The Invisible Man from Salem (13 page)

‘Yes.'

She seems empathetic, but there's something more in her eyes. She suddenly looks vulnerable.

‘Have you met someone?'

‘No,' I say, ‘but I could if I wanted to.'

I'm not trying to hurt her, but when I see the pangs of guilt in her eyes I can't help feeling that she deserves it.

‘I understand,' she says.

‘Are you happy?' I ask. ‘With him?'

‘Yes, I am.' She gets up from the sofa. ‘Go now. I have to work.'

I'm having trouble figuring out what she's thinking. Then someone calls my phone, from a withheld number. I think about the text messages, wonder if it's the sender contacting me, and I answer the call, still sitting on the sofa.

‘This is Leo.'

‘I need you at the station as soon as possible.'

Birck. Shit. Sam looks puzzled, turns to look at the clock on the wall. She has crossed her arms underneath her small breasts, pulling her shirt taut over them.

‘I'm on leave.'

‘You're suspended. But a number of things have turned up, and we need to interview you again.'

‘What sort of things?'

‘You know how we work, Leo. We can talk about that here.'

I look at the clock.

‘I can be there in half an hour.'

‘We look forward to it,' Birck says, and the sarcasm lingers on the line long after the call has ended.

‘Call me,' is the last thing I say to Sam. ‘If you hear anything else,' I add when I notice her confusion, and she nods, blushing.

X

The film was showing at the Rigoletto. I would rather have gone to Haninge or Södertälje, but, according to her, the Rigoletto was the only cinema worth seeing films at, as well as the one with the biggest auditorium. As we sat in front of the screen, I could see what she meant. It was as big and as wide as a tennis court.

When we met up outside I didn't know how to act, or what to say. Julia smiled when she saw me, and I swallowed, several times, and when she put her arm around me and gave me a long hug, I felt her lips touch my earlobe.

Julia wanted popcorn and I paid, even though she wanted to pay herself. She held the box in her lap and I ate some of it, just reaching over the chair and taking some. Even a simple thing like that felt intimate.

It's moments like this that I'll remember forever
, I thought to myself. Our teachers and our parents never tired of telling us how certain things felt life-changing now, but would seem silly and exaggerated in a few years' time, but they had missed something. They'd forgotten what it was like to be sixteen. They didn't understand us. That went for everything: we no longer spoke the same language. Everyone was scared of our generation. We were like foreigners to them.

I thought about the film that Grim and I had made a day or so before, how distracted I'd been, and how I'd struggled not to smile the whole time.

‘You're too happy,' Grim said, looking up from behind the little camera. ‘You're not supposed to be happy in this scene. You need to be oppressed, yeah? Just like I was.'

‘I get it,' I said, but however hard I tried, the scene still turned out badly.

Because I was happy. I was neither quiet nor withdrawn, yet I always felt like I was. Dad said that was normal, but I didn't know what he meant. Now I didn't feel like that anymore. Suddenly I felt invincible.

Julia was looking at me for ages. Then she opened her mouth to say something, but stopped herself as the lights dimmed and the heavy red curtains opened, and I remembered nothing from the first half of the film: all I could think of was what Julia had been about to say but I didn't dare ask about.

AT SOME POINT
during
The Saint
, Julia put her hand on my thigh. It was there long enough to send a jolt through me, but she suddenly whipped it away, and went stiff in the seat next to me. She leant over, and I felt her breath in my ear.

‘Sorry. I meant to put it on your hand.'

I put my hand out in the darkness, and she carefully placed her palm on the back of my hand. Now that we were touching, it was even more difficult to think, impossible to watch the film. After a while she started stroking my hand carefully with her fingertips, as though she were exploring it — the downy hairs, the veins, and the knuckles. I didn't know what to do, so I took a deep breath and hoped that she wouldn't notice. My heart was threatening to strangle me, as though it were now in my throat and about to pop out of my mouth and into my lap.

AFTERWARDS WE WALKED
THROUGH
a warm Stockholm towards Central Station. She put her hand in mine.

‘I like you,' I said after a while.

‘How long have you liked me?'

Not the reaction I was expecting.

‘Erm, yeah, I don't know, a while?'

‘A while,' she mimicked, laughing. ‘I'm not going to say it back.'

‘Why not?' My heart beat harder again. ‘Don't you li—'

‘It's not easy for me to say stuff like that.'

On the train home, I kissed her. She tasted salty on her lips, from the popcorn, and sweet inside, from the fizzy drink. It was me that kissed her, not the other way around, and I was ready for her to give me a slap just for trying. Julia Grimberg seemed like that kind of girl. Instead, her mouth met mine, and I soon felt her hand on my thigh again. This time it didn't move away, and I wanted to touch her hair but I didn't dare to move my arm, worried it might spoil the moment. The train stopped, and people got on. They sniggered, and I thought it was at us. I didn't care.

We separated in front of the Triad, where the three blocks towered high and white above us.

I looked at her. She seemed deep in thought.

‘I'll give you a hundred kronor if you tell me what you're thinking,' I said.

She laughed.

‘It would cost you more than that!' she said, and let go of my hand. ‘See you soon.'

GRIM WAS WALKING
ACROSS
the playground towards me. I wasn't ashamed, but I realised that I was going to have to lie to him. Julia was more important to him than anything else, and my kissing her wouldn't make him happy. I pictured his face if I were to tell him that we'd held hands.

‘What did you do this weekend?' he asked.

‘Nothing much. Went to the football.'

‘Football? Do you like football?'

‘No. It was for my dad's sake. We got the train in to Södermalm together.'

There was the lie. Perhaps it should have been hard, but it wasn't. It was easy. I thought of Julia's face. I hadn't seen her since we said goodbye on Friday, and I hadn't heard her voice either. That made me feel miserable.

‘What about you?' I mumbled, without looking at him.

‘This.' He held something out towards me and I took it off him. ‘My first.'

I caught his stare and saw the glint in his eye.

‘What do you think?'

He'd given me his ID card. I looked at it, turned it upside down and back-to-front. It was nothing more than that.

‘Is this a joke?'

‘What do you think that is?' He beamed, broadly and proudly.

‘An ID card.'

‘That's right.' He leant over towards me. ‘Look at the year.'

He put his index finger next to it.

Then I understood.

‘You were born in seventy-nine,' I said. ‘Right? This says seventy-eight.'

‘Compare it with this one.' He sounded excited. ‘See any difference?'

He pulled out an ID card identical to the one I was holding. Same style, same information, same photo of Grim staring at the camera with a blank expression, the blond hair short and the lips pursed.

‘The year,' I said. ‘This one says seventy-eight; the other one says seventy-nine.'

‘Apart from that? Any difference?'

‘No.'

‘Perfect.'

‘Have you shown anyone else?'

He shook his head. ‘I wanted to show you first.'

I looked up from the ID card and our eyes met; I could see how proud he was, and I realised I didn't know what to do next. I couldn't lie to him about Julia, but I couldn't tell him the truth either.

‘I started with Tipp-Ex on an old card, on the surface itself,' he said. ‘About six months ago. I put a tiny drop over the nine. And if you just glanced at it quickly, you didn't see that it actually said seventy-nine. But if you ran your finger over, it just felt like a tiny crumb had stuck to it. I thought about how I could make it better, and tried other stuff, until I found a way to redo the whole card.'

I rubbed my fingers over the card, and felt the ridges in the hard plastic.

‘It's not completely smooth,' I said.

‘You have to cut the plastic really carefully to get it like that. That's what took longest. That, and finding thick-enough plastic. It's the same stuff as they use.'

I must have looked blank.

‘The Post Office. The ones who do the real thing.' He took both the cards off me, and stuffed them back in his pocket. ‘I think I can make money from this.'

‘Probably,' I said, thinking of all the people we knew who would like nothing more than to get into clubs with age limits, where brain-dead bouncers who'd failed to become cops stood on the door and ran the world.

‘Do you want one?'

‘Me? Er, sure.'

‘Give me your ID. I just need it for a week or so.'

I held it out and he took it, studying it so closely that the card almost touched his nose.

‘It'll be the first time I've done someone other than myself,' he mumbled, turning the card over. ‘I wonder if it will be as good.'

‘Grim, I …'

‘What?'

They were alike; not at first glance, but it was still there, in their expressions.

‘Nothing.' I looked down at my shoes. ‘Doesn't matter.'

We agreed a price for the card. It was lower than I expected, but I still had no idea where I was going to get the money from.

The money he'd sniffed out at my place — I could use that. I hadn't touched it.

Break was over. I left Grim, and walked over towards the nondescript entrance.

SHE WAS WAITING
for me behind the water tower. When I got there it was dark and black; squawking birds circled the tower, as though encouraging someone to fall. I had my hands in the pockets of my hoodie and I took them out, hoping that my palms would get less sweaty.

She was wearing jeans, a red vest with narrow shoulder straps, and black Converses, and was holding a thick black cardigan in her hands. I wondered if she might be cold, but when she came over I felt the temperature rise and I could hear a muffled hum — something in the tower, maybe a generator or a motor of some sort, making the spot where she was standing unnaturally warm.

‘You're early,' she said.

‘So are you.'

When Julia put her arms around me she stood on tiptoes, and then pressed her slim body against mine, her small breasts soft against my ribs, her hands around my neck, and her hair in my face.

‘It's very warm here,' she said quietly, with her lips to my ear.

‘You could have stood somewhere else.'

‘I didn't want to, in case you couldn't find me.'

She let go, and we stood there looking at each other.

‘Grim's got my ID card,' I said, because you have to say something.

‘I know. He showed it to me,' Julia giggled. ‘You look funny in that picture. Sort of young.'

After a while we climbed up the tower, and sat down on the ledge. Julia's hand was resting in mine, and it felt very small.

‘I always get a bit thoughtful, or whatever you call it, when I'm sitting up here,' she said.

‘How come?'

She nodded towards one of the many buildings below us.

‘I knew someone who lived in one of those blocks over there, the one with the red roof. It just always makes me, well, just thoughtful, really.'

Julia told me that they'd gone to the same pre-school and were the same age and had the same shoes. That's how it had started; the little boy was getting teased for having the same shoes as one of the girls. Julia had helped him out by explaining to the others that he didn't actually have girls' shoes; it was she who had boys' shoes. Julia was a peaceful child — the calm before the storm, you know, she once said to me, and laughed — and the boy was, too, so they would often play the same games and go to the playground together. They became friends, and started at the same school, started listening to music together. They eventually drifted apart, as you do when you start a new school and end up in different classes, but they stayed friends.