Frozen Moment (48 page)

    At
first sight Cirka Nemo hadn't changed. As teenagers they had admired her and
the fact that she occupied her own space with confidence, despite her small
stature. She was still just as small, slender and angular, but her dyed black
hair now formed a cloud around her face. The clothes clinging to her thin body
could have been the same ones she had worn back then; the style was just as
timeless as the decor in her tiny one-room apartment.

    'I
just found the granny boots I bought in London when I was nineteen. How cool
are they?'

    She
held up a pair of shabby button boots in bright orange. Seja nodded obediently,
quietly amazed at how life turned out. Here she stood in Cirka Nemo's
apartment, being treated as an equal. And Cirka didn't seem at all surprised at
their strange errand; perhaps that was because strange things were just a part
of her everyday life?

    As
a teenager Seja had admired this woman simply for her unambiguous air of
authority, although most people had seemed worldly- wise compared with her
contemporaries - girls still nervously dabbing Clearasil on those stubborn
spots on their forehead. Confidence was sexy - she still thought so - but after
blinking the teenage dust from her eyes she couldn't help noticing the hard
lines around Cirka Nemo's mouth. Or the unpleasant smell from the overflowing
rubbish bin in the tiny kitchen area - just like the one Seja had in her first
student apartment when she was twenty.

    She
would guess Cirka's age as at least double that. When she wasn't smiling, those
lines drew the corners of her mouth down towards her chin, and the skin beneath
it was starting to slacken. The roots of her hair were peppered with grey. Seja
couldn't help inspecting this woman as if she were under a magnifying glass.
The passing of the years was never
so
tangible as when
you examined a fragment of your own past face to face: in one way unchanged, in
another bearing no resemblance to how it used to be. This encounter made Seja
realise that she was also someone else now: no longer the insecure teenager who
had sweated buckets every time she was spoken to by someone who, in the twisted
hierarchy of a teenage girl's world, was worth more than her.

    'They
were right at the back, and that's where the notebooks from the cafe were as
well, otherwise they would have been chucked out long ago. You can't afford to
be nostalgic when you live in an apartment that only measures thirty metres
square.'

    They
took her point. The little flat was full from floor to ceiling, mainly with
vinyl records. But it seemed not much had changed since the late 8os, the golden
age of artificial silk and crushed velvet. One wall was painted black and
strewn with luminous stars, and the space that remained around the record
collection was taken up by framed posters of the Clash, Nina Hagen, the Cure,
Sisters of Mercy, Nick Cave. An unmade mattress lay directly on the floor, and
on top of it was a pile of battered notebooks with black covers.

    Seja
recognised them at once.

    'I
was absolutely crazy about Woody.'

    Hanna's
expression was so veiled that Seja couldn't help laughing. They had moved from
the Hungarian restaurant, where they had had pea soup and sausage casserole
with green chilli and jambalaya, and had settled down in the espresso bar next
door.

    'You
don't have to be a genius to work that out, reading between the lines.' Seja
was referring to a number of comments written below Woody's drawings, for which
Hanna was responsible.
'Hannami.
Where does the
mi
come from, anyway?'

    Hanna
rolled her eyes.

    'Hannami,
God how stupid. Maria is my middle name. I remember introducing myself that way
for a while - Hanna Maria. Hannami was a kind of abbreviation. I even tried to
change it legally, but to do that you need the signature of your guardian. Mum
refused, of course, and it's probably just as well.'

    
'Yes,
but honestly. Listen to this:
Your drawings touch my soul, Woody. If you
think everything is meaningless, then you are WRONG
!…
In
the darkest hour, when you feel there is no one to comfort you, just remember
lam there for you.
Hannami.'

    Hanna
shuddered.
'How embarrassing!
I thought I was being so
discreet.
And deep.
But he was brilliant at drawing,
you have to admit that.'

    They
had spent a couple of hours ploughing through the material. From behind the
counter the cafe owner was beginning to stare at their empty coffee cups so
they bought a second round to appease her. Unfortunately they had failed to
find the list of aliases they both thought they remembered at the back of each
book.

    The
first book was from 1991, before their time.
Girl
and
Hannami
didn't
appear until the following year, first sporadically and tentatively, as if they
were waiting to check the response before throwing themselves to the wolves.
Gradually their contributions became more personal. In some places there were
sections that resembled an official exchange of letters or a political debate
between Seja and
Crab,
who claimed to be an anarchist, while Seja chose
to describe herself as a socialist. She read with fascination. Even if many of
the arguments were naive, others were well thought through and interesting to
follow.

    
At
least we thought about the world.
She couldn't help comparing this with the
young today, obsessed with reality TV and interested in nothing but what people
looked like and the functions on their mobile phones. For the time being Seja
allowed herself to disregard the fact that she and her friends had been at
least as self-obsessed, their political involvement as much of a fashion
statement as the music and the interest in art.

    'She
used to draw too,' Seja suddenly remembered.
'The girl in the
white leather jacket.
I remember mentioning it to her, that time I
talked to her at the party. I said she drew really well. Let's check all the
drawings.'

    They
flicked back and forth through the books, somewhat disheartened that what they
had in front of them was just a fraction of the hoard the staff must have had
when they closed the cafe. It was perfectly possible that what they were
looking for wasn't even in these books, that the work of the girl in the white
leather jacket had been thrown away many years ago.
In which
case Hanna and Seja's efforts would be in vain.

    'This
one ought to be on display in a museum or the city library,' said Hanna,
reading out a short poem about unrequited love. 'Don't you think so?
An exhibition about the thoughts and feelings of teenagers.
About first love, unrequited love, sex.
The meaning of life,
angst, happiness and togetherness.
Teen culture
uncensored.
Isn't it fascinating?'

    'Yes…
but hang on…'

    Seja
was holding a picture that folded out from a page in the notebook. It showed a
curvaceous naked woman standing in front of a mirror. However, it was not the
woman's reflection that appeared, but a wolf standing on its hind legs, its
slavering jaws wide open. The drawing was on a loose sheet of paper that had
been stuck in the book with something that looked like chewing gum.

    'You
see?' Seja said eagerly, pointing to a squiggle in one corner of the mirror.
She had almost missed the signature because it was in the middle of the picture
rather than in the corner. 'I think it says
Tingeling.
Hanna, I'm
absolutely certain that was her alias, the girl in the white leather jacket.
Tingeling.
I remember now. She signed all her pictures that
way, right in the middle of the picture.'

    They
studied the drawing in silence.

    'Excuse
me!' The cafe owner's voice brooked no contradiction. 'I'm going to have to ask
you to leave if you're not going to order anything else. You have to make way
for other customers.'

    Seja
and Hanna looked meaningfully at the row of empty bar stools but didn't feel
like starting an argument.

    'We're
just going,' said Seja, smiling as sweetly as she could. Unfortunately
just
going
didn't appear to cut it, judging by the death stare she got in
return. She glanced at her watch and realised they had been sitting there for
several hours. The small of her back ached as they gathered their things
together.

    Outside
Hanna looked at her own watch. 'God, I promised the babysitter I'd be back over
an hour ago!' She raced across Gronsakstorget with her jacket flapping open.
Seja stood there for a while with the heavy bag of books. It was slowly getting
dark. She ought to go over to Nils Erikssonsplats before the buses started
running less frequently as the evening timetable took over but it went against
the grain to stop now when she felt so close to finding the answer to the
questions that had been swirling around in her head.

    Now
she knew the alias of the girl in the white leather jacket: Tingeling. As she
spoke the name out loud the picture in her memory became much clearer. A finely
chiselled face with a small mouth, the upper lip a little too thin in relation
to the lower to be aesthetically pleasing.
Tousled
multicoloured hair.
Skinny legs in torn stockings, layer upon layer with
fishnets on top.
Heavy shoes.
Attitude, but who had
the courage to drop the prickliness and be themselves at sixteen? The last time
they met, however, she had seemed noticeably less keen to make a statement and she
had been wearing a man's black coat.

    Seja
walked slowly down to the canal and perched on the edge of a wet bench. The
sound of music poured out of the Barsa bar on Kungsportsavenyn as the door
opened and new customers arrived or left.

    Only
one of the notebooks had been completed after the fateful year: on the spine it
said
NORTHERN STATION 1996-7.
That ought to have been too late. And yet
it was in this book that Tingeling's name came up from time to time. The
letters seemed to stumble over one another as Seja
read,
frantically flicking back and forth with frozen fingers.
Where did she go?
What happened to her - was it true that something terrible had happened? Was it
rape?
Many had wanted to pay tribute to her name with a poem or a verse
from some song. Fear, grief and the desire for sensationalism burned between
the lines. Even if the writers had known each other more through their writing
than personally, it was clear that they felt a strong bond with each other.
That was also how Seja remembered it.

    
Most seemed to believe that Tingeling had taken her own life, some
that she had died of an overdose.
Others expressed themselves more
cryptically, hinting that a crime might lie behind her disappearance; someone
had started this rumour and the ripples had spread. But no one seemed to know
for sure. No one seemed to have been with her that evening when she
disappeared.

    Seja
carried on reading until the dampness penetrated through her jeans and her
hands were stiffened with cold from a sudden icy blast of wind. The restaurant
boat
Atta Glas
moved almost imperceptibly on the water. That was when
she found what she was looking for.

    There
it was, the list she had kept seeing in her mind's eye, conscientiously written
out by someone who clearly liked order and neatness. Her heart began to beat
faster as she searched feverishly among the names for something that sounded
familiar. Many had not filled in their details on the blank line following
their alias, wanting to preserve their anonymity, refusing to accept that their
given name was any more real than the one they had chosen for themselves, or
perhaps they simply hadn't seen the list. Others, in contrast, had filled in
their addresses and telephone numbers, perhaps hoping to create an extended network
of like-minded souls.

    She
had filled hers in:
Girl: Seja Lundberg.
That was why she had been so
sure of the list's existence. With her heart pounding she searched among the
names, and there it was.
Tingeling: Maya Granith.
There was a Borås address,
which definitely decided the matter. It was her.

    Seja
took out her mobile to ring Christian Tell. Her frozen fingers slipped on the
keys and she dropped the phone on the ground between her feet. The interruption
left space for reflection. She sat there with the phone on her knee listening
to the misdial tone, before slowly sliding it back into her pocket.

    There
would be time enough to talk to him, face to face.

    Under
normal circumstances stress turned him into a miraculous organiser. He was like
his father in that respect: he hated doing nothing. During periods when he was
feeling more contented he could compromise on orderliness - he sometimes even
made a point of it - while his father had remained the very personification of
a pedant. However, when the mountain of commitments and unfulfilled promises
rose above his
head, that
was when he turned into his
father in every respect. At that point order and neatness became restful, and
was the only strategy that enabled him to cope.