Pen 33 Read online

  “What do you say?”

  The dark-haired slut is crying.

  “Fucking fucking cap guy.”

  She cries. It took some time, but now she’s just like all sluts.

  “What do you say? Am I beautiful?”

  “Fucking fucking cap guy. I want to go home.”

  His penis is erect. He’s the one who decides. He walks over to them, pushes it up against their faces.

  “Beautiful, right?”

  He did it twice this morning. He can only do it twice more. He masturbates in front of them. He’s breathing heavily, kicking the blond chubby one when she looks away for a moment, comes onto their faces, in their hair, smearing it around as they shake their heads.

  They’re crying. Sluts cry so fucking much.

  He takes off their clothes. Their shirts, he has to cut them off, since their hands are fastened to the hot pipe. They’re smaller than he’d imagined. They don’t even have boobs.

  He takes off everything except their shoes. Not the shoes. Not yet. The blond chubby slut has pink shoes. Almost like patent leather. The dark-haired slut has white trainers. The kind tennis players wear. He bends down. In front of the blond chubby slut. He kisses her pink patent-leather shoes, on top, near the toes. He licks them, from the toes, along the length of the shoe, and to its heel. He takes them off.

  The slut’s foot is so beautiful. He lifts it up. She’s about to fall farther backward. He licks her ankle, her toes, sucking on each one for a long time. He glances up at her face—she’s still crying. He feels an intense desire.

  She wakes up when the morning paper arrives. Every damn time. A thud against the wooden floor. Door after door. She’s tried getting up to stop him, but always too late. She’s seen his back several times. A young guy with a ponytail. If she caught up with him, she’d tell him exactly how people feel on a Sunday morning at five o’clock.

  She can’t go back to sleep now. She turns, twists, sweats, tries and tries and tries to fall asleep, but it’s too late. It used to be no problem, but now her thoughts overwhelm her. She’s tense by six in the morning—fuck the paperboy and his ponytail.

  The newspaper is as thick as a Bible on Sundays. She lies down with a section, looks at a word here and there. Too much text, she can’t make sense of it, all those interesting stories about interesting people that she should read but doesn’t. She ends up putting them all in a pile intending to read them later and never does.

  She’s restless. Newspaper, coffee, teeth, breakfast, bed, desk, teeth again. It’s not even half past seven on a Sunday morning in June. The sun whips through the blinds, but she turns her face away, not yet ready for the light. Too much summer, too many people walking hand in hand, too many people sleeping next to each other, too many people laughing, playing, loving—she can’t take it, not yet.

  She goes down to the basement. To her storage space. Where it’s dark, lonely, messy.

  She knows it will take her at least two hours to clean it. By that time it will be at least nine thirty.

  The first thing she sees is that the padlock has been busted. On the storage pens next to hers, too. She should find out who owns them. Thirty-two and thirty-four. Seven years in this building, and she’s never seen either of them. Now they have something in common, they all own a broken padlock. Now they can talk to each other.

  Then she notices the bike. Or rather the lack of bike. Jonathan’s expensive, black, five-speed bicycle. Which she was going to sell for at least five hundred kronor. Now she has to call him, at his father’s house. Might as well tell him about it now, so he’s calmed down by the time he comes back.

  Afterward, she has a hard time understanding why she didn’t see. That she could think about who owns storage spaces number thirty-two and thirty-four, about Jonathan’s black mountain bike. It was as if she didn’t want to see, couldn’t. When the police questioned her, she started laughing hysterically when asked what she saw when she opened the storage door. Her first important impression. She laughed long until she started coughing, she laughed while tears ran down her face, she explained that her first and only thought was that Jonathan would be sad that his black mountain bike was gone, that he wouldn’t be able to buy the video games she’d promised him with the money they were going to get for it, at least five hundred.

  She had never seen death before, never encountered people who looked at her without breathing.

  Because that’s what they did. Looked at her. They lay on the cement floor, their heads cradled on flowerpots, like hard pillows. They were little girls, younger than Jonathan, not more than ten. One fair-haired and one dark-haired. They were bloody: face, chest, genitals, thighs. Dried blood everywhere, except on their feet, the feet were so lovely, almost as if they’d been washed.

  She’d never seen them before. Or maybe she had? They lived so close.

  Of course. She must have seen them. In the store or maybe in the park? There were always a lot of children in the park.

  They lay there on the floor of her storage space for three days. That was what the coroner said. Sixty hours. They had traces of semen in their vaginas, anuses, on their upper bodies, in their hair. The vagina and anus had been subjected to what was called blunt force. A sharp object, probably metal, had been forced inside repeatedly, which caused major internal bleeding.

  They might have gone to the same school as Jonathan. There were always so many little girls in the playground. All the little girls looked the same.

  They were naked. Their clothes lay in front of them, just inside the storage door. Piece after piece, as if lined up in an exhibition. The jackets folded, pants rolled up, shirts, underwear, socks, shoes, headbands, all in a neat row, carefully arranged, two centimeters between each one, two centimeters to the next garment.

  They looked at her. But they weren’t breathing.

  close to now

  I

  (one day)

  He’d always felt silly in masks. A grown man in a mask should feel silly. He’d seen other men do the same thing. Winnie the Pooh or Scrooge McDuck or something similar, they’d done it with a kind of gravitas, as if the mask didn’t bother them. I’ll never understand, he thought. I’ll never get used to it. I’ll never be the kind of father I wanted and decided to become.

  Fredrik Steffansson fingered the plastic in front of his face. Thin, tight-fitting, colorful. A rubber band on the back, pressing hard against his hair. It was difficult to breathe, smelled of saliva and sweat.

  “Run, Dad! You’re not running! You’re just standing there! The Big Bad Wolf always runs!”

  She stood in front of him with her head tilted back, her long blond hair full of grass and dirt. She was trying to look angry, but an angry child doesn’t smile, and she was smiling as a child does when the Big Bad Wolf is chasing her around a small-town house lap after lap, until he’s completely out of breath and wants to be somebody without a mask, without a plastic wolf tongue or wolf teeth.

  “Marie, I can’t anymore. The Big Bad Wolf has to sit down. The Big Bad Wolf wants to be small and kind.”

  She shook her head.

  “One more time, Dad! Just one more time.”

  “You said that last time.”

  “This is the last time.”

  “You said that last time, too.”

  “Absolutely last.”

  “Absolutely?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I love her, he thought. She’s my daughter. It took time. I didn’t see it, but now I do. I love her.

  Then he glimpsed a shadow. Right behind him. It was moving slowly, stealthily. He’d thought he was in front of him somewhere, over by the trees, but now he was behind him, moving slowly at first, then faster. At the exact same time, the girl with grass and dirt in her hair attacked from the front. They tackled him from opposite directions. He staggered and fell to the ground, and they threw themselves on top of him, lay there. The girl held her hand up in the air and a dark-haired five-year-old boy held up his. They h
igh-fived.

  “He gives up, David!”

  “We won!”

  “The pigs are the best!”

  “The pigs are always the best!”

  When two five-year-olds attack the Big Bad Wolf from either direction, he doesn’t have a chance. That’s just how it is. He rolled over with the two children still on top of him. He lay on his back and took the plastic off his face, squinting up at the bright sunlight. He laughed out loud.

  “It’s so weird. Somehow I never win. Have I ever won? Even once? Can you explain that, you two?”

  He spoke, but the other two weren’t listening. The other two held a prize in their hands, a plastic mask that they wanted to try on and run away with ceremonially—go into the house and up to the second floor to Marie’s room, put it on the dresser next to their other prize, stand in front of both for a while, the height of eternal glory in two five-year-old friends’ Duckburg.

  He watched their backs as they left him. He watched his neighbor’s son and his daughter. So much life, all the years they held in their hands, months running through their fingers. I envy them. I envy them their infinite time: the feeling that an hour is long, that winter will never end. They disappeared through the door, and he turned his face to the sky, lying on his back and looking at the shades of blue. He did that as a kid, and he did it now. Skies are always made of more than one blue. He had a good life back then, as a child. His father was a career officer, a captain, a field officer with the potential for a career to be embroidered on his shoulder. His mother had been a housewife in the apartment he and his brother left each morning and returned home to at night. He never knew what she did in between, three bedrooms on the third floor of an apartment complex. He’d thought about it often, how she could stand those repetitive days.

  Everything changed when he turned twelve. Or the day after, to be exact. It was as if Frans had waited until his birthday passed, hadn’t wanted to destroy it, as if he knew birthdays were more than just birthdays for his little brother. Knew they were all his longing in one day.

  Fredrik Steffansson stood up, brushed the grass from his shirt and shorts. He thought about Frans a lot, more now than ever. One day he was just gone—his bed made and empty, their conversations over. Frans had hugged him that morning for a long time, longer than he usually did, hugged him and said goodbye and went to Strängnäs station and took the train an hour into Stockholm. When he arrived he continued on toward the subway, bought a ticket and sat down in a subway car on the green line south toward Farsta. At Medborgarplatsen he’d stepped off, jumped down from the platform, and slowly walked along the rails in the tunnel toward Skanstull. Six minutes later a subway driver saw a man in the headlights of the train, threw on the brakes, and screamed in panic, agony, and terror as the first car crashed into a fifteen-year-old’s body.

  After that, they left Frans’s bed untouched. The bedspread stretched, the red blanket weighing on the foot of the bed. Fredrik didn’t know why then; didn’t know now either. Maybe they’d left it to welcome Frans if he ever came back? For a long time, Fredrik had hoped to see his big brother standing in front of him again, hoped it was a big mistake. Mistakes do happen sometimes.

  It was as if the rest of his family died on the tracks that day too, in a tunnel between Medborgarplatsen and Skanstull. His mother was no longer waiting at home all day. She never said where she went, just came home after dark, regardless of the season. His father had collapsed—the captain’s straight back was bent now. He’d never talked much, but now he was almost mute, and he never hit again. Fredrik couldn’t remember any more punches.

  They stood in the doorway again. Marie and David. They were the same height, the height of five-year-olds. He’d forgotten the precise figures but had received a note with weight and height from her nursery school. They are as tall as they are—he wasn’t much for printouts of statistics.

  Marie still had grass and dirt in her long blond hair, David’s dark hair lay plastered to his forehead and temples. He’d worn the mask inside. Fredrik could see that, and it made him laugh.

  “A bath is what you need. Pigs take baths, did you know that?”

  He filled the old claw-foot tub with water—he’d found it at an auction in Svinnegarn, at an estate right off Road 55. He sat there for more than half an hour every night, letting the hot water refresh his skin, while he was thinking, just thinking, structuring the next day’s writing, the next chapter. Now the water worried him. Not too hot, not too cold, and he adds white foam from a green Donald Duck bottle, to make the bath look inviting, soft. They climbed in voluntarily, to his surprise, sat at either end.

  Five-year-olds are so small. It’s only when they’re naked that you realize it. Their soft skin, slender bodies, constantly expectant faces. He looked at Marie, white bubbles on her forehead, slipping down along her nose—he looked at David, the shampoo bottle in his hand, upside down and empty and even more bubbles. He didn’t have any pictures of himself as a five-year-old, he tried to imagine his head on Marie’s shoulders, they resembled each other, people often commented upon it triumphantly, which surprised him but embarrassed Marie. His five-year-old face on her body, he should be able to remember, to feel what he felt, but all that came back to him was the beating his father gave him in the living room, that big fucking hand against his back and bottom. He remembered that, remembered Frans’s face pressed against the glass door to the living room.

  “The foam is gone.”

  David held out the bottle, shook it a few times onto the water to demonstrate.

  “I can see that. Probably because you used it all.”

  “Should I not have done that?”

  Fredrik smiled. “No. Of course you should use it.”

  “Now you have to buy us a new one!”

  He also used to watch when Frans was beaten. Their father never noticed them standing there behind the glass door. Frans was older. He took more punches, the beatings lasted longer, at least it seemed like it from a few meters away. Only as an adult did Fredrik remember. The beatings had ended more than fifteen years ago, and at some point just before thirty it suddenly hit him—the big hand and the pane of glass in the living room door. Since then he’d been overcome by memories of that living room again and again. He didn’t feel angry, strangely enough, or vindictive, just full of grief; maybe grief was the best description of what he felt.

  “Daddy, we have more.”

  He looked at Marie emptily. She was chasing it, the emptiness.

  “Hello!”

  “We have more?”

  “We have more Donald Ducks.”

  “We do?”

  “On the bottom shelf. Two more. We bought three.”

  Frans’s grief had been greater. He was older, had time for more beatings. Frans used to cry behind the glass. But only then. Only when he was watching. He lived with his grief, hid it, carried it until it became his own, until at last he turned it on himself, into a giant blow from a thirty-ton train.

  “Here.”

  Marie had climbed out of the tub, walked to the other side of the room to the bathroom cabinet and opened it. She pointed proudly.

  “Two of them. I knew it. I knew you should buy three.”

  The bathroom floor was wet, foam and water flowing off her body, and she didn’t notice of course, walked back with a Donald Duck in her hand and climbed into the tub again. She opened it with unexpected ease. David grabbed hold of it and emptied it without looking up, without hesitation. Then he shouted something that sounded like yippee, and they high-fived for the second time in an hour.

  He hated kiddie fuckers. Just like everyone else. But he was a professional. This was just a job. He’d convinced himself of that. A job a job a job.

  Åke Andersson had been transporting prisoners to and from Swedish prisons for thirty-two years. He was fifty-nine years old. His salt-and-pepper hair was still thick and well taken care of. A kilo overweight. Tall, taller than any of his colleagues, taller than any perp he�
�d transported. Two meters, he usually said. He was actually two meters and three centimeters, but people that tall are considered freaks, nature’s defects, and he was tired of that.

  He hated rapists. Little bastards who have to force their way into a pussy. But he hated the child rapists most of all. The feeling was so intense and forbidden, and it got worse every time they said hello to him—the only time he felt anything at all during the day, an aggression that scared him. He suppressed the urge to turn off the engine, jump between the seats, push the bastard into the rear window.

  He revealed nothing.

  He’d transported worse scum. Or at least scum with longer sentences. He’d seen them all. He’d put every fucking headline in handcuffs, walked them to the door of his van, stared at them blankly in his rearview mirror. Quite a few of them were idiots. Fools. Some got it. They knew the costs. All that fucking talk from people on the outside about compassion and treatment and rehabilitation. Don’t do the crime, if you can’t do the time. As simple as that.

  He knew who the kiddie fuckers were. Every single one. They had a look about them. He didn’t need to see any sentence. Any papers. He saw it on them and hated them. He’d tried to say that a few times at the pub over a beer. That he could see it, and when they wondered how, he hadn’t been able to explain. They’d mistaken he was homophobic, prejudiced, not a humanist, and so he never said it again, didn’t have the energy, but he could see it and those pervs knew it, no matter how they tried to hide it when he met them.

  He’d transported this one at least six times before—in ’01 a few trips back and forth from the court of appeal and Kronoberg jail, then again when he’d escaped in ’07, in ’09 from Säter Institution to somewhere else, and now in the middle of the night to Söder Hospital. He looked at him—they looked at each other, a meaningless stare-down in the rearview mirror. He seemed normal. They always did. To other people. Short, not fat, a crew cut, quiet. Completely normal. The type of man who raped children.