Let the Old Dreams Die (21 page)

I nodded.

‘OK. The following day she asked me to come to the blackboard. I think she wanted me to spell some word in English. I was pretty good at English, and maybe she wanted to encourage me, or…’ Matte shook his head. ‘No, I mustn’t think in those terms. Not as far as she’s concerned. But that was what I thought at the time. Anyway. When I came up to the board and she handed me the chalk, I dropped it and we both bent down at the same time to pick it up. And when I saw that she was on her way down too, I looked up. And then I saw…I mean, her hair lay really flat against her head, but when she bent down and I was looking from a particular angle…I could see that she had no ear. On one side.’

‘No ear.’

‘No. There was just skin where the ear should have been. I didn’t have time to see whether there was a hole…whether the actual auditory canal was still there, but at any rate I could clearly see that the ear wasn’t there.’

‘You never said.’

‘No. I felt as if…it was my secret. Or hers and mine, if you like. At the end of the day I went and asked if I could borrow the tape.
The Wall
. The thing about her ear meant I could ask. I know why, I’ve thought about this a lot, I’ve had plenty of time to think about it, but it’s not important. Besides which, I think you understand.’

‘More or less.’

Matte looked at me and something changed in his eyes.

‘How are things with you, anyway? What’s life done to you?’

I shrugged and told him, keeping it short. The jobs, the drifting around, the travelling, the years with Helena, Laban. I summarised it like this: ‘A feeling that everything is kind of temporary, somehow. As if things never really get started. Or that it’s already over, and I haven’t noticed. But I’m still alive, and there’s Laban after all.’

‘And what about later on?’

‘Later on?’

‘When Laban’s grown up?’

‘I…I don’t know. Video games are getting better and better.’

‘That doesn’t sound like much of a future.’

‘It’s perfectly OK. Many people are in a much worse position.’

Matte looked at me for such a long time that I started to feel uncomfortable, and hid my face behind the teacup. The tea was cold, and tasted better than when it was hot.

‘Good,’ he said eventually. ‘In that case I think…I think you’ll be able to understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘What I’m going to tell you.’

Matte folded his hands on his knee and gazed at a point beyond the walls or behind his eyes. I waited. A sorrow so great surrounded Matte that you couldn’t even call it sorrow. It was more of a condition, the element in which he lived, like a deep sea fish in his black cave.

‘I took the tape home and listened to it, over and over again. I had one of those bean bags, you know, filled with plastic beads, and I lay on it for hour after hour, only getting up to turn the tape over. That initial feeling never came back, but instead I really started to love the music. I just got the whole story.
The Wall
is about society and what it does to people, but above all I saw it as a requiem for a life that had ended before it had even begun.’

‘That was my line.’

‘Yes, and my way of thinking probably wasn’t quite so advanced at the time, but…loss. It’s about loss. And the form is in perfect harmony with the content…Anyway. Forget that. The following day I took the tape back to school, said I thought it was…I can’t remember which word I used, but anyway I was allowed to keep it. As I had hoped. So I spent another evening on the bean bag. My dad was completely out of it in those days, I don’t know if you remember. When I was hungry I just used to take money out of his wallet and go out and buy something.

‘That evening I poured myself a decent measure of whisky too, topped it up with Coke and drank it while I listened to the tape. It was…I thought it made the music even better. I went to the bathroom and threw up. Then I carried on listening.’

‘What a life. For a thirteen-year-old.’

‘Yes, but you know, while it was going on…I just felt…cool. I thought I understood so much that you kids couldn’t even begin to grasp. Tragic, absolutely, but I was also old enough to kind of play the role to myself, if you know what I mean. I could see myself from the outside. Anyway, kids drink at thirteen these days.’

‘Not on their own.’

‘No, that’s true. But it’s not my tragic upbringing we’re talking about here. The following day it was school again, and I felt like shit.’

‘Sorry, Matte, I just have to ask. Have you been in a psychiatric hospital?’

‘A psychiatric hospital, yes. Various kinds. For a long time.’

‘But I don’t get it…I’m sorry to come out with this, but…I kind of thought you’d be a bit…simple, if I can put it that way. But it’s obvious you’re more lucid than I am.’

‘Plenty of people in institutions are lucid. When it comes to certain things. And completely useless when it comes to others. Living, for example. And I’m on medication. Very strong medication.’

‘So this business about the ear…’

Matte frowned and looked annoyed.

‘It’s got nothing to do with that. The ear was gone. Or…it had never been there. I’ll get to that. Can I go on?’

‘Of course. Sorry.’

‘OK. So in English the same thing happens again: she calls me up to the board to spell “conscious” while the rest of you are working in your books. And I pick up the chalk to write, and I remember this because it was…I knew the word “unconscious” and I was going to ask her if it was the same word without “un”, you see. And of course it is, but my head was full of cotton wool that day, which is probably why I…instead of asking her, I prodded her in the back. I mean, you don’t normally do that to a teacher, but…I prodded her in the back to get her to turn around. And do you know what happened?’

‘No.’

‘Nothing.’

‘What do you mean, nothing?’

‘Nothing. I prodded her in the back and she didn’t react. So I prodded a bit harder. Nothing.’

‘Maybe she—’

‘That’s what I thought too. That she was making a point.’

Matte glanced at the photo.

‘You said before that you thought she was…what did you say… kind of disagreeable. Can you remember why you felt that way?’

‘No, it was just a feeling, I suppose.’

‘She never touched us. Never. Normally, if a child is sitting working on a task, if the teacher comes to help…she might put a hand on the child’s shoulder, stroke his arm or hair, something. But she never touched us, do you remember?’

I thought about it. It was true, I supposed: I couldn’t recall a single occasion when Vera had touched me, but when I thought back I couldn’t remember any other teacher touching me either. Except when Sundgren, the music master, grabbed me by the back of the neck when I was plucking the strings inside the piano. But that was something else altogether.

I shook my head, but my expression must have betrayed my thoughts to Matte.

‘I know. You don’t remember. But I noticed it because when she said I could borrow the tape, I tried to be a bit grown-up. So I held out my hand to shake hers and say thank you. But she didn’t take it. She just made a gesture kind of like this…’

‘Maybe it was because of her missing finger.’

‘Yes, but that was on her left hand.’

‘What a memory.’

‘I’ve done nothing but remember her over the past few years. OK. When she didn’t react the second time I prodded her, I did this…’

Matte made a jerky, prodding movement with his finger.

‘Tap-tap-tap, and you know what…her skin. It was all hard. Didn’t give at all, no matter how hard I prodded. Hard, yet not solid. Do you understand what I mean? You can feel it, if you tap on…a statue, for example, as opposed to a sheet of plywood. It’s not
exactly easy to explain what the difference is, but it’s sort of like a…a vibration in a thinner material.’

‘And this was…a thinner material?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what kind of material was it?’

‘Plastic.’

‘Plastic?’

Matte snorted. The corners of his mouth turned up in a grin.

‘I’m joking. I’ve no idea what kind of bloody material it was. Just that it was hard, and thin.’

Silence fell. I could hear the subway rumbling past somewhere down below. The room had grown darker. Only Matte’s white shirt was clearly visible. I tried to picture it: a human being made of a hard, thin material. I saw metal.

‘You mean she was some kind of robot?’

Matte shook his head, got up and went into the kitchen. When he came back he was carrying a lit candle in a holder, and he looked like an illustration from some ghost story. He placed the candle on the table.

‘Classic paranoia, eh? Everyone is a robot except me. No, that’s not what it’s about. I understand, of course I do, you have to picture things in your mind. But delete robot. Can we come back to this? I’ll finish telling you the story, and it might all become clearer. Or not. OK?’

‘OK. Yes.’

‘Eventually I got her to turn around. I waved my hand in front of her eyes like this, and she…she gave me a really funny look. I wrote the word on the board, and that was that. Oh. One more thing. Do you remember what she used to shout when she was calling us in? From the corridor?’

I shook my head.

‘Come on. It would be good if you could remember this yourself.
She’d come out of the classroom, and we’d all be there mucking about, and she’d raise her arm and shout…can you remember what she used to shout?’

I closed my eyes and tried to picture the scene. Yes. There we were. And she came out. She was wearing some kind of brightly coloured blouse with big leaves on it, and she had…

For fuck’s sake, we only had her for a week and she…

I opened my eyes.

‘She never changed her clothes. It just struck me. She wore the same clothes for the whole week she was there. Didn’t she?’

Matte smiled. Or whatever you might call that thing he was doing with his mouth.

‘You’re getting there. And do you remember what she used to shout?’

I closed my eyes again. The big leaves…hair like a helmet…she raised her hand, she shouted…

All you children…all you children…come in…

‘I’ve got it. All you children! Come in! Welcome!’

‘Exactly.’

‘Yes. That was it. So?’

‘I’m getting there. That day I followed her when school was over. Tailed her. From a distance. She didn’t live far from the school. Up in those old apartment blocks on Holbergsgatan, behind the centre. You know the ones I mean? Anyway. I saw her go in through a door, so I sat down on a bench by the children’s playground and waited.’

‘What were you waiting for?’

‘How should I know? Nothing better to do, I suppose. When I’d been sitting there for a while she came out onto the balcony. And where I was sitting…there was a tree between us, closer to me. So I could see her, but she couldn’t see me. She stood there on the balcony for a few minutes. Then she went inside, and I stayed where I was.
I don’t know, I suppose I was in the middle of some fantasy about a stakeout. You know, that I was…’

‘Cup of coffee and a doughnut.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Why didn’t you talk to me?’

Matte raised his eyebrows. For some reason I sounded really upset. I waved it away, told him to carry on. He leaned forward.

‘I asked you. I asked you if you wanted to come with me to tail the substitute teacher, I said there was something shady about her, but you had indoor hockey training or something.’

‘Handball.’

‘Handball. And it was probably just as well. When I’d been sitting there for a quarter of an hour she left the apartment and went off somewhere, and I climbed up to her balcony. Up the drainpipe.’

‘You’re kidding?’

‘No. And fortunately…or however you want to put it, she’d left the balcony door open, so I could get inside. And at this point I have to ask permission to repeat myself, because do you know what was in there?’

‘No.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What do you mean, nothing?’

‘Nothing. Not a single ornament. Nothing.’

‘You mean…but she had furniture and—’

‘No. She had nothing. It was completely empty. No sofa, no rugs, no tables, no telephone, no TV. Not a thing. Just like when you see pictures of brand-new apartments. Nothing.’

‘A bed, then…’

‘No bed. Empty walls, empty floors, empty space in between. I went into the bedroom, what would have been the bedroom, and
opened the fitted wardrobes. Empty.’

Silence. I tried to imagine how a person could live in an apartment that was completely empty. It was impossible.

‘But maybe she was just checking out an apartment she was thinking of buying, or something.’

‘It’s a possibility. But I wasn’t thinking that at the time.’

‘So what were you thinking?’

‘Nothing.’

‘There’s a lot of nothing going on here.’

‘Yes. But as I stood there in the bedroom I heard the key in the front door and I…just froze. I couldn’t move. I just stood there. Heard the front door open, close. I somehow realised there were no explanations or excuses, but…my brain was completely empty. So I just stood there. The door to the living room was open…’

Matte stopped and looked around his own living room.

‘It feels strange to be talking about living rooms and bedrooms when there was no furniture. Without furniture they’re just spaces, aren’t they? Kitchen, bathroom, that’s different, there are things that are part of the fittings, but other rooms become what they are because of the furniture we put in them.

‘So when I say
the door between the bedroom and the living room
, I mean
the door between the smaller and the larger space.
But you understand that.’

There was a short silence, until I asked, ‘What happened then?’

‘Guess.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing. She came into the living room. She was wearing that blouse with the big leaves on it. She went and stood in the middle of the living room with her back to me and…just stood there. In the middle of the floor. And I stood in the bedroom, not moving a muscle, looking at her back. Felt the sweat from my armpits trickling down past my waist. I was scared shitless. I don’t know why, but I
felt as if there was a scream stuck in my throat that just wanted to force its way out. There was something so horrible about her back, no, not her back. But the idea that she might slowly turn around and look me in the eye. I couldn’t interpret her back, you see, the way she was just standing there, the only way I could make sense of it was to think that she knew I was there, and she was simply… playing with me.