looked at me and said, Sisters. Then she stood up and walked out.
The mother is nice to me but she looks at me a lot. Sometimes when she looks at me it seems like she is about to say something to me, but doesn’t. She’s sad. I don’t know why, because she has the things to make you happy, but she isn’t. It’s probably because I’m here. Or maybe it’s because she’s angry with the man. Sometimes when Krysz and Anni were fighting, they didn’t talk for maybe two or three days. In this house, it’s not like that exactly, more that sometimes the mother and father say things to each other, but they don’t really talk. Or they say something but mean something else, like when the mother says, Isn’t that interesting? when the father talks about his job things but what I think she really means is, That isn’t interesting.
Moffa once said that I hear the things that people don’t say. I told Anni this and she said she hears the things that people don’t say, too, but then Krysz said, Those are just the voices in your fucking head. Once Anni and I went to the beach early in the morning. We threw rocks at the water, which was covered by a thin layer of ice, and watched it shatter into glassy shards, letting the black water surge up through the holes. She told me about the farm she lived on when she was a child and how one of the horses could speak with its thoughts. It told her that her mother would die, and it was true – the mother died, and then Anni had to go and live with her mother’s aunt, who was very old and also very mean. She and her husband hit Anni every day and forced her to do things she hated, maybe even eating bark and things like that. When she was fourteen, she ran away and had to live on the street and ask people for money and that was why so many bad things happened to her.
I draw the bed Moffa made for me, and then Baby’s small bed next to it, but when I have finished I feel very angry and very sad so I rip the drawing into small pieces and just then, the mother walks into the room. Tobias, she says, kneeling down next to me, looking at the torn-up pieces of paper, but not at me. Laila is here to speak with you again. You remember Laila? I get back in the bed and turn towards the wall and wait for her to go away. Maybe she is better at waiting than the man, and maybe even better than me, because when I haven’t heard any noises in a very long time, I turn slowly back round, and see that she is still sitting there, on her knees on the floor, waiting. I am angry. Yesterday she made me go to a doctor. The doctor hurt me and took my blood. Then I had to speak to Laila. I know who she is and I don’t want to speak to her any more times. There was a man and another woman in the room as well, but after maybe three hours of them trying to get me to say something, I had managed to say nothing and they gave up. We’ll try again tomorrow, said Laila. Which is now.
I stare at the mother, forcing myself to keep staring even when she stares back, which feels strange. Krysz says I can see into people but it isn’t true. If you like, I’ll come in with you, she says. I shake my head. Did they tell you yesterday why it is so important that they speak with you, sweetie? she whispers, and picks up my drawing of the duck, turning it over as though there may be another drawing on the back. I shake my head again. They think they’ve found your mother, she whispers, close to my head now, her breath on my hair. I don’t want to speak with her. Or with anyone. But I turn around. What? I ask, and sit up, but carefully so I don’t bang my head. Your mother, she whispers. Anni. A small sound floats on the air and I am trying to figure out what it is when she moves closer and begins to rub my back gently, and whispers Hey... hey... The sound is coming from me. It’s a little bit like the sound that came from the cat that almost died when it was hit by a car and Moffa had to kill it more. Anni is not my mother, I say. The mother in this house looks at me, and I want to look away because it is as though she can see behind my eyes, but I can’t look away even if I want to. Tobias, are you sure she’s not your mother? she asks. I nod. Who is your mother? I don’t know, I say, but I know it isn’t Anni. If you don’t know who it is, how do you know it isn’t Anni? Because I remember her, I say. For a moment she looks like I have hit her. What... she says but then she stops talking and presses her fingers in her eyes. Then she moves the different parts of her face around but it looks like it is difficult because I can tell she is angry even if she is trying to not look angry. I open my mouth to say something else, but just then, it is as though a giant vacuum pulls everything inside of my stomach out and I throw up everywhere: on the bed, on the floor, all over myself, all over Cecilia.
*
Your drawings are so beautiful, Tobias, says Laila. Do you think you could draw something for us? I do this thing where I just look at the table like nobody said anything. A hand slides a piece of paper and a new, nice set of colored pens across to me. The wooden table has an interesting pattern I want to run my finger across because it looks a lot like the pattern on a tree stump behind Moffa’s house that I liked to sit on when I was small. I wonder if I’d be able to feel the tree whisper if I put my finger on it, but I think maybe not, because this tree is a table now, so it’s dead. Tobias? The wood grain has long, soft lines in it that are nudged into swirls every two inches or so, like waves rising and falling on the surface of the sea.
The man and the woman took me and the girls to see the woman’s mother. Her house was by the sea. The old lady had baked a cake but it was quite hard. We had Coca-Cola and that was really nice because I love it. We played on iPads and for once the sisters didn’t fight – I think they were afraid of the old woman, who looked like someone hit her in the face every time someone spoke unexpectedly. I wanted to go and look at the gray waves and when I crossed the floor to the door I looked up at a shelf above the fireplace, where lots of photographs stood in gold frames. They were all of the same girl – first as a baby, then as a girl my age, then as a teenager and then as a grown-up. It was the mother in the house I live in now. I stopped and looked for quite a long time because there was something strange about the pictures. Now the mother looks like the ladies who are on posters selling things; the one
s I have seen in magazines, smiling, wearing fluffy sweaters and high heels and swishy hair. She is beautiful, and I have not met someone who looks like that before. Anni looks very tired and old and her teeth aren’t okay anymore. When we lived in the Poland-house I met some other ladies, but I don’t remember them very well, except that they didn’t look anything like the mother. She looks new and shiny even if she is a bit old, like a car that has had all its parts changed and polished.
In the pictures at the old lady’s house, she looked different. It was like the eyes were more open and like she showed more of what she thought on her face. There was also something else about the pictures but I didn’t have enough time to figure out what it was because the girls came running towards the door and scrambled to get outside, pulling me along with them. Out there, they played in the leaves and then ran along the beach, screeching the way girls do, and I decided to stand still and try to hold on to the strange feeling I had when I saw the pictures, but it never did come back to me. But now, watching the wood pattern on the table and remembering how similar it is to the pattern on that tree stump, I realize what it was I felt then, at the old lady’s house – it was recognizing. The girl in the pictures looked like someone I know. But I don’t know many people.
My heart suddenly feels quick and loud in my chest, and I stare as hard as I can at the lines in the wood, digging into my memory to uncover who it is she looks like. Tobias, says another voice, this one more insistent. It is a man talking now, and he repeats my name twice more, so finally I have to give up trying to find the face I know I’ve seen before, somewhere. Can you tell me who this is? says the man, sliding a picture of Krysz across the table. I shake my head. What about this, Tobias? he says gently and the next picture is of Anni. I shake my head again. Please help us, says Laila. We are so sorry to have to tell you that Annika Lucasson has died, says the man. That noise again, the cat screaming. No, I say. Yes, says Laila. The mother in the house I live in now moves closer to me and I let her take my hand. No, I say again. Could you please help us find out what happened to her? says Laila. You can draw if you want. I push the pens and paper away. Can you please try to tell us how you know Annika Lucasson? says the man, running a fat finger across his fuzzy jawline. He looks like a pirate, but his eyes are kind. She’s my mother, I say, and the man sighs. Laila sighs, too, and the mother lets go of my hand and raises an eyebrow at the father in the house I live in now.
*
It’s night. The father took away the bright floor lamp that I like to light in the night-time. You need to sleep in the night, Tobias, he said in a nice voice – the kind you use to speak to babies. I could turn on the overhead light but I don’t like the way it casts shadows from the table and chair by the window onto the floor. Anyway, I don’t mind the dark. They knew that Anni wasn’t my mother. That’s why they got angry. They didn’t say they were angry; they pretended like it doesn’t matter what I say and they’ll be nice to me anyway, but it isn’t true, and I know they got angry.
When I was small, I hoped my mother would come for me. But when I thought things like that, I felt bad, because wishing my mother would come for me was the same thing as wishing to not have Moffa. And she never came anyway, and now I don’t have Moffa, so everything is much worse than I thought it could be when I was small. It was like my mind thought it was either Moffa or a nice mother, like I just couldn’t understand that it is possible to have nothing. And it’s Anni’s fault, all of it. I’m not sad she’s dead. I’m not going to help them find out how she died either, because she ruined everything. She deserves to be dead and when I asked how she became dead they wouldn’t tell me, but I don’t care because I know it anyway.
Part 2
Annika L., Somewhere near Kjerringvik?, October 2017
It’s early and I have to be fast if I’m going to get to the post office and back before he returns. I don’t really know what time it is or even what date so I can’t write it but it’s October, maybe late October. I’ve been up the whole night to get everything ready, and I think everything is in order now, at least I hope so or it’s not gonna make any sense. I’ve cried some, it isn’t easy reading. I’ve done some writing too, adding bits at the end to what was already there, and that was even harder. I’ve had a very bitter black coffee and a smoke and my stomach is aching like it’s bleeding on the inside and maybe it is. My vision’s gone strange in the last week but maybe that isn’t so strange. My temple above my left eye is still hurting real bad like maybe bits of bone have come loose and are floating around underneath the skin
I don’t remember what I was wearing when I came here. I can’t go anywhere wearing what I’m wearing now. My clothes must be in the bedroom anyway. No, now I remember – they’re underneath what I’m wearing and I must have put this over my real clothes because it’s cold – it is so very cold here. I’m looking at my hands writing this and it makes me want to cry, like how can it be that these are the same hands as when I was a little girl and the same hands my mother once held and the same hands that have done so many bad things? The strange old clock starts up in the next room and I count the hours – eight. No more time. On my way out of here I’ll give my love a kiss on his forehead though the idea makes me feel sick now. I’ll do it anyway, carefully, like he might suddenly lunge at me.
Annika L., Karlstad, April 2009
Ellen, my caseworker at Kungshemmet, always said I should keep a journal and write down what I’m doing and feeling. I thought it was stupid but I tried it anyway because I liked her and for a long while I wanted to become how she hoped I could be. And I liked it, so I haven’t stopped. The good thing about writing is that when you read it a while later, the past and things that happened sometimes seem different than you remembered. I always remember things as worse than they were, and when I read my words from a while back, there are always nice or funny little episodes that make me smile. Like the time Tanja and I ran away from Kungshemmet and managed to hitchhike all the way to Arvika before we got caught. We spent a whole afternoon enjoying our newfound freedom, smoking pot with some older boys and running through a park, laughing hysterically.
Now that I have my freedom all the time I look back at Kungshemmet with a mixture of fear and sadness, like a bad dream, but I miss it also. The way the system works is – you can be as fucked-up and insane and addicted and dangerous as you want, but as long as you only harm yourself, you’re out as soon as you turn eighteen. And so, after spending your teens fighting against the well-meaning carers and all the rules, and hating evening lockdown and everything else about it, you’re suddenly out. Free. And you end up missing your prison. At least I do. Suddenly, nobody cares.
My mother always said that we shouldn’t dismiss things like the stars and fate. Sometimes it seems like everybody tells you that if you just work hard and never give up and carpe diem and make good choices, then it will all be okay. You’ll get a good job and a nice partner and maybe even some nice little children. But it isn’t true. Sometimes you do all the right things and it’s still all shit. Other times you do nothing right and it all works out anyways. My mother did everything the way you’re supposed to – she worked hard and got an education, and had a husband and child, and then she died at thirty-four. I try not to think about her much. I try not to think about the first twelve years, or the next twelve, because it either hurts too much, or makes me want to give up. If my life has taught me one thing, it’s this – don’t look back, and don’t look ahead, just do your best right now. It’s all we’ve got.
It’s my birthday today. Twenty-five, and that’s a good few years more than anyone would have thought I’d live to see. I haven’t told nobody, not even Sylvia or Roy. This morning I thought about something Ellen said. She said that writing about my life and my past would teach me to respect myself. So I thought I’d give it a shot. Twenty-five; for most people that’s really young. They have a pretty clean slate and presumably a long life ahead of them. For me, I would guess this is towards the end o
f my life but inside my head it’s confusing; some days I feel young and that there might be different lives for me yet, and other days it’s like I am a single hit away from death.
So I’m going to write about my life now, on my twenty-fifth birthday, and how I got here. I woke this morning on a flimsy mattress on the floor of a garage. My home. The garage belongs to Sylvia and Roy, and they live across the courtyard in a yellow, run-down house. Sylvia is a fortune-teller and looks it. She is probably in her late fifties, and a large woman with jet-black hair parted severely down the middle and lots of black eye make-up. She has plump, smooth hands that like to rest on top of her crazy crystal ball. When she meets with clients, she wears a black robe with hand-stitched gold half-moons on it, and she is quite a sight. Sylvia has been paralyzed for nine years – she fell down a ladder after having visions of the future in the clouds and tried to get closer. Oliver, the neighbor’s son, told me this. He comes round to the garage sometimes to smoke with me.
Anyway. Sylvia’s paralyzed and can’t do many things, and because Roy’s a truck driver and away a lot, I live here and help her. Well, both of them. There are things Sylvia can’t or won’t do with Roy anymore, and so I do them as well. The deal is, I do what they want me to, and I live here for free and Roy gives me smack. Mostly it’s easy things like cooking eggs and bacon, and bringing in mail and cleaning. Sometimes it’s things like shoveling snow and feeding the cats and clearing out their litter trays. And sometimes it’s letting Roy or one of his friends use my body. Like I said, I live for free and they give me smack. It means I don’t need to live on the street or in a hostel like some people I know, and I also have time to do some other odd jobs when Sylvia and Roy don’t need me. In the summer, I pick strawberries on some of the nearby farms, and though it’s a killer on my knees, I like being outside all day and the feeling of earth on my hands. It reminds me of home. In the winter I shovel snow for a couple of the old people in the cul-de-sac and clear snow from their cars and things like that. The winters are quiet, though, because many of the neighbors are wary of me and probably don’t believe that I’m a student lodger. So it’s quite often more of Roy’s friends to earn enough money and enough smack.
