Frozen Moment (5 page)

    The
red three-storey house with its high stone foundations still sits there on the
edge of the forest. The lake still reflects the clouds when there is not a
breath of wind. The gravel area in front of the house is just the same, apart
from the fact that three cars have been carelessly parked there, their
paintwork dulled by the dust from the road. On the side of the minibus it says
STENSJO FOLK HIGH SCHOOL, and something else that has been eroded to the point
of illegibility. And it is also Stensjö Folk High School that is filling up all
the rooms. She will soon be familiar with the history of the house. She will
also find out that it is boiling hot in the summer beneath the roof beams - she
will be one of the few who do not leave Stensjö during the summer break. In the
winter an open fire burns in the common room on the ground floor, but its
warmth does not find its way up to the boarders' bedrooms. The electric
radiators are of course turned up to maximum, but they barely keep the worst of
the cold at bay.

    It
has taken Maya almost a whole day to get there, travelling by bus and train up
through the country. It is a cleansing process: she is leaving Borås with its
suburbs and outlying areas and the strategies she has so far employed in order
to get by. No one knows where she is going, well, her family does, but no one
in her circle of acquaintances. As far as they are concerned she has
disappeared in a puff of smoke. Perhaps she is letting people down, but no one
would be able to take her to task for that. After all, it is a well-known fact
that morality is closely linked to the risk of discovery.

    She
is not quite eighteen, and three years seems an absolute eternity. No one will
even remember her when she goes back, if she ever does go back. All the people
to whom she has been so closely bound during those turbulent teenage years will
have entered the adult world they know so little of as yet. A world they want
to forswear, nevertheless, as if it were a matter of life and death. They think
they are defending themselves against the boring, middle-class mentality of
adulthood, but in fact it is their childhood they are fighting against.

    The
idea of flight has always been like a balm to her soul, often with the help of
drugs: hash, trips and amphetamine bombs rolled in scraps of cigarette paper
and swallowed with a glass of water. Now she is running away with the feeling
that this is her last chance. That she is jumping on the last train to
somewhere completely unknown. It is terrifying, but not as terrifying as what
she knows is waiting if she stays in town: the meetings with stiff-necked
social workers; the youth centre with its employment training programme because
she dropped out of grammar school; in the long term, a residential facility for
young people.

    And
she would continue to pretend to fit in with her friends while at the same time
feeling a marked distance that only she seemed to see: those last few inches of
closeness that were simply not there. She had chosen the security of the gang
because she felt even more of an outsider with everyone else. And her circle of
acquaintances has at least formed some kind of fixed point, even if it is more
apparent than structured. They have made something of having grown up in the
wake of prog music, freshly plucked from both the hippie movement and punk;
they have been political in those contexts where it attracts attention, running
the gauntlet at every opportunity to demonstrate, going barefoot or sitting
cross-legged on the streets in the town centre. Hut the drugs have a definite
tendency to take over.

    She
has never been afraid of ending up an addict; the drugs were to make her
happier, to enable her to stay awake at night, to have the courage to be
against something or for something. She has never been afraid of getting hooked
on them, only of getting hooked on the rest of it - never being able to move
on, suddenly realising one day that she has forgotten what she was for or
against, that the revolt has faded into everyday life and she is no longer
streetwise, just bloody stubborn. She has always been afraid of being pathetic.

    She
is sitting in the buffet car on the train to Stensjö, writing in her black
notebook. It's an ordinary black book with a red spine, although she has stuck
a newspaper cutting on the cover: Ulrike Meinhof, a black and white prison
photograph. Beneath the picture it says,
This
book
belongs to Maya.
On the lined pages are her poems.

    She
writes a great deal but keeps very little. If her words frighten her once the
heat has died down, she burns them. Even as she sits on the train she
scrutinises and crosses out old words in a frenzy of shame. And yet the poetry
she keeps is painfully unstructured, self-centred and obscured by powerful
unidentified emotions.
As if to force some future reader to
feel the mood of the author rather than his own.
It is mostly about
love, because she has devoted the years since leaving junior school to believing
that she is constantly in love, among other things.

    A
middle-aged ice cream maker tries to strike up a conversation with her in the
buffet car. He asks almost straight away what she does for a living, and she
tells him she is unemployed. It sounds more mature than saying that she has
dropped out of school and hasn't yet decided what to do with her life. He waves
vaguely in the air as if to say it's nothing to be embarrassed about.

    'I've
got money, but I don't think I'm better than anyone else because of that. I'm
just as happy talking to a company director as to someone who's out of work and
has a ring through their nose,' he says.

    He
invites her to share one of the tiny ridiculously expensive bottles of wine
they keep behind the counter. She accepts his offer. After a glass of red he
gets personal and wants to talk about his ex-wife. She soon loses interest.

    'I'm
just going to the toilet,' she says, and goes to sit a couple of tables behind
him. The lie, when he discovers it on his way back to his seat, doesn't seem to
bother him. Perhaps he's used to it.

    She
starts a letter to her mother. She writes that growing up has been
the very
opposite of an Oedipal child's great fear.
Her father has never even
existed on paper, and so there was no united parental front to make her feel
alone and excluded. Instead her anxious mother, desperate for approval, wanted
to carry her daughter close to her heart; to keep her like a child as yet
unborn. Intimate. Like a partner.
Mum. I have to put some distance between
us in order to be free of you.
In her mind's eye she can see her mother
opening the envelope as if it were a great event. As if she had been waiting
for the moment when she would finally understand her daughter. As if she had
spent years wondering.

    But
deep down Maya knows that her mother has not spent years wondering, despite all
the arguments and reconciliations. Not really. Her mother has had enough to
cope with just looking after
herself
.

    In
the notebook Maya has scrawled on page after page, words that have somehow
burned themselves into her mind, embarrassing and full of overblown emotions.
It was a significant part of her adolescence, this revelling in her emotional
life. Constantly giving every Tom, Dick and Harry information about how she is
feeling,
which is not so different from her mother, in fact.
She has frightened off a whole load of potential boyfriends in this way. She
spoke with such insight about angst that the supervisor at the youth centre
contacted the psychiatric service. He was afraid she might be suicidal.
Which, after some consideration, she feels she wasn't really, not
at that particular time.

    Out
in the wilds she is picked up by the minibus at a bus stop with a shelter on
the narrow tarmac road. The bus to and from the railway station evidently runs
just twice a day, once in the morning and once

    In
the afternoon, and is the only way to travel to the school if, like Maya, you
have neither a car nor a driving licence.

    The
end of August brings the heat of high summer when the sun is at its zenith. The
evenings have begun to grow cooler as autumn approaches. In her suitcase is a
blank calendar boasting of a fresh start, her nicest clothes and a mishmash of
things representing the room she had as a girl and her earlier
life.
Being seventeen means that every
step is for ever.

    Her
stomach is churning. Apart from that she is stone-faced behind the
black-painted eyes and lips. She is wearing black jeans, a black long-sleeved
sweater and Doc Martens. She took the ring out of her nose at the railway
station, only to put it back in ten minutes later. It is difficult to decide
how she will behave until she has observed what the others are like.

    Most
of all she is afraid of having to share a room with someone. That is also the
first thing she asks the woman who pulls over in front of her on the empty
road, just as she thinks the school bus is going to drive past her. The woman
responds with an inscrutable smile, if indeed it is a smile. It makes Maya feel
embarrassed because she has forgotten to introduce herself. She realises then
that it is the borderlands that are the most difficult.

    Being
angry and rebellious is easy; being well-behaved is something she knows all
about. If you're a girl and you've grown up in a small town, gone through
school before the equal opportunities programme kicked in, you get to be good
at making room for other people.
Standing with one foot in
each camp in front of a woman who is ten years older than you, with cropped
hair and a leather waistcoat worn over paint-stained dungarees, with that smile
and that indulgent expression - that's the difficult part.
She thought
her appearance would protect her. Instead she wishes she could turn back the
clock. She wants to be a blank sheet of paper coming to this new situation,
with nothing to fall back on.

    The
woman throws Maya's bag into the back of the bus. She has a pale rose tattooed
on her upper arm. It looks as if something had been written on the leaves of
the rose, something that has almost been erased. Down the side of her neck
winds the shape of a black snake.
For a second Maya thinks it
looks ominous.

    Next
to the main building a handful of smaller cottages are scattered over the lawn.
High above the roofs are the tops of deciduous trees, their trunks so gnarled
and thick that you probably couldn't put your arms all the way round them. Maya
has no idea what kind of tree they are. She wonders if there is a garden round
the back, and feels a sudden impulse to become a child again, to run around the
corner and have a look. Maybe hide deep inside the leafy greenery. Instead she
stands on the gravel, rooted to the spot.

    She
stands there until Caroline comes back and takes her by the hand, leading her
on her way to her first day at school.
Through the brown
doors and up the stairs to the attic, where the boarders' rooms lie.
Maya switches off the bigger picture, as she always does when she feels
stressed, and silently adds together the details. Stains and scratches beneath
the shining surface of the varnish on the staircase.
The
black snake on the neck.
Long snakes of scar tissue
winding their way up the inside of Caroline's arms, towards the crease of her
elbow.

    Maya
just goes along with her.

    2006    

    The
fried cod eaten in haste, along with countless cups of coffee and several
ginger biscuits during the course of the morning, had left a stale taste in his
mouth. Tell had intended to top up his cup yet again when he discovered to his
annoyance that someone had removed the coffee maker from the kitchenette.
Instead, a huge apparatus had been placed in the corridor, and apparently
countless drinks could be ordered through this machine. He hadn't even heard of
most of them.

    
'Vanilla macchiato.
What the hell is that?'

    Renée
Gunnarsson, one of the indispensable office staff, was walking by and patted
him on the back.

    'Aren't
you up to date with all that kind of thing, Christian? You're a city boy after
all. Don't you go to cafes?'

    'Not
recently,' he muttered, pressing a button at random. You couldn't go far wrong
with cafe au lait. The machine started grinding coffee beans, and finished off
with a long drawn-out hiss as the foaming milk covered the top of the paper cup
like a blanket.

    
'At last, a proper coffee machine!'

    Karin
Beckman's eyes were sparkling like a child's on Christmas Eve. She immediately
started to run through the list of choices.

    'Café
chocolat, Café mint, Café au lait, Café creme, Macchiato, Latte…'

    'And
you call that proper coffee?'