Let the Old Dreams Die (20 page)

I stayed down there for a good hour. I found what I was looking for and took the photograph back up to the apartment, where I sat down at the kitchen table to study it.

There was nothing strange about the picture. I paid particular attention to Mats. He was wearing an Iron Maiden sweatshirt and had longer hair than anyone else in the class, including the girls. A studded bracelet around one wrist. If you looked at the picture without knowing anything else, you would say he had to be the class hard man.

In a way it was true. In another way it wasn’t true at all.

He was hard in that he was impregnable. Nobody gave him any crap. Not because he could fight; he was as skinny and spindly as a ten-year-old, but it was as if there was an aura surrounding him, a sense that he wouldn’t hesitate to rip out your eyes if you messed with him.

He had nothing to lose.

When the picture was taken it was two years since his mother and older brother had been killed in a car accident. Mats had had so much time off school that he had been forced to repeat a year, and that was how he ended up in our class. His style, the clothes he wore, all of it really belonged to his brother, Conny. His father hadn’t cleared out Conny’s room, he just couldn’t bring himself to do it, and Matte just helped himself to whatever he fancied.

His father went downhill after the accident. I didn’t go round to Matte’s place very often, and I just remember his dad as something sitting in an armchair. Something grey. I once asked Matte, ‘What does your dad actually do?’

‘Nothing. He does nothing. He just sits at home.’

I didn’t ask any more questions. But mainly I remember Matte’s dad as a ghost with a physical form. A weight, nothing more. I suppose they must have got by somehow, but I didn’t ask. You’re not really interested in that kind of thing when you’re twelve.

I looked at the class photo. We were all standing close together on the patch of grass next to the flagpole. I didn’t know what had happened to any of them. I remembered all their names. Except the teacher. She was a substitute teacher who’d only been there for two weeks, and she was standing slightly apart from the class, not wanting to look as if she belonged.

All those names. Pointlessly etched into the back of my brain, never to be forgotten. As if we still lived in villages, when the names of the people we went to school with became the names of the people we worked with, hunted with, ended up marrying. But that’s not the case now. Now they’re just names.

Ulrika Berggren, Andreas Milton, Tomas Karlsson, Anita Köhli.

Moved away, dispersed to the four winds, forgotten. Only the names remaining. There’s nothing to say about it. That’s how things
are these days: everything must move aside to make room for the new, all the time.

And that’s the bottom layer in old boxes: melancholy, an indefinable sense of loss. You dig around and it comes swirling up to the top.

The following day was a Friday. We had decided that I would go round to Matte’s place at six, and I wasn’t planning to stay long. Laban was due at nine o’clock on Saturday morning. Laban is my son, he’s ten years old, and he stays with me every other weekend.

That was one of the reasons why I wasn’t all that keen on seeing Matte on a Friday. I try to make sure I’m cheerful on Fridays, that I don’t start feeling down. No booze, no gloomy thoughts. On Saturday mornings I want to be in top form, to be as good as any every-second-weekend dad can be. I think I’m doing a pretty good job. But I could sense that Matte was weighed down by something, something I could easily get tangled up in, and I didn’t want that. I’ve got enough with my own problems.

Anyway, I took the subway to Råcksta and wandered around among the apartment blocks before I found the right address. Even at that stage the weight started dragging at my feet. There’s something depressing about a minor collection of apartment blocks. An immense area like Rissne is one thing, there’s something grandiose about the insanity, a world of its own. But a clump like the one in Råcksta—that’s just ugly.

There were two Hellbergs on the board down by the main door, but I guessed that Matte was the one whose name was made up of the newest letters. Brand new, they looked. He couldn’t have been living here for long.

My suspicions were confirmed when I reached the fifth floor in the lift. There were no letters fixed on the letter box, just a handwritten note. Two notes, to be precise. The other one said ‘No junk
mail’. I rang the bell and the door opened immediately, as if he had been standing waiting just inside.

I had thought he would look like his dad. That there would be dust reaching all the way back from his eyes. But Matte had gone into his decline—if in fact it was a decline—the opposite way. He looked as if he had been blasted clean in a furnace.

He had actually grown a few centimetres since we were at school, but he was still short. And slim, really slim. His eyes were deep-set, his cheekbones were prominent and he had no hair on his head. That description doesn’t really convey the fact that he looked pretty good, in a haggard kind of way. If I say Michael Stipe, the lead singer with REM, perhaps that will help. But make the eyes smaller and the chin more rounded.

On his upper body hung a snow-white shirt. I say
hung
because that was what it looked like. The shirt and the black jeans looked as if they had been placed there, kind of, like one of those cut-out dolls. A powerful smell of soap powder.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’

He held out his hand and I took it. His grip was firm and dry.

‘Come in.’

His apartment was like his clothes. There was furniture and there were lamps and everything you might need, but none of it looked right, if you know what I mean. I lived in Kista for a while, and was invited to visit a family in my block who were refugees from Bosnia. They had been given a temporary apartment and that very temporariness was a little oppressive. The furniture had been given to them, or found, or bought cheap. Placed in position. Clean and tidy, but without any life. Just a place to wait. Same thing with Matte’s apartment.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’

‘Tea would be very nice.’

‘What kind?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Just ordinary tea.’

‘Would that be Earl Grey?’

‘I don’t drink all that much tea, so I don’t…’

‘Hibiscus? Is that all right?’

‘I expect so.’

Matte disappeared into the kitchen, a little corner where everything shone. I looked around the living room, unable to shake off the feeling that—how shall I put it?—that Matte hadn’t invited me round to his place at all, but had set this apartment up specifically for the occasion.

There were no photographs on the walls, just pictures of American Indians and wolves at sunset, that kind of thing. The contents of the bookcase looked as if they had come straight from a Salvation Army shop.
The Family Moskat
by Singer,
The Da Vinci Code
by Dan Brown…the books that are always there. Something in the background of an interior design suggestion from Ikea. Nothing was in alphabetical order, and the impression was reinforced when I found another copy of
The Family Moskat
on a shelf lower down.

When Matte came in with a teapot and cups on a tray, I couldn’t help asking, ‘Have you read these?’

Matte put the tray down on the coffee table and looked at the bookcase as if he’d only just discovered that it was there.

‘No. But I thought I would. Eventually.’

The tea looked peculiar, bright red. It smelled peculiar too. And it tasted peculiar. Bitter and flowery at the same time. Matte watched me as I lifted the cup to my lips, and I thought:
He’s trying to poison me.

‘Have you got any sugar? It’s slightly bitter.’

‘Sugar, no. Sorry. No sugar.’

I put down the poisoned chalice and leaned back in the armchair. There was something about Matte that didn’t inspire small talk, so I
said, ‘So what was it you wanted to tell me?’

‘Did you find the photograph?’

I fetched the photo from my coat pocket in the hallway, put it down on the coffee table. Matte bent over it and nodded. Then he sat there staring at it for a while. I sat down again. When I thought the silence had gone on for long enough, I said, ‘What did we look like, eh?’

‘Mm.’ Matte pointed at the teacher. ‘Do you remember her?’

‘No, not really. She was a substitute, I think.’

‘A substitute teacher, yes.’

Matte got up and went over to the stereo unit, one of those towers of plastic, knobs and diodes that everyone had in the eighties; you can pick them up for a hundred kronor at flea markets all over the place these days. No CD player. Out of a drawer he took a magnifying glass, then came and sat down again. He passed the magnifying glass over the photograph, making small noises to himself.

Two thoughts:

One, he did actually have something in the drawers, it wasn’t all just set dressing.

Two, there was still something badly wrong with him.

I sipped my tea, which didn’t actually taste too bad once you got over the initial surprise. Matte put down the magnifying glass.

‘OK. The thing I wanted to tell you is about her.’ Matte pointed to the substitute teacher. ‘Do you remember her name?’

‘No. All I remember is…she played us some music, didn’t she?’

Matte suddenly laughed. A brief, joyless laugh. It struck me that his slow movements, social ineptitude and quiet, almost whispering voice were down to the fact that he was institutionalised, or whatever it’s called. He’d been locked up for quite a long time, that was all.

‘Her name was Vera and the music she played us was
The Wall.
You know,
The Wall.
Pink Floyd.’

‘Oh yes. Now you come to mention it.
The Wall.
That was it.’

Matte looked me in the eye.

‘You do remember this? You’re not just saying that because I said it?’

‘No, I do remember. I thought that business of not needing an education was a bit odd, a teacher playing something like that. But what about it?’

‘Do you remember her?’

I slid the photograph towards me and stared at the woman in the picture. Her face was no bigger than the nail on my little finger, and I made a movement to take the magnifying glass, but Matte stopped me.

‘No. Not yet. Wait till I’ve told you.’

I understood nothing, but I just had to let it go. I peered at the picture. The woman, Vera, had a round face that could have been really pretty if every element of it hadn’t been too small. Thin lips, small eyes and a straight, slender nose. As if everything had been pushed in towards the middle by a small but critical amount, giving her the expression of a skilfully painted balloon. The dark brown hair sat on her head like a helmet. Yes. A German helmet from the Second World War, the ends of her hair curling outwards a fraction to complete the resemblance.

The image came to life in my memory, and I recalled an unpleasant feeling. There had been some kind of disagreeable aura surrounding the woman who had come in when our usual teacher was on maternity leave.

‘Do you remember?’

‘Yes. I remember. There was something kind of unpleasant about her, as I recall.’

Matte nodded.

‘Yes, although I didn’t feel that way. At the time. As you might remember, things weren’t going too well for me just then. Dad’s dead, by the way. Killed himself six months after I…disappeared.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

‘It’s a long time ago. I could…understand it in a way. The car, the vacuum-cleaner hose. It wasn’t really something that touched me. It was just part of everything that was going on. Everything will disappear. Anyway. This substitute teacher. Vera. When she arrived I didn’t take much notice. I sat at the back most of the time eating Refreshers, those chewy sweets with sherbet inside. But then she did that thing, if you remember. It was only her second day, and she brought in a ghetto blaster and said she wanted to play something to us.’

‘
The Wall.
’

‘Yes.
The Wall.
And when she pressed Play…as soon as those first chords, the sound of the guitar, those thin chords on the guitar, a fragile echo as if they were playing in a big room…you know the song? ‘Hey You’? Those chords at the beginning? Something got to me right from the start. It was something about the tone. And when he started singing…’

Matte looked at me, cleared his throat and started to sing. ‘Hey you…’

Now I remembered the song. Matte actually sounded better than the original, and the hairs stood up on my arms:
Must get that album.

Matte went on, ‘It was perfect, somehow. Love at first sound, as it were. Iron Maiden and all that crap, it was just…that’s another story, but I never really liked it. This, on the other hand. This hit the mark right away. The lyrics, of course, but I think it was mostly the atmosphere. The way it sounded. It was
me
, if you know what I mean. It was the sound of my life.’

‘The soundtrack of our lives.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. Go on.’

‘And it was as if she was playing it for me. Maybe she was, I don’t
know. But it did for me completely. And then when the next one started, ‘Is there anybody out there?’, it was just…it was perfect.’

Matte leaned back in the armchair and closed his eyes. I couldn’t work out where this was going, but listening was OK. Things I thought had gone forever suddenly twitched and came to life again. I could see the light from the window falling on Ulrika’s hair as she sat in front of me. A hair slide in the shape of…a ladybird. Yes. A ladybird. The smell of scented erasers. Matte opened his eyes.

‘I wanted to borrow it. But I was scared to ask. It was as if… looking back, I think I didn’t want to expose myself in that way. Ask for something. I didn’t like asking for anything.’

‘No. You were pretty much…closed up.’

Matte ignored my comment.

‘But the next day something happened that meant I could ask.’ He gestured towards the picture. ‘You remember she had a finger missing?’

Stupidly I looked at the picture to check his assertion, but Vera had her hands behind her back. Anyway, I remembered. The little finger on one hand was missing. We talked about it, but nobody asked her what had happened. Perhaps it was more exciting that way.