Let the Old Dreams Die (19 page)

Frank has one hundred and eighty pictures of a patio with a pool in Djursholm. Nothing else.

He hangs the negatives up to dry and stands there with his arms dangling limply by his side. Has he gone mad, imagined the whole thing? No. He saw what he saw. Somehow the camera has been deceived.

I’m not having this.

By the time the negatives are dry he has set up the processor, and prints twenty pictures, four from each film, on 10 × 15 paper.

As the photographs emerge in the bath of fluid, they still show the same thing as the negatives, but he refuses to accept it.

There must be something there.

He wasn’t hallucinating. Roberto and Amanda were there, just as clear whether he was looking through the lens or with the naked eye. What kind of illusion can tolerate all those changes of focus, go on for so long and be so detailed?

He examines the pictures closely. Nothing. In his agitation he has been careless with the exposure time: everything blue is a couple of nuances too pale. The sky is almost white. The surface of the pool…

Hang on, what’s this…

He looks from one picture to the next. Takes out a magnifying glass and examines them even more closely. He had hoped to find some kind of…trace left by Roberto and the woman. That is not what he finds. But there is a difference between the pictures. He studies them carefully, one after the other, with the magnifying glass.

Of course it could be due to carelessness during the developing process, but in several of the pictures there is a faint shadow at the bottom of the pool. What has captured his attention is that the shadow moves. Changes shape. In some of the pictures it is no bigger than a football, in others it takes up a significant portion of the pool.

The shadow of a cloud…

Yes. If there had been any clouds.

At half past ten Frank is back in the car. There is a hole in the exhaust, and the engine roars throatily as he drives out towards Djursholm. A few hours earlier, when he was driving in the opposite direction, he was sitting here wondering what kind of new car he should buy when he had sold the pictures.

Almost amusing.

There are no pictures, no millions. He is able to accept it now. For some incomprehensible reason the subject was not captured on film. Terrible but true. OK. What he cannot accept is the idea that the subject never even
existed.
That he is—to put it bluntly—ready for the funny farm.

And there is, after all, something that can prove he isn’t crazy. Yellow polka dots on a red background: the bikini that was thrown in the pool. If it’s still lying on the bottom, then he saw what he saw. If it isn’t…well, somebody might have removed it.

Or something.

He stops at the 7-Eleven on Sveavägen, buys a bar of chocolate and the evening papers, and stuffs the chocolate in his mouth on the way out.

The houses belonging to the multimillionaires sparkle like wedding cakes in the summer evening, and a faint aroma of barbecued meat drifts in through the open car window as he pulls up outside the house where he has spent the last few days sitting in the garden. The gates are closed, and the bass beat from some dance hit is pulsating out into the garden. Through the panorama windows Frank can see bodies moving. Marcus is having a party.

He sits there, uncertain what to do. The party could go on for hours, should he wait until it’s finished? Or go in right away? He hasn’t got the five thousand to give to Marcus, and he’ll have all his cronies behind him, high as kites, yelling abuse as Frank climbs the tree…

No.

He picks up one of the evening papers, turning the pages distractedly, and suddenly stiffens. On the entertainment pages is a picture of Roberto and Amanda. They are standing side by side at what must be an airport. A heart surrounds their faces.

‘LOVE IS IN THE AIR IN MEXICO’

Frank reads the caption. It says that the picture was taken the previous day at the airport in Cancun.

The couple have kept their relationship secret for a long time…a week’s relaxation at a secret location in Mexico…future film project…new album…left Sweden the day before yesterday…

Frank looks up from the paper, stares at the gates of the house with the pool. ‘It’s all lies,’ he murmurs, without knowing exactly what he means.

Wrong. Something else is…wrong.

He looks at the picture in the paper. He sees it now. Amanda has short hair. She’s had her hair cut since the last time he saw her on TV, at the Oscars ceremony. But the Amanda he saw by the pool a few hours ago had long hair.

He sits there in the car, trying to make sense of it: Amanda’s long hair. The couple’s stiff, unnatural movements.

The fact that they didn’t appear on the film ought to be the most significant thing. And yet it didn’t feel that way. The most important thing of all is the bikini, the red one with the yellow polka dots.

He closes his eyes, tries to picture it. The curve of Amanda’s hips, Roberto’s hand caressing the broad strip of elastic fabric. The big yellow polka dots. Then Maria: those sweaty moments behind the white wooden building where every single knot had been poked out to make peepholes.

It’s…the same.

Yes. The appearance of swimsuits has changed over the thirty years since he and Maria were kissing behind the changing rooms,
but the bikini Amanda was wearing not only had the same pattern, it was
exactly the same.

And now it’s lying at the bottom of the pool.

The lights in the house are switched off, only the floodlights over the pool are shining. Frank looks around and tries the gate. It isn’t locked. He slips through, walks up four stone steps and stands by the edge of the pool.

There is the fresh smell of chlorine. The artificial light on the tiles and the still water give the whole experience a dreamlike character. Blue tiles make the water blue, make his skin blue. He ought to be nervous—breaking and entering isn’t his thing, his place is just outside the property boundaries—but he feels strangely calm. As if he is anticipating a revelation.

He walks to the edge and looks down into the water.

The bikini is lying on the bottom, undulating slowly like an aquatic plant in the current of circulating water. In the blue light the yellow dots are green. Frank closes his eyes and rubs them hard.

So who were the people who were here?

While he is still massaging his eyelids, the feeling from earlier in the day returns. Something is piercing his head. Thin needles are being forced through his skin, his skull, penetrating deeper and deeper, moving around, searching. He wants to press his eyes tight shut against the pain, but instead he opens them.

At the very second his eyes open, the pressure disappears from his head, but he just has time to see. A number of threads, as fine as cobwebs, are floating between his head and the surface of the water. He just has time to see them before they melt away, or become invisible.

He blinks, fumbles in the air with his hand outstretched, but the threads are gone and the surface of the water…the surface of the water is covered in notes. He drops to his knees. Hundreds of
thousand-kronor notes cover the entire pool like a lid. He shuffles forward.

The notes are real. Just a real as the picture he was waiting for, the bikini he was searching for. Frank puts his hands on his knees and laughs. Now he understands.

It’s all in my mind.

He laughs, shakes his head and sobs out loud. Because it’s tragic at the same time. The fact that his dream, the thing he wants most in the whole world, comes down to this. Pieces of paper.

Perhaps he knows exactly what he’s doing, perhaps not. He reaches down towards the water to pick up a note. As soon as his fingers touch the surface of the water, the notes disappear. Something clamps onto his skin, and in a reflex movement he tries to pull back his hand, but it is impossible. His hand, his arm are slowly sucked down into the water, and Frank follows. When his face is just a couple of centimetres from the surface, he catches a glimpse of the thing that is pulling him.

It’s one of those creatures that lives down at the bottom. In front of its mouth dangles something that looks like a precious stone, shimmering in every colour imaginable.

Finally the will to live takes over. Frank screams, braces himself with his free arm and tries to haul himself out of the water. The creature offers stubborn resistance, but Frank is fighting for his life, and he is stronger. One centimetre at a time he regains his arm. The creature has vanished, become one with the water again. Only the precious stone, the rainbow spot is still visible. It is pulsating.

‘Frank?’

She clings to his arm. Maria. She is wearing her polka-dot bikini. He had forgotten how pretty she was. How could she ever have been interested in him?

‘Frank, come on…’

Frank relaxes, opens his mouth to say that she doesn’t exist. That
she is just one of a series of dreams that never came true. Before he has time to speak she gives a start and he loses his balance, falls into the warm water.

The creature resumes its proper form and swallows him.

When the pool man arrives in the morning to carry out his weekly cleaning duties, he sees something on the bottom and fishes it out with his net.

A mobile phone.

He shakes the water out of it and tries switching it on. Doesn’t work. He throws it in the bin and checks the water in the pool. It really is filthy. Full of fibres and fluff, discoloured. He makes several sweeps with the net, brings up scraps of fabric and…nails.

What the hell have they been doing?

The water still looks terrible. He decides to change the lot, and opens the valve. The water in the pool slowly runs away. After half an hour, it’s empty.

The water continues on its way down to the purification plant. After passing through a number of filters and cleansing processes, it slips back out into the sea via enormous pipes. There it disperses, merges with the greater water and remains the same.

When Matte rang me it was the first time I’d heard from him in twenty-two years. It’s a strange feeling, picking up the phone and there on the other end is a person you assumed was…well, maybe not dead, but gone. A person you will never bump into again. Gone.

‘Hi. It’s Mats. Mats Hellberg.’

‘Matte?’

‘Yes. How are you?’

‘Fine. Fine. What about you?’

A three-second pause. During that time a number of different scenarios flickered through my mind. I knew something had gone wrong in the autumn of 1982. Something that meant Matte couldn’t come back to school. That was the last I heard. Something had gone wrong, and presumably it was still a problem. So the pause made me feel uncomfortable.

‘There’s something I have to tell you. Can we meet?’

‘I don’t know…’

‘Please. It’s important. You’re the only one I could call.’

‘So what’s it all about?’

Another pause. I looked at the clock.
Six Feet Under
was due to start in two minutes, the last episode of the season, and I didn’t want to miss a second.

‘Have you never wondered what happened?’

‘What?’

‘To me.’

‘Well yes, but—’

‘It’s not what you think. It’s not even close to anything you might think. Can we meet?’

In the autumn of ’82 there had been a great deal of speculation in my class about what had really happened. Matte had killed someone, Matte had gone completely crazy and was in some loony bin. After Christmas he was as good as forgotten. Life went on. I suppose I thought about him from time to time because I was the person who’d been closest to him, as far as it was possible to be close to someone like Matte. But even I forgot about him. As you do, I told myself.

And yet my conscience was pricking me. Not because of what I did or didn’t do when we were thirteen, but because I hadn’t thought about him. So I said, ‘Yes, OK. When and where?’

‘Can you come over here tomorrow? To my place?’

‘Where do you live?’

He gave me the address of an apartment in Råcksta. I immediately thought it must be something the hospital had organised for him, and it turned out I was right.

It was exactly twenty past nine, and I would only be missing the title sequence. But before I managed to hang up, Matte asked, ‘Listen, have you still got the class photo?’

‘Which one?’

‘The last one. Year 6.’

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘Could you have a look and bring it with you? It’s important.’

‘OK.’

We said goodbye and hung up.

David and Claire were smoking hash, Nate was due to have an operation and I couldn’t stop thinking about the class photo. Firstly, where was it, and did I actually still have it? And secondly, what was special about it?

As soon as the program was over I went down into the cellar and started rummaging through the archive of my life: three banana boxes full of photos, letters, magazines, tapes and all the other stuff you end up collecting if you’re that type, which I am.

I got hung up for a while on a concert program from Depeche Mode’s Black Celebration tour. Page after page of meaningless icons that I’d copied into my school books. A picture of Martin Gore, who’d been my role model. If only I’d had curly hair. But that was around 1985–86. I burrowed deeper.