The Beast (ewert grens)

by Anders Roslund

  A black-and-white still came on screen; it showed Bernt Lund dressed in a white shirt and dark pants, and smiling at the camera.

  Dickybird stepped closer to the set.

  ‘See that bastard from hell? That’s the beast I kicked the shit out of in the gym yesterday. That fucking arsehole!’

  Dickybird was screaming and those standing closest to him jumped and moved away a bit. They had been around at other times when he had freaked out about the nonces.

  ‘What are the bastards fucking well coming here for? Why here?’

  As he screamed, he shoved the memories into the back of his mind. He did that every time. Home in the Svedmyra house, that sodding awful image of his uncle at his dad’s funeral. He was five. Per’s hand suddenly stroking his back and then slipping down to his bum.

  ‘I’ll cut their cocks off!’

  Memories, crowding his head, he was forced to think about them, see them in his mind’s eye, relive them. Per said they should pop into Dad’s workshop, put his hand on top of the little boy’s best trousers, right in front, then pulled the trousers down, and the underpants. And pulled down his own trousers. Held him close, pushed at his bum with his knob.

  ‘Hilding, it’s got to be done. Cut it all off. Balls, the lot!’

  He cleared his throat thoroughly and collected plenty of juice, spat it at Bernt Lund’s smiling black-and-white face on the TV screen, then stared at the splattered face, watching as the saliva trickled down across that cold smile behind the glass screen and dripped on to the floor.

  The group scattered. Some retreated to their cells, some ambled off down the corridor, some stayed and picked up the cards again. Dickybird sat back in his old chair, but shook his head when Hilding gave him his hand of cards. The images in his head were refusing to go; somehow they resisted, however hard he tried to concentrate, calling out and slapping his thighs hard. Still an out-of-control mechanism projected one image after another. Per in their small holiday house in Blekinge; his big hands had been doing the same things, the boy was bleeding heavily and he hid his underpants so Mum wouldn’t see them. She never looked in the old cupboard in the shed.

  ‘Shit, Dickybird, come on, let’s play.’

  ‘Forget it. Not me. You carry on.’

  ‘Bugger Hitler. Come on, let’s start.’

  ‘Bugger yourself. Leave me alone or you’ll get it where it hurts. Again.’

  Images. Now he was thirteen and stoned out of his mind, he had mixed beer and preludin. He got Larren to come along, Larren who was a big boy and quite fearless. They hitchhiked to Blekinge, walked to the house, stepped inside, passed Laila, who was washing up, and found Per in the sitting room. No one realised what was happening, not until Larren grabbed hold of Per and he himself started stabbing at Per’s balls with an ice-pick.

  ‘House!’

  ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘Eights and sixes.’

  ‘That’s no fucking house.’

  ‘It fucking well is. Dickybird, explain to that shithead.’

  ‘You heard me. I’m not interested. Play with yourselves.’

  Keys were rattling. Two screws coming through the main door.

  Dickybird checked them out. They’d brought somebody new. Meant to replace Bojo, he guessed. This morning Bojo’s cell had been empty, he’d been transferred to Hall in a hurry. The lads had got it in for him, but someone had alerted the screws and the wing boss responded instantly. No blood on the floor in this unit, at least not for a bit.

  The new guy was a big bugger. Shaved head, shit-coloured skin, one of them tanning-shop poofs. Dickybird sighed as he watched the group of men step inside, the screws keeping an eye. They walked past the TV corner and the card-players took note now. The new guy stared straight ahead, dead to the world. He was taken to Bojo’s cell, went inside but left the door open.

  ‘Who’s that fucker?’

  Dickybird pointed. Hilding drew a deep breath, tried to remember.

  ‘Don’t know. Never saw him before. Has anybody?’

  Dragan shook his head. Skåne shrugged. Bekir picked up two cards from the table.

  ‘Fucking leave it. Let’s play, I’ve got a good hand.’

  Dickybird focused on the open cell door and waited. That was what he usually did, waited until they came out. Then he told them the score.

  One hour passed. One hour and twenty minutes. Then he came out.

  ‘Oy, you! Over here.’

  Dickybird waved, it was a command. The new inmate heard him, but kept his eyes ahead, ignored the hectoring voice. He walked almost demonstrably slowly into the kitchen and drank water straight from the tap. The large shiny head glistened with scattered drops.

  ‘Hey! Over here!’

  This was irritating, it was Dickybird’s unit and he decided who did what. That skinhead had no fucking rights.

  ‘Here!’

  Dickybird pointed at the floor in front of his chair, waited. The new man didn’t shift.

  ‘Now!’

  He didn’t get it, that shaved moron didn’t fucking get it.

  Hilding could sense the silence and glanced nervously at Dickybird, grabbed the deck of cards, sticking a finger up to show the others that they should hold it. But Dragan and Skåne and Bekir had caught on long ago; it was time to teach the skinhead a lesson. Not that the beating was their problem, they just had a grandstand view! They too could sense the silence; it looked like a fight, quite a few good rounds coming up.

  They squared up to each other. The new guy was walking towards Dickybird and stopped when there was only a hand’s breadth separating them.

  Dickybird had never been faced down before and had no intention of letting it happen now. The skinhead was taller than he was, probably one hundred and eighty-five, and had this fucking big scar running from his left ear down to the corner of his mouth. It was clean, could’ve been a knife but more likely a razor. He had seen razor scars before, they looked like that.

  ‘I’m Lindgren, Dickybird Lindgren.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We usually say who we are, round here.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  The images started up in his mind, Per and Larren, Per’s balls bleeding something fucking awful, Auntie Laila over by the sink screaming her head off, Dickybird himself running about with the ice-pick lifted shouting that if anyone wanted a taste he’d stick it in, Per wailing; he had jabbed with the ice-pick at his eyes when Larren suddenly let his uncle go. Not eyes, that was Larren’s bottom line.

  Dickybird was trembling. He tried to hide it but everyone noticed; he shook and hesitated and spat, this time on the floor.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  The new guy yawned. Twice.

  ‘Police cells.’

  ‘So fucking what, of course it’s the cells, don’t mess with me. Do you have your papers?’

  Once more.

  ‘Listen, Icky-dicky. That’s you, isn’t it? You must know I’m not allowed to bring my sentence in here.’

  Dickybird shifted his weight from left to right leg. Per was dead long ago, a corpse with not much left of its balls. The ice-pick had been kept as evidence, shown over and over to the authorities, on the long way from Blekinge to the young offenders’ institution.

  ‘Fuck your sentence, I’m not interested. What I want to know is what’s the score. Like, I don’t want no sodding nonces or faggots in this place.’

  Weird how a room can suddenly shrink, how sounds become words that turn into spoken messages that bounce off the walls and take up space, suck up energy until there is no more, only intakes of breath in the silence, and piled- up expectations.

  The new guy shouldn’t have been able to get any closer but somehow he did. He was hissing, sending a shower of saliva into the air between them.

  ‘You asking for special treatment then? Is that it?’

  One of them must give way, look down or away, but they stayed facing each other.

  ‘There’s just one thing you’ve got
to fucking remember, Dickybird. No one, and I mean no one, calls me a faggot or a nonce. And if it comes from some shot-up, junk-crazed old wanker, then there’ll be bad, bad trouble.’

  The skinhead poked at Dickybird’s chest with his index finger, several times, hard. Still hissing, he mumbled something incomprehensible.

  ‘Hotikar di rotepa, burobengf

  Prison lingo.

  Then he poked Dickybird’s chest once more, turned and walked back to the cell with the wide-open door.

  Dickybird stood quite still.

  His unseeing eyes followed the newcomer until he had disappeared. Then he focused, first on Hilding and then on the rest of them, and shouted down the empty corridor.

  ‘What the fuck. What the fuck.’

  No one showed. Nothing but an open door.

  That finger poking at his chest. Dickybird shouted again.

  ’You fucking listen. Racklar di romani, tjavon?’

  Lennart saw him, waiting by the tower on the east side of the wall. It was their usual meeting place, at lunchtime or in the afternoon, when the shifts had changed over. Nils looked young, in shirtsleeves with his jacket thrown over one shoulder. A mere boy, waiting for his sweetheart.

  Only a few seconds left to watch him unnoticed. Lennart slowed down. Nils was facing the other way, the way Lennart normally took; today was different because he had gone out for lunch at the old inn on the village square, he and Bertolsson had feasted on steak and fresh garden peas. Bertolsson had dropped him off halfway to the prison, because Lennart had said that he wanted to walk, needed time to think over what had happened, to try to get his mind round the note-scribbling and the microphones and the camera being shoved into his face. Strange to think that for a few minutes of midday news he had been inside all those homes, with his ready-made statements about how criminals ought to be managed.

  It was still windy, a change after weather dominated by high pressure for the best part of a month. It had been an eternity of stagnant heat, sweating and irritation, always something itching, always something troubling around the corner.

  Nils smiled. He had caught sight of Lennart and couldn’t wait. He started strolling towards his lover, came close, held him and wouldn’t let go, kissed his forehead and then his cheek.

  ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘I did.’

  They walked across the grassy slope, keeping a space between them. Seventy metres to go before they were safely into the wood. Behind the first fir tree they reached out and found each other’s hand. They walked on, holding hands tightly.

  ‘We’ve done all we could. At all levels of the service.’

  ‘Stop worrying.’

  ‘Environmental adjustment training. Pills. Group therapy. Person-to-person stuff.’

  ‘It wasn’t about that, I mean, not about what you or the service had done or not done. It was television, for Christ’s sake, a reality entertainment show. Point the camera at the culprit, strip him naked, make him sweat and lose his cool and jabber. Make him look shifty. Then the editorial people think it’s a red-hot show and your average couch-potato enjoys every minute, because it lets him forget his own bloody awful life. He can laugh at the bureaucrat who’s looking sad and stupid and dead ignorant. Screw them all. It’s not about content and meaning, it’s about scoring points, making people look weird.’

  ‘Nils, you don’t see what I’m after. We did try, we threw everything we’ve got at Lund. What happened? He grabs the first chance he gets, makes mincemeat of two guards and runs off. Now he’s on the loose some damned place. All he’s after is getting to toss off on dead little girls.’

  They were out of the wind now, following a path that wound its way through the dense, untidy forest of fir and spruce to the water-tower on the hill. It was a two-and-a- half-kilometre round-trip. Walking briskly, they’d have half an hour to themselves behind a shed near the tower; now and then they made love there. Few walkers came that way and were easily spotted because the path was the only possible route. Everywhere else the forest formed an impenetrable wall.

  Nils clutched Lennart’s hand harder, pulling him towards the shed.

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Listen, I can’t. I’m really sorry. I said different, I know, but I can’t now. I needed to talk, quite simply. Freely, away from the damned camera. That’s all. Talk to you, Nils. You’re so sane. Please help me. Explain things to me.’

  Nils stroked his temples, then his hair.

  ‘My beloved.’

  Lennart closed his eyes, feeling Nils’s breath as he spoke.

  ‘Listen, it’s over now, done. Finished. No one can hope to understand people like Bernt Lund and that’s what makes him so dangerous. To us, but also a danger to himself too. Sometimes it’s impossible to defend oneself against another human being. They are there. Man is the only species of mammal capable of such acts against itself, of cold-blooded killings, to the point of extinction. We’re worse than animals, more like demons, uniquely prepared to self-destruct. It’s incomprehensible, but true.’

  They held each other.

  Someone was walking along the path, and was about to pass the shed without noticing them, tricked as usual by the wall of spiky conifers. Lennart clung to Nils, who hugged him tight, and was overwhelmed by a sudden wave of longing, of desire for Karin, of wanting her body. He could see her thighs, her breasts. He felt for her, and missed her.

  They both wanted to tug at the foil wrapping, their probing fingers colliding, fumbling.

  Inside the foil was a square piece of blackish-brown, glassy resin. They had ordered top-class pressed kif. It gave best sucks, each single drag kicked like a fucking horse.

  It had been hard putting up with waiting for it, and once they knew it was there, they had longed to telescope the empty spaces of Aspsås, the hours of waiting.

  They had ordered from the Greek, pooling enough dough to pay for half the order, which meant owing more than was really healthy. They should’ve kept their heads down and stuck to ordinary compressed Moroccan or even green mix, but Hilding had been eager, nagged and pleaded and brown-nosed until Dickybird caved in. When the pure hashish order had been placed all they could do was sit around waiting for three days.

  The Greek had delivered. Glowing with satisfaction, they held the piece of hash close to the shower-room lamp and admired the shiny fragments.

  ‘Hey! Spot the glass?’

  ‘Course I fucking spotted it.’

  ‘Looks like good shit.’

  Hilding produced a lighter and handed it to Dickybird, who used the flame to heat the foil from underneath. About one minute usually did the trick. The flat brown lump softened enough to be kneaded and shaped with his fingertips. Hilding had brought tobacco. Three-quarters baccy to one Turkish worked just fine.

  ‘Smells good.’

  ‘Fucking well does.’

  Hilding made himself tall, stood on tiptoes and pushed on one of the ceiling tiles, the one nearest the lamp. It gave easily and he pulled out a corn-pipe. He handed it to Dickybird, who scraped the bowl, packed it, lit the mix and dragged to heat it through. Then he had another drag before handing the pipe to Hilding, who put it in his mouth in a hurry.

  Every round they had two drags each, handing the pipe over in silence. The only sounds came from a couple of dripping taps. One of the lamps kept blinking. Drip blink drip blink drip blink. It was great stuff, better than last time.

  ‘Fuck it, Wildboy Hilding. Fuck it.’

  Dickybird inhaled a couple more times, then held out the pipe and giggled.

  ‘D’you know, Wildboy? We’re in this fucking shower- room and smoking great pot and don’t think about this place. Like that it’s the best place for doing the nonces.’

  Dickybird kept giggling. Baffled, Hilding looked at him.

  ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘We didn’t ever check it out.’

  ‘The fucking shower-room, is that what you’re on about? So what? Fuck’s sake, we’ve whipped an
y number of nonces and rapists and faggots in here. They say that in the States the cons set on each other in the shit-houses, right there between the crappers. What’s so special?’

  Dickybird couldn’t stop giggling. That was what usually happened once he got started on good pot, he felt kind of childish and then as randy as hell, though in the end the images would come back and start scaring him; he’d be back with all that shit about Per and his cock and getting hold of that ice-pick and Per’s screaming and his bleeding balls.

  He drew deeply on the pipe, holding on to it to tease Hilding, patting the lad’s head with his other hand.

  ‘Wildboy, you don’t get it, do you? Poor sap. You see, this ain’t about whipping, it’s about something else.’

  Hilding reached out for the pipe, but Dickybird held on to it stubbornly.

  ‘Listen. Next time we get one of these beasts on the unit we’ll lie in wait for the bastard, hang on until he’s in the shower. When he’s in there, water going all over him, then you start a racket outside in the yard, so all the duty screws go pounding off to deal with it.’

  Hilding wasn’t in the mood for this stuff. He tried to get at the pipe again.

  ‘Fuck it, Dickybird, it’s my turn.’

  Dickybird had another fit of the giggles, threw the pipe in the air, caught it and handed it to Hilding, who dragged deeply, twice.

  ‘I told you to listen. So, the nonce is in the shower. I go in first, or Skåne, anyway, someone kicks the freak in the balls to get him down and we start giving it to him. Then we cut his throat. And then we butcher the stiff, carve him into small, small pieces. Break any fucking leftover bits of bone and unscrew the crapper and push all the bits down the pipe. And then we fix the seat on again and pull the chain. Flush the bits down. Use the shower to wash the blood away!’